A Study of Yeats’s Byzatium Poems

Like Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), the German-born British Indologist, and Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), the author of the famous novel Siddhartha (1922), who never came to India, Wiliam Butler Yeats (1865–1939), who wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” (1925), and “Byzantium” (1930), who never visited Istanbul (The original name of Constantinople was Byzantion. It was conquered by Byzos of Megara, a city-state near Athens in the seventh century B.C.E. People of Byzantion spoke Greek until its conquest by the Ottomon Turks took place in 1453. Before the city was under the control of the Spartans between 411 and 408 B.C.E. In 196 C.E., the city passed into the hands of the Romans who called it Byzantium. In 330 C.E., Constantine the Great (274–337), a Roman emperor (r. 306–337), transferred his capital to Byzantium, which was then called Roma Nova, which he later renamed Constantinople. Sultan Mehemed II of the Ottomon Empire conquered Constantinople in 1453). His interest in Byzantium life and art began in the 1890s and continued through his life. “Rosa Alchemica” became a first in a series of short stories published in 1896 with Byzantine Life and Culture as its theme. In addition, in Book V of A Vision (1937), Yeats wished to spend a month of Antiquity in Byzantium shortly before Emperor Justinian opened St. Sophia and closed the Academy of Plato.