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.”
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