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Image and Idea in Yeats' the Second Coming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Donald Weeks
Donald Weeks*
Affiliation:
Mills College
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Extract

There are poets whose art is an accumulating cluster of images that become more and more identified with specific ideas. I believe Yeats to have been such a poet, in whom a cluster of images grew in significance to produce the great poems of the period from the first World War to the second. Generally accepted as one of Yeats' finest lyrics is The Second Coming. I believe that the poem gains in richness by being considered in the light of associations that had long preoccupied Yeats, and that are frequently found together in his writings: Shelley, and especially his Prometheus Unbound; the Great Memory; and the Second Coming.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 63 , Issue 1: Issue 1 part 1 , March 1948 , pp. 281 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1948

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References

1 Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 7.

2 The Autobiography of William Butler Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 58, 150. 3 Ideas of Good and Evil (New York: Macmillan, 1903), p. 4.

4 Autobiography, pp. 273, 78, 80.

5 Ideas of Good and Evil, p. 91.

6 Ibid., pp. 110–111.

7 Poets and Dreamers (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1903), p. 104.

8 Ideas of Good and Evil, pp. 105, 112–114.

9 Ibid., p. 105.

10 J. B. Yeats, Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 238.

11 Per AMica Silentia Lunae (New York: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 45–46.

12 Ibid., pp. 66, 90.

13 Early Poems and Stories (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 476–477.

14 Ibid., p. 477.

15 Per Amica, pp. 91–92.

16 Ibid., p. 95.

17 A Vision (New York: Macmillan, 1938), p. 19.

18 Per Amica, p. 46.

19 Vision, p. 184.

20 Ibid., p. 50.

21 Ibid., pp. 210–211.

22 Ibid., p. 263.

23 Hone, op. cit., p. 362.

24 The Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1935), p. 448.

25 Four Plays for Dancers (London: Macmillan, 1921), p. 136.

29 A Vision, pp. 54, 207–208.

27 Wheels and Butterflies (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 103.

28 Op. cit., p. 455.

29 Essays 1931 to 1936 (Dublin: Cuala Press, 1937), pp. 61–62, 58, 62.

30 Autobiography, p. 211.