DONALD ROSS
210L Lind Hall, (612) 625-5585
rossj001@tc.umn.edu
Department of English, University of Minnesota


"Stylistic Contrasts in Yeats's Byzantium Poems," Language and Style, 8 (1975), 293-305.

The styles of "Sailing to Byzantium" and "Byzantium" are very different-"Byzantium" (1930) is much more difficult to interpret than is its 1927 predecessor. In the earlier poem, the flow of statements is the dominant stylistic feature. Conjunctions and sentence structure help the reader progress from statement to statement. The narrator of "Byzantium" uses quite a different style to express his confusion and his ultimate inability to evaluate the city. Its major feature is the appositive, a noun phrase which has a generally loose connection with the clause in which it appears. The image generation caused by choppy syntax, pseudo-logical involutions, and tightly knit verbal and phonetic associations provides suitable tactics for conveying the speaker's ambivalence in the later poem.


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