ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

LITERATURE QUESTIONS

MODERN POETRY AND POETICS

Question [CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
Complete the following sentence. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” is a good example of High Modernism, because it:
A
embraces the rhythms and diction of common man’s speech.
B
was written at the very beginning of the 20th century.
C
attempts to create a modernist high culture.
D
does not employ rhyme.
Explanation: 

Detailed explanation-1: -Sailing to Byzantium proves to be the poet’s long entertained concept of art by which he seeks to cure the malady of the 20th century life. The poem is an evidence of Yeat’s excellence of art and symbolic interpretation of modern life . It contains subtle symbolism and a complexity of thought and style.

Detailed explanation-2: -"Sailing to Byzantium” is a poem by William Butler Yeats, first published in the 1928 collection The Tower. It comprises four stanzas in ottava rima, each made up of eight lines of iambic pentameter. It uses a journey to Byzantium (Constantinople) as a metaphor for a spiritual journey.

Detailed explanation-3: -Written in 1926 and included in Yeats’s greatest single collection, 1928 ‘s The Tower, “Sailing to Byzantium” is Yeats’s definitive statement about the agony of old age and the imaginative and spiritual work required to remain a vital individual even when the heart is “fastened to a dying animal” (the body).

Detailed explanation-4: -Well, if our speaker is “sailing to Byzantium, ” then the title is a big signal that the poem takes place in the middle of a journey. As it turns out, this journey seems to be both literal (the speaker travels from “that country” to Byzantium) and metaphoric.

There is 1 question to complete.