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. |
From inside the book
Results 1-3 of 52
Page 60
... Nature , free of any suspicion that Fancy , which structures his read- ing of Nature , is inauthentic . In a second phase , he is paralyzed by the discovery that Fancy is inadequate to identify and mediate sensations of the sublime . A ...
... Nature , free of any suspicion that Fancy , which structures his read- ing of Nature , is inauthentic . In a second phase , he is paralyzed by the discovery that Fancy is inadequate to identify and mediate sensations of the sublime . A ...
Page 65
... Nature . Centering their expec- tations in the abstract ideal of Divine Man , and presuming that Nature's purpose is to submit herself as a source of images for that ideal , the young pilgrims would necessarily resist a natural sublime ...
... Nature . Centering their expec- tations in the abstract ideal of Divine Man , and presuming that Nature's purpose is to submit herself as a source of images for that ideal , the young pilgrims would necessarily resist a natural sublime ...
Page 69
... Nature provides the object of perception , the mind still provides the object's meaning , without which the object can take no form . The contents of the vision serve less as evidence of divinity glowing through the surface of Nature ...
... Nature provides the object of perception , the mind still provides the object's meaning , without which the object can take no form . The contents of the vision serve less as evidence of divinity glowing through the surface of Nature ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 7 |
Logos and Ego | 44 |
Egocentered Authority | 72 |
Copyright | |
4 other sections not shown
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
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