Sailing to Byzantium (Historical Context)

Historical Context

This poem tells us about a man who, feeling past his prime, sails off to a land where emphasis is not on the physical achievements of a person, which he finds more and more difficult for his aging body. To represent this land of the mind, Yeats uses Byzantium, which was the capital of the eastern half of the Roman Empire from 476 to 1453, surviving the fall of Rome by a thousand years. The reason that he may have thought this actual city could be used to represent a haven for the aged can be found in one of his earlier writings: in his book A Vision, he says, “I think that in early Byzantium, maybe never before or since in recorded history, religion, aesthetics, and practical life were one.” A Vision is a collection of “automatic writing” done by Yeats and his wife. Automatic writing was a practice that tried to capture psychic impressions without the interference of the conscious mind, much like a spiritual medium might “channel” the voices of dead spirits and speak their words for them.

Yeats had been a student of spiritualism and the occult since his late teens. He attended seances and studied the beliefs of the ancient Irish Celtic religion, as well as neo-Platonism, Indian magic, and esoteric Buddhism. In the 1880s and 1890s, before transportation and communication made knowledge of other cultures common, these were all considered exotic and dangerous. He was a founding member of the Dublin Hermetic Society. In 1893 he became a member of the Inner Order of the Golden Dawn, and worked his way up to the honored title of “Instructor of Mystical Philosophy” and “Statesman of the Second Order.” In 1887 Yeats was introduced to Madame Blavatsky, author of Isis Unveiled, a “Master Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology,” and founder of an international quasi-religion known as Theosophy. Almost immediately Yeats joined the London Lodge of Theosophists: he used to tell people that Irish literature owed more to Theosophy than to Dublin’s Trinity College. According to Theosophist beliefs, there is an external existence, composed of matter and spirit, which changes through seven planes of existence: some more physical, some more spiritual. After death, the three levels of spiritual existence split off and go into a period of repose until they are reincarnated by being joined with a new set of physical planes. Critic Allan Donaldson explained theosophy in a 1954 essay as the soul being joined to the body of a being that was already occupied with its own, lower soul: this, he argues, could be the basis for the line “fastened to a dying animal.” Although Yeats was only a Theosophist for a short time before quitting, his interest in occult explanations of reality stayed with him throughout his life and influenced his work.

Yeats was in his sixties when this poem was published and he wrote it in the 1920s, which was a time of a fast-living youth culture. World War I, which ended officially in 1919, is generally considered the primary cause of the new artistic sensibility known as “Modernism,” mainly because the scope of international involvement and the capacity for large-scale destruction made available by tanks, airplanes, and submarines stunned the world, leaving returning soldiers happy to be alive. Rich Americans ran wild in Europe, where their dollars could buy much more than they could in America. Modernism meant experimentation: Cubism in painting, Imagism in poetry, jazz in music. The rush to spend money and have fun continued until the beginning of the 1930s, when the Depression affected not just America but economies around the world. It was a great time to be young and alive, or, if you were Yeats, to imagine a place where being young and alive would not matter.