William Butler Yeats

William Butler Yeats is invoked as a diagnostician of crisis rather than treated through a biography or a narrative of his life. The book cites lines from his 1920 poem “The Second Coming” to frame a modern condition in which violent eruptions coexist with passivity, while conviction seems to drain from those who might resist fanaticism. Its close reading centers on “the ceremony of innocence”: not simple ignorance, but a performed belief sustained alongside awareness of facts that contradict it.

Identity and Appearance in the Book

The passage identifies Yeats as an arch-conservative and presents his poem as an earlier diagnosis of the twentieth century. Its focus is tightly bounded: Yeats appears through a handful of lines, not through biographical detail or a discussion of his wider body of work. The book’s concern is what those lines can illuminate about violence, belief, and the conditions under which people continue to participate in shared symbolic forms.

The quoted passage moves from an image of innocence being submerged to the opposition between “the best” and “the worst.” The book takes that opposition as more than a contrast between good and evil individuals. It links the best with an inability to sustain conviction and the worst with an excess of passionate intensity. Yeats’s lines thus provide a compressed diagnosis that the surrounding argument can develop: the crisis lies both in the weakening of belief and in the forceful return of forms of conviction that no longer depend on reflective judgment.

“The Ceremony of Innocence”

The book singles out “the ceremony of innocence” as the key to its use of Yeats. It clarifies the phrase by comparing it with the “age of innocence” in Edith Wharton’s novel. In the example, Newton’s wife understands that her husband is passionately in love with Countess Olenska. She does not naively mistake his conduct for fidelity; instead, she politely ignores what she knows and stages belief in his faithfulness. The example gives “innocence” a precise, active sense: a social performance that permits a shared order to continue despite knowledge of its contradiction.

That comparison shapes the reading of Yeats. Innocence, in this argument, is not merely the absence of knowledge, and its ceremony is not an accidental error. It names a practice of sustaining appearances while knowing that reality does not support them. The passage’s emphasis falls on the gap between what is known and what is enacted. By making that gap central, the book turns Yeats’s phrase into a way to understand how collective life can depend on carefully maintained fictions rather than on simple credulity.

Violence, Passivity, and Conviction

Yeats’s diagnosis is introduced after a discussion of violence that runs in two directions: violent outbursts can express a deeper passivity, while withdrawal into inactivity can itself become a radical gesture. The poem’s contrast between lost conviction and passionate intensity gathers these apparently opposed responses into one crisis. In the book’s reading, the danger is not confined to overtly forceful action; it also appears in the inability to sustain a commitment capable of resisting it.

The passage brings Yeats’s contrast into the present by comparing tolerant but anemic liberals with fundamentalists full of passionate intensity. This is the book’s application of the poem, not a claim that Yeats himself supplied that specific political comparison. The contrast clarifies what the cited lines do within the argument: they frame a divide between weakened symbolic commitment and intense forms of certainty, while leaving open the question of what kind of belief could avoid both cynicism and fanaticism.

From Yeats to the Problem of Belief

The discussion ultimately connects Yeats’s lines to its account of belief as a symbolic practice. The “ceremony” of innocence requires neither ignorance nor confidence that appearances are literally true. It involves continuing to act within a shared symbolic order even when its human representatives or visible circumstances provide reasons for skepticism. The book describes the alternative as a cynical insistence on believing only what the eyes confirm; that stance, it argues, misses how symbolic fictions organize experience and social relations.

In this framework, Yeats’s “best” are unable to sustain symbolic innocence, while the “worst” are energized by fanatic forms of conviction. The poem serves as a compact point of departure for this distinction, rather than as a complete explanation of it. Its importance to the book lies in the way its stark opposition opens onto a more difficult problem: how belief can persist without being reduced either to direct knowledge or to a knowingly empty performance. Yeats’s appearance therefore marks a turn from the diagnosis of political intensity to an inquiry into the fragile rituals by which people maintain a common world.