SOURCE: Franke, William. “The Dialectical Logic of Yeats's Byzantium Poems.” Yeats Eliot Review 15, no. 3 (summer 1998): 23-32.

In the following essay, Franke examines the symbolic unity of Yeats's two Byzantium poems, and demonstrates how the poems structurally and thematically rely on dialectical tension. In a dialectical perspective, the author argues, the distinctions between things break down as all forms flow beyond their boundaries and interpenetrate their opposites.

Yeats is unusual, if not unique, among poets for having formalized his subject matter into an extra-poetic system.¹ Although certainly poetry always remained his final aim, its fluid movement, subtle ambiguity, and defiance of confinement (especially characteristic of symbolic poetry) promised to frustrate any attempt to conceive a unified vision of the whole in it alone. He had first to achieve his unity of vision in the abstract; then he could proceed to weave it, with control and precision, into the rich...