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...