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 21
... poet from access to the divine and thus to cultural conse- quence . Unless the poet's imagination is mimetic , transferring from apprehension to reason the word of God undistorted ( and by exten- sion , from God to humanity ) , attempts ...
... poet from access to the divine and thus to cultural conse- quence . Unless the poet's imagination is mimetic , transferring from apprehension to reason the word of God undistorted ( and by exten- sion , from God to humanity ) , attempts ...
Page 161
... poet's mission to bring coherence and purpose to a chaotic and disjointed world , and it measures his chances of success by dramatizing the poet's situation between the divorced realms of mind and object . This place is the intersection ...
... poet's mission to bring coherence and purpose to a chaotic and disjointed world , and it measures his chances of success by dramatizing the poet's situation between the divorced realms of mind and object . This place is the intersection ...
Page 202
... poet is also identified , however ironically , with Joseph : " the old man in the / middle , his sagging lips / incredulous " ( 227 ) . In this last case , the poet is more midwife than progenitor to the birth of art . Because the poet's ...
... poet is also identified , however ironically , with Joseph : " the old man in the / middle , his sagging lips / incredulous " ( 227 ) . In this last case , the poet is more midwife than progenitor to the birth of art . Because the poet's ...
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