BL. W. B. Yeats

188. Wilson, Bruce Matthew. ‘The Artifice of Eternity: Yeats and the Purgatorial Vision’. PhD thesis, University of Virginia, 1977. Abstract in DAI 38/9: 5470A.

Chapter 1, ‘Yeats and the Japanese Noh of Ghosts’, discusses the influence of nô on European playwrights and argues that Yeats found in the form a means of portraying his beliefs about the ‘spirit world’; Chapter 2 argues that in The Dreaming of the Bones (14a) and Purgatory (44b) Yeats adapted the nô form and its ghosts to ‘portray the battle between warring halves of the self’.