New and Modern Ages: Fantasy, Occult
Sciences, Vienna Secession, Art Deco, Cubism, Futurism, The Dada, Surrealism,
Fascism, Stalinism, Democracy; Workers and their Revolutions
W.
B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”, “Byzantium”, “The Second Coming”
On
the poem “Sailing to Byzantium”
“I think that if I
could be given a month of antiquity and leave to spend it where I chose, I
would spend it in Byzantium a little before Justinian opened St. Sophia and
closed the Academy of Plato [ca. 530 B.C.]…. I think that in early Byzantium,
maybe never before or since in recorded history, religious, aesthetic, and
practical life were one, that architects and artificers . . . spoke to the
multitude in gold and silver. The printer, the mosaic worker, the worker in
gold and silver, the illuminator off scared books were almost impersonal, almost
perhaps without the consciousness of individual design, absorbed in their
subject matter and that the vision of a whole people.”
—W.
B. Yeats, A Vision
On
the poem “Byzantium”
“The poem originates
from a criticism of yours. You objected to the last verse of ‘Sailing to
Byzantium’ because a bird made by a goldsmith was just as natural as anything
else. That showed me that the idea needed exposition.”
—Y.
B. Yeats, letter to Sturge Moore, Oct. 4, 1930
“Subject for a poem /
Describe Byzantium as it is in the system towards the end of the first
Christian millennium. A walking mummy; flames at the street corners where the
soul is purified. Birds of hammered gold singing in the golden trees. In the
harbor [dolphins] offering their backs to the wailing dead that they may carry
them to paradise.”
—from
Yeats’ diary, April 1929
George
Orwell: “W. B. Yeats”
The
Scientists Take Over” (review of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength
Introduction
to Emanations: Third Eye
Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
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