The Museum of Eternity: The Spatial Politics of Aging 
in Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium

Runsen Liu; Ming Sun

doi:10.70711/rcha.v4i1.8895

The Museum of Eternity: The Spatial Politics of Aging in Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium

Runsen Liu, Ming Sun

Abstract

Traditional scholarship on W. B. Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium typically maps a linear trajectory from biological decay to aesthetic
immortality, viewing the holy city as a symbol of spiritual transcendence. However, such readings often overlook the poem's rigorous spatial
mechanics and its underlying political necessity. Drawing on Michel Foucault's concept of the "heterotopia" and Henri Lefebvre's analysis of
social space, this paper re-examines the poem not as a metaphysical voyage, but as a radical project of spatial sanitation. The paper argues that
the speaker's rejection of the "sensual music" of generation is an act of abjection, necessitating the construction of a compensatory archivea
museum-space where the subject is not liberated, but curated. By analyzing the "singing school" as a pedagogical instrument of preservation
and the golden bird as an automaton, the study reveals the tragic irony of Yeats's solution: to survive the biological flux, the subject must consent to become a static ornament of imperial power. The paper concludes by framing Yeats's poem as a desperate epitaph for the architectural
defense against the chaos of the organic.

Keywords

Sailing to Byzantium; W. B. Yeats; Heterotopia; Spatial politics; Abjection

Full Text:

PDF

Included Database

References

[1] Yeats, W. B. W. B. Yeats: The Major Works. Edited by Edward Larrissy, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001.

[2] Dume, Thomas L. "Yeats' Golden Tree and Birds in the Byzantium Poems." Modern Language Notes, vol. 67, no. 6, 1952, pp. 404-07.

[3] Campbell, Harry Modean. "Yeat's 'Sailing to Byzantium.'" Modern Language Notes, vol. 70, no. 8, 1955, pp. 585-89.

[4] Raines, Charles A. "Yeats' Metaphors of Permanence." Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 5, no. 1, 1959, pp. 12-20.

[5] Holdeman, David. The Cambridge Introduction to W. B. Yeats. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

[6] Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias." Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuit, 1984.

[7] Lefebvre, Henry. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge: Blackvell, 1991.

[8] Kuhn, Elizabeth. "Toward an Anti-Humanism of Life: The Modernism of Nietzsche, Hulme and Yeats." Journal of Modern Literature,

vol. 34, no. 4, 2011, pp. 1-20.

[9] Yeats, W. B. A Vision. New York: Collier Books, 1975.

[10] Frye, Steven. "Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium and McCarthy's No Country for Old Men: Art and Artifice in the New Novel." The Cormac

McCarthy Journal, vol. 5, no. 1, 2005, pp. 14-20.

[11] Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Print.

[12] McCarthy, Cormac. No Country for Old Men. London: Picador, 2022.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/rcha.v4i1.8895

Refbacks

There are currently no refbacks.