"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"
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A line like this doesn’t just diagnose a political moment; it indicts a psychological pattern that keeps repeating because it flatters no one. Yeats is writing with the cold eye of someone watching a society’s moral center fail in real time, and he refuses the comforting story that history is driven by the wise. The scandal is that decency often arrives as hesitation. The “best” aren’t ignorant; they’re paralyzed by nuance, fractured by self-scrutiny, too aware of consequences to barrel ahead. Conviction, in Yeats’s framing, isn’t automatically virtue. It’s a force multiplier, and in unstable times it’s frequently rented out to the most reckless tenants.
The subtext is a critique of liberal temperaments before that word hardened into a partisan label: people trained to weigh arguments can end up treating urgency as vulgar. Meanwhile the “worst” thrive on the emotional shortcuts of certainty, mistaking volume for truth and intensity for legitimacy. Yeats’s brilliance is the way he makes “passionate intensity” sound both seductive and terrifying. It captures the heat of demagoguery, the romance of radicalism, the intoxication of being unconflicted.
Context sharpens the bite. “The Second Coming” lands after World War I, amid revolution, reaction, and the violent redraw of borders and beliefs. Yeats, an Irish poet shaped by nationalist upheaval and European collapse, isn’t predicting a specific regime so much as mapping a social physics: when institutions wobble, the cautious retreat and the ruthless advance. The line works because it’s not a slogan; it’s an accusation aimed at the listener, daring you to ask which role you’re rehearsing.
The subtext is a critique of liberal temperaments before that word hardened into a partisan label: people trained to weigh arguments can end up treating urgency as vulgar. Meanwhile the “worst” thrive on the emotional shortcuts of certainty, mistaking volume for truth and intensity for legitimacy. Yeats’s brilliance is the way he makes “passionate intensity” sound both seductive and terrifying. It captures the heat of demagoguery, the romance of radicalism, the intoxication of being unconflicted.
Context sharpens the bite. “The Second Coming” lands after World War I, amid revolution, reaction, and the violent redraw of borders and beliefs. Yeats, an Irish poet shaped by nationalist upheaval and European collapse, isn’t predicting a specific regime so much as mapping a social physics: when institutions wobble, the cautious retreat and the ruthless advance. The line works because it’s not a slogan; it’s an accusation aimed at the listener, daring you to ask which role you’re rehearsing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | "The Second Coming", poem by William Butler Yeats (1920). Contains the line: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." (first published in The Dial, 1920) |
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