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Yeats: Tragic Joy and the Sublime

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

R. Jahan Ramazani
R. Jahan Ramazani*
Affiliation:
University of Virginia, Charlottesville
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Abstract

Critics have failed to grasp that Yeats's “tragic joy” is a version of the sublime. The phrase captures the affective dynamic of the sublime—the transformation of defeat and terror into joy—as do similar concepts in Longinus, Edmund Burke, Kant, and Schiller. Yeats can help us understand death as the ultimate occasion of the sublime. Through his lyrics of tragic joy we can trace the psychic and rhetorical resemblances that connect diverse modes of the sublime: curse, prophecy, and apocalypse. These modes encode affirmative responses to destruction, so that the psycholinguistic violence in the poems may owe less to fascism than to the Romantic sublime. Although Yeats turns the sublime of Blake and Shelley in a reactionary direction, the politics of the sublime are inherently neither right-wing nor left-wing but open to either articulation.

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Type
Research Article
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PMLA , Volume 104 , Issue 2 , March 1989, pp. 163 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1989

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