“To what poem is Joan Didion referring in the title of her book Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968)? She refers to the last line of ‘The Second Coming‘ (1921) by William Butler Yeats: ‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,/Slouches toward Bethlehem.'”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.