The purpose of this study is ultimately subjected to the Orientalism, even though this deals with some positive effects in the realm of art and architecture as the scope of study, because through which the relationship between two different cultures will be discussed. That is to say, this research focused not only on how the presentation of ‘avant-garde’ visual art, which is explained as formal ‘purity’ and ‘abstraction’ as the characteristics of modern arts, could be made in the transition to the 20th's World, but also on what is the role and meaning of Eastern thoughts, which is popular in that time, for the new philosophical background of the artistic revolution. As a result, this study found that a lot of ‘avant-garde’ architects such as F. L. Wright, M. Mahony in Prairie School and L. Sullivan, D. Burnham, J. Root in Chicago School, and Lauweriks, H. P. Berlage who introduced Wright's works into the Europe, had possessed the ‘Universal Philosophy’ including Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, Deism, and Theosophy which are all influenced by Oriental religions and thoughts through historic western philosophers, although it is generally well-known that W. Kandinsky and P. Mondrian were belong to that. Furthermore, they gave attention to the Oriental religions and thoughts in that time, eventually made a historical progressive process of unification of thoughts between East and West. In a word, the new universalism was the philosophical background that made the artist's idea and presentation on ‘from Being into Becoming’.

In this paper, I argue that W. B. Yeats’s pursuit of universalism was rekindled by his rediscovery of the East through Tagore. Yeats’s political experiences during the 1910s also influenced his fascination with universalism. I will first discuss the significance of Yeats’s fascination with Tagore in relation to his rediscovery of the importance of East, particularly India, not only for spiritual reasons, but also for political reasons. That is, Tagore ultimately gave Yeats an opportunity to see India as a place to reconcile his split allegiance to both Romanticism and nationalism, and to art and politics. The East, for Yeats, is the place to swerve from his Romantic predecessors for political reasons. At this time, a return to East was especially important to him because it also offered a psychological vindication for his political setback—being attacked for his anti-nationalism—during the Playboy riots. That is, the pursuit of Eastern values, particularly Indian values, became his way of fighting colonialism, as well as for finding spiritual wholeness. By the time Yeats returned to the East, Yeats also began to witness the most turbulent and dramatic political events of his life such as the 1916 Easter Rising, the Irish and English War, and the Irish Civil War, which Yeats viewed as the culmination of the hatred between political groups and parties. His rediscovery of Eastern values through Tagore and his political experiences at that time slowly led Yeats to develop a concept of universalism: the unity of East and West. In other words, Yeats’s continuous movement towards universalism during this period was the necessary and inevitable course to deal with his political experiences: his psychological need to purify the bitterness and hatred Irish politics breeds into his mind, and his need to offer a more inclusive political vision to the Irish politicians who fight out of hatred of opposing parties. What Yeats basically wants to do by pursuing universalism is to create a citizen of the universe whose consciousness transcends the distinction between one and many, present and past, and East and West. Poems such as “The Double Vision of Michael Robartes,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Among School Children,” and “Byzantium,” written after 1919 express Yeats’s universalist idea of reconciling East and West employing a meditative scheme. It is unmistakable that all three poems encapsulate Yeats’s universal consciousness, but we also see that they are also tinged by Yeats’s skepticism about the transcendental state, as well as about universalism, in one way or another. Yeats’s doubt about universalism betrays his conflicting political agenda: his belief in the Anglo-Irish aristocratic government. Looking at other poems (“The Wild Swans at Cool,” “In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,” “An Irish Airman foresees his Death,” “A Prayer for my Daughter”) published in the same period reveal his covert allegiance to the Anglo-Irish aristocratic tradition.

This article touches upon Yeats’s relationship to the spiritual traditions of the world in the 1930's. During this period when he was immersed in Eastern, especially Indian philosophies, Yeats affirmed his desire to pursue the marriage of East and West for political and psychological reasons. An analysis of the poems from A Full Moon in March (1935) reveals that Yeats believes that the idea of the East-West marriage works as an antidote to the persistent political problems of Ireland -- the battle between Catholics and Protestants -- which again haunted Ireland after de Valera became the president of Ireland in 1932. Yeats’s Supernatural Songs is a testimony to his ideal of wholeness which he expresses through his pernona-hermit Ribh. Yeats’s attempt to reconcile the conflicting forces of East and West (evolved from Catholics and Protestants) reflects the poet’s Romantic ideals so that the East and the West (the colonized and the colonizer) co-exist harmoniously by discarding one’s own weaknesses and accepting the other’s merits. His life-long efforts to pursue the political unity of his country and the world also show his practical character in that he is always thinking about the possibility of maximizing the potential of each component of a group. We, however, also see that Yeats is not completely free from his Protestant prejudice even when he strongly urges the unity between two opposing political parties by making a subtle connection between a religious hermit and Parnell. It is no wonder that Supernatural Songs also has poems which express Yeats’s skepticism about the possibility of conveying the idea of oneness to the everyday world, as well as his resistance to the mystical concept of oneness.