The International Yeats Society and the Yeats Society ofJapan Joint Symposium in Kyoto 20182018 International Yeats Society Symposium, Kyoto
The 54th Annual Conference of the Yeats Society of Japan

ProgramDates: December 15-16, 2018
Venues: Kyoto University Clock Tower
Centennial Hall, Kashokaku Noh Theater, et al.

1Saturday, 15 December
Venue: Kyoto University Clock Tower Centennial Hall
9:20-14:00
Registration (Lounge, 2F)
10:10-11:30
Welcome and Plenary Lectures, Hall I
Opening Address
MC: Tomoaki Suwa, Secretary-General of the Yeats Society of Japan
Ryoji Okuda, President of the Japan Yeats Society
Alexandra Poulain, President of the International Yeats SocietyDavid Murphy, Embassy of Ireland
Plenary Lectures
Chair: Yoko Sato (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology)
Sean Golden (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)“W.B. Yeats and Laughter: Wit and Humour, Irony and Satire, Zen and ‘joy’”Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University)“Yeats, Japanese Noh Drama, and World Literature: Mask, Ghost, and Dramatic
Representation of World Spirit”
11:30-13:00(11:35-12:00)
12:50-14:20

Lunch BreakGeneral Meeting of the Yeats Society of Japan
Sessions 1 & 2 (Hall I & II)

Session 1 (Hall I)
Chair: Margaret Mills Harper (University of Limerick)
Charles Armstrong (University of Agder)“Humbugging and the Wild Beast: Laughter in Yeats’s Where There is Nothing”
Yoko Sato (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology)“Yeatsean Heroes and Laughter”
Session 2 (Hall II)
Chair: Miki Iwata (Rikkyo University)
Zsuzsanna Balázs (National University of Ireland, Galway)“Laughing Off Male Power: Superwomen in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s Plays”
14:30-16:00

Sessions 3 & 4 (Hall I & II)

Session 3 (Hall I)
Chair: Ryoji Okuda (Tokai University)
Matthew Campbell (University of York)“‘Fescennine Buffoonery’: Swift, Mangan, Yeats”
Aoife Lynch (University College Dublin)“W. B. Yeats and the ‘casual comedy’ of Life”
2

Yuki Ito (Josai University)“W. B. Yeats’s “Imitated from the Japanese” and the Philosophy of Kobayashi Issa”
Session 4 (Hall II)
Chair: Alexandra Poulain (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3)
Taeko Kakihara (Musashi University)“Sotoba Komachi, a Possible Model for Crazy Jane”
Tomoko Iwatsubo (Hosei University)“Inventing At the Hawk’s Well and The Cat and the Moon”
Melinda Szuts (National University of Ireland, Galway)“Yeats in Rehearsal: Character, Movement, Music and Masks in The Only Jealousy of Emer”
16:10-17:30

Reception (Hall I)

Venue: Kashokaku Noh Theatre
18:00-19:30
Hirohisa Inoue and Toshiaki Yoshinami, “An Introduction to Noh”
Shigeyama Sengoro Kyogen Family, The Cat and the Moon
MC & Translation: Akiko Manabe (Shiga University)

Sunday, 16 December
Venue: Kyoto University Clock Tower Centennial Hall
9:30-10:00
Morning Coffee (Hall I)
10:00-11:30
Session 5 & 6 (Hall I & II)
Session 5 (Hall I)
Chair: Nobuaki Tochigi (Waseda University)
Boey Kim Chen (Nanyang Technological University)“Yeats’ Poetry of the Marrow-Bone”
Peter Robinson (Japan Women’s University)“The English-language Poetry of Oshima Shôtarô: An Introduction by W.B. Yeats”
Session 6 (Hall II)
Chair: Charles Armstrong (University of Agder)
Kimihito Kubo (Osaka University)“‘The Second Coming’ and Laughter”
Adrian Paterson (National University of Ireland, Galway)“Why Should We ‘laugh and weep’?: Odds and Ends in Yeats’s ‘All Soul’s Night’”
Nobue Miyake (Independent)“Yeatsean Laughter in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’”311:30-13:00
13:00-14:30

Lunch BreakPlenary Symposium (Hall I)

Plenary Symposium
Yeats’s Later Plays and Laughter: Wheels and Butterflies (Hall I)
Chair: Akiko Manabe (Shiga University)
Alexandra Poulain (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3)“…but a play”: laughter and the invention of theatre in The Resurrection
Margaret Mills Harper (University of Limerick)Wheels and Butterflies as Comedy
Akiko Manabe (Shiga University)“Are you that flighty?” “I am that flighty.”––The Cat and the Moon and Kyogen Revisited
14:30-15:00
15:00-17:00

Afternoon Tea (Hall II)
Session 7 & 8 (Hall I & II)

Session 7 (Hall I)
Chair: Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University)
Sunghyun Jang (Korea University)“The Influence of Yeats on Modern Korean Poetry: The Case of Kim So-wol”
Sirshendu Majumdar (University of Burdwan)“Landscape and Memory: Yeats’s and Tagore’s Autobiographies”
Felix Green (Brown University)“Yeats and Rilke’s Epitaph Poems”
Kazuo Oikawa (Waseda University)“Walter Pater and W. B. Yeats”
Session 8 (Hall II)
Chair: Masashi Asai (Kyoto Tachibana University)
Wit Pietrzak (University of Lodz)“Battling the ‘ready-made element’: Yeats and Bergson’s Le Rire”
Jaron Murphy (Southampton Solent University)“No Laughing Matter? Yeats and the Orwellian A Vision”
Dionysious Psilopoulos (American College of Greece)“Yeats and Jung: The Coincidentia Oppositorum and the New Divinity”
Toshio Akai (Kobe Gakuin University)“The Global Network a Vegetarian Restaurant in Dublin Represents”
4

17:00-17:30

Closing Remarks (Hall I)

