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    A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming"
    A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming"
    A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming"
    Ebook38 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 19, 2016
    ISBN9781535839464
    A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" - Gale

      6

      The Second Coming

      W. B. Yeats

      1921

      Introduction

      William Butler Yeats was arguably the most accomplished, most widely esteemed twentieth-century poet who wrote in English. His eminence derived in particular from his tone, which combined the grandiose with the everyday. And within Yeats’s opus, The Second Coming is perhaps his most masterful, highly regarded poem. An epitome of Yeats’s tone throughout his writings, The Second Coming takes as its theme a cataclysm with similarities to end of the world scenarios that have been sketched by several religions. Yet the poem never pinpoints which mythic future is being realized; it never even divulges whether the cataclysm is for the best or for the worst. Further, despite a wildly abstract and inherently preachy subject matter, Yeats’s language is highly accessible—as familiar to a casual reader as to a religious-minded scholar.

      Due in part to its combination of high-mindedness and familiarity, The Second Coming has seemed to powerfully bring timeless symbols and high fears into the imaginations of inhabitants of the modern world. While the poem is frequently linked to Russian and Irish political-historical tumult, it is sometimes read as a gasp, before the fact, at the horrors of World War II. Still, the poem’s dominant meaning is the ambiguous one—as a self-declared vision, it could have been influenced by a variety of cataclysmic events, past or pending. Far from envisioning postindustrial progress as the deliverer of a world beyond God, The Second Coming sees the twentieth century as the precise moment when the world will be thoroughly undone. Indeed, since its publication in 1921, the poem has become something of an anthem for those who detect imminent demise in the world, regardless of whether they view such an ending as cause for hope or for despair.

      Author Biography

      William Butler Yeats was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1865. By the time of his death more than seven decades later, in 1939, he had cofounded an Irish literary movement, served as a senator to the Irish Free State, and achieved enormous renown as a poet, earning the Nobel Prize for poetry

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