|
[[Cleanth Brooks]] asks whether, in this poem, Yeats chooses idealism or materialism and answers his own question, "Yeats chooses both and neither. One cannot know the world of being save through the world of becoming (though one must remember that the world of becoming is a meaningless flux aside from the world of being which it implies)".<ref>Cleanth Brooks, "Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium'", in Staton, Shirley F., ''Literary theories in praxis'', (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 1987) {{ISBN|0-8122-1234-7}} p. 17</ref>
==Popular culture==
* Some readers and reviewers assume that the title of [[Philip Roth]]'s novel ''[[The Dying Animal]]'' is derived from the third stanza of the poem.<ref>"The Animal in Man:
Roth returns to introspection and the Id", a review by Lucas Hanft, http://www.yale.edu/yrb/fall01/review04.htm</ref>
* The title of ''[[No Country for Old Men]]'' by American author [[Cormac McCarthy]] and its subsequent [[No Country for Old Men (film)|film adaptation]] by the same name is derived from the first line of the poem.
* The title of "The Young in One Another's Arms" by Canadian author [[Jane Rule]] is a quotation from the poem.
* The title of ''[[The Sarantine Mosaic#Sailing to Sarantium|Sailing to Sarantium]]'' by Canadian author [[Guy Gavriel Kay]] is inspired by the title of the poem.
* [[Robert Silverberg]] wrote a science fiction novella titled ''Sailing to Byzantium''; it won a [[Nebula award]] in 1986.
* [[Robert Silverberg]] wrote a science fiction novel entitled "Up the Line" (1969) in which our hero, a Time Courier, is about to take Time Tourists back to Byzantium. During the farewell party a guest shouts "that is no country for old men".
* In the BBC documentary series [[The Ascent of Man]], Jacob Bronowski cites the 'monuments of unageing intellect' as a primary focus for his series of essays.
* [[Lisa Gerrard]] has a track entitled ''Sailing to Byzantium'' on her album ''Immortal Memory''.
* J. M. Coetzee focuses his book ''Disgrace'' around the story of an aged scholar suffering with questions of his own mortality and quotes the poem directly in the work.
* In the [[William Kennedy (author)|William Kennedy]] novel ''[[Billy Phelan's Greatest Game]]'' (the second of his cycle of novels set in Albany, New York; many of its characters are Irish Americans), Albany Times Union columnist Martin Daugherty recalls something his playwright father said to him while they walked through Washington Park "an age ago": "This is no country for old men, his father said. I prefer, said Edward Daugherty, to be with the poet, a golden bird on a golden bough, singing of what is past."
==Notes==
| 