t or f: "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"

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I know, I know Yeats has become the unofficial poet of the new century's desert wars but after hearing "the second coming" quipped by not 1 but 2 tv commentators today (the centre cannot hold bit) I dug out my old high school english text and read the thing and damned if it doesn't still push the old buttons.

so what do you all make of the line in the thread title and how true is it?

(i also noticed that "time out of mind" is a yeats rip today too, but you probably knew that)

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Friday, 21 March 2003 03:49 (twenty-three years ago)

i think its dumm, cos firstly it depends on what your passionate about. secondly, it sounds like another version of the old "cold logic is the way" humans-should-be-robots bollocks that feminists have critiqued over and over. i mean who on earth lacks conviction anyway?

― di smith (lucylurex), Friday, 21 March 2003 03:55 (twenty-three years ago)

unless he was taking the piss, but how would i know, i've read no Yeats.

― di smith (lucylurex), Friday, 21 March 2003 03:56 (twenty-three years ago)

i thought of "conviction" more as "moral certainty" - that he was saying the best aren't governed by dogma or even logic which is good but neccessarily kind of confusing

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Friday, 21 March 2003 03:58 (twenty-three years ago)

here's the whole poem

The Second Coming

1922

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.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at laSt,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Friday, 21 March 2003 04:01 (twenty-three years ago)

when you juxtapose "lack of conviction" with "passionate intensity", it does sound like "reason" vs "emotion", to me anyway. i just don't see what's wrong with "passionate intensity" - though i can see how it can be misguided.

― di smith (lucylurex), Friday, 21 March 2003 04:07 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't know, "lack of conviction" doesn't exactly mean "reason" and I don't think he's saying "passionate intensity" is itself neccessarily bad - just that the worst are full of it to the absence of anything else

― Fritz Wollner (Fritz), Friday, 21 March 2003 04:14 (twenty-three years ago)

Maybe Yeats is associating passion and intensity with those in power, and "power corrupts absolutely." Better to be obscure and powerless; or apathetic, even.

― Aaron A., Friday, 21 March 2003 04:33 (twenty-three years ago)

This is a description of a worst case scenario: the people who are obsessed with one issue and care deeply about it are obsessed with mad, bad, crazy things (not that they have to be like that, but in this apocalpyse they are) while the people who might see alternatives, or have better ideas or impulses cannot muster up the energy to care anymore. And I find this scary because I can imagine it happening.

― isadora (isadora), Friday, 21 March 2003 05:27 (twenty-three years ago)

i never took "lack of conviction" to mean "reason over emotion"; if anything i took it as "emotion sabotaged by reason".

― jess (dubplatestyle), Friday, 21 March 2003 05:34 (twenty-three years ago)

i.e. conviction drowned by pessimism, which def resonates with me, lately

― jess (dubplatestyle), Friday, 21 March 2003 05:36 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah, I think Isadora is right in the sense that this line is almost always quoted out of context--I don't think Yeats is here setting down a universal principle, though I suppose that reading is valid.

― slutsky (slutsky), Friday, 21 March 2003 05:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Yeah. It's like WHEN the worst are full of passionate intensity and WHEN the best lack all conviction, then we're really in the shit.

I love this poem so much.

― Archel (Archel), Friday, 21 March 2003 10:50 (twenty-three years ago)

He's talking about a situation in which the people who are sure they're right aren't and the people who are right aren't sure.

― Tom (Groke), Friday, 21 March 2003 11:23 (twenty-three years ago)

My friend used to have some GBS quote pertaining to this on a sticker in her kitchen ("The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."). When I was drunk once I scrawled 'Wanker' on it, cause I thought it a bit smug.

But yeah, as I said on another thread recently, praising passionate viewtaking for its own sake is surely dud (sorry doomie).

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 21 March 2003 13:22 (twenty-three years ago)

I was also thinking of another two quotes recently - the "All it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing" and the MTV co-opted "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". The weakness with both is that anyone can gain moral succour from them, no matter how heinous their actions might seem to others. Most, if not all, people taking violent political action surely think they are doing the right thing? Or do we really think that as they took the controls the 9/11 suicide pilots were going "mwah ha ha I'm so evil"?

― N. (nickdastoor), Friday, 21 March 2003 13:31 (twenty-three years ago)

"if you're not part of the solution you're part of the problem" is such total bullshit

― J0hn Darn1elle (J0hn Darn1elle), Friday, 21 March 2003 14:17 (twenty-three years ago)

I'm the worst person in the world but I don't give a fuck about anything

― dave q, Friday, 21 March 2003 14:54 (twenty-three years ago)

"If you're not part of the problem, fuck off." -Jody Beth Rosen

― Jody Beth Rosen (Jody Beth Rosen), Friday, 21 March 2003 14:55 (twenty-three years ago)

slouching rough beasts = rowr

― mark s (mark s), Friday, 21 March 2003 14:58 (twenty-three years ago)

hey people -- remember that Yeats is one of the most dialectical fucking poets ever. So whatever you think a line / poem "means", it probably also means the exact opposite at the same time.

― alext (alext), Friday, 21 March 2003 15:52 (twenty-three years ago)

when you put it in that context, yeah, it doesn't read like a universal principle. obv i read no poetry.

― di smith (lucylurex), Saturday, 22 March 2003 02:25 (twenty-three years ago)

Wasn't Yeats some kind of fascist?

― N. (nickdastoor), Saturday, 22 March 2003 02:26 (twenty-three years ago)

N's point is valid. The idea that we should nod our heads at what WBY thinks is 'right' is not that reliable; which is a pity as I'm always quoting him myself.

― the pinefox, Monday, 24 March 2003 13:07 (twenty-three years ago)

"(i also noticed that "time out of mind" is a yeats rip today too, but you probably knew that)"

"Time out of mind" is much older than Yeats, basically a stock phrase meaning "time immemorial" or even "for as long as I can remember", as in this line from Measure for Measure, Act 4, Scene II:

POMPEY
Sir, I have been an unlawful bawd time out of mind; but yet I will be content to be a lawful hangman.

― Paula G., Monday, 24 March 2003 21:49 (twenty-three years ago)

I think it's a cop out for slackers.

― Horace Mann (Horace Mann), Monday, 24 March 2003 21:55 (twenty-three years ago)

that poem is SO GOTH (in a good way)

― Maria (Maria), Tuesday, 25 March 2003 01:37 (twenty-three years ago)

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