SOURCE: Baker, Howard. “Domes of Byzantium.” The Southern Review 7, no. 3 (winter 1941): 639-52.

In the following essay, poet-scholar Baker examines the symbolism of Byzantium, suggesting that for Yeats, Byzantium “stands primarily for modes of expression in which conscious design supersedes natural florescence.” Baker maintains that Yeats uses the idea of Byzantium to argue that consciously-produced culture endures whereas nature-and ourselves-grow old and pass away.

On receiving the Nobel prize, Yeats, who was sixty, observed the youthfulness of the poet and muse who decorated the medal presented to him, and he remarked to himself that when he was young his Muse was old and full of infirmity, whereas now that he had grown old his Muse had become young. He was referring to the reformation which in mid-career he had imposed upon his poetry, to his achievement of an articulation which, as he puts it in his Autobiography, is “hard...