SOURCE: “Yeats's Byzantium Poems and the Critics, Reconsidered,” in Colby Library Quarterly, Vol. X, No. 2, June, 1973, pp. 57-71.

In the following essay, Allen surveys the critical analyses of “Sailing to Byzantium.”

In 1962, A. Norman Jeffares published an article, “Yeats's Byzantine Poems and the Critics,” which ostensibly surveyed the major scholarship and criticism produced up to that time on the two famous pieces. The present essay is intended both to update and to improve upon that earlier article. In the period since 1962, a quite considerable volume of valuable scholarship and criticism on the two poems has been published. Moreover, Jeffares' article suffered appreciable deficiencies in the first place, digressing at points into its own analyses rather than sustaining a survey of previous studies, manifesting a marked bias in favor of British commentators over American, and committing errors in such basic matters as the spelling of authors' names and the...