June 5, 1939
The death of William Butler Yeats [who died Jan. 28, 1939] closes the great era of the Irish literary revival. That death will doubtless have been duly recorded in Japan. Someone in Tokyo may also know of Yeats' Japanese interlude or flirtation. He, at one time, thought he would be called to a Japanese professorship and did, I think, receive some sort of invitation. You have a "link" with Dublin in those plays of Yeats which were directly stimulated by Fenollosa's reports and translations of Noh. Having worked with Yeats during the three or four years of his intensest interest in the Noh, I know how much it meant to him.
"The form I have been searching for all my life" was one of his comments. (That would have been about 1917.)
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