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 73
... actual world , he would have no cultural authority in the actual world , for the modern reality is defined by its indifference to the exertions of the individual mind.3 A successful speaker must dissolve in his own idiosyncratic vision ...
... actual world , he would have no cultural authority in the actual world , for the modern reality is defined by its indifference to the exertions of the individual mind.3 A successful speaker must dissolve in his own idiosyncratic vision ...
Page 75
... actual problem of the opening com- plaint , then , is different from the stated one . The actual issue here is how to avoid the suffering of old age , not whether old age si- lences the muse . Thus , the choice in the following passage ...
... actual problem of the opening com- plaint , then , is different from the stated one . The actual issue here is how to avoid the suffering of old age , not whether old age si- lences the muse . Thus , the choice in the following passage ...
Page 145
... actual , as mediated by that poetry . That authority is founded on contact with the local , the intersection of the actual and the abstract , the thing and the idea . At this intersection , the mind can apprehend reality and at the same ...
... actual , as mediated by that poetry . That authority is founded on contact with the local , the intersection of the actual and the abstract , the thing and the idea . At this intersection , the mind can apprehend reality and at the same ...
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