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1. An essay by Uygar Aydemir
A Comparison between “The Second Coming” and “The Waste Land”
William Butler Yeats' “The Second Coming” and T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land” both
explore a similar feeling that was common in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Western
Europe. The devastating effects of the First World War on physical and moral levels still prevailed
in the period when the poems were published. Having just come out of the most violent war that the
world had witnessed up until then, having experienced the greatest political event since the French
Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, that yet signified an obscure meaning and boded an even
more obscure future at the time, seeing the Eastern European empires, the long-lasting legacies (or
remnants) of the Pre-Modern Era, collapse leaving their place to a barren and an unsecure political
state that seemed highly potential to trigger a worse conflict than the recent one, the modern society
was shocked at the turning of the events which proved that civilised human beings were capable of
morphing into primitives in terms of the darkness of the heart and barbarian feelings, regardless of
their advanced level of civilisation, and they tracked down every step of demoralisation losing a
solid ground and concrete reasons to be cheerful about future and faithful for their beliefs they had
thitherto hold on to: Finally, their god was dead.
Yeats' and Eliot's poems appeared in this pessimistic aura, in which modern literature also
had been inquiring into the possibilities of expressing this kind of an unprecedented experience. The
vision of the destroyed cities and the sense of fragmentation in what was previously believed to be a
holistic world yielded to the abandonment of apparent coherence and to using a broken style in
grammar. An early example of this style in modernist literature, Ulysses, would be gradually more
exemplified later on after the World War. His preference of a Wagnerian synthesis of different
components than mundane coherence, writing in a turmoil of languages, “these fragments [he has]
shored against [his] ruins”, and referring to complex allusions in “The Waste Land” seem to be

2. deriving from Eliot's inability to express via classical poetry and daily language his feelings against
the extraordinary events of his time. While Eliot chooses to convey the feeling through the poem's
content and form, Yeats follows a classical style and, trusting the power of the image in the poem,
finds it enough to leave the reader with the feeling of nausea invoked by the shape “with the lion
body and the head of a man”.
The circularity of history and the eternal recurrence of being take a different shape in the
opening of “The Second-Coming”. Yeats recognises that the history is not linear, yet its circularity
does not necessarily require a perfect circular route that keeps repeating itself; rather, its continuity
resembles more like a gyre, which never returns back to its original position but keeps widening and
widening, since the centrifugal force is greater than the power of the centre that eventually fails to
make a complete circle. Once in every twenty centuries Yeats awaits a new beginning which is not
necessarily on the same path as the last one. In this case, Yeats expects an ugly beast to come up at
the commencement of this new epoch, whereas it was Jesus Christ who had opened the previous
one. This imagery of Yeats' offers a different view than “The Waste Land” in which Eliot does not
anticipate a new beginning whatsoever, until the very end, indeed the last stanza, of the poem in
which he still does not witness something new but the fact that he is fishing “with the arid plain
behind” implies the emergence of the anticipation of a new beginning. Both poets acknowledge the
end of a period and they express their disbelief in grand narratives such as humanism, progress, and
rationalism which had overwhelmed the works of the intellectuals since the Enlightenment.
Because Yeats and Eliot are aware that they are at a point where things will not be the same
as before ever again, they are curious and ask questions about future. They both believe that in
order to predict the future, one has to have a knowledge and understanding of the past.
Consequently, Yeats develops a new theory in reading the past and bases his idea of the second
coming on this repetitive sense of time. Eliot, on the other hand, while giving examples from certain

3. periods in European and World history, takes a stand against the circularity of time and implies that
time is linear and now has come to an end: We are left with the wastes of the civilisation and
nothing seems to come up from this waste. Eliot does not mention a signal of new system, despite
not completely rejecting the idea through ironic distortions of the idea of resurrection. Whereas,
Yeats sees a vision out of Spiritus Mundi, and foretells the emergence of Nemesis of contemporary
civilisation.
In conclusion, both poets approach one of the most important crises in world history
similarly, yet a significant difference between them is the style. While Eliot's desperation is
apparent in the lyrical and fragmented style of the poem, Yeats takes a more realistic approach with
a classical style, which leads him to a more accurate prediction, almost a prophecy, of the future.
Unsure and incurious about what is to come, Eliot takes different pictures of what is lost and what
the society is left over with. Yeats, on the other hand, after taking a succinct glance of the present,
foresees the rise of a beast, which at the first hand reminds of Hitler and The Second World War,
and forewarns the society.