The Fall of Man in Second Coming and The World Is Too Much with Us Although WB Yeats wrote about a century after the Romantic era, 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, Worth's rebuke of greed and materialism in a growing industrial society influences Yeats's poetic interpretation of the 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 consumerism, loss of focus on nature, and lack of conviction fuel both poems, but only Yeats imagines the graphic result in an eventual man's seizure of power. 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 spending, we waste our powers: we see little in Nature that is ours; we have given away our hearts, a sordid advantage (Wordsworth 1394)! Wordsworth, normally writing in a much softer tone, indicative of the Romantic style he helped define, begins the sonnet in a strong, reproachful voice associated specifically with Milton (Levinson 644). It strongly condemns the "vulgar materialism" of the era which shows the frivolity and nervousness of the human race that instead of looking at Nature (its own and the surrounding one), man...... middle of paper... ...Cantor, Jay. "History in the Revolutionary Movement: Men Made of". The space between: literature and politics. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981.Rpt. in twentieth-century literary criticism. Ed. Dennis Poupard. vol. 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. "Yeats's 'The Second Coming'." Explicator 49 (1991): 104-105. Wordsworth, William. "The world is too much with us." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed., the main authors. Ed. MH Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996. 1394.Yeats, William Butler. "The Second Coming." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed., the main authors. Ed. MH Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1996. 2280