Catechisms and cliches

Who’s this Yeats fellow you keep talking about?

I did get a laugh out of Rice’s line about how the recent war in Lebanon represented “the birth pangs of the New Middle East.” Like Iraq and Lebanon weren’t enough, now we have to worry about rough beasts with bad posture.

(What is this recurrent animus against Alan Wolfe? Of all the people out there to be irritated by, surely he doesn’t stand out that much?)
As another public high-school grad (1998), I also have read the Yates, and not the Achebe. But then I had an Irish nationalist H.S. English teacher, so there was quite a bit of Yeats (and Joyce, and Heaney, and even O’Casey). Nigeria, not so much.

What’s a yeat?

Well, “what rough beast” had about 50,000 Google hits, “what tough beast” had only one hit– and “what louche beast” had none.

I read Myles na gCopaleen in high school too, but it wasn’t assigned reading. A hard, but not cold fact.

Who’s this Yeats fellow you keep talking about?

The brother of the more famous Jack.

I read Things Fall Apart in college (in a history class, not literature) and I thought then that the title sounded distinctly African – perhaps part of a proverb. I never read any Yeats at school and came to him years later and entirely on my own. Before today if you’d asked me I would have said that I knew my Yeats fairly well for an American who doesn’t read much poetry (Those that I fight I do not hate, Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone, was there another Troy for her to burn, I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, etc)- yet until this moment it never remotely occurred to me that the novel’s title was an allusion to The Second Coming, not even when my own children were assigned it in their high school classes.

I think that’s partially because Africa and Ireland are so distant, but even more because in my mind the title has three accented syllables – THINGS FALL a-PART – while the phrase from the poem has only two – Things FALL a-PART – so, in the way my mind works, the two phrases were entirely different, not even close to one another.

My (private) high school read the novel in freshman year English–except for the year I was a freshman, when we managed to spend an entire quarter reading Genesis. I’ve never read Yeats, either.

I went to a private school where I had a teacher who quoted it to us from memory and implied that if you didn’t make at least a half assed effort to read some poetry (Yeats, Ferlinghetti, dirty lymrics on the bathroom walls; something) you weren’t quite fully human. Never got to Achabe. Had to read Ethan Frome, though.

I thought at first that he must have gotten things backwards – surely more people have read a little 10 line poem (especially one with such a famous first line!) than a whole novel! But then I remembered that I had been assigned the novel in high school a year before being assigned the poem, and that the first line is famous because it’s the title of that book.

What things?

27. You mean what things fall apart? Cheap crockery. Self-assembly furniture. Society. Respect for one’s betters.

You know the kind of thing.

Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is not a book about postcolonial Nigeria but colonial Nigeria.

I also thought it an odd assertion. We read TFA in high-school: as I recall the first thing Mr Jewell did was read the poem aloud, from the prescribed poetry collection, Inscapes.

In addition, Joni Mitchell had a song ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem’ on one of the later albums, ‘Night Ride Home’ if memory serves. That would put it fairly in the mainstream I woulda thunk.

Maybe I just had an exceptionally good teacher, but we were assigned the book and later the poem, so that we could discuss the title, book and poem. Surely that isn’t uncommon!

I had quite a bit of poetry assigned in my HS classes, mostly classics like Beowulf, Shakepseare’s sonnets and the American poets (Longfellow, Dickinson, Pound, Eliot etc.) including Keats. We did not read Achebe due to the structure of the classes I took (American Literature, Literature of the Great Plains, British Literature and Science Fiction) didn’t match with “Things Fall Apart”

I always thought that “The Second Coming” had jumped the shark after Joan Didion used Slouching Towards Bethlehem as the title for her essay on the the “hippies” (and subsequently the book of essays in which it appeared) in the late ’60s. But I assumed that it retained a place in the semi-popular canon. Not quite a Top 10 poem, but Top 25 at least … I’m sure VHS-1 did a countdown sometime.

I’ve not read the Achebe.

School curriculum in Ireland in the 80s and 90s was entirely focused on the state exam syllabus. English had about 12 poets averaging 4 poems each: Yeats had 6 but not Second Coming. There were about 7 novels: A Handful of Dust, Silas Marner, The Charwoman’s Daughter; The Great Gatsby maybe; I skipped the others. Definitely nothing ethnic. I was left with no love of literature and have read little since. I have read Second Coming once or twice though — as Kenny says, it’s only 10 lines(…googles…22 lines…)long.

I believe schools are still completely exam-focused, but the syllabus is a bit looser these days.

Most school systems seem to make the acquisition of an appreciation of literature central, while an appreciation of music is peripheral. Why is this?

Oh, yes. I remember my HS poetry assignments very clearly. And a grim bunch of poems they were. Ted Hughes, View of a Pig. Henry Reed, Naming of Parts. Wilfred Owen, Dulci et Decorum Est. Walt Whitman, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Emily Dickinson, Because I could not stop for death. Andrew Marvell (at last a cheerful one, but still about death), To His Coy Mistress.

Funny, I found the assertion hard to believe, but I recalled that I was assigned the Achebe book in intro. to sociology first year of college and only read the poem later, on my own. Hmmmph.

They’re both really good, it seems to me, although the poem is the only verson I’ve memorized. One may also note there’s several Spenser* novels in a row that refer to lines from that poem; it’s irritating enough to be one of the reasons I gave up reading those books.

*(that’s Spenser the private eye, not the Faerie Queene author).

9: A traditional Irish measurement of a meal. Surely there is a Welsh counterpart, D2?

I read “The Second Coming” in high school and Things Fall Apart in college, and did the same with Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” and Achebe’s No Longer At Ease.

I’ve read both “The Second Coming” and Things Fall Apart, but it never occurred to me that the title of one came from the other. “Things fall apart” has to be the least distinctive phrase in the poem.

Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Jerusalem)
John seems to have gone through the looking glass.

Turning and turning in the tightening gyre
The falcon returns to the falconer;
Things come together; the centre cannot fail;
Mere anarchy is banished from the world,
The blood-loosed tide is dimmed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is revived;
The worst lack all conviction, while the best
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at an end.
The end of the Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Gladdens my sight: somewhere in the dark of the jungle.

A shape with human body and the head of a lion,
A gaze deep and welcoming as the moon,
Is moving its quick loins, while all about it
Reel images of the joyous forest birds.
The sunshine comes again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of watchful waking
were lulled to sleepfulness by a soothing breeze,
And this rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Jerusalem to be killed.

I’ve also written on this one at my blog: http://incertus.blogspot.com/2007/09/sunday-times-book-review-updates-us-on.html

I teach college Literature courses so my take is a little different, but I essentially agree with you that the NYTBR is seriously oversimplifying the situation and underestimating its audience. They’re behaving as though every person gets 3 hours to read a book at age 20 and after that, you’re a cooked goose. The reality is that every English major’s degree is more or less unique, built by the student’s individual interests and his/her college’s strengths and overall offerings. And for anyone committed to studying literature as a vocation, the degree is hardly the end of the education: reading is a lifelong activity.

The article also seems to be implying that when someone like Achebe uses a Yeats quote to title his novel, he is somehow undermining Yeats, instead of honoring him and keeping his words alive. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a Hemingway novel and a John Donne line. Brave New World is a Huxley novel and a Shakespeare line.

Shakespeare, Donne, and Yeats aren’t going anywhere. :-)

I’m always doing that kind of thing, JPS. Pardon my brain.

I went first to a private school (1 year), then a public school for h.s., and then a private college, all in the U.S. I was assigned the poem in my second year at the public school (1994) and wrote a substantial paper on it; I haven’t ever been assigned the novel. Oddly enough, I’ve also never heard anyone talk about the contents of the novel, not once before this thread anyway — if it is widely read, does it not make any impression on its readers? The poem, by contrast, comes up again and again. I knew a guy who maintained that the rough beast was Aleister Crowley, for instance — but that may also be a cliché.

48: Oh, it’s like a keat then.

I’ve read The Second Coming many times, for school/university and for myself. I’ve never heard of the novel. Or anyway, I couldn’t have told you what it’s about before reading this post. This may well say more about the Anglocentrism (including pre-Free State Ireland) of Eng Lit courses at Oxford and my admittedly atrocious knowledge of contemporary novels than anything else. I’ve always leaned more toward drama, poetry and non-fiction, with a handful of exceptions.

I always thought that “The Second Coming” had jumped the shark after Joan Didion used Slouching Towards Bethlehem as the title for her essay on the the “hippies”

Surley the defining shark-moment was the publication of Robert Bork’s, “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,” a reference to the poem everyone else in this thread seems mercifully to have forgotten, or at least, suppressed . . .

As a Canadian, the poem was on my curriculum in Grade 13, although I think I had read it already. The book I had never heard of.

Oddly, although I have an M.A. in English, I don’t think the poem was on any university courses I took (and I did at least two courses involving modern poetry, including the entire Cantos, so it wasn’t simply avoiding the period).

Surley the defining shark-moment was the publication of Robert Bork’s, “Slouching Toward Gomorrah,”

Don’t call me surley ….

Did give me the idea to check out other “Slouching Towards” completions, (205,000 total hits) – not all are books:
Tehran, Bedlam, Utopia, Adjournment, Creation, Kalamazoo (A DeVries book), Big Brother, Wisdom, Consensus, Ganache, Extimacy, Consensus, Dublin, Nirvana (Bukowski), Liverpool, Birmingham ….

In fact, a test of your cities chops is whether you have a Slouching Towards xxx hit on Google. Pittsburgh, for instance, does not.

But my forgettable favorite is Bork going to the well one more time with a piece in the WSJ in 2005: Slouching Towards Miers– “Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values.”

Maybe he is trying to establish a “Slouching Towards” franchise the way Hunter S did with “Fear and Loathing”

I graduated an Ivy League college as a lit major in the late 80s. I’ve read the Yeats poem, I’ve never even heard of the Achebe novel (although I know Achebe by reputation). Needless to say, I don’t know anyone who has read the Achebe novel. I know plenty of people who read Yeats. Maybe it’s a generational thing, or maybe I hang with a very different crowd than Alan Wolfe.

My English prof parents would be embarrassed to know that I don’t have a clue if I read that poem at any point. I took multiple literature classes, so I’m sure I must have, but I have no clue. I know all of you didn’t just get out of school last week, so I’m impressed that so many of you can be very precise about what you read and when. Maybe it’s because I read far more science and history than literature – we remember what we are most interested in. As a professor myself (history) at a less-than-stellar institution, I can bet that a very high percentage of my students have read neither book nor poem and could identify neither one unless they had one or the other coming up next week on an exam. And even then, they might struggle.

Ooh! Ooh! Slouching Towards Fear and Loathing!

Or Fear and Loathing in The Gyre.

I’ve read Arrow of God and not Things Fall Apart, but I have a copy of the latter on a shelf somewhere. It never occurred to me that it had a link with the Yeats poem. (I’ve read through an anthology which had a couple of dozen Yeats poems, though I’m not a big reader of poetry.)

I read the poem before I read the book. I’d guess, completely at random, that at least twice as many people have read the poem than have read the book (even if we restrict attention to, say, the last 10 years so as to make up for the fact that the poem has been around for much longer).

The fact that the NYTRB writer feels the need to gloss “Things Fall Apart” seems to me to give the lie to the idea that “everyone” has read it, even in the rather attenuated sense of “everyone” that’s presumably being used.