BL. W. B. Yeats

151. Jochum, Klaus Peter. Die dramatische Struktur der Spiele von W. B. Yeats. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1971.

Jochum’s play-by-play analysis of Yeats’s drama divides the plays into three ‘groups’, including those that are ‘immediate reactions to the Japanese nô’ (Four Plays for Dancers [17] and The Cat and the Moon [24a]) and the ‘last plays’, which ‘still depend on nô conventions but . . . do not flourish them’. A chapter on the influence of the nô identifies ‘nine major aspects’ in Yeats’s understanding of the form, outlined in an English summary of the book (p. 256) as ‘the insistence on the difference between life and art, the idea of indirect, symbolic and aristocratic art, the practice of literary and mythological allusion, the importance of the audience’s imagination, the theatre of beauty and poetry as distinct from the realistic theater, the existence of a stylized action ending in a climactic dance, the use of masks, the use of a chorus, and recurrent imagery’. Originally a DPhil thesis, University of Frankfurt, 1968.