Vexed to Nightmare by a Rocking Cradle—The 2026 Horror of W. B. Yeats' "The Second Coming"
About this episode
The episode explores William Butler Yeats's poem 'The Second Coming' and its relevance to contemporary issues, including horror as an art form and the implications of artificial general intelligence.
I've had a poem stuck in my head, and it isn't one of biophilia and whimsy. It's about liminality, death, and interregna. Let me read for you one of my favorites and one of the all-time classics of Enlighs literature, William Butler Yeats's "The Second Coming". While beautiful for its own sake, I'll also make a case for the defense of useless things, an argument for the horror genre as a serious art form, and a close reading of a poem that has become a kind of shared vocabulary for moments when the center will not hold. I work through the imagery line by line, and connect it to everything from Frankenstein and Genesis's exile from Eden, to Tig Notaro's stage presence, to theriantropic madness from The Office 's Michael Scott, to H.P. Lovecraft, to Slavoj Žižek on Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds , and more. The trigger wasn't climate policy rollback or the war in Iran, as you might guess—it was actually thinking about artificial general intelligence, and that the falcon that can no longer hear the falconer. Listen in to hear more about why "The Second Coming" reads as present-progressive horror rather than past-tense lament, why "troubles my sight" is a…
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