![]() ![]() He wrote a few anthems for the Blueshirts, an Irish fascist group. He said admiring things about Mussolini and eugenics. ![]() ![]() Yet as Roy Peter Clark, Senior Scholar at the Poynter Institute, notes in an elegant recent post, history must also note that William Butler Yeats became enamored of nationalist authoritarian movements, including fascism. Over the past century, Joan Didion, Chinua Achebe, Lou Reed, Stephen King, and scores of other writers and artists have taken phrases from Yeats's poem as lines and titles of their own works. "And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" And what kind of times will be wrought from a world where, "the worst are full of passionate intensity?" Yeats asks: But it makes you feel that that a page of history is about to flip: one epoch is about to give birth to another. I would scarcely call "The Second Coming" a holiday poem. "Things fall apart the center cannot hold / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." And over the century since, perhaps no poem has been more invoked for vexing times, to convey, in Yeats's own incomparable words, that: Yeats's poem was published in November 1920. The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the waves of a flu pandemic, which infected Yeats's wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, while she was pregnant. Perhaps like now, perhaps like many years. William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge. (His Last Bow, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)Īn instant later we had reached the same spot, and there was the road beneath us, steep and narrow, winding in long curves into the valley.Irish poet William Butler Yeats circa 1920. (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) The trap drove on, and a few minutes later we saw a sudden light spring up among the trees as the lamp was lit in one of the sitting-rooms. (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)Ī little later I heard the stroke of oars, growing nearer and nearer, and the calls of a man.Ī few minutes later I saw Morris step suddenly back from a corner, which he was examining. If you want me for the trial, my address and that of Watson will be somewhere in Norway-I’ll send particulars later. (Gulliver's Travels into several remote nations of the world, by Jonathan Swift) I desired that the senate of Rome might appear before me, in one large chamber, and an assembly of somewhat a later age in counterview, in another. (The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)Īs a note to those readers who are curious: in the US, the eclipse will fall on December 25 and later, on December 26, in countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Australia. It was too late, however, for we were rapidly gathering momentum, and an instant later had shot clear of the station. "What a pretty girl!" Ruth said a moment later. ![]()
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