{"id":93055,"date":"2015-12-21T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T17:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93055"},"modified":"2015-12-21T11:46:19","modified_gmt":"2015-12-21T16:46:19","slug":"no-slouch-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/no-slouch-2\/","title":{"rendered":"No Slouch"},"content":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year!<\/em><\/p>\n

\"yeats\"<\/a>

An undated photo of Yeats by the Bain News Service.<\/p><\/div>\n

The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

A recent Russia Today<\/em> headline<\/a> suggests that Europe is \u201cslouching towards anxiety and war.\u201d According to the title of Robert Bork\u2019s latest best seller<\/a>, the United States is Slouching Towards Gomorrah.<\/em> A new book by W.\u2009C. Harris, an English professor, claims we\u2019re Slouching Towards Gaytheism<\/em><\/a>. A casual reader might wonder why the nations of the world have such terrible posture; is it that the earth is slouching towards bedlam<\/a>? Have things fallen apart?<\/p>\n

The only thing not doing any slouching these days is the \u201crough beast\u201d in W. B. Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming,\u201d the 1919 poem from which the phrase originates: \u201cAnd what rough beast, its hour come round at last,\u2009\/\u2009Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?\u201d<\/p>\n

But Yeats\u2019s beast, it must be said, isn\u2019t deteriorating or dying in its slouching, as the many references to the phrase would have you believe; rather, it slouches in steady, dedicated progress toward a goal. It\u2019s actually a terrifying sight: the poem\u2019s narrator intuits that the beast is coming to wreak some untold havoc. (At least one blog got this subtlety right in a headline about the 2012 election cycle: \u201cRomney slouching toward GOP nomination.\u201d<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Second Coming\u201d may well be the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English. (Perhaps Macbeth\u2019s famous \u201csound and fury\u201d monologue is a distant second.) Since Chinua Achebe cribbed Yeats\u2019s lines for Things Fall Apart <\/em>in 1958 and Joan Didion for Slouching Towards Bethlehem <\/em>a decade later, dozens if not hundreds of others have followed suit, in mediums ranging from CD-ROM games to heavy-metal albums to pornography. These references have created a feedback loop, leading ever more writers to draw from the poem for inspiration. But how many of them get it right? Read More >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. Please enjoy, and have a happy New Year! The widening gyre of heavy-handed allusions to Yeats\u2019s \u201cThe Second Coming.\u201d A recent Russia Today headline suggests that Europe is \u201cslouching towards anxiety and war.\u201d According to the title of Robert Bork\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":815,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20653],"tags":[3870,1362,17702,17699,17703,17700,17701,8928,2462],"class_list":["post-93055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-best-of-2015","tag-chinua-achebe","tag-joan-didion","tag-northrop-frye","tag-poems-poetry","tag-slouching-towards-bethlehem","tag-the-second-coming","tag-titles-allusions","tag-w-b-yeats","tag-woody-allen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nYeats\u2019s \u201cSecond Coming\u201d\u2014Our Most Thoroughly Pillaged Poem<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Hundreds of titles borrow from Yeats\u2019s masterpiece, and not always knowledgeably.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/21\/no-slouch-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"No Slouch by Nick Tabor\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 21, 2015 \u2013 We\u2019re away until January 4, but we\u2019re re-posting some of our favorite pieces from 2015. 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