Closing Remarks
MC: Tomoaki Suwa, Secretary-General of the Yeats Society of Japan
Ryoji Okuda, President of the Japan Yeats Society
Venue: Ganko, Takasegawa Nijoen
19:00-21:00
Conference Dinner5Plenary Lectures
W.B. Yeats and Laughter. Wit and humour, irony and satire, Zen and ‘joy’.
Seán Golden Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
In ‘Imitated from the Japanese’, his version of a Japanese haiku, Yeats wrote very late in life,‘Seventy years have I lived … And never have I danced for joy’. In ‘Lapis Lazuli’, one of his
late masterpieces, he extolled the joy in the eyes of Chinese literati, ‘Their ancient, glittering
eyes, are gay’. The standard perception of Yeats does not suggest a stand-up comedian, yetlaughter does play an important role in his work, as it did in his life. This talk will explore
various forms of humour in his work, in appreciation of the role joy plays therein. In ‘Easter,
1916’, Yeats comments on his custom of telling ‘a mocking tale, or a gibe, / To please acompanion / Around the fire at the club’. His conversation was reported to be witty. His wit
could be wicked, and his letters certainly provide examples, as do his Senate speeches. As atheatre entrepreneur he certainly appreciated and promoted humorous works. Directors
despair of producing his play The Green Helmet until they realise that it can work well in theform of slapstick comedy. Straightforward jokes do appear in his prose and in hiscorrespondence. His play The Cat and the Moon takes its cue from a Japanese kyogen
original, a genre prone to farce, and he uses beggars there and in his Cuchullain plays, toprovide a comic or satiric relief to high tragedy. Many shades of irony saturate Yeats’ work,
edging into profound satire later in life, the saevo indignatio he so admired in ‘Swift’s
Epitaph’, and embodied in the ‘Crazy Jane’ poems. He admired the work of D.T. Suzuki,
corresponded with him, and introduced Zen humour and koans into his late work, giving
clues to their importance in his letters. Underlying the variety of forms of humour thatpermeate his work, laughter, leading to gaiety or joy, becomes a counterweight to theconsequences of ‘the blood-dimmed tide’ foreseen in ‘The Second Coming’, that wasdrowning the hopeful expectations of Ireland’s new-found freedom and threatening the very
idea of ‘civilisation’ for Yeats; perhaps even a counterweight to inevitable and, for him,
impending death.
Yeats, Japanese Noh Drama, and World Literature: Mask, Ghost, and Dramatic
Representation of World Spirit
Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University, South Korea)
In an essay on the Japanese Noh drama, “Fenollosa on the Noh,” Ernest Fenollosa (18531908) provides a unique but reverse case of Franco Moretti’s concept of “world literature.”
Moretti argues that “the compromise between the foreign and the local is so ubiquitous” that“the encounter of Western forms and local reality did indeed produce everywhere a structuralcompromise.” I agree with Moretti that the problem is always a structural compromise
between foreign form and local materials in the field of world literature. However, I contend
that what is at stake in world literature is rather the problem of balancing between close
readings of local/global materials and distant readings of discourse at large in structural
reconstruction. Even a prominent critic of world literature like T. S. Eliot fails to see thecomplicated nature of William Butler Yeats’s transcultural interweaving between the foreign
form of the Japanese Noh drama and the local materials of Irish plays. In this context, I haveattempted to provide a case of balancing between the foreign form of the Japanese Noh andlocal materials found in Irish plays, thereby suggesting a new model for the study of world
literature. Stimulated by Pound and Fenollosa’s translations of the Noh plays, and having
envisioned Japanese Noh plays as the visionary model for his future theatre, Yeats had a new

6

vision of world drama by investigating the potential theories of “mask” and “ghost,” thereby
anticipating the vision of transcultural/transnational world literature and drama.

Plenary Symposium
Yeats’s Later Plays and Laughter: Wheels and Butterflies“…but a play”: laughter and the invention of theatre in The Resurrection
Alexandra Poulain (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, France)
Looking at the play’s multiple uses of theatrical images and performative modes, this paper
seeks to analyse the unconventional uses of laughter in The Resurrection and to link them toYeats’s (re)invention of theatre as an experimental genre, free from realist conventions. It
also aims to articulate the ways in which the self-consciously deployed syntax of modernist
theatre is used as a philosophical language in which Yeats’s singular vision can be translated
into stage material.

Wheels and Butterflies as Comedy
Margaret Harper (University of Limerick, Ireland)
Yeats’s late volume of plays with long argumentative introductions, Wheels and Butterflies,
is not often discussed as a volume. In this panel, Alexandra Poulain and Akiko Manabe will
discuss two of the four plays in the volume, The Resurrection and The Cat and the Moon,
respectively. The plays are the butterflies of the title, imaginative texts. The introductions are
the wheels, introducing the heavy axles of structure and argument, squeaking with strain
rather than fluttering in scholarly wisdom. But the wheels are a counterweight with its part toplay in the larger drama of the whole.

“Are you that flighty?” “I am that flighty.”––The Cat and the Moon and Kyogen Revisited
Akiko Manabe (Shiga University, Japan)
Since 2015, I have experienced The Cat and the Moon being performed in a Japanese kyogen
style by the prestigious Sengoro Shigeyama Family nine times including performances atthree Irish venues where I was primarily involved as a semi-producer. This experience hastransformed my previous views on Yeats in relation to kyogen and laughter. I will present
what I now think Yeats acquired through his encounter with kyogen, as well as how
contemporary kyogen actors reflect while on stage, the actual gist of Yeats’ encounter withJapan. The key word I would like to focus on here is “flighty,” which is used six times to
describe the Lame Beggar. The principle that runs deeply through “flighty” strikes me ashaving a lot to do with a certain Japanese sense of lightness, literally karomi or karumi in theJapanese language, which Yeats acquired through his encounter with kyogen. This can befound not only in his thematic approach, but also in other theatrical details such as thelanguage used and choreography.

7

Abstracts
Session 1

Laughter in Yeats’s Plays (1)1. Humbugging and the Wild Beast: Laughter in Yeats’s Where There is Nothing
Charles Armstrong (University of Agder, Norway)
In time Yeats renounced the play Where There is Nothing (1903), and published a rewrittenversion entitled The Unicorn of the Stars (1907). The genesis of the plays was a difficult affair,
involving Yeats in difficult collaborations with both Lady Gregory and George Moore. Despite
these complications, Where There is Nothing provides an important document of the lengthy
and complex transitional phase that saw Yeasts transform himself from a Symbolist to
something akin to a Modernist. Paul Ruttledge is a singularly destructive character, who cannot
settle down for long in any vocation or place without seeking a radical change. At one point in
the play he declares: “My wild beast is Laughter, the mightiest of the enemies of God. I will
outrun it and make it friendly.” Laughter is cast as a key vehicle for a divesting of all personalmoorings, as well as being linked – in the form of “humbugging” and joking - to a kind ofremoval of all seriousness from communicative language. This paper will present a reading of
the motif of laughter in the play, contextualizing it as both (a) part of Yeats’s reception ofNietzsche’s thought in Also Sprach Zarathustra and (b) as ab anticipation of Yeats’s later,
apocalyptical poetry and the use of laughter as a response to irrational transformation in The
Resurrection (1931).
2. Yeatsean Heroes and Laughter
Yoko Sato (Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Japan)
Laughter is a historical, cultural, and physiological phenomenon. For Plato, laughter should be
avoided as a malicious emotion which overthrows rational self-control. Mikhail Bakhtin,
however, regards laugher as the carnival spirit, which frees human consciousness, thought, andimagination. In the Japanese kyogen, which interested Yeats together with the Noh, laugher isa stylized expression of humour, satire, and celebration.
This presentation explores Yeatsean laughter, which is unique in the sense that it is often
heard across the boundaries of this world and the other world. In The Wanderings of Oisin,
Niamh and Oisin galloped over the sea with Niamh’s songs of ‘pensive laughter’, which is‘unhuman sound’. In Yeats’s farce, The Green Helmet, Red Man with ‘a great laughing mouth’
comes from the sea for a contest to choose the true champion. He chooses Cuchulain as thehero endowed with ‘the laughing lip’, who never forgets to laugh on good days and bad days.
Similarly, ‘a head that laughs’ appears in A Full Moon in March. In the play, the Swineherd’shead laughs and sings for the haughty Queen, who eventually begins to laugh and dances withhis head in her hand. It is worth noting that for Yeats ‘laugh’ is equivalent to ‘sing’ so that theact of laughing, like singing, may have the power to create a new sphere of reconciliation andtransfiguration. In Yeats’s religious play, The Resurrection, the Syrian laughs, anticipating thereturning of something beyond human knowledge, thus indicating the moment of thetransfiguration.

