Critical responses to Yeats's engagement with Asian literature and thought have tended to veer between opposite extremes. Skeptics have sought to ridicule what they have interpreted as a superficial flirtation with, or expression of, merely questionable “New Age” tendencies in the Irish poet. Enthusiasts, on the other hand, have been quick to embrace the wisdom and universality of Yeats's attempts to transcend, or question, the limitations of Western civilization, often emphasizing the exclusively Eastern provenance of key Yeatsian themes. Shiro Naito, for instance, has tried to show that “the later Yeats found the ideas of tragic gaiety and Unity of Being in the East.” More modestly, Jerusha McCormack has claimed that Yeats, in the final stanza of “Lapis Lazuli,” is able to transcend his Western conditioning and attain a vision that is fully Daoist. Other commentators have been less generous, essentially repeating Auden's censure of the “Southern Californian” side of Yeats. One aspect of what is at stake is the link between Yeats's beliefs and his works of literature. While he is widely acknowledged as a key literary figure of the twentieth century, with few rivals within English–language poetry, Yeats's beliefs have tended to be mocked, avoided, or—more insidiously perhaps—tacitly altered through being rephrased. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with his esoteric ideas, it is hard to argue that the elaborate belief–system propounded in A Vision, for instance, is at all close to the mainstream of modern secularism. Margaret Mills Harper has pointed to the resulting lack of fit between an appreciation of Yeats's verse and his thought. In the context of her own work on Yeats's esoteric pursuits and automatic writing, she criticizes what she calls: