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 95
... desire for such faith , for if he possessed it he would have no need to defy a Logos - centered authority that could exert no pressure on him . The need to speak , however , does not leave him powerless . Even though he is thrust back ...
... desire for such faith , for if he possessed it he would have no need to defy a Logos - centered authority that could exert no pressure on him . The need to speak , however , does not leave him powerless . Even though he is thrust back ...
Page 199
... desire . And as with the hunt of the Unicorn , the result of desire's pursuit is death : the young girl no more than a child leads her aged bridegroom innocently enough to his downfall ( 208 ) Portraying the poet as the aged bridegroom ...
... desire . And as with the hunt of the Unicorn , the result of desire's pursuit is death : the young girl no more than a child leads her aged bridegroom innocently enough to his downfall ( 208 ) Portraying the poet as the aged bridegroom ...
Page 217
... desire , this passage in Part III is the climax , the peak of desire and the beginning of that desire's dissipation . 26. Explications of the Daws passage are numerous and not in serious conflict . Langbaum ( 199 ) points us to a ...
... desire , this passage in Part III is the climax , the peak of desire and the beginning of that desire's dissipation . 26. Explications of the Daws passage are numerous and not in serious conflict . Langbaum ( 199 ) points us to a ...
Contents
Acknowledgments | 7 |
Logos and Ego | 44 |
Egocentered Authority | 72 |
Copyright | |
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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