Most of the writers we think of as pioneers of modern literary form and style - Proust, Conrad, Mann, Rilke, Pound, Valery, Eliot, and Lawrence - were reacting (or, as Valery preferred to call it, acting ) against what they saw as the spirit of the coming age: The growing dominance of the machine and the subsequent proliferation of the human type that the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset labeled ''Mass Man.'' While those of more liberal inclination saw Mass Man as a hapless victim of the society that produced him, others, less charitably, were sufficiently dismayed at the prospect of a society dominated by Mass Man that they longed for a return to some kind of aristocratic hierarchy. That one of the greatest modern poets should have written most of his work as a reaction against modern times should not surprise us.
For countless readers, Yeats's poem has crystallized our recurrent fears that civilization may be falling apart and the nightmare sense of helplessness felt in the face of the impending disaster. But the shock of recognition we feel upon reading them is as powerful today as the day they were written. These lines from ''The Second Coming'' were originally inspired by the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart the centre cannot hold Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.m