SOURCE: Gwynn, Frederick L. “Yeats's Byzantium and its Sources.” Philological Quarterly 32, no. 1 (January 1953): 9-21.

In the following essay, Gwynn explores the multiple meanings of Byzantium in “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium,” and A Vision, and identifies sources as diverse as Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Grimm's fairy tales, and Shakespeare's King Lear.

“‘Sailing to Byzantium,’” Ellmann points out, “is full of echoes of Yeats's other works, of his reading, and of his experiences. In a sense he had been writing it all his life.”¹ Ellmann gives us a half-dozen sources of phrases in the poem, items dating from Yeats's boyhood in the 1870s to a few weeks before September 26, 1926, when “Sailing to Byzantium” came into being. Ellmann's statement is also partially applicable to the poem's sequel, “Byzantium” (written in 1930), although, as others have shown,² the later piece is more part and parcel of the system of...