Sailing to Byzantium written by William Butler Yeats Summary and Questions Answers
The poem was written in the autumn of 1926. Yeats’s knowledge of the city was largely derived from his reading of W.G. Holmes, The Age of Justinian and Theodora (1905). Byzantium is a holy city, as the capital of eastern Christianity and as the place where God exists because of the life after death Yeats imagines existing there. His description of Byzantium shows that he valued the position of the artist in the city.
