the great war and modernist poetry The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
Theceremony of innocence is drowned.^26If modernism denotes a sensibility attentive to the extremities of its own historical
moment, Yeats has gathered the sense of world-altering world endings into a poetic
language remarkably adequate to the manifold crisis of this exceptional time. This
sense of ramifying fracture from the past may be apprehended as a difference from
the traditions of heroic literature, as byJones; or as a disruption in the mainstream
conventions of Public Reason in liberal modernity, as by Pound and Eliot; or as the
apocalyptic convulsion that Yeats envisions as the true shape of the contemporary
chaos. Each of these instances comprises a prime type of the modernist Now, the
enabling condition of the newest—and most durable—poetry of the extraordinary
moment of this Great War.
(^26) Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, ibid. 235.