SOURCE: “Yeats's Christ Pantokrator and the Image of Edessa: Some New Observations on the Significance of Byzantium in Yeats's Historical System,” in Yeats Eliot Review, Vol. 8, Nos. 1-2, 1986, pp. 41-49.

In the following essay, Murphy underscores the importance of historical events in Byzantium as they relate to Yeats's poems.

While both Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium” and his “Byzantium” are poems deserving of the intense critical attention which they have received over the years, scholars too often have diminished or ignored completely the historical importance of Byzantium itself whenever they have tried to determine the source of Yeats's fascination with the city.¹ Thus they have neglected to consider that Yeats's prose and poetry on the subject of Byzantine culture might yield as well to analysis when that fabulous city is regarded in the light not of aesthetic or symbolic values but of the larger and no less coherent system...