The version of this poem used to create this study guide appears in: Yeats, William Butler. “The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming.

Note that parenthetical citations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Exemplary of the Modernist period, William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” illustrates the crisis of meaning with which writers and philosophers wrestled after World War I. Published in 1919, “The Second Coming” would become Yeats’s most famous poem. The strange and violent imagery is paradigmatic of a historical moment in which artists were not only working through how to find meaning and value in the world, but what type of aesthetic modes were best equipped to tackle those issues.

“The Second Coming” depicts a world descending into chaos, a world in which violence is commonplace and morality is unrecognizable. The “second coming” which emerges in the second stanza is not Jesus Christ, but a monstrosity of man and beast, appearing from the sands of time. “Slouching” towards “Bethlehem,” the beast provides no clear path to redemption for human history (22).