Recently, Fu Hao, research professor at the Institute of Foreign Literature, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, published two notes on Chinese elements in Yeats’s poems in Notes and Queries, Volume 69, Issue 1, March 2022 published by Oxford University Press. They are respectively entitled “Who Is the Lord of Chou?” and “Who Is the Queen?” The former points out the errors in the notes and commentaries by Richard J. Finneran, Daniel Albright, A. Norman Jeffares, and others concerning the “Duke of the Chou” mentioned in Yeats’s poem “Vacillation”, and with proper evidence provides the correct answer that the particular Duke of Chou is not the commonly known Duke of Chou, but the senior one, namely, his father King Wen of Chou before he became king. The latter solves the mystery of the identity of the Chinese “queen” mentioned in Yeats’ poem “His Phoenix”, which no one knew before, and concludes from the context that this queen may be probably Wang Qiang (alias Zhaojun), a household name in China.
Links to both articles are listed below:
Who is the Lord of Chou? | Notes and Queries | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
Who is the Queen? | Notes and Queries | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
