The Paris Review might have overstated it just a little recently when suggesting that WB Yeats's The Second Coming was "the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English". But as to the poem's extraordinary popularity with headline writers, novelists in search of titles, and other magpies, the journal certainly had a point.
For a work of such obscure meaning, The Second Coming is astonishingly quotable. In fact, if there was a world record for the distance between quotability and comprehension, Yeats would have held it since the poem was written, 96 years ago. For the endless adaptability of his term "Slouching towards Bethlehem" alone, he deserves an award for services to journalism.
The April issue of the New York Review of Books underlines the point made by its Parisian cousin in having an essay headlined "Slouching Towards Mecca". It's about Michel Houellebecq's latest book – a vision of France under Islamic rule. And Mecca does at least share the general direction of the original "rough beast". But that's an exception to the rule these days.
You could amuse yourself for at least 15 minutes by Googling the names of random cities around the world after the words “slouching towards”. Almost invariably, somebody somewhere has already used the combination in print. Maybe you think that, for example, Kalamazoo has never been slouched towards by anything? You’re wrong: it has, in the title of a 1983 novel.
Cities are just the start of it, though. Whenever some grim but ill-defined future needs to be hinted at, Yeats's phrase is indispensable. This must be why it's so beloved of economists, and the Economist magazine in particular, which has at various times foreseen things slouching towards "Brussels," "Europe", "Banking Union", "nationalisation", "a showdown", "the Drachma", and so on.
But there's more to The Second Coming's quotability than slouching. For how would political commentators have coped over the past century without "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"? And indeed, the poem's entire first verse now reads like a collection of famous quotations – down to the last couplet, which as the Paris Review noted, was once borrowed for what may be the classiest put-down of a rock-concert heckler ever.
I suspect Lou Reed had practiced this mentally, because the concert and the quip were being recorded for a live album. In any case, when interrupted, he reached for his Yeats and let the heckler have it with both barrels. “The best lack all conviction,” he said, “while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
The poem has something for almost everyone – even angst-ridden adolescents. As an example of its appeal outside the usual poetry-consuming circles, the Lou Reed incident pales in comparison to its involvement in the climax of the TV mob drama The Sopranos. With the body count rising and the family under siege, Tony Soprano's teenage son Anthony reads the poem in his bedroom. Yeats's doom-laden words thereby frame the final scene, in which the protagonists gather for a relaxed dinner at an Italian restaurant, always an ominous event in Mafia movies.
At the time he wrote it, Yeats was obviously thinking of the just-ended first World War. He is also said to have been troubled by the turn of events in Ireland (it was January 1919) and by the rise of Bolshevism in Russia. Elsewhere, he described Marxism as “the spearhead of materialism [...] leading to inevitable murder”.
But within a few years, The Second Coming looked instead to have been an uncanny prediction of Fascism, with Hitler as the rough beast. No wonder the poem is a model for economists trying to make future-proof forecasts.
Anyway, now that we’re moving purposefully and in an upright position towards the 150th anniversary of Yeats’s birth, on June 13th, I might as well mention an event that starts next Tuesday (May 5th) in his beloved Drumcliffe.
It’s the annual Sean Nós Festival, which as the name implies is mainly about music and dance. But it does also have a light dusting of poetry. And besides, the event has full-cover Yeatsian insurance (call now for a quotation): “For the good are always the merry,/Save by an evil chance,/And the merry love the fiddle/And the merry love to dance.”
The dance in this case is the old, free-style version. Unlike other forms of Irish dancing, it does not demand a ramrod posture or straight-jacketed arms. In fact, dare I say it, a certain amount of slouching is allowed. Details of workshops and other festival events are at www.coscos.ie
@FrankmcnallyIT