Does Artistic Genius Come From the Devil? | Faust, Yeats, and the Poetic Sublime

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Richard Barakat's *Faust the Magician* is available here: https://shorturl.at/CDWx0

See also the below discussions:

Richard Barakat: The Literary Collective (Spring 2025): https://youtu.be/rwecUdt0p28

Richard Barakat: Philosophic Dialogues from La Frontera (Spring 2024): https://youtu.be/YiiZbUErFcA

Richard Barakat joins us to explore the strange relationship between poetry, magic, and the Devil, beginning with Marlowe and Goethe’s Faust tellings and ending with Richard’s own apocalyptic Faust for the 21st century. Along the way: Pindar raises men towards the gods, Ovid turns poetry into immortality, Yeats makes images into magical powers, paganism and Christianity collide and combine, artistic genius edges towards possession, and Faust’s desire to transcend the human becomes inseparable from the old suspicion that the arts are, somehow, the Devil’s domain.

00:00 – Are the Arts the Devil’s Domain?

06:24 – What Is the Magic of Poetry?

10:15 – Marlowe, Goethe, and their Fausts

19:37 – Pagan Gods, Christianity, and Syncretism

27:43 – Pindar and Becoming Like the Gods

38:52 – What Makes Great Art Ineffable?

41:42 – Writing a Darker Faust for the 21st Century

49:50 – Faustian Knowledge, Faustian Power

52:32 – Yeats the Magician

57:20 – Ovid, Transformation, and Artistic Immortality

01:07:16 – Yeats: Leda and the Byzantium Poems

01:22:33 – Satan's Faustian Bargain

01:30:13 – Can Art Create Gods?