SOURCE: "Vision and 'Responsibility'," in The Dissolving Image: The Spiritual-Esthetic Development of W. B. Yeats, Wayne State University Press, 1970, pp. 81-101.

In the following essay, Levine considers "The Second Coming" in the context of several earlier poems by Yeats, seeing the work " as proof of the speaker's journey toward psychological equanimity" and humankind's imaginative acceptance of responsibility.

The heroic quest for Yeats was a perdurable subject for poetry, explored first in the longest and one of the earliest of his poems, "Oisin" (1889). Almost immediately after "Oisin," love, the longing for everlasting union with the beloved, became the poet's principal concern; and after that Yeats dealt with the lover's anguish and disillusionment (1897-1905). This in turn became the basis for reaffirmation of an heroic discipline, evidence in poems which made the immortal beloved an epical rather than an ethereal figure, the personification of a martyred ideal, noble and solitary...