What poet wishes in the poem The Second Coming?

"The Second Coming" is a response to a world wracked by violence. Yeats wrote the poem 1919, right after the end of World War I, in which 16 million people were killed in a horrifying display of the power of modern technological warfare and of the continuing conflicts that wracked the supposedly modern, civilized world. The poem voices a sense of shock, dismay, and pessimism about the future that many felt after the war. Lines like "blood-dimmed tide" and "mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" both eloquently describe the horrific chaos of war and violence.

Many people felt as if there could never be another war after World War I; it was even called "The War to End All Wars," because people believed that it was so horrible and destructive that people would never allow something like it to happen again. But Yeats foresaw a darker future, which of course came to pass—World War II began a mere 14 years later, and Yeats's second coming took the form of a modernity that endowed humans with increasingly destructive weapons like the atomic bomb, and continued to force people to question how far into the violence the world could descend. This violent history continues, with unimaginable violence continuing on in the Middle East and around the world today.