Approaching Authority: Transpersonal Gestures in the Poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and WilliamsThis study, using the example of Yeats, Eliot, and Williams, examines the principal gestures of Modernist poetic speakers attempting to identify, mediate, and project cultural authority. To effect this mediation, the poetic speakers must engage in "transpersonality"; by association with the objects of presences in the poem, they must translate their finite egos into mediating voices detached from the concerns of unique selfhood. However, complete transpersonality brings silence: the fact of utterance presupposes a unique perspective, never the totality of perspectives that an atemporal authority possesses. So, rather than the speaker's elevation to a position of authority, the necessary result of the transpersonality is instead that the speaker approach authority in calculated acts of mystification. |
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Page 172
... Beautiful Thing , the elusive , epiphanic mo- ment of contact between the creative mind and chaotic reality.12 After describing tradition's destruction , the speaker seeks to re- place it by a merging of language and unmediated ...
... Beautiful Thing , the elusive , epiphanic mo- ment of contact between the creative mind and chaotic reality.12 After describing tradition's destruction , the speaker seeks to re- place it by a merging of language and unmediated ...
Page 175
... Beautiful Thing for good luck and emphasis cracking it till I must believe that all desired women have had each in the end a busted nose and live afterward marked up Beautiful Thing for memory's sake to be credible in their deeds ...
... Beautiful Thing for good luck and emphasis cracking it till I must believe that all desired women have had each in the end a busted nose and live afterward marked up Beautiful Thing for memory's sake to be credible in their deeds ...
Page 223
... Beautiful Thing to subjective animation . He describes the Beautiful Thing as a " nameless presence , " or , in Williams's terms , a “ hidden flame ” circulating be- tween the formless , chaotic ground and the formed , defined thing ...
... Beautiful Thing to subjective animation . He describes the Beautiful Thing as a " nameless presence , " or , in Williams's terms , a “ hidden flame ” circulating be- tween the formless , chaotic ground and the formed , defined thing ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 7 |
Logos and Ego | 44 |
Egocentered Authority | 72 |
Copyright | |
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abstract actual archetypal argues assert authenticity authority to mediate Book Burnt Norton centered authority claims co-extensive authority consciousness consequence create creative Cress cultural authority death descent desire display divine Dry Salvages East Coker effort ego and Logos ego-centered authority ego's Eliot empirical exist experience expressed failure figurative level Four Quartets gestures Hanrahan hieratic homologous human idea ideal identify identity images imagination individual inevitable interpretive invocation language Little Gidding Logos-centered authority Mary Hynes meaning mind mind's modern modernist movement Nature objective world passage Paterson perceived perception poem poem's poet poet's poetic authority poetic speaker poetry position presence pride prior projected reader purpose reading reality relationship reorientation rhetorical role Romantic Romantic poetry self-consciousness self's sense speaker's authority speaking ego structure T.S. Eliot temporal authority textual voice thority tion tradition transpersonal University Press vision W. B. Yeats William Carlos Williams Williams's Yeats Yeats's younger