In twentieth-century poets such as W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, the literary apocalyptic--identifiable by its homology with the major elements of the biblical Apocalypse--undergoes progressively complex transmutations. While in the early Yeats the apocalyptic is evocative of earnest Romantic moods, in his later work it is complicated by irony, yoked to the cycles of Yeatsean history, and counteracted by exaggerated postures of defiance. In Eliot, a reductive juxtaposition of the apocalyptic and the contemporary foreshortens the traditional paradigms to a diminutive modern-day scale. In Lowell, the apocalyptic is manifested variously as a bitter inversion of American Puritan eschatology, the telescoping of the personal and the cosmic, and a catastrophe in slow-motion. The climactic point of distortion, however, is reached in Ginsberg's poetry in which apocalyptic horrors form a bizarre combination with humour and bathos. While their treatment of the eschatological is widely divergent, an element common to all four poets is their ambivalence towards the paradigms of an apocalyptic new world.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.68703 |
| Date | January 1983 |
| Creators | Sarwar, Selim. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000157902, proquestno: AAINK64481, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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