Session 2

Laughter in Yeats’s Play (2)1. Laughing Off Male Power: Superwomen in Yeats’s and D’Annunzio’s Plays
Zsuzsanna Balázs (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)8Gabriele D’Annunzio introduced the art of political performance into Italian politics in the firsthalf of the twentieth century, and as a poet-soldier, he occupied the city-state of Fiume, which
is often referred to as the rehearsal of Mussolini’s March on Rome. D’Annunzio’s selffashioning as a Nietzschean superman and the last Renaissance hero, along with his dramatic
occupation of Fiume, turned Yeats’s attention even more towards Italian politics at the end of
the 1910s, and seeing D’Annunzio’s success, Yeats claimed “power to the most disciplined.”
Accordingly, their plays are mostly associated with male heroism, authoritarian tones,
nationalism, and male raisonneur figures who want to set up the rules of the game, demandorder and oppress subversive voices. Yet D’Annunzio proposed a liberal constitution for Fiume,including absolute equality for women, and he publicly disagreed with Mussolini’s plans anddestructive utopian visions. Yeats’s remarks also showed an increasing preoccupation with thedangers of authoritarian and ultranationalist political performance and conventional notions ofmasculinity. Their mature plays portray more and more dramatic clashes between male andfemale power images, in which female mythic heroes often win over male authorities anddestroy their rules with the subversive power of laughter. In this paper, I will examine some ofD’Annunzio’s and Yeats’s plays to illustrate how laughter works in the context of political
performativity and power, and how it can reveal latent contradictions and absurdities intotalising systems.

Session 3 Laughter in Yeats’s Poems (1)1. ‘Fescennine Buffoonery’: Swift, Mangan, Yeats
Matthew Campbell (University of York, UK)
According to John Mitchel, James Clarence Mangan’s first apologist writing in 1859 ten years
after Mangan’s death, for all that Mangan’s pathos was ‘genuine’, ‘his laughter was hollow
and painful’. He says of Mangan’s ‘humour’ that it ends up as ‘bitter Fescennine buffoonery’.
The fescennine tradition of Latin poetry was the ribald, the obscene, the abusive, the burlesque.
Elizabeth Butler Cullingford has suggested that Yeats too invokes the fescennine, particularlyin the hollow laughter of Solomon and Sheba, there turned from the woman on to the man.
This paper will trace this odd lineage of Irish poetic laughter back to Swift. It will think about
Mangan and Yeats as latter-day purveyors of the horse-laugh and parody pushed just too far:to the ribald, and the abusive, while seeming rooted in the more acceptable satiric. It will invoke
some theories of comic verse and think again about the Irish comic tradition as it treads on thetoes of the decorous, part-burlesque and part political complaint. Poems by Swift and Mangan
will be compared with later poems by Yeats, such as the Crazy Jane monologues. But the paper
will address some more unlikely areas where the Yeatsian joke surprises while treating withdelicate matters such as marriage, the occult and his own supernatural experience.
2. W. B. Yeats and the ‘casual comedy’ of life
Aoife Lynch (University College Dublin, Ireland)
In a letter to Dorothy Wellesley, Yeats wrote: “I thought my problem was to face death withgaiety, now I have learned it is to face life” (Letters, 164). This paper will examine the poet W.
B. Yeats’s response to the events of life in his poetry through laughter and comedy. It will lookat his use of the Crazy Jane poems to explore the subversive nature that the poets humour cantake in relation to both public and private life. It will also consider Yeats’s use of the conceptof tragic joy that encapsulates the sublime of art, poetry and indeed the struggle of life itself.
Particular emphasis will be placed on the late poem “High Talk” and its consideration of
linguistic play that ends in tragic joy.
9

3. W. B. Yeats’s “Imitated from the Japanese” and the Philosophy of Kobayashi Issa”
Yuki Ito (Josai University, Japan)
W. B. Yeats composed the poem, “Imitated from the Japanese” based on “a Japanese Hokku inpraise of Spring.” However, until Edward Marx’s discovery (2007) that its model was a seriesof three haiku works of Kobayashi Issa, this source of influence had remained a mystery. While
this paper does not insist that Yeats was strongly influenced by Issa, a closer examination of
the similarities and differences between the two poets seems relevant.
In the same year the poem “Imitated ...” was composed, Yeats presented his philosophicalthesis: “passive suffering is not a theme of poetry.” Both in theme—and specifically in the final
line of the poem—is a passive acceptance of a joyless life. Even so, the speaker can afford tolaugh at such bitterness or difficulty in attaining “tragic joy” as a living man, which can be seen
to describe a path to “tragic joy.”
The final line of the poem is taken from one of Issa’s haiku, written at the age of sixty. The
haiku, like Yeats’s line, reveals bitterness with old age and life. However, in the same year, inthe same haiku notebook, Issa expressed his philosophy of ara bompu [a wild ordinary man],in which he asserts the nature of his own life and old age, based on his Pure Land Buddhist
faith. In this paper, the philosophical stances of the two poets will be clarified.

Session 4 Encounter with Noh Theater, Theater Production of Yeats’s
Drama
1. Sotoba Komachi, a Possible Model for Crazy Jane
Taeko Kakihara (Musashi University, Japan)
Crazy Jane's impressive line of "Fair and foul are near of kin,/ And fair needs foul" in the poem
"Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop" have reminded many readers of the witches' words in
Macbeth, "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." In the present paper I claim that there can be anothersource for the line: that is “Sotoba Komachi,” a Noh drama written by Kan’ami. I also suggestthat the heroine Komachi can be a model for Jane in other Crazy Jane poems as well.
When he first read Earnest Fenollosa’s manuscript of the several Noh works with Ezra
Pound, Yeats was fascinated with this old symbolic theater of Japan and wrote a new drama At
the Hawk’s Well. Later he read more works of Noh including "Sotoba Komachi" translated by
Arthur Waley in 1921.
Komachi, the woman who used to be a celebrated beauty and talented poet of the court,
now becomes old and poor and lives a rootless wandering life in this drama. When taking abrief rest sitting on sotoba (stūpa), she is accused of her impiety by the passer-by Buddhism
priests. Komachi and the priests then start a dialogue, which eventually develops to thephilosophical questions, what is good, what is evil, and what is salvation.
My paper examines the appropriateness of Sotoba Komachi as a model for Crazy Jane
who can boldly argue back against the Bishop, and points out that in Yeats’s dialogue the
Bishop does not accept her, which makes a bitter contrast with the Noh story. I also claim that
Jane has much commonality with Komachi in other Crazy Jane pomes as well, concluding thisJapanese heroine can be deemed as a possible model of Crazy Jane.
2. Inventing At the Hawk’s Well and The Cat and the Moon
10

