Revelation At Hand: Artistic Distance, or Prophetic Sense

Abstract

This essay draws upon the critical theory of Walter Benjamin to give an account of the nature of “prophecy” in poetry and poetic interpretation. The other primary interlocutors of the paper are Frederic Jameson, in the paper’s first half, and W.B. Yeats in its second. The first section draws upon Jameson’s writing to create an argument for why prophetic writing has fallen out of style, romantic-early modernist writing. I conclude by using Benjamin’s theories of history to point to a potential revival of this idea of prophecy, in the construction of a “re-modern” moment.