Modernism - Literary Movements, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, English Poetry - 20th Century - Literary Criticism, 20th Century Irish Fiction & Prose Literature - Literary Criticism, Irish Poetry - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - U

Approaching authority

Name: Approaching authority
Author: Anthony Flinn
ISBN: 9780838753408

by Anthony Flinn, Judith Nowinski

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Overview

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.