SOURCE: “Yeats's ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and the Limits of Modern Literary Criticism,” in Revue des Langues Vivantes, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 5, 1972, pp. 492-507.

In the following essay, San Juan offers a reading of “Sailing to Byzantium” that underscores the thematic concerns of the poem, particularly those of transition and change.

In spite of the rigorous and systematic methods skilfully 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 clear “dialectical sequence” in...