Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Herbert J. Levine

Critical Essay by Herbert J. Levine

SOURCE: “Yeats's Ruskinian Byzantium,” in Yeats Annual No. 2, edited by Richard J. Finneran, Macmillan Press, 1983, pp. 25-34.

In the following essay, Levine determines the influence of art historian John Ruskin's work on Yeats's Byzantium poems.

Reading the numerous source studies of Yeats's Byzantium poems, one sometimes gets the impression that Yeats spent his life in a vast library, poring over books and pictures, until one day when he had absorbed enough, he retired to his study and fashioned a masterpiece out of those numerous fragments. Blake's Golgonooza, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Eugenie Strong's Apotheosis and After-Life, illustrations of the Baptistry dome at Ravenna, the Byzantine decor of Stockholm's Stadshaus, all have been suggested as instrumental to the conception of Yeats's Byzantium.¹ While such studies are valuable in illuminating how Yeats transplanted details from his reading and visual experiences into his completed poems, they do...
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