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ISSN : 1226-4946(Print)
ISSN : 2288-5412(Online)
The Yeats Journal of Korea Vol.78 No. pp.317-344
DOI : http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2025.78.317

Yeats and the Critique of Legal Violence: Rewriting Moments of Crisis

Ilhwan Yoon
Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Hanyang University

Abstract

This article, drawing on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” examines W.B. Yeats’s exploration of juridical violence during Ireland’s decolonizing period. In poems such as “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” “The Tower,” and “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats keenly observes and reflects on the workings of legal violence that operate like fate upon individuals and communities amid historical upheaval. This reflection does not culminate in a one-sided critique. While he consistently criticizes the continuity of violence perpetuated under the guise of the law’s fairness, Yeats also, in the aftermath of the Irish Free State’s founding, defends certain forms of legal force—such as sovereign power over life and death and the conscription of citizens—as unavoidable for the establishment of national order. Caught between juridical violence and the notion of pure order, he wrestles with this contradiction without resolving it through simple reconciliation. Rather, without weakening the tension generated by this gap, Yeats alternately critiques and defends it, exposing—without mitigation—the incisive teeth of law-making and law-preserving violence long concealed beneath the presumed universality of law.

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