“The Second Coming” is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war.
The pundits who quote it, though, are picking up on Yeats’s words, but not his world view. As Helen Vendler, the great Harvard poetry scholar, and others have pointed out, “The Second Coming” is really two poems. The first eight lines are filled with the pointed aphorisms that pundits like so much, while the rest of the poem suggests the unpredictability of how history will unfold. This second, less quoted part is the one that speaks most directly to the grim situation in Iraq.
What W. B. Yeats’s ‘Second Coming’ Really Says About the Iraq War (New York Times)
More poetry plus politics or law:
- The state shall appropriate (Walker Art Center on Minnesota House Bill H0224, via Neil Gaiman)
- Conference uses poetry to ‘humanize’ law (Daily Illini)