Rereading W. B. Yeats's "Sailing to Byzantium" through the Gramscian and Foucauldian lenses of hegemony and power relations

This paper presents a re-examination of W.B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” (1927). The poem has been analyzed in various ways, mainly in terms of historical and biographical references. This study attempts to unravel the language through a close reading. With the focus on the semiotics of the “old men,” “singing school,” and “drowsy Emperor,” in my invesgiation, I will decode the philosophical riddles in Yeats’s work. Eventually, the analysis will show the concept of shifting power and its integration to space and history, which evokes the essence of theories related to cultural hegemony (Antonio Gramsci) and power relations (Michel Foucault) within historical context, but also throughout the act of reading the text.