SOURCE: Lesser, Simon O. “‘Sailing to Byzantium’: Another Voyage, Another Reading.” In The Whispered Meanings: Selected Essays of Simon O. Lesser, edited by Robert Sprich and Richard W. Noland, pp. 128-48. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977.

In the following essay, the author argues against the generally accepted interpretation of “Sailing to Byzantium” that the “I” of the poem considers that “engrossment in poetry is the only, but a sufficient, recompense for the privations of old age,” and against the critical approach of paying “as little attention as possible to the emotional content of literature and to our emotional responses to it.”

Art … shrinks … from every abstract thing, from all that is of the brain only, from all that is not a fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body. Its morality is personal, knows little of any general law. …

Yeats¹

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“Sailing to Byzantium...