title: The Great Poets W B Yeats
author: W B Yeats
description: This volume in Naxos's Great Poets series offers 32 poems from Yeats's prodigious creative output, which spanned fifty years, from 1889 until his death at the dawn of WWII. Of the three readers, Denys Hawthorne (who recently suffered a stroke that ended his acting career) is the most dramatic in poems such as "To the Rose Upon the Rood of Time," while Nicholas Boulton's younger voice highlights the playfulness of "The Fiddler of Dooney" and others. Jim Norton, meanwhile, handles the whole range of Yeats's verse with lyricism and authority. Unlike some other titles in this series, this one contains commentary before some of the poems, which helpfully places them in context. D.B. &copy; AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- <i>Copyright &#169; AudioFile, Portland, Maine</i>
zlib_text: CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITIES:
  MARTIN GURRI’S REVOLT OF THE PUBLIC
  Gary North
  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. . . .
  – W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming (1920)
  This is Yeats’ most famous poem.  He wrote it in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I. It was
  published in an American literary magazine in 1920, The Dial. Yet he was a Scot. The poem had
  international appeal.  Why? Because it encapsulated a sense of dread that was beginning to
  influence the thinking of thoughtful analysts of world events. They recognized that the war had
  shaken the religious and social foundations of the West. The century without a major
  international 