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 150
... expression the essential nature of technique or transcription . Only when this position is reached can life proper be ... expressed and brought into being . The second premise is that there is no a priori pattern , no Logos , to provide ...
... expression the essential nature of technique or transcription . Only when this position is reached can life proper be ... expressed and brought into being . The second premise is that there is no a priori pattern , no Logos , to provide ...
Page 174
... expressed . And given the passage's context , the literary tradition , expressed in “ prejudices , " is the enemy of creativity , and by extension , of life , because it insists on freezing the epiphanic moment into a predetermined form ...
... expressed . And given the passage's context , the literary tradition , expressed in “ prejudices , " is the enemy of creativity , and by extension , of life , because it insists on freezing the epiphanic moment into a predetermined form ...
Page 200
... expressed both naturalistically and mythically as a hunt . The pur- suit is baldly , naturalistically expressed in the speaker's pursuit of the androgynous woman of the second section : Her hips were narrow , her thin and straight . She ...
... expressed both naturalistically and mythically as a hunt . The pur- suit is baldly , naturalistically expressed in the speaker's pursuit of the androgynous woman of the second section : Her hips were narrow , her thin and straight . She ...
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