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 22
... presence in the moment and returns it to the capacity of messenger , no longer its own agent . Yet this is a willed submission , a point beyond which “ each choice dissolves into the inevitability of the already chosen ; no choice is ...
... presence in the moment and returns it to the capacity of messenger , no longer its own agent . Yet this is a willed submission , a point beyond which “ each choice dissolves into the inevitability of the already chosen ; no choice is ...
Page 107
... presence in Four Quartets , a presence as clearly felt as the speaker of The Prelude , is to miss the point . What distinguishes these two positions is not the comparative vigor of the speakers but their point of focus and relationship ...
... presence in Four Quartets , a presence as clearly felt as the speaker of The Prelude , is to miss the point . What distinguishes these two positions is not the comparative vigor of the speakers but their point of focus and relationship ...
Page 171
... presence of the poet in the park , consequently enhancing the authority of that presence by removing from it any elements of idiosyncracy or neurosis . Williams makes Cress the embodiment of poetic error and failure while at the same ...
... presence of the poet in the park , consequently enhancing the authority of that presence by removing from it any elements of idiosyncracy or neurosis . Williams makes Cress the embodiment of poetic error and failure while 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