Byzantium Poems | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 7 pages of analysis & critique of Byzantium Poems.

Byzantium Poems | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 7 pages of analysis & critique of Byzantium Poems.
This section contains 1,674 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Harry Modean Campbell

SOURCE: “Yeats' ‘Sailing to Byzantium’,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. LXX, No. 8, December, 1955, pp. 585-89.

In the following essay, Campbell interprets Yeats's vision of Byzantium as an “unorthodox but devoutly religious version of the New Jerusalem.”

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 magnificent exaltation of art. Typical of this second group are Louis MacNeice, who says: “Yeats is still, though reluctantly, asserting the supremacy of art, art, as always for him, having a supernatural sanction”2; and Kenneth Burke, who says: “there is in Yeats an intensification of Keats's vision of immortalization, not as a person, but by conversion into a fabricated...

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This section contains 1,674 words
(approx. 6 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Essay by Harry Modean Campbell
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Critical Essay by Harry Modean Campbell from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.