SOURCE: “Sailing the Seas to Nowhere: Inversions of Yeats's Symbolism in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’,” in Yeats: An Annual of Critical and Textual Studies: Volume 5, edited by Richard J. Finneran, UMI Research Press, 1987, pp. 95-106.

In the following essay, Lense investigates the unique aspects of “Sailing to Byzantium.”

Poetry concerns itself with the creation of Paradises. I use the word in the plural for there are as many paradises as there are individual men—nay—as many as there are separate feelings.

J. B. Yeats to W. B. Yeats, 10 May 1914

When his father made this comment in a letter to him,¹ Yeats had already been creating Paradises in his work for thirty years and would continue to do so until the end of his life. Each of his versions of Paradise was, furthermore, based on “a separate feeling”; for Yeats, the Other World in any of the forms he...