![]() The poem has bequeathed a number of resonant phrases to the English language, which have had a life far beyond the poem: “the centre cannot hold,” “the best lack all conviction,” and, its closing question, “what rough beast / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” Yeats is frequently referred to as an apocalyptic poet by literary commentators. ![]() In the poem, this is crystalised in the image of the “rough beast ” with a “blank and pitiless” gaze, slouching its way to be born in the crib of Jesus Christ -usurping the second coming of Christ anticipated by Christians. In Yeats’s system, history is understood as an endless oscillation between diametrically opposed worlds of meaning and values. While informed by the disorder and breakdown around him, the poem conveys Yeats’s bleak vision of a much larger, almost cosmological, scheme of history drawn from his occult studies. Written in the aftermath of World War One and during the Irish War of Independence, ‘The Second Coming’ is one of his most famous poems. He had a committed life-long interest in occult, esoteric, and spiritualist practices which overlapped with a mystical and folkloric Irish identity. He was an Irish nationalist, and served in the first parliament of the Irish Free State following the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. ![]() He was a poet and dramatist of international renown, one of the leading Irish poets of the twentieth century, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was born in Dublin, Ireland, which at that time was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland following the Acts of Union (1800).
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