SOURCE: “Return from Byzantium: W. B. Yeats and ‘The Tower’,” in ELH: English Literary History, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring, 1980, pp. 149-57.

In the following essay, Pruitt contends that “Sailing to Byzantium” and “The Tower” not only discuss the issue of aging, but asserts that each poem is “part of a process, that they are complements.”

A remarkable level of creative activity characterized Yeats's final decades. Indeed, T. R. Henn has suggested that there exists “no precedent in literary history for a poet who produces his greatest work between the ages of 50 and 75.”¹ What was the reason for Yeats's anomalous achievement? A clue to the enigma may lie in his concurrent cultivation of aesthetic sophistication and instinctive drives. Because the youthful Yeats was confident of his intellectual superiority, but felt out of touch with his instinctive drives, his effort to develop those drives was the pursuit of a lifetime. The...