Yeats’s Byzatium Poems: A New Critical Approach

Abstract

New Criticism is primarily concerned with the text in itself, its language and organization. A close reading of the text articulates the paradox, ambivalence, order and harmony within the text.  An emphasis on objectivity, impersonality and humanist principles marks the basic trend of Anglo-American New Criticism. This paper aims to provide a close reading of W. B. Yeats’s Byzantium poems-“Sailing to Byzatium” and “Byzatium”. The paper gradually unravels the insolvable enigma of human life-the transience of life and the permanence of art. The poems achieve a resolution through the working out of contradictions, a unification of different dispositions towards experience.