The Second Coming (Taylor’s Version)
Reputation, revisited
It must be exhausting / Always rooting for the antihero — Taylor Swift
Let’s gossip, shall we?
When William Butler Yeats wrote “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” who did he have in mind?1 Who, for Yeats, were these too-passionate “worst?”
Who is he subtweeting?
Those lines were written in 1919, on the heels of the War to End All Wars—with a second world war already brewing, two short decades away.
Certainly, then, there was no shortage of worst-ness. Can we narrow the candidates?
Among figures plausibly known to Yeats, one springs eagerly to mind. In the years between the wars, a fellow Irish writer—at the time quite famous—said the following:
I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles.
Despotic, you say?2 Like, “Yo quiero dictatorship,” is that what you’re saying?
This Irishman continues, upsettingly:
As a great popular leader3 has said to an applauding multitude, “We will trample upon the decomposing body of the Goddess of Liberty.”
And just in case the villain in the Great Gatsby needs more lines, this zinger which doubles as a note-perfect Tom Buchanan impression:
Though well-known specialists are convinced that the principal European nations are degenerating in body and in mind, their evidence remains almost unknown because a politician and newspaper that gave it adequate exposition would lose, the one his constituency, the other its circulation.
You have perhaps, by this point, guessed what I’m up to. Our ghoulish Irishman?
🎈W.B. Yeats.🎈
Here he is giving Idiocracy a sinister gloss:
Since about 1900 the better stocks have not been replacing their numbers, while the stupider and less healthy have been more than replacing theirs. Unless there is a change in the public mind every rank above the lowest must degenerate, and, as inferior men push up into its gaps, degenerate more and more quickly.
And what, Yeats, is to be done?
I am trying in association with ex-cabinet minister, an eminent lawyer, & a philosopher to work out a social theory which can be used against communism in Ireland—what looks like emerging is Fascism modified by religion.
Cool groupchat. This weekend they’re all getting “Prosecute Fauci” tattooed on their dicks.
…Now that I think about it, maybe just “p.f.”
Good time to remind ourselves how Yeats liked to dress on purpose—and this in the time of flappers, jazz, Picasso:
If someone makes a movie, this guy has to play him:
Menacing aristocrat ahoy!
The vest alone.
Is this your king?
I am growing more confident in my hypothesis that Yeats’ “Second Coming”—his vision of a “rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem”—is the Ozymandian zombie of monarchical tyranny. The twist is, Yeats eagerly welcomes its arrival.
I said I came neither to bury Yeats nor praise him. I came to read him differently—to scramble the Received Yeats.
That said, who literally cares? What am I to Yeats, or Yeats to you?
Most people don’t read poetry no matter how hard I blog about it. I wasn’t even 100% sure how to pronounce “Yeats”—or “Keats,” who, in my head, sometimes feels like he must be a relative of Yeats’ because of Name Sounds—until Vampire Weekend and Danielle Haim sang, “We go together like Keats and Yeats.” (Keats rhymes with “eats”; Yeats rhymes with “eights.”)
Ezra Pound4 defined poetry as “news that stays news.” Yeats’ poem, then, is news that gets views.
As NPR put it:
Over the century since [its publication], perhaps no poem has been more invoked for vexing times.
Or as phrased by a blogger who, like me, refuses to let anyone edit his sentences:
W. B. Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming” foreshadows our perilous times with ominous urgency.
Put the poet aside, hideous politics and all. Why do so many people relate to this poem, weird as it is, slow thighs a-slouchin’?
What if the answer isn’t Ominous Foreshadowing (of Peril)?
The Usual Suspects told us that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.
What this blog presupposes is: the devil is fake. What if his greatest trick was convincing the world he existed?
SEE YOU FRIDAY, DEAR FRIENDS.
For all my affectionate skepticism, I can’t deny it: the man could turn a fucking phrase. “No country for old men” is also Yeats’ coinage, though it took Javier Bardem and a cattle gun to make it famous.
Only in my dreams does the adjective “despotic” refer to the rapper Despot.
Mussolini (while he was still right-side up).
Pound was the rare poet who makes Yeats’ politics look good by comparison. Like Yeats, it did not diminish his gift of gab.