The Second Coming

[Sheilbh]

Was this writter before Wasteland  or after?

The writer was way before and a major influence on Modernism.  Yeats started in the 1890s.  The poem itself was published a year or two before the Wasteland.

I don't think this is worth mentioning (as obviously everybody realized it) but the beast described in the second stanza is obviously the Sphinx. So it's about the chaos caused (or which causes) the birth of an enigma.

To link this back to the Joker, Yeats described the beast he described in 'The second Coming' as being associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction.

I think Spiritus Mundi here means more something like the Zeitgeist, and not some sort of a pan-human connection.

It could well be both.  Yeats was, as I say, obsessed with obscurantist religious beliefs and it wouldn't surprise me.

As to interpretation I think it's ridiculous to say Grumbler's teaching something inappropriate here.  One of Yeats's abiding fascinations in his poetry is the terrifying, but awe-inspiring devotion to a cause of men of action.  Just 6 pages earlier, in the volume, you have him saying in 'Easter, 1916' that 'hearts with one purpose alone/ through summer and winter seem/ enchanted to a stone/ to trouble the living stream [...] too long a sacrifice/ can make a stone of the heart./  O when may it suffice?'. 

This volume is one with some of most potent political poetry of the 20th century: 'a terrible beauty is born'.  Now he may have literally cut politics out of the poem.  It originally referenced Burke and Irish, French and Russian revolutionaries.  Even without that, however, the poem directly uses, or paraphrases, sections of Shelley and Blake who are two of the greatest radical poets of all time, both of whom had a definite social and political purpose in their poetry and in the poems Yeats is referring to.  So the idea that the political interpretation is somehow 'alternative' or wrong is simply preposterous.

Equally so is the exclusion of the occult and obscurantist elements of Yeat's writing.  Surely the beauty and fun of reading the poem is the ambiguity between those two terribly demonstrable interpretations.  Now we can argue, with referencce to the text and other things Yeats wrote, in favour of one of the other but given that they're both grounded in the text and in Yeats's work I think it's impossible to dismiss either. 

And I think it's the ambiguity of meaning that is what's great about poetry (moreso than prose fiction, though, ironically I think it's easier for a poem to have a message than it is for prose fiction).  Literature, unless it's bad, doesn't have a meaning.  It does, however, have meaning.

[Fate]

Why would a student of an AP class explore what they already knew? I would rather suspect if an AP student understood the historical facts required to get an A in the class, they wouldn't waste time with a poem (unless you're a prick and put it on the test.  )

I don't write the AP test! 

AP courses are more than about learning the material; half the points on the AP test come from essays, and those essays require you to apply existing knowledge to new situations.  A good way to teach this is to "make the familiar unfamiliar," which is to take something they know (like how nationalism was exploited by the conservatives in the years leading up to WW1) and make it unfamiliar (i.e. nationalism is now a falcon "turning and turning in the widening gyre" and it "cannot hear the falconer").

If your teachers do not do this where it is possible, I pity you (and them).  I do test using this method as well (like my test on Gandhi placed him in the modern US as the leader of a group of Hispanics trying to force the US to give up the land it gained in the treaty of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.  Students had to show they understood the career of Mohandas Gandhi by describing what the parallels would be in the case of the "American Gandhi."

It's been more than four years, but I don't remember the essays being nearly that involved. If English was your first language and you knew the basic historical facts, you could easily get a five.

[katmai]

In retrospect I should have used the 32 credits I had going into college to do a year abroad with a light schedule instead of picking up a minor.

I took a double major.  What was wrong with us?

Pfft i skipped all AP and started college at 15, and look where i ended up.







I'm go drink a bottle of whisky now

[grumbler]

Presumably they still have tests during the course of the semester?

All of the MC and essay questions on my tests come from previous AP exams.

[The Minsky Moment]

One thing is certain Grumbler.  It is the lucky student that has you as a teacher.

