November 1, 1920: William Butler Yeats Publishes "The Second Coming"

November 1, 1920: American literary magazine The Dial publishes "The Second Coming," a poem by William Butler Yeats.

Born on June 13, 1865 on the Southside of Dublin, Ireland, Yeats (pronounced like "yates") was a Protestant who became fascinated by poetry and by early Irish legends. He was first published in 1889, but by 1900, his poetry grew more physical and politicized.

With Ireland still in the British Empire, and its men forced to fight for an occupying force in World War I, leading to the Easter Rising of 1916 and the Irish struggle for independence, Yeats wrote "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," published in 1919 after the war's end:

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love.

World War I scarred so many, in so many ways. And, though they began during the war, neither the Irish struggle for independence nor the Spanish Flu epidemic ended with it. Indeed, Yeats' wife, Georgia Hyde-Lees, caught the flu, while pregnant, and she and the baby barely survived.

Things really did seem to be falling apart, and Yeats' poem "The Second Coming," rather than suggest the Second Coming of the Messiah, seemed to suggest the end of the world:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

In 1923, Yeats was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died on January 28, 1939, at the age of 73, having survived the post-World War I "mere anarchy," and the Great Depression, but knowing that World War II was on the horizon. Shortly before his death, he published "The Municipal Gallery Revisited," in which he wrote, "Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends."

Georgie lived on until 1968. Daughter Anne, born during the Spanish Flu epidemic, became a costume and stage designer, and then an esteemed painter, and lived until 2001. Son Michael became a lawyer, and was elected to the Irish Senate, the Seanad Éireann. He lived until 2007, and the poet's genetic line continues through Michael's children and grandchildren.

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November 1, 1920 was a Monday. There were 2 other reasons that this was a big day in the history of writing. Eugene O'Neill's play The Emperor Jones premiered on Broadway. I have a separate entry for that event. And conservative newspaper columnist James J. Kilpatrick was born.

Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And the NHL season didn't start until December 22. So there were no scores on this historic day.