The Crusades, Yeats, and the Poetry Word

I am reading a book about the Fourth Crusade (The Great Betrayal by Ernie Bradford). That’s the Crusade that saw Christians of the North ignore their papal directive and attack and sack Christian Constantinople. Because where would we be without schism and strife? And then I thought of Yeats’ poem, “Sailing to Byzantium”. Yeats hearkens to the spent glory of that city. I have read Yeats over the years, tho not recently. The fact is, I don’t seem to read poetry much at all these days. Instead, I make my own, or think I do. I guess that’s lax of me. I lean toward reading history. I am no scholar but the agitations that history books invoke involve me in the pertinence of language. The mysteries of political moments engender the mysteries of language and communication. By political moments I mean our interaction with what we see and hear of ‘the world’. Yeats’ mysticism leaves me completely flat but when his gaze goes hard into instants and words, and with his consummate craft, I feel a twitch of the nerve. He was, after all, politically-minded, for all his Celtic Twilightiness. I don’t know what number Crusade the world currently suffers but we are certainly learning the simplest things last.