Tomoko Iwatsubo (Hosei University, Japan)“Yeats is making a new start on the foundation of these Noh dramas,” reported Ezra Pound on
9 March 1916. Yeats began to compose At the Hawk’s Well not long after his writing “Ego
Dominus Tuus,” a poem set under the tower, where a dialogist Ille insists “[he] call[s] to [his]own opposite” “[b]y the help of an image” (VP 367). From late 1915 to early April 1916, theperiod leading up to the Easter Rising in hindsight, Yeats was engaged in his new enterprise“with the help of Japanese plays ‘translated by Ernest Fenollosa and finished by Ezra Pound’”(Yeats’s introduction to Pound’s Certain Noble Plays of Japan [Cuala, 1916, CW4 163]). In
the introduction Yeats mentions “an ambition”—which he “had to put away” “when [he] firstbegan to write poetical plays for an Irish theatre”—“of helping to bring again to certain places
their old sanctity or their romance.” He regrets his failing, unlike Noh plays’ conventional
opening, “to call up the shallow river and the few trees and rocky fields of modern Gort” in
The King’s Threshold, almost conjuring up the location of his germinating tower project (CW4171). A week after his writing this introduction occurred the Eater Rising.
This paper will explore how Yeats “[made] a new start on the foundation of” what hediscovered in Japanese Noh and kyogen, “set[ting] his chisel to the hardest stone,” at this crucial
stage and turning point of his life and work as well as of Ireland.

3. Yeats in Rehearsal: Character, Movement, Music and Masks in The Only Jealousy of
Emer
Melinda Szuts (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)This paper investigates the most important rehearsal methods and approaches in character
development applied during the two-month-long rehearsal period in preparation forDancePlayers’ production of Yeats’s The Only Jealousy of Emer. The analysis focuses on how
the use physical theatre training methods (Michael Chekhov technique, contact improvisation,
clown through mask) and the experimentation with a new character development techniquebased on the interplay of movement and text in Yeatsian dramaturgy worked towards theformation of a fully staged theatre production of Yeats’s most challenging dance play. Special
attention is given to importance and difficulties of coordinating the musical dramaturgy of a
newly composed piece to the development of the production’s choreography and mask work.
The investigation is primarily based on the experience of directing and producing the piece for
the Galway Theatre Festival in early May in 2018 and for a site-specific version staged inYeats’s Tower in Gort at the end of the month. It will also summarise the practical experiencegathered at a workshop session for university students using the same methodologies at
Liverpool University in November 2018. The methods discussed will be supported by various
visual materials (photographs and recordings of rehearsal sessions with actors and musiciansand of the two productions in Galway and Gort, and of the workshop in Liverpool).

Session 5 Yeats’s Late Poems, Reception of Yeats in Japan
1. Yeats’ Poetry of the Marrow-Bone
Boey Kim Chen (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)11

In “Prayer for Old Age” Yeats defines the poetics that has governed his life and work thus:“God guard me from those thoughts men think/ In the mind alone;/ He that sings a lasting song/
Thinks in a marrow-bone.” Yeats strove to achieve a poetic language is rooted in the body, its
material reality becoming the touchstone of all the abstractions and transcendental thought hisquest for coherence gives rise to. What is remarkable about Yeats’ work of spiritual quest andtransformation is that even as it seeks to utter the ineffable, it becomes more and more centredin “the sensual music” of the human body, its thoughts and imagery “fastened to a dying
animal.” The paper examines how Yeats’ corporeal poetics evolved to accommodate thepolarities in his work and sustain the processes of thinking, vacillation, rethinking andremaking that underpin his late poems. Close readings of key poems like “Among SchoolChildren” and “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” will reveal how the rhythm, diction andimagery combine to embody a poetry of the “marrow-bone.”
2. The English-language Poetry of Oshima Shôtarô: an introduction by W.B. Yeats
Peter Robinson (Japan Women's University, Japan)
Professor Oshima Shôtarô (1899-1980) has long been considered the ‘Father of modern Irish
studies’ in Japan. Translator, correspondent, and friend of W.B. Yeats, Oshima greatly
influenced his reception in the country whose artistic forms, especially nô, profoundly
impacted the laureate’s poetic style and creativity. As author ofW.B. Yeats and Japan (1965),
and first President of the Yeats Society of Japan, founded in the same year, the perception of asomewhat one-way relationship of appreciation and promotion has solidified in existing
scholarship. This paper highlights the mutually appreciative aspects of the Yeats-Oshima
relationship, with a particular focus on Oshima’s efforts, through Yeats, to obtain critical
recognition of his Poems: Among Shapes and Shadows (1939) by literary critic Laurence
Binyon.

Session 6 Laughter in Yeats’s Poems (2)
1. “The Second Coming” and Laughter
Kimihito Kubo (Osaka University, Japan)
Yeats's "The Second Coming" does not arouse laughter. To look for comedy in this poem may
be considered futile. Nevertheless, it is certain that this poem is a parody of the Advent. Parody
uses and adapts a framework, in this case, the story of the Advent, in a humorous or satiricalmanner, with the gap between the original and its adaptation being the factor from whichlaughter arises. However, when a Sphinx-like monster, instead of Christ, appears in this poem,
the gap never seems funny. This gap reflects the poet’s critical attitude towards civilization.
The “gyre” is the illustration of the historical cycle of Christian civilization over two thousand
years. While the cycle of civilization in Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West isbiological, Yeats's is characteristic of mechanical repetition. I find similarity between Yeats’s
reduction of civilization to mechanical repetition and the "mechanization of life," which Henri
Bergson considers an element of laughter. We need to examine Yeats's view of civilization.
He looks critically at the modern era, intending to provoke cynical laughter by the gap between
Christ and the monster. This assumption can be examined in light of Bergson’s idea thatlaughter has the role of rectifying irregularities in human collectives by laughing at thoseirregularities.

