BL. W. B. Yeats

79. Henn, T. R. The Lonely Tower: Studies in the Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London: Methuen, 1950. Rev. ed., 1965.

Henn’s classic study suggests (1950, p. 80) that in his drama Yeats worked toward ‘the exclusion of the extraneous and irrelevant’, and ‘from this follows his unduly high valuation of the Japanese nôh plays as a model’, for ‘that limited, stylized, aristocratic and remote drama . . . allowed him to express both his gifts for lyric and also the mystical doctrines of the Self and Anti-Self’.