Sept. 15, 2025 Editor, The News-Gazette: In recent months I have found the letters to your paper to be especially thoughtful and intelligent. Your editorials have also been excellent, and once again I want to thank you and Mr. Paxton for keeping The News-Gazette alive and strong. We here in Rockbridge County and Lexington are incredibly fortunate to have not one but two splendid newspapers. For a community as small as ours, this is a very rare blessing.
I can’t comment on all the letters that have impressed me, but if I must choose one, it is the letter (Aug. 27) by Rachel Johnson of Rockbridge County, in which she presents the relevance of the poem, “The Second Coming,” by the poet W.B. Yeats, written shortly after WWI, to our current political mayhem -namely, the rise of Trump.
Yeats wrote this poem in response to the chaos he saw worldwide following the war, and his fear that the “Christian Era” was over, to be replaced by something inherently evil. Ms. Johnson’s observations are astute, and they highlight the prescience of great poetry.
Another equally prescient poem regarding the ambitions of Trump, and one he would do well to read himself, were he capable of reading poetry (or reading anything for that matter, like the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, or the Bible) was written over a hundred years earlier by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is called, “Ozymandias.” PHILLIP WELCH Rockbridge County.
