Write in Brief Yeats’s Concept of History or the Rise and Fall of Civilizations.

Yeats’s Concept of History or the Rise and Fall of Civilizations

Yeats’s sense of history is one of the major themes of his poetry. Poems such as ‘The Second Coming’, Nineteen hundred and Nineteen, September 1913, Easter 1916, provide good illustrations of Yeats’s sense of history or the rise and fall of civilizations as propounded in a vision. The Second Coming gives the best expression of Yeats’s theory of the rise and fall of civilizations.

The poem effectively shows how the history consists of cycles and that every civilization has a time span of its own. According to him, the present cycle of history which began roughly with the birth of Christ is about to end and it is likely to be replaced by another cycle, the ruling authority of which may be very terrifying and cruel.

Easter 1916 deals with the contemporary history of Ireland. The Easter Rising of 1916 had taken Yeats by surprise. Those every revolutionary whom he had come to despise attained heroic stature and it seemed to Yeats that a terrible beauty had been born. Thus Yeats had created wonderful poetry out of his sense of history and mythology which give interest to the readers even today.

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