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Yeats’s Poetry

To understand where “The Second Coming” sits in relation to Yeats’s other major poems, please consult this guide, which provides an analytical overview.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

Achebe used a line from Yeats’s poem for the title of his landmark novel of 1958. At first glance Achebe’s account of the colonization of the Lower Niger region might seem to have nothing to do with Yeats’s prophetic poem, rooted as the latter is in his own mystical theory of history. Yet like Yeats, Achebe is focused on the tumultuous transformation that occurs when one historical era gives way to another. Furthermore, Achebe is suggesting an implicit solidarity between his native Nigeria and Yeats’s Ireland, both of which suffered greatly under British colonization.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Yeats loved the British Romantic poets, and his early verse showed their influence. Though he consciously set that influence aside starting in the early 1900s, something of it remains in “The Second Coming.” Here, though, it’s less the sensuous language of William Wordsworth and John Keats that survives. Rather, it’s the mystical and even prophetic strain that may be traced through William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. For but one example, check out Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” which shares with “The Second Coming” a comparable poetic form and a similar fascination with time and the deserts of Egypt.

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