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Opinion: Reading William Butler Yeats 100 Years Later

NPR's Scott Simon reflects on what a 100 year-old poem by William Butler Yeats means today.
Irish poet William Butler Yeats circa 1920.

William Butler Yeats wrote "The Second Coming" a hundred years ago, when the world seemed on the verge. Perhaps like now, perhaps like many years.

The losses of the First World War were still overwhelming when millions more began to die in the

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