Yeats and Mohini Chatterjee

Abstract

“There was one period in [Yeats’s] early life;”, writes C. L. Wrenn, “when his imagination was captivated and stimulated by India -not the India of politicians, or historians or travellers, but an India of pure romance, which bears some subtle yet obvious relation to old romantic Ireland.;“1 This was a period when he experimented with “many pathways” in order to find his true poetic subject and voice (VP 845). One of the paths Yeats travelled on was revealed to him by Mohini Chatterjee, a young Brahmin who came to Dublin in 1885 as a representative of the Theosophical Society, but went beyond the “contemporary” eclecticism of theo-sophy2 to the philosophia perennis of Vedanta3 — to the ageless perceptions of human existence enshrined in the Upanishads, the Gita and in the works of the eight-century South Indian seer Sankara. The teachings of Mohini Chatterjee left a vivid and lasting impression of Yeats; initially, they strengthened his youthful romanticism, cast a dreamy atmosphere over his early poetry and inspired some specifically “Indian” poems in the section called Crossways in his Poems (1895); eventually they impelled him to transcend his cultural and national boundaries to articulate themes of universal validity and cosmic significance.