One of the most well-known Irish poems of the 20th century, William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" was first published in 1920. It originally appeared in the influential modernist literary journal The Dial, but was republished in Yeats's book Michael Robartes and the Dancer in 1921. The poem immediately struck a chord with readers, thanks to its mixture of Christian imagery and its frightening apocalyptic vision, which served as a critique of Europe following World War I.
With its reimagining of familiar motifs and its highly allusive style, "The Second Coming" has become one of the most important modernist poems, alongside T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Ezra Pound's Cantos....
