BL. W. B. Yeats

100. Rexroth, Kenneth. ‘The Plays of Yeats’. In Bird in the Bush: Obvious Essays. New York: New Directions, 1959. Reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries, 1970.

Unedited transcript of a talk given ‘without notes or preparation’ on a weekly book program for San Francisco radio station KPFA. The nô ‘had a determinative influence on Yeats. . . . He was simply overwhelmed by the new dramatic insights afforded by Noh.’ The dance-dramas ‘compare very favorably with the greatest Japanese Noh’, and are Yeats’s ‘greatest achievement’. Rexroth’s debt to Yeats’s ‘dance plays’ is apparent in his own nô-inspired verse drama (see CA13c). Partly incorporated in ‘William Butler Yeats, Plays’, in Rexroth’s More Classics Revisited (New York: New Directions, 1989).