Friday Literature Workshop: Kimberly Wine, "Yeats' Apocalypse and Burke's Sublime"

Although closely linked to Burke’s definition of the terrible sublime, W. B. Yeats' apocalyptic images are more closely aligned to the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, translated as "revelation" and defined as "to uncover or reveal" (OED). Yeats frequently connects this revelation with images of the sublime, but the apocalyptic moment of revelation is better understood as a product of engagement with the sublime in a rhetorical sense—an effect of moving through a sublime moment rendered via the artifice of poetic structure to a moment of spiritual revelation.