Sailing to Byzantium, William Butler Yeats - Harry Modean Campbell (essay date December 1955)
Harry Modean Campbell (essay date December 1955)
SOURCE: Campbell, Harry Modean. “Yeat's “Sailing to Byzantium.” Modern Language Notes 70, no. 8 (December 1955): 585-89.
[In the following essay, the author refutes the interpretations of the poem as magical rather than religious and as an assertion of immortality through art as “fabricated thing,” and suggests instead that Byzantium is Yeats's “devoutly religious version of the New Jerusalem” where “the poet, the 'dying animal,’ is primarily concerned, not with the art, but with the spiritual life visibly represented by the art.”]
The numerous analyses of Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium” seem to fall into two main groups: a minority of critics feel as does John Crowe Ransom that the poem is “more magical than religious … and its magnificence a little bit forced”1, the great majority, however, praise it highly for its perfect structure and its...
[The entire page is 1920 words long]
Join eNotes
Over 3,500 study guides, question and answer forums, literature criticism, reference content, and much more!
Navigate
Related Topics
