Poetry, Part 2: Modernism, Allusion and Style in Yeats and Eliot, and How Achebe Answered Yeats

Hook: a headline poem

Some lines escape their poems. Journalists, politicians and bloggers quote Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold whenever the world seems to be coming apart: wars, elections, pandemics, market crashes. Many who quote it have never read the poem.

The line comes from W. B. Yeats's The Second Coming, written in 1919, just after the First World War, during the Russian Revolution and as the Irish War of Independence began. In this lesson you will read the whole poem's argument, learn how modernist poets built meaning out of fragments and allusions, and see how a Nigerian novelist turned that famous line into the title of one of the most widely read novels of the twentieth century.

Yeats's The Second Coming (1920)

W. B. Yeats (1865 to 1939) was an Irish poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923. The Second Coming was published in 1920. It has two stanzas.

Stanza 1 (paraphrase): a falcon circles in a widening gyre until it cannot hear the falconer. Then the poem names what this means:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Anarchy and a blood-dimmed tide are let loose, and innocence is drowned. The stanza ends with a judgment on its own time:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

Stanza 2 (paraphrase): surely, the speaker says, some revelation, some Second Coming, must be near. (In Christian belief, the Second Coming is Christ's promised return.) But as soon as he says the words, a vision rises from Spiritus Mundi (Latin, spirit of the world, Yeats's term for a shared store of images): in a desert, a shape with a lion's body and a man's head, its gaze blank and pitiless, moves slowly while desert birds wheel around it. The vision fades, but the speaker now knows that two thousand years of history were troubled into nightmare by a rocking cradle (the birth of Christ). The poem ends with a question: what rough beast, whose time has finally come, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

T. S. Eliot's Prufrock: modernism from inside a mind

T. S. Eliot (1888 to 1965) published The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in the magazine Poetry in 1915. It opens with an epigraph in Italian from Dante's Inferno, spoken by a soul in hell who tells his story only because he believes no one will ever repeat it. Then Prufrock begins:

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table;

The third line is a shock: a romantic evening sky compared to an anaesthetized patient on an operating table. That clash of the lyrical and the clinical is a modernist signature.

What happens (paraphrase): Prufrock, a timid middle-aged man, walks through foggy city streets toward a drawing room where women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo. He wants to ask an overwhelming question (perhaps a declaration of love) but keeps postponing it. He worries about his thinning hair and thin arms, and sums up his cautious life in one line:

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

He insists he is not Prince Hamlet, only a minor attendant lord, and ends imagining mermaids singing, though not to him.

Features: a dramatic monologue that drifts; fragments and sudden jumps; allusions to Dante, Michelangelo, Hamlet and the Bible; irony (a love song with no love and no song).

Writing back: Chinua Achebe and Things Fall Apart

In 1958, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe (1930 to 2013) published Things Fall Apart, a novel about Okonkwo, a respected man in an Igbo community, at the time when British missionaries and colonial government arrive. Achebe took his title from Yeats's line and used lines from the poem as his epigraph. (The novel is under copyright, so it is described here rather than quoted.)

Why does this matter for critical literacy?

• Yeats's poem imagines Western civilization falling apart; its centre is Christian Europe.
• Achebe's novel shows a different centre: a complex Igbo society with its own laws, religion, arts and politics, and it is that world that is torn apart, by colonialism.
• Achebe writes back: he borrows a famous line from the colonizing culture's literature and turns its perspective around. The rough beast arriving, from an Igbo point of view, might look a lot like the colonizers.

This is a powerful kind of extending understanding: one text changes how we read another. After Achebe, it is hard to read Yeats's centre without asking: whose centre?