Byzantium in Early Modernist Literature: Yeats, Pound, and Others

In the decades around World War II, Byzantium and Byzantine culture attracted the attention of a few Anglophone modernist poets, both major (W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound) and less illustrious ones (Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, Louis MacNeice). In this paper, the images of Byzantium constructed by those writers will be explored and compared, with particular focus on Yeats and Pound. Both these poets were unacquainted with the actual locations of the Greek East and only learned of Byzantine history and culture through intermediary, popularised or semi-scholarly sources. Their fascination for things Byzantine was motivated by their endorsement of medieval spirituality as a counteragent to the corruption and decline of the modern West. Characteristically, both Yeats and Pound envisage Byzantium as a monumental city (Constantinople, epitomising the entire empire) and telescopically conflate different historical phases (from Justinian to the Macedonian Dynasty and the Iconoclasts) into a single achronic panorama. For Yeats, the occultist bard, Byzantium represents the transcendence of human time and of the material universe. The holy city of Byzantium is conceived as a metaphysical space in which souls arrive to be transmogrified. The turbulent matter of human physicality and emotionality is purged by spiritual fire and metamorphosed into a timeless substance, an “artifice of eternity” that has the perennial essence of great art. Pound, a worldlier thinker of imperialist tendencies, plants his Byzantium within historical time and envisions it as a durable and felicitous culture which has successfully attained the most valuable goals of human existence: the production of high art and the establishment of social justice. In this respect, Pound’s Byzantium takes its place in a chain of historical paragons which provide models for the construction of the ideal city, the social and spiritual utopia that will transcend the decadent world of modernity.