The nature of the beast: Yeats and the shadow

Abstract

Yeats’s ‘rough beast’ in “The Second Coming" emerges not only 'out of Spiritus Mundi, but out of an era that was especially attracted to various encodings of the unconscious, a trope, so to speak, made famous by Freud and Jung. I argue that certain psychological discourses are inherent in an era sceptical of foundationalism, that Yeats's poem is a manifestation of the machinery of this scepticism, and that, ultimately, aspects of the poem foreshadow Postmodernist interrogations of received ‘truth’.