It was Virginia Woolf who wryly observed, “On or about December 1910, human character changed.”[1] I had no idea what this meant, until I stumbled into a fairy wood where a gilded volume by W.B. Yeats waited patiently for my arrival. I read The Second Coming (published nine years after Woolf’s moment of eschaton) and all was made plain. Here were succinct lyrics for a generation succinctly removed from their Greek, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Romantic, and late-Victorian ancestors:
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