The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the. It continually means something new because that's what great art does - it is reinvented, re-energized, by the person who reads it. Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The question to ask is, 'Does this poem still speak to people?' Yeats passes the test. When we read, recite, or fire our minds with Yeats's poem, do we somehow condone the devastating ideas which he came to favor? What works do we choose to keep or discard as we reconsider our history and art?Īnn Patchett, the novelist and memoirist, told us this week that, "If we applied today's morals to dead artists, then history would be fairly scrubbed of art. 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. Excerpt Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon.
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