Who wrote the poem 'The Second Coming'?

“Who wrote the poem ‘The Second Coming’?” W. B. Yeats wrote it. The poem is among Yeats’s most famous works and is known for its ominous vision of cultural collapse and an approaching new age.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, shortly after the First World War and during the Irish War of Independence. Its imagery reflects a world in which established political, religious, and social structures appear to be breaking apart. The poem was published in 1920 in the American magazine The Dial and later included in Yeats’s 1921 collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer.

Although its title evokes the Christian idea of Christ’s return, Yeats presents a disturbing inversion. Instead of a reassuring savior, the poem imagines a rough beast moving toward Bethlehem. Its opening image of a widening gyre and the line about “the centre” failing have become shorthand for historical disorder.

Readers sometimes confuse Yeats with T. S. Eliot because both wrote influential modernist poetry about cultural crisis. “The Second Coming,” however, is distinctly Yeats’s poem and reflects his personal theory of recurring historical cycles.