Contrasting Yeats’ Second Coming and Shelleys Ozymandias Essay

Contrasting Yeats Second Coming and Shelleys Ozymandias William Butler Yeats specialized in the early Modernists style of literature. Coming just out of the Late Victorian age, Yeats used strong literary and historic elements in literary form to kick up his symbolic message in The Second Coming. Through the use of his theme of the new Apocalypse, (lecture notes on Early 20th Century Modernism) he imagined the universe of discourse was culmination into a state of unsurity from the post-WWI Modernist experience. The war left people in a state of chaos, and although the war was meant to bring people a sense of hope for no more wars in the future, it did far more damage then good, especially in peoples minds. The time in the Modernist era was reflected in the equally chaotic, and choppy record book structure in Yeats poem. In The Second Coming conditions are illustrated as being chaotic, Things fall apart the centre cannot hold/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world (Yeats, Longman p. 2329 ll. 3-4), confused in a way. Those words he uses, fall apart, cannot hold, and anarchy are ...