Sublimity at Colonus: from Yeats to Mahon Fiona Macintosh (Oxford)
Annual lecture of the St Andrews Centre for Receptions of Antiquity.
**Abstract**
There is nothing new about turning to Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus towards the end of life. Yeats, for one, regularly retraced Oedipus' last journey in his last two decades, and in many ways it is the Yeatsian example that resounds in the poetic imaginary of many Irish poets who came after him. This paper seeks to chart what is really a search by these poets for the sublime at Colonus, and also more broadly sublimity in the landscape, in political events and in concepts of heroism. It is also an attempt to delineate a ‘Celtic' sublime, which stems from Burke and eighteenth-century antiquarianism as much as it does from Longinus, and which continues to leave its imprint on Irish poetic responses to Sophocles' last tragedy.
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