SOURCE: "What Rough Beast?: Yeats's 'The Second Coming' and A Vision," in REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 3, 1985, pp. 223-63.

In the following essay, Allen interprets "The Second Coming " as a political poem associated with the rise of communism.

"The Second Coming," one of Yeats's three or four most famous poems, is also one of his most frequently explicated or analyzed. It is, furthermore, one of the most variously interpreted, perhaps the most variously interpreted. There is no generally accepted reading or any significant degree of consensus about meaning or meanings. One reason for this situation is that the poem's broadly suggestive imagery and apocalyptic tone suited or matched the age from which it sprang—a period of cultural and political upheaval between two world wars, to which it might seem to apply descriptively or prophetically. In colloquial terms, the piece "caught a...