The fall of man at the Second Coming and The World is Too With Us Although WB Yeats wrote about a century ago after the era of Romanticism, his Romantic precursors greatly influenced his writing. One of his most famous poems, “The Second Coming,” echoes both Blake's Book of Urizen and Shelley's most ambitious poem, Prometheus Unbound (Bloom 530). Despite less criticism of the relationship between Yeats's poems and the writing of another of his Romantic predecessors, Williamworth, accusations of greed and materialism in a growing industrial society influence Yeats's poetic interpretation of apocalypse . Bothworth and Yeats describe the fall of man; “The World is Too Much With Us” foreshadows and describes the reasons for the predicted apocalypse of The Second Coming. A cultural focus on redundant commercialism, a loss of focus on nature, and a lack of conviction fuel both poems, but only Yeats envisions the graphic outcome in an eventual takeover of man. In the first four lines of "The World is Too Much with Us," the speaker laments the shift of man's attention from nature to materialism: The world is too much with us; late and early, getting and in spending we waste our powers: we see little in the nature that is ours; we have given our hearts, a sordid bargain (Wordsworth 1394)! Romantic that he helped define begins the sonnet with a loud, reprimanding voice associated so specifically with Milton (Levinson 644). worried about the fact that instead of turning to nature (their own and that which surrounds them), humans...... middle of paper ...... Cantor, Jay “The story. in the revolutionary movement: men made from'. The space between: literature and politics. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.Rpt. in 20th century literary criticism. Ed. Denis Poupard. Flight. 11. Detroit: Gale, 1983. 540-541. Levinson, Marjorie. “Back to the Future: Worth’s New Historicism.” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 (1989): 633-659. Profitt, Edward. “The Second Coming” by Yeats. " Explanator 49 (1991): 104-105. Wordsworth, William. "The world is too much with us." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed., principal authors. Ed. MH Abrams. New York: WW Norton and Company, Inc., 1996. 1394. Yeats, William Butler. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. MH Abrams. Company, Inc..., 1996. 2280