122. Why should we ‘laugh and weep’?: odds and ends in Yeats’s ‘All Soul’s Night’
Adrian Paterson (National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland)‘All Soul’s Night’ is an odd poem of ends. Poised at ‘midnight’, it’s set at the end of the day,positioned to conclude the first publication of A Vision (1925) and Yeats’s monumental book
The Tower (1928). It’s a poem about death, and its ends, and all that happens after to the endof the soul’s journey, in which line-ends particularly matter, so that ‘friend’ and ‘end’, ‘fast’and ‘last’, ‘host’ and ‘ghost’, as well as the familiar rhyme ‘breath’ and ‘death’, makesignificant declining pairs. ‘Mock’ and ‘clock’ might suggest mirth’s end as well as time’s, but
an unrhymed pair explaining we should both ‘laugh and weep an hour’ on hearing the promised‘marvellous thing’ is suggestive and uncomfortable – what has timed laughter to do withrevelation, never mind audition, weeping, madness, and truth? This paper examines Yeats’slong investigation of end-times laughter which overcomes mockery, culminating in this nightin which the dead are expected to rise, and this poem marking new beginnings: of a new day,of promised utterance, of thought finding when and ‘where the blessed dance’. Tracking thecultural interests and esoteric publications of those dead (and still living) who play a part in the
poem, including William Horton, Florence Farr, and Samuel MacGregor Mathers, together
with Mathers’ wife Moina Bergson and Yeats’s wife George Hyde-Lees, all of whom haunted
the British Museum’s anthropological collections and reading room, this paper uncovers new
matter in their obsessions with ends and sounds, in Indian ‘figurative speech’, in Greek andEgyptian mysteries and The Book of the Dead, those fin-de-siècle, end-of-empire revivals of
rituals and voices and words and lives and dead-ends that give rise to the ‘mummy truths’ thatthe poem so carefully does not tell us.
3. Yeatsean Laughter in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”
Nobue Miyake (Independent, Japan)
Yeats is a seeker poet. He laughs and sings when he has found what he is after. The
laughter is a genuine emotion that lets the reader feel happy too. So it is in “A Dialogue of
Self and Soul”.
The form of the poem is a dialogue. This is obvious in Part I, where Self and Soul talkin turn, making the respective views clearer. In Part II, however, Soul is silent while Self talks.
It is not that Self is neglecting soul, but Soul listens to Self to the last, while Self speaks of the
discovery good for both. A transformation from Self to anti-self is under way in the dialogue,
and it is the anti-self that talks in Part II.
At the very beginning Self (the poet) is silent, inflicted with remorse. Soul (it is in Self, andhas its distinct voice) watches it and speaks first, knowing that Self wants to be released fromremorse. So the dialogue begins. As it develops, Self awakens to life’s preciousness and its
role to protect Soul. In other words, Soul is the sword, Self, the embroidery, and together, as
Yeats says in a letter, they embody life. This discovery leads to the acceptance of the poet’s
past, which, after full consideration seems nothing but his lot. His will to life is renewed, while
the remorse is dispelled. Laughing and singing enter. The laughter is very Yeatsean, for its
principle shares a great part with Yeats’s idea of tragic joy.

Session 7 Yeats and Other Poets
1. The Influence of Yeats on Modern Korean Poetry: The Case of Kim So-wol
Sunghyun Jang (Korea University, South Korea)

13

For many writers of Japanese-occupied Korea (1910-45), W. B. Yeats represented the greatest
achievement which a writer living under colonial rule could make. Born in Ireland, then aBritish colony, Yeats came to be recognized as one of the world’s foremost poets in early 20th
century. It is thus no wonder that he was the most widely translated Western poet in the Koreaof the 1920’s and 30’s, thereby contributing significantly to the modernization of Korean
poetry. Translations of Yeats’s poetry, in particular, were a formative influence on the poetryof Kim So-wol (1902-34), who laid the foundations for the lyric genre in modern Korean
literature. This paper explores how So-wol matured into a poet with a distinctive lyric voicethrough reading Yeats’s poems then available to him. It is here important to understand the roleof Kim Eok, So-wol’s lifelong mentor, who produced the first Korean translations of Yeats.
So-wol incorporated Yeatsian themes, images and literary styles in his poetry mainly throughKim Eok’s mediation. Many of Yeats’s verses that Kim Eok translated have themes of lost loveand nostalgia, e.g. “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” and “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” bothof which actually left indelible traces of their presence in So-wol’s work. I argue that So-wol
added a national dimension to the agonies of personal love described in Yeats’s poems(especially ones based on his troubled relationship with Maud Gonne). He transformed the painof losing love into the collective traumatic experience of having lost the country. Idyllic Irish
settings in Yeats’s poetry also prompted So-wol to imagine a rural community in which the
Korean folk tradition is still kept alive.
2. Landscape and Memory: Yeats’s and Tagore’s autobiographies
Sirshendu Majumdar (University of Burdwan, India)
The thrust of this paper is to argue the fact that though Yeats and Tagore were poets
who grew up under British imperialism, their attitude to the rulers was different. This iseminently evidently in their autobiographical works where they speak in a confessional formof their attitudes. The confessional form of the autobiography enables them to explore theirambiguities and their sense of loss. Yeats and Tagore encountered the other through Englandand English culture.
London was the metropolitan capital, the centre of power, and Yeats began his literarynationalism here. Yet it was the image of Sligo that haunted him. His attachment to Sligo was
obsessive: Yeats’s sense of place is acute, almost mythopoeic. To him, Sligo was not merely ageographical reality but a dreamland, a magical place, ‘Sindbad’s yellow shore’. This oriental
association transforms the reality of Sligo into a phantasmagoria, a site where mystery, magic,
sensuousness and poetry converge. By associating his Irish landscape with the exotic East,
Yeats reiterates the orientalist concept of the East as the origin of all civilization.
In Tagore’s Reminiscences, the narrative space is extremely restricted, but the confinesof the household are transformed by the power of imagination into a whole universe. However,in Boyhood Tagore leads us towards a much wider geographical horizon, and places us morein the outer world of reality. This reality, being remote in time, acquires an enchantment of its
own.
3. Famous Last Words: Yeats and Rilke’s Epitaph Poems
Felix Green (Brown University, USA)
Both Yeats and Rilke wrote their own epitaphs; moreover, they both wrote them inverse. While neither of these points of trivia is necessarily noteworthy for a poet, what isinteresting is that Yeats penned his epitaph under the (indirect, negative) influence of Rilke. In
the margins of William Rose’s essay “Rilke and the conception of death,” a conception which“annoyed him,” Yeats wrote this famous quatrain, later beheaded to became a lopsided tercet:
14

Draw rein; draw breath.
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.

Horseman pass by.

Given that Yeats’s objections lay in what he perceived as the Bohemian’s near-obsession
with death, we might indeed read these rhetorically and rhythmically stoic lines as a direct
response to Rilke’s decidedly more dramatic and halting:Rose, O pure contradiction, desire
to be no one’s sleep under so manyeyelids.
Beginning with a close reading of these two epitaph-poems, this paper offers acomparative reading the of two men’s attitudes towards death. It suggests not only that they
were closer in outlook than Yeats would ever have wanted to admit—linked by their shared
dedication to the Nietzschean of an heroic, aesthetic affirmation of all existence—but that it
may be in the formal textures of their poems on death (including Rilke’s haunting final
apostrophe, “Come you, you last one I will acknowledge” and the “finest deathbed poem,”
Yeats’s “Cuchulain Comforted”) that each poet’s understanding of the relationship between
art, life, and reality finds its most complex final depiction.

