‘The centre has held’: Joe Biden quotes WB Yeats in his final UN General Assembly speech [Video]

US PRESIDENT JOE Biden quoted lines from WB Yeats’ poem The Second Coming during his last speech at the UN General Assembly in New York today.

In a speech that took in the major world events the outgoing president has seen through his decades-long political career, Biden said:

“The Irish poet William Butler Yeats described a world, and I quote, where ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world’.”

He continued, “Some may say those words describe the world, not just in 1919, but in 2024, I see a critical distinction. In our time, the center has held.”

Biden said that “leaders of people from every region and across the political spectrum have stood together” to deal with the Covid-a9 pandemic.