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 74
... passage from Per Amica Silentia Lunae as an explanation : 8 A poet , when he is growing old , will ask himself if he cannot keep his mask and his vision without new bitterness , new disappointment . Could he if he would , knowing how ...
... passage from Per Amica Silentia Lunae as an explanation : 8 A poet , when he is growing old , will ask himself if he cannot keep his mask and his vision without new bitterness , new disappointment . Could he if he would , knowing how ...
Page 174
... passage work by venting irony against the speaker and still finding tradition at fault for that failure . The poem's textual voice comments with implicit irony on his fury and disappoint- ment . The speaker's stated desires in this passage ...
... passage work by venting irony against the speaker and still finding tradition at fault for that failure . The poem's textual voice comments with implicit irony on his fury and disappoint- ment . The speaker's stated desires in this passage ...
Page 217
... passage and the one that compelled the speaker to turn aside from the " great labyrinth . " The speaker's attitude toward this latter pride Stead characterizes as courageous self - criticism , unlike this later " elderly pride , " a ...
... passage and the one that compelled the speaker to turn aside from the " great labyrinth . " The speaker's attitude toward this latter pride Stead characterizes as courageous self - criticism , unlike this later " elderly pride , " 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