4. Walter Pater and W. B. Yeats
Kazuo Oikawa (Waseda University, Japan)
W. B. Yeats edited The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936 and, surprisingly enough,opened it with Walter Pater’s ‘Mona Lisa’ passage, which he transformed into a verse style.
Yeats explains the reason of this extraordinary treatment as follows, ‘only by printing it in vers
libre can one show its revolutionary importance’.1 I’ll try to examine what he means by this‘revolutionary importance’,
Moreover, in ‘the Tragic Generation’, Yeats confesses that three or four years before he reread Marius the Epicurean, expecting to find he cared it no longer, but that ‘it still seemed tome, as I think it seemed to us all, the only great prose in modern English, and yet I began towonder if it, or the attitude of mind of which it was the noblest expression, had not caused thedisaster of my friends’.2 ‘My friends’ in this passage are what he calls the Tragic Generation,
the members of the Rhymer’s Club; Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, Oscar Wilde and others.
Yeats continues ‘it taught us to walk upon a rope tightly stretched through serene air, and wewere left to keep our feet upon a swaying rope in a storm’.3 I’ll also examine why and how
Pater’s works influenced Yeats and other fellow Rhymers.
Notes
1. W. B. Yeats, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (London: OUP, 1936), p.viii.
2. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955) p.302.
3. Ibid., pp.302-303.

Session 8

Yeats, Philosophy, and Spiritualism

1. Battling the ‘ready-made element’: Yeats and Bergson’s Le Rire
15

Wit Pietrzak (University of Lodz, Poland)
Yeats’s laughter takes on many hues, with the mirthful guffaw in face of tragedy, amanifestation of tragic joy, being its most readily recognisable variation. Then perhaps there isYeats’s socially-stinging derision of the unheroic and cowardly, as in ‘Beautiful Lofty Things’
when the poet’s father is recalled as having deployed a mockery of ‘the land of plaster saints’.
In this presentation, however, I propose to explore Bergsonian undertones of Yeats’s laughter.
Yeats met Bergson in 1894 and, though the acquaintance never became close (despite Yeats’s
closer affinity with the philosopher’s sister, Moina), he did carefully read Matter and Memory
and Creative Evolution, scattering notes and observations across both books. In addition to theknowledge of the above-mentioned titles, it is my contention that there is also a strong presencein Yeats’s implementation of laughter of Bergson’s view, delineated in Le rire (1900), thatlaughter represents mockery of “the unthinking and the unbecoming’. Although there is noevidence that Yeats owned a copy of either the original or the 1911 English translation of thebook, the fact that he stayed in touch with Moina and that in 1911 he was approached by
Maurice Bourgeois, who was at the time writing a study of Synge but also was a specialist on
Bergson, both imply that Yeats would have been familiar with Bergson’s theory of the comic,
most likely via Bourgeois’s excerpts from his monograph on the philosopher that were being
published in The Irish Review towards the end of 1911. Whether conscious or not, Bergson’s
theoretical pronouncements on the nature and role of laughter seem to inform Yeats’s poetic
and dramatic praxis whenever it is concerned with the derision of intellectual mediocrity andunartistic sensibility.
2. “No Laughing Matter? Yeats and the Orwellian A Vision”
Jaron Murphy (Southampton Solent University, UK)
This paper considers the multifaceted notion of laughter in relation to W.B. Yeats’s
philosophical treatise A Vision, covering four main areas: its making, its original and revised
contents, and its critical reception. The abiding touchstone is George Orwell’s “W.B. Yeats”(1943) which, as Grattan Freyer states in W.B. Yeats and the Anti-Democratic Tradition (1981),
discharged “the first real salvo” at Yeats’s politics. Part and parcel of Orwell’s central argumentthat Yeats’s tendency was Fascist is a caution against laughing at or off Yeats’s mystical beliefs
as mere eccentricities, not least in relation to the System of A Vision; and ultimately thesuggestion that Yeats’s “political and religious beliefs are not excrescences to be laughed away,
but something that will leave their mark even on the smallest detail of his work”. This paper
weighs Orwell’s argument (among other critical accounts) in examining both versions of thetreatise (dated 1925 and 1937) as well as important scholarly texts such as George Mills
Harper’s two-volume The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (1987)
and four-volume Yeats’s Vision Papers (1992- 2001). In doing so, the paper also reflects uponYeats’s own deployment of the literary device of humour, and the trope of laughter, in A Visionand related writings. Should we be amused, or disturbed, by what we encounter in A Vision?
This paper concludes that Yeats’s ability and tendency, even within an individual text, to elicit
and induce contrasting or mixed responses from his reader is key to the force of his
philosophical vision and power of his poetical imagination.
3. Yeats and Jung: The Coincidentia Oppositorum and the New Divinity
Dionysious Psilopoulos (American College of Greece, Greece)
When Yeats and Jung were producing their revelatory philosophical and religious manifestos,
A Vision (1925) and The Red Book (from 1914 to 1930), were experiencing what Albert
Schweitzer had pointed out in The Decay and Restoration of Civilization (1923) the “collapse16

of civilization” (1). Being both students of the esoteric tradition they were aware of the theoryof the world cycles and believed that they were living in the end of times, at the end of one
cycle and the birth of the new one. They both felt that what is emerging in the post-apocalyptic
world is the redeemed Universal Anthropos, a deified human being who has re-established its
identity with the divine and restored its dignity. For this to happen though humanity has toturn to the ‘primordium’ source, to the archetype of the eternal feminine.
Both Yeats and Jung dissatisfied with the external patriarchal religions longed for a transhistorical religion that could be embraced by all people. They both dealt with myth, symbols
and mysticism and delved into the original sources of the Oriental and Western esoteric
traditions. They did so in order to offer an initiatory alternative based on the mysticalexperience, on an ecstatic moment, felt only after the dissolution of the ego, the resolution of
the opposites in the human psyche. They believed that, a supra-logic, or knowledge beyond
the conventional knowledge, a ‘gnosis’ or a new state of consciousness is needed in order toliberate the hidden Christ or divinity that lies enslaved in the human psyche. The coincidenceor resolution of the opposites will help people transcend the human mental limitations andperceive the ultimate mystical gnosis that lies in the sphere of the absolute divinity, the Great
Goddess.
Both Yeats and Jung were seized by the power of the ultimate divinity and became theforerunners of the New Age. They were chosen to convey to profane humanity the good news,
that there exists in the depths of the human psyche a divinity, who like ‘the sleeping beauty’awaits to be awakened by a ‘kiss’, an act of voluntary devotion and love. This divinity would
liberate humans from the shackles of matter and blind obedience to a false creator.
4. The global network a vegetarian restaurant in Dublin represents
Toshio Akai (Kobe Gakuin University, Japan)
My paper is to unearth a long-forgotten restaurant called Sunshine Vegetarian Dining Rooms,
a small diner once existed in Grafton Street, Dublin in 1891, and to examine the significancethis restaurant held in terms of connecting local Dubliners with the movements then active
across the globe. Actually, the restaurant lasted only a few months, and this tempted us toregard it as a small incident, unworthy to remember in any contexts of Irish modern culture.
Nevertheless, a new light is shed upon it given that the restaurant was managed by the two
younger sisters of Charles Johnston, an ex-British Bengal Service and a close friend to W. B.
Yeats since his school days, and we are not wrong to locate it in the extent of Hermetic Society,a small circle for occult study Johnston formed five years ago before he went to India. Yeats
was benefitted handsomely from the society, as it enabled him to develop the network withouter world and to access to the movements like Theosophical Society, then under way globally.
Likewise, Sunshine Vegetarian Dining Rooms was not opened only for Dubliners who
demanded the meal without meats and fish. My survey revealed that the customers of therestaurant were chiefly the members of the Brotherhood of the Light, a communal group an
Anglo-American spiritualistic Swedenborgian Thomas Lake Harris founded in New York, and
it is likely that the restaurant functioned to affiliate local Irish culture with the movement
dynamically developed worldwide.

