The Second Coming Yeats, William Butler - Robert F. Fleissner (essay date 1988)
Robert F. Fleissner (essay date 1988)
SOURCE: "On Straightening Out Yeats's 'Rough Beast'," in CLA Journal, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, December, 1988, pp. 201-8.
[In the following essay, Fleissner speculates on the nature of the "rough beast" in "The Second Coming."]
The bestial image at the tail end of William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming" is described there as a "rough" one indeed and so deserves some critical straightening out. Hence yet another note on this famous poem may be justified.
I
As a starter, let us consider a surprising, recent news release, which was boldly captioned, at least in the local papers, as follows: "Move Over, Tarzan: Anthropologist says army of apemen slaves only a test tube away." Composed by Uli Schmetzer of the Knight-Ridder News Service, the essay depicted a dean at Florence University, Brunetto Chiarelli, who had announced that "biogenetic scientists, using refined techniques of artificial...
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