Approaching Authority: Transpersonal Gestures in the Poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and WilliamsBucknell University Press, 1997 - 236 pages This 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 117
... Little Gidding , " directing contem- plation toward the permanent and essential . But the projected reader is still lodged in an ego - centered perspective : he can con- ceive of the permanent in personal terms alone . Because memory ...
... Little Gidding , " directing contem- plation toward the permanent and essential . But the projected reader is still lodged in an ego - centered perspective : he can con- ceive of the permanent in personal terms alone . Because memory ...
Page 121
... Little Gidding , " where the ego can intersect the Logos . But the second level does mark a kind of progress for the projected reader : what the ego author- izes - sensations - can be annihilated with a few words . For if words are ...
... Little Gidding , " where the ego can intersect the Logos . But the second level does mark a kind of progress for the projected reader : what the ego author- izes - sensations - can be annihilated with a few words . For if words are ...
Page 131
... Little Gidding , " directly proportional to his authority to mediate . But what about the projected reader's response to Krishna's words ? By this point he is stripped of ego - centered illusions , purged in a willed passivity . A sign ...
... Little Gidding , " directly proportional to his authority to mediate . But what about the projected reader's response to Krishna's words ? By this point he is stripped of ego - centered illusions , purged in a willed passivity . A sign ...
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