The title of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is an allusion to a William Butler Yeats' poem.
The title of the novel Things Fall Apart written by Chinua Achebe is an allusion to the poem "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats. In this poem, the author writes "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" in the third line. Moreover, both the poem and Achuba's novel present the idea of an important change. Things Fall Apart was published in 1958 and it focuses on the arrival of the Europeans to Nigeria during the last decades of the nineteenth century.