BL. W. B. Yeats

246. Londraville, Richard. ‘The Dramatic Function of Yeats’s Dreaming Back’. Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies 7 (1989): 99-124.

While it is not Londraville’s central aim, this work demonstrates that Yeats’s dramatic use of the ‘dreaming back’ of the dead (see, especially, 13) is directly traceable to his understanding of the nô, the first dramatic form in which the concept is a central premise. Londraville’s analysis of the ways Yeats puts the idea to use in The Dreaming of the Bones (14a), The Only Jealousy of Emer (14b), Calvary (17a), The Words Upon the Window Pane (34), and Purgatory (44b) is the best available, and particularly good about the ways Christian understanding and the Yeatsian model differ from the Buddhist concept that underlies the mugen nô, and how Yeats’s departure from this informs his work.