What’s your Literary Cliché for 2016?
The leader of the pack is
probably Yeats’s Second Coming, with
its apocalyptic lines about a rough beast
slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Very few liberal/left commentators
on recent political events have been able to resist the poem’s choice phrases:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
…
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
This is all “woe is us”
stuff, offering on its surface nothing but unsubtle pessimism. Certainly the
poem is usually wrenched out of its historical context – the end of WW1, and
the turmoil of events in Ireland and Russia, and, most especially, out of the
context of Yeats’s own idiosyncratic and mystical beliefs in unfolding epochs
supplanting one another- the “gyres”. By his calculation, an epoch of
“progress” was doomed to give place to something savage and reactionary. The
fact that over the next decades this actually happened in the West has lent
credence to Yeats’s accidental prophetic powers, if not to his philosophy.
