BL. W. B. Yeats

211. Wilson, Bruce M. ‘“From Mirror after Mirror”: Yeats and Eastern Thought’. Comparative Literature 34/1 (1982): 28-46.

A provocative attempt to ‘substantiate Ishibashi’s inviting, insistent conclusion’ (in 131) that Yeats’s later interest in the nô derived from his growing interest in Zen Buddhism, and that his later poetry might be ‘re-examined in this light’. Wilson’s understanding of Zen, like Yeats’s, derives largely from Suzuki (see D28), but given the evidence presented it is nonetheless difficult to dispute the conclusion that Yeats sought in Zen and Hindu mysticism an escape from dualistic and Neoplatonic views of human experience, and that this seeking may be traced through his later work. Discusses among other works The Dreaming of the Bones (14a), The Only Jealousy of Emer (14b), and The Cat and the Moon (24a). See also 113.