17

Plenary Speakers
Seán Golden was born of Irish parents in London. Early childhood in Ballina andBallaghaderreen (Ireland). Schooled in Connecticut and Massachusetts (USA). Returned tothe home place in Ireland to live. Worked some years in Tianjin (China). Before China, aspecialist in Irish Studies and James Joyce; after, a specialist in Chinese thought, politics, andinternational relations. Published in Ireland in Cyphers, The Crane Bag and The Field Day
Anthology of Irish Writing, as well as Force 10, The Cathach II, The SHOp, The Stinging
Fly and North West Words. Co-editor with Peter Fallon of Soft Day. A Miscellany ofContemporary Irish Literature. Numerous translations of Chinese poetry, classical andcontemporary, as well as publications in Irish Studies and East Asian Studies. Retired Full
Professor and Former Director of the East Asia Studies & Research Centre of the UniversitatAutònoma de Barcelona (UAB), Senior Associate Researcher of the CIDOB Barcelona
Centre for International Affairs, and Associate Professor of the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis
Internacionals (IBEI). Divides his time now among Barcelona (Spain), Ballyconnell (Sligo,
Ireland) and Beijing (China).
Youngmin Kim has been teaching literatures in English and critical theory at the Departmentof English, Dongguk University since 1991 after he got his Ph. D. at the University ofMissouri-Columbia. He is currently Dean of the College of the Humanities, Professor ofEnglish, Distinguished University Professor, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of English
Language and Literature. He was Visiting Professor at Cornell University and Sapporo
Gakuin University in Japan, and the Visiting Scholar at the University of Virginia at
Charlottesville. He had served as President of William Butler Yeats Society of Korea, of
Jacques Lacan & Contemporary Psychoanalysis Society, and of English Language andLiterature Association of Korea. His current interest is Yeats, Hopkins, Pound, and modern
and contemporary British and American poetry, transnationalism, world literature, and digital
humanities. He wrote articles and books on modern and contemporary poetries in English,
critical theory, psychoanalysis, comparative literature and world literature.
Alexandra Poulain is Professor of postcolonial literature and theatre at Sorbonne Nouvelle
University (France). She has published widely on modern and contemporary Irish drama andperformance, with a special focus on Yeats and Beckett. Her latest book Irish Drama,
Modernity and the Passion Play (Palgrave, 2016) looks at rewritings of the Passion narrative
as a modality of political resistance in Irish plays from Synge to the present day. She is
President of the International Yeats Society and Vice-Chair for Europe of IASIL(International Association for the Study of Irish Literatures). Her current research focuses oncultural and artistic representations of shame in postcolonial drama, performance and thevisual arts.
Margaret Mills Harper is Glucksman Professor of Contemporary Writing in English at the
University of Limerick, Ireland. Publications include Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual andLiterary Collaboration of George and W. B. Yeats (2006) and scholarly editions of Yeats’s“Vision” Papers (Macmillan 1992 and 2001) and Yeats’s A Vision (2008 and 2015). She isformer President of the International Yeats Society and served as director of the Yeats
International Summer School from 2013 to 2015.
Akiko Manabe is Professor of English & Special Assistant to the President (Cultural &International Affairs), Shiga University, Japan. Secretary general of Japan Ireland Society.
Specializes in American and Irish Modernist poetry and drama, especially Ezra Pound andother poets he directly influenced such as W. B. Yeats and Ernest Hemingway with a special
interest in the relationship of words and music. Recently researched the Japanese influence of18

European and American modernism, especially with relation to Noh and kyogen. Recent
publications: Hemingway and Ezra Pound in Venezia, “W.B Yeats and kyogen :Individualism& Communal Harmony in Japan's Classical Theatrical Repertoire” in ÉTUDE S ANGLAISES
revue du monde anglophone”(2015), “Pound, Yeats and Hemingway’s Encounter with Japan:
Kyogen and Hemingway’s Poetry” in Japanese Artists and Modernism in Europe and America
and “ Literary Style and Japanese Aesthetics: Hemingway’s Debt to Pound as Reflected in his
Poetic Style,” Cultural Hybrids of (Post)Modernism: Japanese/Western Literature, Art andPhilosophy. Produced a series of kyogen performances in Ireland in 2017 (60th anniversary ofthe diplomatic relationship between Japan and Ireland).

Session Speakers
Charles Armstrong is a professor of English literature at the University of Agder, in
Norway. The most recent of his three monographs is Reframing Yeats: Genre, Allusion andHistory (Bloomsbury, 2013). Of his four co-edited volumes, the last published is The Legacyof the Good Friday Agreement: Politics, Culture and Art in Northern Ireland after
1998 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). He is the vice president of the International Yeats Society
and the president of the Nordic Association of English Studies.
Yoko Sato is a Professor of English at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.
Her main research interest focuses upon the poetry and drama of W.B. Yeats. She is the cotranslator of Morton N. Cohen’s Lewis Carroll: A Biography (1999) and Seamus Heaney’s
The Place of Writing (2001). She served as Secretary of IASIL Japan from 1997 to 1999, andas President of IASIL Japan from 2013 to 2015.
Zsuzsanna Balázs is a PhD student and Irish Research Council Government of Ireland
Postgraduate Scholar in the O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance at the
National University of Ireland Galway. Her PhD research considers representations ofandrogyny and power performance in W. B. Yeats’s, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s and Luigi
Pirandello’s plays in the context of totalising political discourses. She is also founding
member of Modernist Studies Ireland and co-organiser of monthly research seminars on
modernism at NUI Galway.
Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. He is theeditor of the Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry and author of Irish Poetry
Under the Union, 1801-1924. He is currently writing a History of Irish Poetry for Cambridge
University Press. With Lauren Arrington, he is Director of the Yeats International Summer
School and they are also editing the Oxford Handbook of Yeats.
Dr Aoife Lynch obtained a Ph.D on the late poetry of W. B. Yeats and the prose of SamuelBeckett from University College Dublin in 2013. She has published in The Irish University
Review and The Irish Studies Review on the poetry of W. B. Yeats. She is a member of the
UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland and is currently working on a monograph on the poetryof W. B. Yeats entitled The Undoing Project: W. B. Yeats and Science.
Yuki, ITO, Ph.D. is an assistant professor at Language Education Center, Josai University.
As a member of the Modern Haiku Association (of Japan), he has continued to conduct haiku
studies along with Anglo-Irish literature studies, especially W. B. Yeats. He received Ph.D. inliterature from Kumamoto University in 2011. His interests include philosophy and national
19

