Worldbuilding in Old Age: A Transhistorical Literary Motif

This paper identifies and traces a persistent yet largely unrecognized literary motif that I call “late-life worldbuilding.” Alongside the familiar portrayal of old age as a condition of physical decline and retrospective wisdom, the western literary tradition repeatedly imagines elderly protagonists embarking on visionary journeys toward the creation of new worlds and new forms of life. Through close readings of Aristophanes’ Birds , (Pseudo) Plato’s Seventh Letter , Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” together with comparative reference to the Book of Genesis and the Pauline Epistles, I argue that this motif persists across widely separated historical and literary traditions while undergoing significant transformations. Whereas the Greek texts imagine worldbuilding primarily through the framework of the polis, the late Romantic poems relocate the creative quest inward, toward the remaking of the self. More broadly, the persistence of this motif complicates reductively materialist models of aging by foregrounding the enduring literary association between old age, imaginative agency, and future-oriented creation.