Yeah, learn this interpretation of a poem that isn't want the poet intended. Yay!

and garbon signals that he has missed the last 100+ years of literary criticism and theory.

[The Minsky Moment]

That the "rough beast" be the materialism of the US or the Stalinism of Russia seems a stretch for 1920.  No more of a stretch than Nazism, of course, but Nazism seems a better extrapolation of the tenor of the times than materialism.

I think that a careful observer in 1920 would be able to see enough into the Bolshevik regime and its modus operandi to have a pretty good idea about its general tenor and possible future development.  Arguably that direction would be easier to foresee than the development of Nazism from the farcicial failure of the Kapp putsch.

Re America - I am not sure to what degree the trope of America as being representative of a kind of soulness materialism had taken root by 1920, perhaps from the excesses of the Gilded Age.  Certainly it had by the late 20s. 

Fun to see what people choose to read into these things, and how it exposes their own mindset.  Malthus for example thinks of radical spiritual movements; no doubt Spellus could tie it in some way to some obscure late medieval sufi movement.

[derspiess]

and garbon signals that he has missed the last 100+ years of literary criticism and theory.

Even I knew that.

[Sheilbh]

Re America - I am not sure to what degree the trope of America as being representative of a kind of soulness materialism had taken root by 1920, perhaps from the excesses of the Gilded Age.  Certainly it had by the late 20s.

I think it's plausible for Yeats given that he was very much a believer in an aristocratic elite - whether artistic or landed.  I mean he was a later slight fascist sympathiser.  So I think that sort of conservative, nationalist view fitted quite well with anti-Americanism in the period.

[Caliga]

and garbon signals that he has missed the last 100+ years of literary criticism and theory.

Even I knew that.

There's something of a parallel between this discussion line and my thread on experimental theatre.  I was trying to explain this to Princesca and she refuses to accept that:

a) the lack of a plot is not because the writer sucks, but rather because he strung together a bunch of symbols and wanted the viewer to assign meaning to them;

b) there is any possibility that a play constructed in such a manner can be good.

[Malthus]

That the "rough beast" be the materialism of the US or the Stalinism of Russia seems a stretch for 1920.  No more of a stretch than Nazism, of course, but Nazism seems a better extrapolation of the tenor of the times than materialism.

I think that a careful observer in 1920 would be able to see enough into the Bolshevik regime and its modus operandi to have a pretty good idea about its general tenor and possible future development.  Arguably that direction would be easier to foresee than the development of Nazism from the farcicial failure of the Kapp putsch.

Re America - I am not sure to what degree the trope of America as being representative of a kind of soulness materialism had taken root by 1920, perhaps from the excesses of the Gilded Age.  Certainly it had by the late 20s. 

Fun to see what people choose to read into these things, and how it exposes their own mindset.  Malthus for example thinks of radical spiritual movements; no doubt Spellus could tie it in some way to some obscure late medieval sufi movement.

It isn't a stretch to find a mystic implication to the term "spiritus mundi". It is almost certainly what the authour intended, in context.

[The Minsky Moment]

It isn't a stretch to find a mystic implication to the term "spiritus mundi". It is almost certainly what the authour intended, in context.

Spiritus Mundi comes right from Hegel.  Whether that was what Yeats had in mind, I have no idea.  Certainly anyone who received a serious liberal education in the last 19th century would be aware of that connection.

[Malthus]

It isn't a stretch to find a mystic implication to the term "spiritus mundi". It is almost certainly what the authour intended, in context.

Spiritus Mundi comes right from Hegel.  Whether that was what Yeats had in mind, I have no idea.  Certainly anyone who received a serious liberal education in the last 19th century would be aware of that connection.

Did Hegel also go on about visions of the antichrist derived from the impersonal forces of history?

Surely anyone reading the poem, even those with a liberal education, would realize that it has religious and mystic implications.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight:

Are you seriously contending that it is somehow idiosyncratic to find that "Spiritus Mundi" (lit. "spirit of the world") has a mystic meaning in this context, because your educated person would realize that he was referring only to the Hegelian world-historical notion?

