Literature Network » H.G. Wells

"Passionate intensity" in Wells's 'The Island of Doctor Moreau' and Yeats's "The Second Coming": constructing an echo.(author H.G. Wells, poet William Butler Yeats)

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From: ANQ
Date: 19960922
Author:MacDonald, Alex

The phrase 'passionate intensity' used by William Butler Yeats in the poem, 'The Second Coming,' in 1919 was also used in a similar context by H.G. Wells in the novel, 'The Island of Doctor Moreau,' in 1896. This echo, whether it was intentional, unconscious, archetypal or coincidental, is interesting because both authors use it to portray someone who is either evil or potentially evil. Yeats and Wells also commonly depict, in these two works, a degraded world in which the human intellect becomes a tool for destruction and savagery, a world presaging the rise of fascism.

The words ...

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