Politics

"Politics" is a poem by Irish poet William Butler Yeats written on May 24, 1938. It was composed during the time of the Spanish Civil War as well as during the pre-war period of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich in Germany. The poem hints at the political situations of "Rome" (Italy), "Russia" (the Soviet Union), and Spain, but ultimately discusses topics more relevant to private human interaction rather than public, or political situations. The poem never mentions Germany or Hitler, despite the fact that the "war and war's alarms" surrounding the poem's creation arose from fears of Germany's aggression rather than Italy's, Russia's, or Spain's. Many versions of the text exist: the original typescript of May 1938, the first typescript with hand-written corrections dated August 12, 1938, as well as a final "Coole Edition" of the poem dated June 29, 1939, which was not published until it was included in Last Poems in 1939. Yeats intended for the poem to be printed last in the collection, as an envoi to "The Circus Animals' Desertion", and while a debate as to the true order of the poems has continued since 1939, "Politics" was the last lyric poem Yeats wrote and remains the final work printed in all posthumous editions. Background The epigraph at the top of the poem is taken from Thomas Mann, "In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms". The phrase had been quoted in a copy of the Yale Review and Yeats wrote notes on that edition and attached them to the first typescript draft of the "Politics". The last two lines of the poem, "But oh that I were young again/ And held her in my arms", is likely taken from a quatrain cited by American writer Archibald MacLeish in a 1938 article in the Yale Review intended to exemplify the use of "living tongue" by the anonymous author of the 16th Century song "The Western Wynde": O Western wind when wilt thou blow That small rain down can rain:-- Christ, that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again MacLeish, in the article, compliments Yeats for his "public" language, but the poem's response to that compliment appears, to Yeats historian Brenda Maddox, to be tempered by Yeats' refusal to believe that war would actually break out.