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.

This thesis proposes that Yeats found in certain conventions of the Noh drama a realization and defense of his idea of unity of culture, which his Noh-like Four Plays for Dancers illustrates. Yeats' use of recurrent imagery in the dance plays expresses his belief in a unity of culture defined and evoked by an image and stems in part from the pattern of images he discovered in the Pound-Fenollosa translations of the Noh. The imagery of the poetic text reappears in symbolic visual designs or is coordinated with music and dance in the production of the plays. The importance of the spoken word above all determined the basis of the association of arts with which Yeats characterized unity of culture and shaped his adaptation and occasional misconception of the staging techniques of the Noh. A common love of vivid, allusive words joined the audience for whom the dance plays were written. When Yeats stated that they were modelled on the audience of the Noh, his perception was colored, as usual, by his own priorities and experience.

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