International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature E-ISSN: 2200-3452 & P-ISSN: 2200-3592 www.ijalel.aiac.org.au Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: The Poetic Process of Impersonal Art S. Bharadwaj* Annamalai University, India Corresponding Author: S. Bharadwaj, E-mail:
[email protected] ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history W.B.Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” is a symbol of unity combining the realistic, intellectual, Received: March 13, 2018 emotional and mythical elements into a harmony; the harmony ensuing from a resolution of Accepted: May 23, 2018 conflicts or contending claims of his contemporaries, D.H.Lawrence and T.S.Eliot. All sorts of Published: September 01, 2018 existing critical perspectives on the most popular poem, though they provide “a greatly deepened Volume: 7 Issue: 5 understanding of Yeats,” are limited to either paraphrasal or aesthetic, biographical or holistic, Advance access: July 2018 spiritual or allusive, symbolic or technical level and they fail to read the text in the context of the pre-texts and the texts falling within its texture, in the light of other poems of Yeats and his contemporaries to bring out its totally different poetic structure and its single distinctive quality. Conflicts of interest: None This paper adopting an analytical inquiry into rhetoric of the poem, the play of meanings, filiations Funding: None among meanings and signs, substitutions and intertextuality, strives to uncover the difference within unity, the life-centric poetic process of Yeats’s impersonal art, his paradoxical structure of life-in-death for “perfection of life” of mortal man in contradistinction to his contemporaries’s death-centric structural concerns for “perfect work of art.” Key words: Paradox, Holistic, Irony, Arrogance, Magnificence, Erudite, Inherent and Callousness.