The 'Dialogic' Yeats: A Bakhtinian Reading of Yeats’s 'Sailing to Byzantium'

Authors

  • Pradipta Sengupta

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2013.5.5

Keywords:

“Sailing to Byzantium”, dialogic, dialogue, addressivity, polyphony, voices, heteroglossia, W. B. Yeats, M. M. Bakhtin, dialectic

Abstract

Yeats’s love for words and spoken language of the common people in general coupled with his intrinsic moorings in Irish dialect directed his focus on the conversational and the colloquial. The influence of William Blake on Yeats, among other factors, whetted his dialectic sensibility. Finally, his innate love for drama and the dramatic led him to fiddle with both conflict and dialogue. Yeats’s very penchant for the dramatic triggered off his fascination with conflict which, in turn, precipitated his dialectical sensibility couched through the ‘dialogic’, both in its neutral sense, and also in a Bakhtinian sense of the term. Using the theoretical tools of Bakhtin’s “Dialogism”, this paper examines Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium” as a “dialogic” poem in general, and “polyphonic” poem in particular.

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Published

2013-11-18

How to Cite

Sengupta, P. (2013). The ’Dialogic’ Yeats: A Bakhtinian Reading of Yeats’s ’Sailing to Byzantium’. Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies, 5(1), 101–116. https://doi.org/10.18485/bells.2013.5.5

Issue

Vol. 5 No. 1 (2013): BELLS - volume 5

Section

LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

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Copyright (c) 2021 Pradipta Sengupta

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