The Influence of Japanese Noh on the Plays of Ezra Pound and William Butler Yeats＊

2003 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 163-180
Author(s):  
Hae-Kyung Sung ◽  
Keyword(s):  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
Ezra Pound

Occultism, Spiritualism and Hermeticism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Large Seagrave
Keyword(s):  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Literary Modernism ◽  
Religious Knowledge ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Hidden Knowledge ◽  
Black Magic

Sometimes called ‘hidden knowledge’, Occultism refers to beliefs and practices concerning the intersection of the material and spiritual worlds, purportedly representing the most ancient religious knowledge, but mainly originating in Hellenistic and medieval times. The term carries with it nefarious overtones, often indicating evil works associated with black magic, though this veil obscures the ancient arts of spiritual understanding, manipulation and evolution contained in the Western esoteric tradition. Many modernist artists devoted serious study to occult mysteries, which led Leon Surette to theorize that the interest of William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) in Occultism underlies the aesthetics of literary Modernism.

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

Yeats's Barfieldian Rebellion: Locating Yeats's Synthetic Symbolism in Barfield's Evolution of Consciousness

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Clayton McReynolds
Keyword(s):  
William Butler Yeats ◽  
Evolution Of Consciousness ◽  
The World

In this paper, I draw on Barfield's theory of the evolution of consciousness and language to argue that William Butler Yeats employs language in his poetry in a way which resembles the older, ‘organic’ poetry Barfield describes. I observe how Yeats's ‘concrete’ understanding allowed him to weave a rich web of meaning into his poetry without feeling confined by T.S. Eliot's ‘dissociation of sensibility’. Many of Yeats's Modernist contemporaries struggled to bridge a perceived gap between thought and feeling, but Yeats's view of the world as innately symbolic allowed him to use language both literally and symbolically at once, speaking simultaneously of a literal rock, a symbol for stasis, and an emblem of the idée fixe. Thus, Yeats creates, in Barfield's terms, ‘organic’ poetry where the multilayered meanings arise naturally from Yeats's understanding. I further note how Yeats attempts to create a mythology in A Vision that would function much as Barfield describes mythology operating in ancient, concrete societies. Through this study, I hope to illuminate both the interconnectedness of Yeats's symbolic metaphysic and poetic technique and the relevance of Barfield for understanding Yeats and, perhaps, other poets finding new ways to communicate through an evolving language.

Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones

2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Masaru Sekine
Keyword(s):  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The University

‘Yeats and Japan: The Dreaming of the Bones’ first investigates how the Noh came to influence Yeats, then analyzes Yeats's Four Plays for Dancers, focusing on The Dreaming of the Bones, and explains how this Yeats play is adapted into a new Noh play, Hone-no-Yume, in which the places, names and situations were changed to Japanese ones. An account is then given of the latter's production. Fenolossa came to Japan with an appointment to teach Ethics and Logic at the University of Tokyo in 1987, where he studied Noh with Minoru Umewaka, a Noh master. He also translated some Noh plays with the help of his students. After his death in London, his manuscripts were handed over to Ezra Pound by his second wife, Mary, and it is through Pound that Yeats came to read them. Inspired by them Yeats wrote Four Plays for Dancers. At the Hawk’s Well was later translated into two different Noh plays by Mario Yokomichi, thus completing the circle from Japan to Ireland and back.

‘BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND’: The Manifesto in Britain and Ireland

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 297-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Wyndham Lewis ◽  
Italian Futurism ◽  
Free Zone ◽  
Hugh Macdiarmid ◽  
The Times

Aside from the familiar story of Vorticists and Imagists before the war, no detailed analysis of manifestos in Britain (or Ireland) exists. It is true that, by 1914, there had been such an upsurge in manifesto writing that a review of BLAST in The Times (1 July 1914) began: ‘The art of the present day seems to be exhausting its energies in “manifestoes.”’ But after the brief fire ignited by the arrival of Italian Futurism died out, Britain again became a manifesto-free zone. Or did it? While a mania for the militant genre did not take hold in Britain and Ireland the same way it did in France, Italy, Germany, or Russia, the manifesto did enjoy a small but dedicated following that included Whistler, Wilde, and Yeats; Patrick Geddes and Hugh MacDiarmid; Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound; Dora Marsden and Virginia Woolf; and Auden, MacNeice, and Spender. Through these and other figures it is possible to trace the development of a manifesto tradition specific to Britain and Ireland.

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