ABSTRACT
The verse plays W. B. Yeats wrote in the last two decades of his life all explore the reconciliation through ritual action of the oppositions dividing human experience and confounding full unity of being. The unique cultural permeability of Yeats's approach is especially apparent because the rituals he celebrates and uses as dramatic guides Irish, Greek, Japanese are almost invariably without a specific content. This chapter traces Yeats's construction of a ritualistic drama from the time of the Easter Rising to his death in 1939. It begins by looking at some of the spiritual, aesthetic, and cultural ideals that led Yeats to pursue a ritual type of drama, and the principles drawn from the Japanese Noh that shaped his early plays. It then situates Yeats's dramatic project in the context of his evolving idea of Europe in the interwar period, emphasizing the points at which his political ideas and those of European fascism overlap.
