A Comparison of Imagery in Yeats’ “The Hollow Men” and Eliot’s “The Second Coming”.

William Butler Yeats and Thomas Stearns Eliot both have written very powerful poetry that has changed the face of literature for future generations. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” and Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” are permeated with the feeling of despair. This despair reflects the feelings of the age in which the poets lived. In these poems, there is a pervasive sense of futility, a sense that mankind will never recover. Through the use of tone, visual imagery, and religious images, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot paint a verbal portrait of life that is both desolate and apocalyptic.
Both poets use apocalyptic images to express tone. The first stanza of Yeats’ “The Second Coming” is a statement about the state of the world. The tone is set in the following lines: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (Yeats, lines 3-4). This tone reflects the seriousness of the situation. The “widening gyre” (Yeats 1) image show...