On Jul 23, 2010, at 10:17 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>>
>> On Jul 23, 2010, at 9:40 PM, Chip Berlet wrote:
>>
>>> the center cannot hold (tip o' the hat to the Yeats poem)
>>
>> As I've said before, Harold Bloom reads that passage as evidence of
>> Yeats's fascist sympathies. I could quote the text, but I lost the
>> book in the divorce.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>
> Bloom is probably right. I'm reasonably sure that the "roubh
> beast" is
> Red, which Yeats hopes fascism will protect us from. But I can't
> support
> this. Too bad Doug can't quote the text.
What is strange about this is that the title of the poem is "The Second Coming." So the whole poem is casting the imperialist war and its aftermath as a metaphor for the Apocalypse--but the Christian myth is both inverted and subverted. It does seem awfully crude to read a crude political message into the symbolism of a masterpiece by one of the very greatest poets, whatever his prose animadversions about the Mussolini of the early 1920's.
Shane Mage
Porphyry in his Abstinance from Animal Flesh suggests that there
are appropriate offerings to all the Gods, and to the highest the only offering acceptable is silence.