FWIW, googling about seems to confirm this: http://books.google.ca/books?id=h17SuG8km1cC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=spiritus+mundi+yeats&source=bl&ots=Zz9GcI3CXW&sig=5pwCThZ-VGaPe7oTpB46TIzOlws&hl=en&ei=EFXeSfTJDY7oMJiZjFU&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9#PPA195,M1

[The Minsky Moment]

Did Hegel also go on about visions of the antichrist derived from the impersonal forces of history?

No Hegel was not writing poetry.  The question is not whether the poem inspired Hegel but whether the Hegelian concept of Weltgeist (Spiritus Mundi) has any implications for interpreting or understanding the poem.  To the extent that one would read the poem as having *political* implicaiton - as grumbler does in the first post, it seems like a logical possibility.

Surely anyone reading the poem, even those with a liberal education, would realize that it has religious and mystic implications.

It makes reference to relgious tropes.  The assumption that it has "mystic implications" is a reading.  You are proving my point here I think.

Are you seriously contending that it is somehow idiosyncratic to find that "Spiritus Mundi" (lit. "spirit of the world") has a mystic meaning in this context

Quite sure I made no such claim. 

FWIW, googling about seems to confirm this: http://books.google.ca/books?id=h17SuG8km1cC&pg=PA195&lpg=PA195&dq=spiritus+mundi+yeats&source=bl&ots=Zz9GcI3CXW&sig=5pwCThZ-VGaPe7oTpB46TIzOlws&hl=en&ei=EFXeSfTJDY7oMJiZjFU&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9#PPA195,M1

Well your link seems to confirm that some critic wants to draw parallels to Jungian concepts but there doesn't seem to be any claim that Yates was reading Jung in 1920.

EDIT: look at the top of 195!  That conception seems to draw influence from the Hegelian conception of philosophy of history (though it differs in character and exposition).

[Sheilbh]

To be fair the mysticism isn't necessarily a reading into the text.  Yeats published a theory of history based on an ecstatic vision he had (the turning gyres).  No doubt he was very well read but he was, as I say, literally obsessed with mystical, occultist stuff.  He famously made all of his friends get their horoscopes drawn.

[Malthus]

Did Hegel also go on about visions of the antichrist derived from the impersonal forces of history?

No Hegel was not writing poetry.  The question is not whether the poem inspired Hegel but whether the Hegelian concept of Weltgeist (Spiritus Mundi) has any implications for interpreting or understanding the poem.  To the extent that one would read the poem as having *political* implicaiton - as grumbler does in the first post, it seems like a logical possibility.

I'm not denying it is "... a logical possibility". Indeed, it is clear that Yeats was weaving the political and religious together, and using a historical-theory term which also had a mystical meaning would have been right up his alley.

It makes reference to relgious tropes.  The assumption that it has "mystic implications" is a reading.  You are proving my point here I think.

And you are splitting hairs frantically.

Quite sure I made no such claim.

That's how I read this:

Fun to see what people choose to read into these things, and how it exposes their own mindset.  Malthus for example thinks of radical spiritual movements; no doubt Spellus could tie it in some way to some obscure late medieval sufi movement.

I contend that anyone, even someone who is not me, could easly objectively come to the same conclusion I did. Research appears to indicate this is true. So I disagree with your argument that my reading is idiosyncratic "reading into" the poem. It's there for everyone to read.

Well your link seems to confirm that some critic wants to draw parallels to Jungian concepts but there doesn't seem to be any claim that Yates was reading Jung in 1920.

EDIT: look at the top of 195!  That conception seems to draw influence from the Hegelian conception of philosophy of history (though it differs in character and exposition).

What I see is some pretty clear evidence, linked to earlier work of Yeats, that he had some typically mystic preoccupations. It is therefore to no surprise that these appear in his poem.