Comparing The Wasteland by TS Eliot and The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats, World War I fundamentally changed Europeans' perspective on man. Before the war they believed that man was intrinsically good, after the war people became disenchanted with this view of man. Thomas Sterns Eliot and William Butler Yeats both felt this disenchantment deeply and manifested it in their poetry. In addition to war, Eliot and Yeats also saw the continuing unrest in Europe, such as the Russian Revolution and the Irish Rebellions, as confirmation of their fear of human nature and expanded on their disillusionment in "The Waste Land" and “The Second Coming.” "The poets shared more than a disbelief in the goodness of human nature, they also both had religious experiences which colored their thoughts. Eliot was an atheist early in his life and converted to Christianity, coming to fervently believe Eliot also played with Buddhism during one stage of his writing "The Wasteland" (Southam 132). The Second Coming,” he formed his own personal philosophy based on an accumulation of everything “[he] had read, thought, experienced, and written over many years” (Harrison. 1). His philosophy therefore included Christianity as a factor in his life, but not as important a factor as in Eliot's life. Because of the importance of religion in their lives, Yeats and Eliot used many mythological and religious allusions in their poems. Although both poets shared a disenchantment with the nature of man, their different religions gave them different perspectives on the horizon of humanity. Eliot saw the future as salvageable, while Yeats believed it could only...... middle of paper ......"Works CitedHarrison, John. "What brute beast? Yeats, Nietzsche and historical rhetoric in “The Second Coming”.Leavis Electric Library, FR “The Waste Land”. TS Eliot: a collection of critical essays.ed.HughKenner. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962. 104-109 “Rudyard Kipling and William ButlerYeats” http://www.en.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/316unit4/studentprojects/kiplingyeats/intro.htmlSoutham, BC A guide to selected poems of TS Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994. UVA Lecture Notes, Department of English, lit. introduction in English from 1890 to 1989.http://www.faraday.clas.virginia.edu./~sg5p/Class_notes_2.htmlVickery, John B. The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.