The Widening Gyre of Now …

I found a newsletter in my email today from a while back … nearly two years back, in fact, from September 2022. One of the more interesting newsletters around, founded, in the way things go, by one of Heather Cox Richardson’s Boston U classmates by the name of Ben Hunt. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most expensive newsletters around, so I only read it when 1) a friend occasionally shares a post with me, and 2) I have the intellectual energy to sort through what not infrequently is, in my view, high-flown doomer histrionics and bullshit I don’t fully agree with and which is insufferably arrogant, even as it is inevitably insightful and interesting.

 

Anyway, I found this 2 year old email, and read the first line, which starts out with the words “The widening gyre of American politics …. “.

 

There's no doubt this was an intentional allusion to one of my favorite poems by one of my very favorite poets … a dead Irishman by the name of William Butler Yeats.

 

It occurred to me, suddenly, that the poem – ‘The Second Coming’ – is really a poem for our time. So I found it online and reread it, which reinforced my impression. I’m sharing it here, because … it’s awfully good stuff. If you’re not at all familiar with the poem, you’ve still probably heard a couple of the lines.

 

Some of the best imagery in the English language, right here.