IN A POEM COMPOSED IN 1919, William Butler Yeats prominently writes that “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” With these words, he mourns the perceived collapse of the order that had previously provided structure and meaning to human life. The embattled center in this verse is not fated for complete dissolution, however, since the poem, entitled “Second Coming” and written in the wake of the First World War's destructiveness, anticipates the arrival of a new messianic force that has the ability to restore humankind to a state of spiritual and ontological harmony. The longing for a new center in this poem can be read as a reaction to the war and to the corrosive changes in social and cultural life initiated by the processes of modernity—scientific rationality, secularization, industrialization, and urbanization. But the poem can also be interpreted as a recondite response to the unmanageable heterogeneity of modern and modernist art. After all, modernism is frequently characterized as a disparate collection of aesthetic approaches which sought a radical break from the cultural, social, and political status quo of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to this interpretation, “Second Coming” also articulates the desire to re-establish order out of the shocks, crises, and violations of modernism's early phase. The poem's vision of redemption through a new center for art was arguably realized in the decade after the First World War. After all, the 1920s was the period when modern literature entered a central or mainstream phase that largely renounced the caustic and destructive spirit of the avant-garde,according to the narrative of many literary historians. One scholar writes that “by 1918 both the neo-Romantic pastoralism of the Georgians and the protestations of the avant-garde were giving way to a new cultural and literary mood.” This view, that literature of the early interwar period is distinctive, has effectively come to dominate the scholarly discourse about early twentieth-century aesthetics, notwithstanding Daniel Bell's claim that “there is no center” to modernism.

In literary studies, texts of the 1920s are often ascribed to what is called “high modernism,” but the very notion of a high phase is problematic, and it evokes two primary associations. For some scholars, “high” represents a value judgment emphasizing the elevated nature of serious art in contradistinction to the banality and inconsequentiality of “low” or popular culture.