BL. W. B. Yeats

245. Leeming, Glenda. ‘Later Yeats: The Noh Plays and After’. In Poetic Drama. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Begins with an obvious proposition, but one that some writers about the subject fail to grasp: Yeats was ‘not . . . a Japanese scholar aiming for an authentic reconstruction or imitation of the Noh models’. What follows is a reading of the plays not hampered by discussion about what they do or do not have in common with ‘real’ nô, but that nonetheless responds to Yeats’s selective incorporation of principles he found in the form, particularly the methods it afforded him for ‘presenting the supernatural on stage’.