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 52
... vision , he is now , by force of natural balance , entitled to celestial vision . Yet the speaker masterfully evades this Satanic trap , this reconstruction of the universe to suit personal will , by presenting only his desire , not its ...
... vision , he is now , by force of natural balance , entitled to celestial vision . Yet the speaker masterfully evades this Satanic trap , this reconstruction of the universe to suit personal will , by presenting only his desire , not its ...
Page 69
... vision and the contents of the very exposition predicat- ing it , for both display the mind's mediating mastery over its per- ceptions . Though Nature provides the object of perception , the mind still provides the object's meaning ...
... vision and the contents of the very exposition predicat- ing it , for both display the mind's mediating mastery over its per- ceptions . Though Nature provides the object of perception , the mind still provides the object's meaning ...
Page 113
... vision parallels the vision in the garden of " Burnt Norton " ( 130 ) . But a sign that the projected reader has grown since then , grown at least according to the terms of Logos - centered authority , is that he directs his attention ...
... vision parallels the vision in the garden of " Burnt Norton " ( 130 ) . But a sign that the projected reader has grown since then , grown at least according to the terms of Logos - centered authority , is that he directs his attention ...
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