Op-Ed writers have started dipping into vats of poetry when trying to make sense of our present state of affairs. The New York Times makes available their headlines through a free on-line subscription. If something catches your eye you can download the article and read away. That is something I did yesterday when I read "What W. B. Yeats' 'Second Coming' Really Says About the Iraq War." The first stanza of that poem furnishes many quotable bits that writers are seizing on in their arguments. That stanza goes like this:
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.
This op-ed writer argues that Yeats did not intend the poem to a scenario like the Iraq War. Little matter. The poem is fertile ground for writers to steal well-turned phrases from, and it takes only a little imagination to make appropriate connections. Then, in yesterday's local paper a local writer pointed to the beauty of language in poems like Wallace Stevens' "Peter Quince at the Clavier," T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and W. E. Henley's "Invictus." These references sent me scrambling to my poetry anthologies to refresh my memory of them. In abrupt counterpoint, our local pundit said we will have to leave the "gentleness of pleasant
thoughts" and choose words with "the weight of blunt instruments, the keenness of Toledo steel" to fight the dangers that confront us. I know that attention to poetry rises and falls. It looks like the poets are being noticed again.
