In his 1916 dissertation, Eliot asserted that individuals were locked into finite centers and that all knowledge was epistemologically relative, but he also believed that finite centers could be transcended through language. In the essay "Lancelot Andrewes,'" Eliot identified Andrewes's "relevant intensity," a method very close to nonsensical verse. Eliot used Andrewes's Word and the impersonality of nonsense verse in Ash Wednesday. The Word, God's logos, embodied the Virgin Mary as its source, and allowed Eliot to transcend the finite center through language. Ultimately, Eliot philosophically empowered the feminine as the source of the Word. Though failing to fully empower the earthly Lady in part II of Ash Wednesday, Eliot did present a philosophical plan for transcending the finite center through language.

The poetry of T. S. Eliot represents intense yet discriminate expressions of desire. His poetry is a poetry of desire that extenuates the long tradition of love poetry in Occidental culture. The unique and paradoxical element of love in Occidental culture is that it is based on an ideal of the unconsummated love relationship between man and woman. The struggle to express desire, yet remain true to ideals that have deep sacred and secular significance is the key animating factor of Eliot's poetry. To conceal and reveal desire, Eliot made use of four core elements of modernism: the apocalyptic vision, Pound's Imagism, the conflict between organic and mechanic sources of sublimity, and precisionism. Together, all four elements form a critical and philosophical matrix that allows for the discreet expression of desire in what Foucault calls the silences of Victorianism, yet Eliot still manages to reveal it in his major poetry. In Prufrock, Eliot uses precisionism to conceal and reveal desire with conflicting patterns of sound, syntax, and image. In The Waste Land, desire is expressed as negation, primarily as shame, sadness, and violence. The negation of desire occurred only after Pound had excised explicit references to desire, indicating Eliot's struggle to find an acceptable form of expression. At the end of The Waste Land, Eliot reveals a new method of expressing desire in the water-dripping song of the hermithrush and in the final prayer of Shatih. Continuing to refine his expressions of desire, Eliot makes use of nonsense and prayer in Ash Wednesday. In Ash Wednesday, language without reference to the world of objects and directed towards the semi-divine figure represents another concealment and revelation of desire. The final step in Eliot's continuing refinement of his expressions of desire occurs in Four Quartets. Inn Four Quartets, the speaker no longer carries the burden of desire, but language at its every evocation carries the cruel burden of ideal love.

No description available.

In spite of the large amount of criticism written about T. S. Eliot, no attempt has been made to point out the great debt that Eliot owes to Dante Alighieri, and the pervasive influence of The Divine Comedy on Eliot's poetical works. This thesis endeavors to illustrate the extent of that debt and influence.

Not available / text

Accompanying materials housed with archival copy. / This project focuses on the prosody of three major poets, William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and T. S. Eliot. It explores the relationship between each poet's poetic sound structures and his spiritual aims. The project argues that in Blake's prophetic poems The Four Zoas, Milton, and Jerusalem, in Yeats's middle and late poetry, and in Eliot's post-conversion poetry, the careful structuring of the non-semantic features of language serves to model a process through which one may arrive at the threshold of a spiritual reality. / The introductory chapter situates these poets' works within the genre of mystical writing; establishes the epistemological nature of poetic sound and its relationship to mystical expression; considers the historical and personal exigencies that influence each poet's prosodic choices; and outlines the prosodic method by which their poetry is scanned. Chapter one addresses William Blake's efforts to re-vision Milton's Christian epic Paradise Lost by means of a logaoedic prosody intended to move the reader from a rational to a spiritual perception of the self and the world. Chapter two considers the development of W.B. Yeats's contrapuntal prosody as integral to his attempt to make of himself a modern poet and to his antithetical mystical philosophy. Chapter three explores the liminal prosody of T. S. Eliot by which he creates an incantatory movement that points to a spiritual reality behind material reality. The project concludes with a consideration of the spiritual aims of Gerard Manley Hopkins and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) and posits a revaluation of Hopkins' sprung rhythm and H.D.'s revisionary chain of sound as prosodic practices intrinsic to their spiritual aims.

No description available.

x, 175 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This dissertation considers the formal and thematic camaraderie between T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes. The Waste Land 's poet, whom critics often cite as exemplary of reactionary high modernism, appears an improbable companion to Nightwood 's novelist, who critics, such as Shari Benstock, characterize as epitomizing "Sapphic modernism." However, Eliot and Barnes prove complementary rather than antithetical figures in their approaches to the collapse of historical and religious authority. Through close readings, supplemented by historical and literary sources, I demonstrate how Eliot, in his criticism and poems such as "Gerontion," and Barnes, in her trans-generic novel Nightwood , recognize the instability of history as defined by man and suggest the necessity of mythmaking to establish, or confirm, personal identity. Such mythmaking incorporates, rather than rejects, traditional Christian signs. I examine how, in Eliot's poems of the 1920s and in Barnes's novel, these writers drew on Christian symbols to evoke a nurturing, intercessory female parallel to the Virgin Mary to investigate the hope for redemption in a secular world. Yet Eliot and Barnes arrive at contrary conclusions. Eliot's poems increasingly relate femininity to Christian transcendence; this corresponds with a desire to recapture a unified sensibility, which, Eliot argued, dissolved in the post-Reformation era. In contrast, Barnes's Jewish and homosexual characters find transcendence unattainable. As embodied in her novel's characters, the Christian feminine ideal fails because the idealization itself extends from exclusionary dogma; any aid it promises proves ineffectual, and the novel's characters, including Dr. Matthew O'Connor and Nora Flood, remain locked in temporal anguish. Current trends in modernist studies consider the role of myth in understanding individuals' creation of self or worldview; this perspective applies also in analyzing religion's role insofar as it aids the individual's search for identity and a place in history. Consequently, this dissertation helps to reinvigorate the discussion of religion's significance in a literary movement allegedly defined by its secularism. Moreover, in presenting Eliot and Barnes together, I reveal a kinship suggested by their deployment of literary history, formal innovation, and questions about religion's value. This study repositions Barnes and brings her work into the canonical modernist dialogue. / Committee in charge: Paul Peppis, Chairperson, English; Suzanne Clark, Member, English; John Gage, Member, English; Jenifer Presto, Outside Member, Comparative Literature

Accompanying materials housed with archival copy.

No description available.