identity. His forthcoming publication is Kaneko Tohta in Translation: Poetry and Philosophy(co-translation. Red Moon Press, VA, USA. 2019).
Taeko Kakihara is a part-time lecturer at Senshu University and Musashi University inTokyo, Japan. Her current interest is representation of the objects such as marionettes anddolls in W. B. Yeats's poems and plays, which may eventually extend to the impersonality
theory of the literary modernism.
Tomoko Iwatsubo, PhD, is Professor at Hosei University, Japan. Her publications include“‘Coole and Ballylee, 1931’: Yeats’s Elegy for the Poetic Demesne” in Yeats 150: William
Butler Yeats 1865-1939, ed. Declan J. Foley (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2016).
Melinda Szuts is an IRC Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholar at the O'DonoghueCentre for Drama, Theatre and Performance, NUI Galway. She is a graduate of Eötvös
Loránd University, Budapest (BA in English and Film Studies, MA in English Literature).
Her practice-as-research PhD project is entitled “Yeats the Dramaturge: Space Dramaturgy inFour Plays for Dancers”. Melinda has experience in working on Yeats’s plays as a theatre
practitioner, both as actor and director. Her most recent Yeats production, The Only Jealousyof Emer, premiered at the Galway Theatre Festival in May 2018. Melinda is founding
member and acting head of the Hungarian Yeats Society.
Boey Kim Cheng has published five collections of poetry, a travel memoir entitled Between
Stations, and Gull Between Heaven and Earth, a historical novel based on the life of the Tang
Dynasty poet Du Fu. He teaches Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University in
Singapore.
Dr. Robinson is Associate Professor in the Department of English, Japan Women’s
University. He gained his PhD from the University of Sussex (UK), and has published andlectured on subjects as diverse as local history, philosophy of history, and English Literature.
His core research focus is intellectual history and the history of print culture, with particularexpertise on book advertising in the eighteenth century. Dr. Robinson recently curated an
exhibition entitled, 'Novelists and Newspapers' at the University of Tokyo, where he worked
for many years. He is co-founder of the Write House, a loose consortium of local historians
based in Sussex, UK, and co-conceived a Heritage Lottery-funded literary outreach project, ASouth Downs Alphabet in 2017. His current work, a JSPS-funded project, surveys bookadvertising in Britain and Japan from the seventeenth century to the digital age.
Kimihito Kubo received his Ph.D. from Osaka University. He is a specially-appointed
assistant professor at Osaka University and lectures on American and English literature. He
is co-author of an encyclopedia on Hemingway and two college-level textbooks.
Nobue Miyake is from Osaka, Japan. She graduated from Kobe College in 1987. Her B. A.
thesis was on Philip Sidney. She went on to the same college graduate division, and started
her study on W. B. Yeats. After she took an M. A. on Yeats, she became a high school
teacher and taught in Kobe and Osaka for about twenty years. During this period she wrote a
paper on “Among School Children”, “‘Among School Children’ and Its Interpretations” forYeats Studies. It was published in 2004. She took early retirement in 2010. She wrote on“Lapis Lazuli”, “The Brightness of ‘Lapis Lazuli’” for Yeats Studies, and it was published in
2014. She has been a member of the Yeats Society of Japan and Iasil since the late 1990’s.
Her interest goes to Yeats, poetry, and music.
20

Sunghyun Jang is an assistant professor of the English department at Korea University,
Korea. My special interest is British Romantic literature. I'm teaching courses on Romantic
and Victorian poetry.
Felix Green is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University. His
dissertation, “Unities of Being: The Tension between Transcendence and History in theFormal Aspects of William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Wallace Stevens,”
combines historical research with close reading to argue that form, by both shaping andsubverting content, is the point where poetry becomes most resistant to ideology. He also
writes and translates poetry and has published poems in France, the UK, the USA, Australia,
and Mexico.
Kazuo Oikawa is Professor of English and Irish literatures at the Department of English
Language and Literature, School of Education, Waseda University. Vice-President of theJapan Association of English Romanticism. His latest publications include The Harp &Green: Irish Poetry and National Identity (Otowa-Shobou Tsurumi-Shoten, 2018), Ichikawa,
Ito et al. (eds.) Intellectual Adventures: Essays in English Romanticism (Otowa-Shobou
Tsurumi-Shoten, 2017).
Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British Literature at the University of Lodz, Poland, he
specialises in modernist Irish and British poetry. His recent publications include “Levity of
Design.” Man and Modernity in the Poetry of J. H. Prynne, and The Critical Thought of W.
B. Yeats.
Dr Jaron Murphy (Southampton Solent University, United Kingdom) holds a DPhil fromthe University of Oxford (2014). His research thesis, entitled “The Arnoldian Element inYeats’s A Vision”, was supervised by Prof Bernard O’Donoghue. Dr Murphy’s publications
on Yeats include “‘Of Hunters and of Fishers’: A Covert Critique of Arnold’s Celtic Elementin Yeats’s A Vision” (Notes and Queries, Oxford University Press, Volume 64, Issue 4, 1
December 2017, pp648–656) and “Passion and Imagination: Yeats’s ‘Fundamental
Agreement’ with Lewis at Phase 9 in the Great Wheel of A Vision” (The Journal of Wyndham
Lewis Studies 7, 2016, pp194-201).
Dr. Dionysious Psilopoulos is an assistant professor of English and academic writing at
Deree-The American College of Greece, and a visiting professor of advanced academic
writing at the American University of Sharjah. He holds a PhD in English from the
University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Prophets and the Goddess: W. B. Yeats,
Aleister Crowley, Ezra Pound, Robert Graves and the Chthonic Esoteric Tradition. His
research and published essays focus on the influence of the esoteric tradition on modernist
literature.
Toshio Akai: born in 1957 in Kyoto, Japan. Educated in Kwansei Gakuin University,
Nishinomiya, Japan, and conferred MA (English Literature) in 1984 there. Humanities
Professor, Kobe Gakuin University, Kobe, Japan, since 1999. Specializing Theosophist
activities in Ireland and India, and Irish impact on the interwar years Japanese culture.

21