"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold"

In his review of two books about the poet William Yeats, Robert Huddleston sheds some light on why Yeats is considered the greatest poet of the 20th century, and why, "like Shakespeare, he is inescapable."

Despite the conventionality of its composition, Bedient maintains, Yeats’s work is a revelation and enactment of the twentieth century’s discoveries about the nature of the physical world and of the human psyche. He is the poet of dynamism, of “creative destruction,” and also of violence and horror.