Part 1 Prolegomena to a Yeatsian metaphysic
- mercury sublimate - gender, revolution and the Burkean sublime
the smell of the fire - Kant, aesthetics, morality and culture - night or joy
Yeats, the negative and positive sublime. Part 2 Ascending breathless starlit air - the beautiful and the positive sublime
- eternal beauty - early transcendental aesthetics
the labour to be beautiful - constructing an aesthetic
living beauty - aesthetic accommodation of history and society
the language of illusion
"A Vision" and the transcentental. Part 3 A dancer wound in his own entrails - the negative sublime
- the frivolous eye - Yeatsian epiphany and the violence of God
desire and the fascist dream - destructive/creative violence in society
heart's victim and its torturer - wounds of the subject-object mystery. Part 4 Whence did all that fury come?
- starlit air - the positive sublime
the stream that's roaring by - the tragedy of history
moving upon silence - alternating visions of sublimity.