Chapter 8 Yeats, Noh Theatre, and the Traditions of Asia
In: Eastern and Western Synergies and Imaginations
Author:
Matthew Gibson
Matthew Gibson
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Abstract
This chapter demonstrates the development of Yeats’s use of Nōh theatre in relation to the poet’s growing interest in Buddhism. Noh contributed to his understanding of spiritualism, while Buddhist notions of Ultimate Reality contributed to the cyclical presentation of history in plays like The Resurrection. This facilitates the further use of drama as a metaphor for history and the changes of influx over cycles, which Yeats illustrates with Chinese iconography. Thus Asian traditions influence Yeats’s dramatic practice, his understanding of the theory of history, and are also used to present the Great Year – his macroscopic historical cycle, as drama.