BL. W. B. Yeats

244. Chiba, Yoko. ‘W. B. Yeats and Noh: From “Japonism” to Zen’. PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1988. Identical abstracts in DAI 50/6: 1486A, and DAI 53/2: 502A.

A ‘cross-cultural study of the influence of the Noh theatre on Yeats, in the context of Japonisme and the aesthetic of Zen Buddhism’. Includes examination of Craig’s debts to Japanese theatre (see D17), Japonisme ‘in the Yeats circle’, and the Pound/Fenollosa versions of the nô. Part two establishes a relation between the nô and Zen ‘as a context for Yeats’s ideas’, and is ‘largely derived from Japanese sources for lack of English material’. Finds that ‘Noh greatly helped to develop Yeats’s symbolic theatre, which was further strengthened after his study of Zen’.