BL. W. B. Yeats

242. Hayley, Barbara. ‘Lafcadio Hearn, W. B. Yeats and Japan’. In Literature and the Art of Creation: Essays and Poems in Honour of A. Norman Jeffares, edited by Robert Welch and Suheil Badi Bushrui. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1988.

Focuses much more on Hearn than on Yeats, and of numerous similarities Hayley finds between the two, only one—that for each ‘Japan offered a way out of a tired literary tradition’—particularly concerns Japanese interests. Includes passing reference to Yeats’s interest in the nô and to Sato’s sword (see 21 and 48k). Yeats himself apparently did not feel a sympathy for Hearn:. For all Yeat’s interest in Japan apparently none of Hearn’s books were in his library (see 228), and only once in Yeat’s published work does he mention Hearn, that in passing (see 35b).