Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats - Epifanio San Juan (essay due 1979)
Epifanio San Juan (essay due 1979)
Source: San Juan, Epifanio. “William Butler Yeats: “Sailing to Byzantium.’” Poetics: The Imitation of Action: Essays in Interpretation (1997): 56-77.
[In the following essay, San Juan presents how other critics have analyzed Yeat's poem and then goes on to offer his own analysis.]
In spite of the rigorous and systematic methods skillfully applied by critics and scholars in the interpretation of literary texts today, we have grown more sharply aware that all such methods possess intrinsic limitations. The neo-Aristotelians have of course candidly announced their pluralistic orientation in matters of theory. But in the realm of practice, the result seems far from satisfactory in elucidating the meaning of poetic form. Elder Olson's excellent analysis of Yeats's poem, its value as a comprehensive evaluation of the poem's artistic principle, depends on the debatable assumption that one can discern a...
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