Thesis--Hamburg. / Bibliography: p. 184-198.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses. / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / 2031-01-02

Thèse--Lettres--Paris III, 1973. / Bibliogr. p. 723-735. Index.

Thesis--Universität Göttingen. / Bibliogr. p. 287-310.

Thesis--University of Southampton. / Bibliography: p. [227]-233.

Texte remanié de: Thesis Ph. D.--University of Ulster, GB, 2001. / Bibliogr. p. 315-336.

Les mythologies – gréco-romaine, irlandaise, perse, indienne, japonaise, chinoise –sont omniprésentes dans la poésie de Bunting, Eliot, Pound et Yeats. Les prédilections desauteurs pour certaines mythologies, véritables choix identitaires et politiques, montrenttoutefois une péroccupation commune pour les mythes violents, aux niveaux martial et sexuel.Ce premier niveau thématique se combine avec une réflexion plus distanciée sur le mythe,outil critique qui permet la reformulation de croyances rituelles et spirituelles, et de nouvellesthéories poétiques qui visent à ordonner et donner un sens au monde chaotique du XXe siècle.Le mythe, subversif, permet donc l’articulation de nouvelles spiritualités et denouvelles expériences poétiques. Enfin, matériau vivant et modelable, dont la mention est à lafois un raccourci de récits anciens et un horizon élargi vers d’autres références et réécritures,le mythe est objet linguistique. En traduction, le mythe transfert les contenus thématiques,déplace les rythmes et fait circuler et s’entremêler les arts. En effet, retour fantasmé à uneorigine du langage artistique, le mythe est parfois fiction d’un art total où les figuresmythiques seraient à la fois objet linguistique, représentation imaginaire picturale etmanifestation musicale. De cette vision du mythe émane une poésie polyphonique et hybride,à l’image du centaure et des autres créatures monstrueuses présents dans l’oeuvre poétique deBunting, Eliot, Pound et Yeats. / Greek and Roman, Irish, Persian, Indian, Japanese and Chinese mythologies areeverywhere in the poetry of Bunting, Eliot, Pound and Yeats. Their favouring somemythologies over others are often justified by their definitions of identity and politics. Yettheir common point is a recurent rewriting of sexually or martially violent myths. Secondly,more than a theme, myth also provides a distanced reflection which enables the poets toformulate new ritual and spiritual beliefs, together with a new poetics meant to order andmake sense of what is seen as a chaotic 20th century.Finally, myth is a living and protean material, whose presence is both a shorthand forolder narratives and a broader horizon pointing to other rewritings. In its linguistic dimension,myth in translation emphasizes questions of rhythm and enables the incorporation of other artsinto poetry. Indeed, the use of myth suggests a fantasized return to the origins of language andthe arts. Myth enables poets to try and create total art works where mythical figures are bothlinguistic and musical objects, as well as pictural representations of the imagination. From thepossibilities afforded by myth stems a polyphonic and hybrid poetry, akin to the image of thecentaur and other monstrous creatures present in the poetic works of Bunting, Eliot, Poundand Yeats.

This paper is a study of the effect of W. B. Yeats's contact with Japanese Noh drama on his work. The immediately discernible effect on his work can be seen, of course, in his adaptation of Noh dramatic form to his Four Plays for Dancers and The Death of Cuchulain. It is the thesis of this paper, then, that, despite many handicaps, Yeats's aesthetic background was not only sufficient to discover what suggestion did lie in the limited information available to him concerning Noh, but also sufficient for him to intuit much of what wasn't suggested.

Abstract available in pdf file.

Previous critics have paid insufficient attention to the political implications of Yeats's life-long preoccupation with a wide range of Western and Eastern religious traditions. Though he always preserved some skepticism about mysticism's ability to reshape the material world, the early Yeats valued the mystical idea of oneness in part because he hoped (mistakenly, as it turned out) that such oneness would bring Catholic and Protestant Ireland together in a way that might make the goals of Irish nationalism easier to accomplish. Yeats's celebration of mystical oneness does not reflect a pseudo-fascistic commitment to a static, oppressive unity. Like most mystics—and most modernists—Yeats conceived of both religious and political oneness not as a final end but rather as an ongoing process, a "way of happening" (as Auden put it).