SOURCE: "What Rough Beast?: Yeats, Nietzsche and Historical Rhetoric in The Second Coming'," in Papers on Language and Literature, Vol. 31, No. 4, Fall, 1995, pp. 362-88.

In the following essay, Harrison focuses on Nietzschean suggestions in the language and imagery of "The Second Coming. "

In the absence of a thorough examination of the impact on "The Second Coming" of Yeats's historical thought, it is arguable that the meaning the poet intended has not only been consistently overlooked, but that in general the poem has been taken to mean the opposite of what he intended. This essay offers a reassessment of the thought and imagery, of the response Yeats wished to evoke, and of the antithetical rhetoric of his dialectical view of history.

The text provides a striking example of the synthetic technique which produced some of Yeats's finest poems, one which condenses into imagery as much of the poet's thought...