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

Mans autumn in Second Coming and The human race is also much with us Although W.B. Yeats wrote roughly a century after the Era of Romanticism, his Romantic precursors influenced his writing greatly. One of his approximately famous poems, The Second Coming, echoes both Blakes The Book of Urizen and Shelleys most ambitious poem Prometheus Unbound (Bloom 530). Despite less criticism on the relationship between Yeatss poems and the writing of another one of his Romantic predecessors, William Wordsworth, Wordsworths wrong of greed and materialism in a waxing industrial community influences Yeats poetic interpretation of the apocalypse. Both Wordsworth and Yeats depict mans downfall The world is withal much with us foreshadows and describes the reasons for the predicted apocalypse of The Second Coming. A cultural meanness on redundant commercialism, loss of focus on nature, and lack of trust fuel both poems, yet only Yeats envisions the graphic result in an eventual takeover of 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 devastate our powers Little we see in Nature that is ours We have given our police van away, a sordid boon (Wordsworth 1394) Wordsworth, normally 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 in spades condemns the vulgar materialism of the age exhibiting the human races frivolousness and frets that instead of aspect to Nature (their own and the surrounding), human... ...Cantor, Jay. History in the Revolutionary Movement manpower 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. 540-5 41. Levinson, Marjorie. Back to the Future Wordsworths in the buff 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. sixth 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