No Country for Old Men

Since it is an Oscar winning film, I am assuming most of you have seen No Country for Old Men. In the 20th Century novel class that I am taking, we just finished reading No Country for Old Men, and it is just about as grusome as the movie. With the movie you just don't have to imagine what the scene looks like, the director created it for you. The novel lets your imagination run wild with all the murder scenes and gunshots.
Anyways, what I found interesting is that Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men adopted a line out of a William Butler Yeats poem for the title (also known as intertexuality). And please hold don't get too excited because a quick literature lesson about Yeats. If you have never really read any of his poetry or have limited background knowledge about him, this is your lucky day!
Yeats started writing poetry at the turning point between the Victorian period and Modernism, the conflicting currents of which affected his poetry. With Yeats' increased involvement with nationalist politics was to have a significant impact on his poetic style: his diction grew plainer, the syntax tighter and the verse structures, whilst retaining their traditional form, more muscular. He was also entered the official political life when he was elected to the Senate, the upper house of the new Free State, in 1922. But around that time his personal life was changing and married. Her interest in spiritualism echoed Yeats' and his explorations in this area informed some of his powerful visionary poems. Yeats' was now entering his poetic maturity in which he developed a symbolism to mediate between the demands of art and life.
Phew, that is all for now. But needless to say, Yeats has a unique style of writing, and you personally can come up with numerous reasons why McCarthy decided to choose one of the lines from this poem, Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country ffor old me. The young
in one another's arms, birds in the trees-
Those dying generations- at their song,
The salmon- falls, the mackerel- crowed seams,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For ever tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre.
And be the singing- masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

I am just going to leave it there. :)