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 64
Page 73
... failure to install himself unself- consciously into an archetypal role . The speaker accepts his failure to extend his imaginative powers and his cultural authority beyond the range of his mortality.2 The character of this acceptance ...
... failure to install himself unself- consciously into an archetypal role . The speaker accepts his failure to extend his imaginative powers and his cultural authority beyond the range of his mortality.2 The character of this acceptance ...
Page 84
... failure to recover ideal beauty and mediate it for the reader , and such a failure challenges the speaker's poetic au- thority . But the speaker does not retire , baffled . Instead he forgets , which means both that he once knew and ...
... failure to recover ideal beauty and mediate it for the reader , and such a failure challenges the speaker's poetic au- thority . But the speaker does not retire , baffled . Instead he forgets , which means both that he once knew and ...
Page 183
... failed love that he identifies in the romantic triangle of the first part . The failure of love is the failure of the imagination to address its object as an Other possessed of its own subjectivity , and thus a failure to animate it . A ...
... failed love that he identifies in the romantic triangle of the first part . The failure of love is the failure of the imagination to address its object as an Other possessed of its own subjectivity , and thus a failure to animate it . A ...
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