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 34
... identity upon the dismissal of that object .. What the poet is really doing is establishing his empire over the field of vision , constituting himself at the expense of the world which makes him possible . . . . ( 136 ) Perception ...
... identity upon the dismissal of that object .. What the poet is really doing is establishing his empire over the field of vision , constituting himself at the expense of the world which makes him possible . . . . ( 136 ) Perception ...
Page 42
... identity , submits the reader to at least a trial acceptance of both the poet's authority to mediate and that authority the poet mediates . I must make an important qualification here , however . Textual identity can only be approached ...
... identity , submits the reader to at least a trial acceptance of both the poet's authority to mediate and that authority the poet mediates . I must make an important qualification here , however . Textual identity can only be approached ...
Page 93
... identity would be held collec- tively , not individually ; what transcended his passing would bear no evidence that he had existed . Furthermore , participation in this collective identity removes the need for the entire poem's medita ...
... identity would be held collec- tively , not individually ; what transcended his passing would bear no evidence that he had existed . Furthermore , participation in this collective identity removes the need for the entire poem's medita ...
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