Comparing Mans Downfall in Second Coming and The world is too much wit

Mans Downfall in Second Coming and The world is too much with us Although W.B. Yeats wrote roughly a century after the epoch of Romanticism, his Romantic precursors influenced his writing greatly. One of his most famous poems, The Second Coming, echoes both Blakes The Book of Urizen and Shelleys most ambitious poem Prometheus Unbound (Bloom 530). Despite less objurgation on the relationship between Yeatss poems and the writing of another one of his Romantic predecessors, William Wordsworth, Wordsworths reproach of greed and materialism in a waxing industrial baseball club influences Yeats poetic interpretation of the apocalypse. Both Wordsworth and Yeats depict mans downfall The world is too much with us foreshadows and describes the reasons for the predicted apocalypse of The Second Coming. A cultural concentration on redundant commercialism, loss of focus on nature, and lack of conviction fuel both poems, yet only Yeats envisions the graphic result in an eventual coup detat o f man. In the first four lines of The world is too much with us, the speaker laments mans shift of focus from nature to materialism The world is too much with us late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers Little we see in Nature that is ours We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon (Wordsworth 1394) Wordsworth, usually writing in a much softer tone indicative of the Romantic style which he helped to define, begins the sonnet with a strong, scolding voice associated so specifically with Milton (Levinson 644). He emphatically condemns the vulgar materialism of the age exhibiting the human races frivolousness and frets that instead of looking to Nature (their own and the surrounding), human... ...Cantor, Jay. History in the Revolutionary crusade Men Made Out of Words. The Space Between Literature and Politics. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. Vol. 11. Detroit Gale, 1983. 540-541. Levinson , Marjorie. Back to the Future Wordsworths New Historicism. South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989) 633-659. Profitt, Edward. Yeatss The Second Coming. Explicator 49 (1991) 104-105. Wordsworth, William. The world is too much with us. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed., the major authors. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996. 1394. Yeats, William Butler. The Second Coming. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed., the major authors. Ed. M. H. Abrams. New York W.W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996. 2280