EBOOK Yeats and Violence

The night can sweat with terror as beforeWe pieced our thoughts into        philosophy,And planned to bring the world under a rule,Who are but weasels fighting        in a hole.W.B. Yeats, 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen'This is a book about how        poetry, seen through the instance of a single poem, seeks to make sense of a        turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is        none, and also, in certain crucial cases, remain faithful to the disorder and        shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few        manage both. W.B. Yeats 'Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen' (written and first published        in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happenswhen what is taken to        be civilization crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are        history's victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn?Successive chapters        investigate the six parts of the poem, connecting them to Yeats' broader poetic        practice, his interest in the occult and his changing vision of Irish nationalism;        to the work of other poets (Irish, English, Russian German); and to Irish and        European history between 1916 (the date of the Easter Uprising in Dublin) and 1923        (the date of the end of the Irish Civil War). Theoretical considerations of the        shape and meaning of violence, both political and religious, link thechapters to        each other.