The Poem on the Mountain: A Chinese Reading of Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’

Plate 4. Yeats’s Lapis Lazuli mountain (given to him by Harry Clifton, and the inspiration of the poem ‘Lapis Lazuli’), front view. Photograph courtesy and © of the National Library of Ireland. All rights reserved. During my first stay in Beijing in 2004, one poem kept running through my head. It was W. B. Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’. Why this would be so puzzled me at first. I had come here teach a course in Western Civilization at a small, elite university; this year I was not even teaching lite..

Irish Studies in China: The Widening Gyre

<div class="page" title="Page 171"><div class="section"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>At the furthest reach from Ireland – whether in terms of size or geography or culture – China seems an unlikely place for Irish Studies. Yet over the last few years, Irish Studies has emerged as an acknowledged academic field in several key Chinese universities. This essay looks at the obstacles to Irish Studies in China as well as Ireland’s importance, after the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, in opening up discussion of such domestic issues as the role of literature in establishing a new national identity. The many unexpected similarities between Irish and Chinese culture have ensured that translations of Irish writers such as Wilde, Yeats, Shaw, Beckett and especially Joyce have played a distinctive role in ushering a newly emerging Chinese nation into its own version of global modernity. </span></p></div></div></div></div

Yeats's Mask

Yeats’s Mask, Yeats Annual No. 19 is a special issue in this renowned research-level series. Fashionable in the age of Wilde, the Mask changes shape until it emerges as Mask in the system of A Vision. Chronologically tracing the concept through Yeats’s plays and those poems written as ‘texts for exposition’ of his occult thought which flowers in A Vision itself (1925 and 1937), the volume also spotlights ‘The Mask before The Mask’ numerous plays including Cathleen Ni-Houlihan, The King’s Threshold, Calvary,The Words upon the Window-pane, A Full Moon in March and The Death of Cuchulain. There are excurses into studies of Yeats’s friendship with the Oxford don and cleric, William Force Stead, his radio broadcasts, the Chinese contexts for his writing of ‘Lapis Lazuli’. His self-renewal after The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and the key occult epistolary exchange ‘Leo Africanus’, edited from MSS by Steve L. Adams and George Mills Harper, is republished from the elusive Yeats Annual No. 1 (1982). The essays are by David Bradshaw, Michael Cade-Stewart, Aisling Carlin, Warwick Gould, Margaret Mills Harper, Pierre Longuenesse, Jerusha McCormack, Neil Mann, Emilie Morin, Elizabeth Müller and Alexandra Poulain, with shorter notes by Philip Bishop and Colin Smythe considering Yeats’s quatrain upon remaking himself and the pirate editions of The Land of Heart’s Desire. Ten reviews focus on various volumes of the Cornell Yeats MSS Series, his correspondence with George Yeats, and numerous critical studies