There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold . . .” The “centre” that Yeats refers to is less the political center between two partisan extremes than the center that is civilization itself. In modern times, writes Yeats, “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”: mercy and decency are under assault as never before as “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

With vivid, even unforgettable words and imagery, Yeats captures the spiritually destructive cumulative effect of a murderous and suicidal European war, the nihilism that both informed it and resulted from it, the trahison of those trusted to be guardians of European culture and civilization, and the emergence of bloody civil war in Ireland and of the specter of a cruel and unprecedented totalitarianism in Soviet Russia. “Passionate intensity,” one might think, can be a force for decency and civilization when it is tied to civilized restraint, but “lack of conviction” is hardly a virtue in any historical circumstance. How then to reconnect restraint and decency with energy and conviction and thus to the “centre” in Yeats’s rich and capacious sense of the word? How are we to overcome the debilitating separation of passion and civilized restraint, a divide that risks making the “best” among us both feckless and ineffective?