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 13
... speaker as a mediator ; we must be convinced of the poet's disinterest . It is because this speaker's disinterestedness is problematic that the poem above is archetypal for my purposes . The speaker is an explicitly marginal figure ...
... speaker as a mediator ; we must be convinced of the poet's disinterest . It is because this speaker's disinterestedness is problematic that the poem above is archetypal for my purposes . The speaker is an explicitly marginal figure ...
Page 42
... speaker's temporal authority . This new rela- tion compels the objects in the poetic field into the speaker's serv- ice and the reader into the charismatic field of poetic vision to determine , disrupt , expand , or distort purely ...
... speaker's temporal authority . This new rela- tion compels the objects in the poetic field into the speaker's serv- ice and the reader into the charismatic field of poetic vision to determine , disrupt , expand , or distort purely ...
Page 59
... speaker can remember epiphanic moments of rapture without insisting on their authority , reducing the degree of irony he is subject to . Through this distance from both Fancy and his younger self , he accomplishes three essential ...
... speaker can remember epiphanic moments of rapture without insisting on their authority , reducing the degree of irony he is subject to . Through this distance from both Fancy and his younger self , he accomplishes three essential ...
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