BL. W. B. Yeats

239. Komesu, Okifumi. ‘At the Hawk’s Well [12] and Taka No Izumi in a “Creative Circle”’. Yeats Annual 5 (1987): 103-13.

Aims to demonstrate a ‘circularity’ of ‘reception’ and ‘destruction’ in culture and in creative activity, and finds Yeats’s adaptation of the nô, and Yokomichi Mario’s of Yeats, ‘interesting case stud[ies]’, since both ‘reacted both receptively and destructively to the norms they confronted, be they foreign or native’. Ultimately, and refreshingly, Komesu is not concerned with the degree of Yeats’s faithfulness to the nô, and his comments about ‘severely limited’ source and influence studies might serve as a caveat for future scholarship about the subject: a study that focuses on the ‘affirmative side’ of Yeats’s adaptation of the form ‘fails to grasp the crucial significance of his radical deviation from the Noh aesthetic’, for ‘finding the shadow of the Noh on the map of Yeats’s dramatic country does not go very far in uncovering the deepest strata that constitute the geology of the territory’; likewise, however, ‘a completely negative treatment of Yeats’s relationship to the Noh will lead one on an equally dangerous critical path’ that ‘obscures the significance of Yeats’s Eastern schooling by forfeiting an important clue to the unravelling of the . . . mystery of [his] creative process’, particularly his ‘negative view’ of the ‘objective’ nature of the West, and its culmination, as Yeats saw it, in an aesthetics of realism.