Photograph: Dirck Halstead/Getty ImagesĪs the world is wrenched out of joint by the coronavirus pandemic, many people are turning to poetry for wisdom and consolation, but “The Second Coming” fulfils a different role, as it has done in crisis after crisis, from the Vietnam war to 9/11 to the election of Donald Trump: an opportunity to confront chaos and dread, rather than to escape it. Visions of crisis … south Vietnamese flee Saigon in 1975. As Auden wrote in “ In Memory of WB Yeats” (1939), “The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” Whether or not it is Yeats’s greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. Someone reading it for the first time in 2020 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. While many poems in Yeats’s corpus have contributed indelible lines to the storehouse of the cultural imagination (“no country for old men” “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”), “The Second Coming” consists of almost nothing but such lines.
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At 164 words, it is short and memorable enough to be famous in toto but it has also been disassembled into its constituent parts by books, albums, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games, political speeches and newspaper editorials. Written in 1919 and published in 1920, “The Second Coming” has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language. Yeats was justified in taking the long view.
This will seem little to you with your strong practical sense for it takes fifty years for a poet’s weapons to influence the issue.” I have written of the same thing again & again since. “It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago & foretold what is happening.
Yeats responded instead with a reading recommendation: “If you have my poems by you, look up a poem called ‘The Second Coming’,” he wrote.
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The 70-year-old Yeats was a Nobel prize-winning poet of immense stature and influence, not to mention Mannin’s former lover, and she asked him to join a campaign to free a German pacifist incarcerated by the Nazis. In April 1936, three years before his death, WB Yeats received a letter from the writer and activist Ethel Mannin.
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