In a way, it might have begun with the Age of Enlightenment and its drive toward a mastery of nature and society, with human reason at the center of everything, since which rationality had been considered the key to justice, morality, control, organization, understanding and happiness. This, in reality, also led to a horrid war, industrial squalor, the breakdown of traditional rural society, loss of faith, exploitation of other cultures and races, and a society built on power and greed. This was a shift in paradigms from the optimistic, reason-centered discourse of 19th century Victorianism to a depressing, changing, strange world.
Modernist reactions were primarily condemnatory or apocalyptic and despairing. Modernism is therefore an aesthetic and cultural reaction to modernity and modernization. It completely changed the way artist used form, style, content, genre, expression, etc. The artists' work reflected their Crisis of Belief, the pervasive sense of loss, disillusionment, and even despair in the wake of the Great War; and their subsequent reaction to it, the need to break with the structure that brought about it. In the case of Yeats, he opted for an escapist response. He believed the world is built in conical gyres, and after a two thousand years peak of society, culture, etc., there would be a downfall with two thousand years of darkness.
"The Second Coming"" was intended by Yeats to describe the current historical moment. "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold." His poem was published after World War I, when he thought society had broken down and fallen apart, and it reads as a prediction of a dark future. He interchanges the biblical symbols with predatory images: Christian dove for falcon; lamb for cannibal sphinx; and the Holy Spirit for the spiritus mundi, the spirit of this world. He sees modern civilization as a murderous beast. Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation, as history reached the end of the outer gyre.
HISTORY: in its broadest sense, is the story of humanity's past. It also refers to the recording of that past. The diverse sources of history include books, newspapers, printed documents, personal papers, and other archival records, artifacts, and oral accounts. Historians use this material to form...