Columbia Teachers Alan Purves and William York Tindall illuminate the Poetry of William Butler Yeats

My introduction to William Butler Yeats (June 13, 1865 - January 28, 1839) was as a Freshman at Columbia College. Alan C. Purves, my English instructor, assigned our class Yeats's  Second Coming to explicate.

The first stanza was very disturbing to say the least. It begins with a disruptive image of a falcon not being responsive to its trainer, the falconer and

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 poem was written in 1919 at the end of  the "blood dimmed tide" of World War I and "anarchy is let loosed" as the the Russian Revolution has gripped the attention and toppled the stability of the world.

My appreciation of Yeats was greatly enhanced by studying some of his great poems under the aegis of Professor William York Tindall of Columbia University's Graduate Faculties English Department.  He brought the rhythms of Yeats's poems alive by reading significant passages out loud.  His favorite was September 1913 and his favorite lines:  

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,

It's with O'Leary in the grave. 

The poem was occasioned by the lockout in September 1913 of employees by the employers and merchants of Dublin. The poem also pays tribute to those early Irish revolutionaries and  patriots who tirelessly devoted their lives to the futile cause of creating a free Irish Republic;

Here is a video animation of Yeats reading The Second Coming 

Other Yeats poems that I suggest one read include: Adam's Curse, The Lake Isle of Innisfree and The Wild Swans at Coole.

Yeats won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923. 

Happy Birthday Mr. Yeats.