Decoupling Memory from Desire: T.S. Eliot’s Journey Towards Detachment
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This paper pivots on T.S. Eliot’s impersonality by focusing on the overarching religiosity in his later writings, or in the case of his earlier works, the lack thereof. Such claim is predicated on the paradox of a glaring absence, which is suggestive of intentional, or at least subconscious avoidance. Although the triad paradigm of attachment, indifference, and detachment is introduced much later in “Little Gidding,” the poet’s immersion in religious philosophy dating back to his college days allows us to discover detachment as prefigurative of Eliot’s formulation of poetic impersonality, thereby facilitating a more holistic reading of his oeuvre. To conceptualize attachment, indifference, and detachment, therefore, I borrow from the thirteenth-century German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart whose works Eliot first became familiar with at Harvard. Opening with Eliot’s early poems of attachment, I demonstrate how the poet often takes up heterosexual relationships to showcase the poetic consciousness as inextricably caught up in the secular, everyday world. Here, I mainly examine “La Figlia Che Piange.” Because the poem delineates an escape from genuine emotion and functions as an exposé of the male speaker’s irresponsible, egotistic aesthetics, it performs indifference, which I next delve into. In this intermission on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and The Waste Land, I carry out a quick analysis of indifference and Eliot’s poetic impersonality, which attempts to disentangle it from the traps of human emotion and personality. My understanding of impersonality is as a precursor to detachment, a principle more closely and explicitly articulated in “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding.”
Abstract
This paper pivots on T.S. Eliot’s impersonality by focusing on the overarching religiosity in his later writings, or in the case of his earlier works, the lack thereof. Such claim is predicated on the paradox of a glaring absence, which is suggestive of intentional, or at least subconscious avoidance. Although the triad paradigm of attachment, indifference, and detachment is introduced much later in “Little Gidding,” the poet’s immersion in religious philosophy dating back to his college days allows us to discover detachment as prefigurative of Eliot’s formulation of poetic impersonality, thereby facilitating a more holistic reading of his oeuvre. To conceptualize attachment, indifference, and detachment, therefore, I borrow from the thirteenth-century German Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart whose works Eliot first became familiar with at Harvard. Opening with Eliot’s early poems of attachment, I demonstrate how the poet often takes up heterosexual relationships to showcase the poetic consciousness as inextricably caught up in the secular, everyday world. Here, I mainly examine “La Figlia Che Piange.” Because the poem delineates an escape from genuine emotion and functions as an exposé of the male speaker’s irresponsible, egotistic aesthetics, it performs indifference, which I next delve into. In this intermission on “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and The Waste Land, I carry out a quick analysis of indifference and Eliot’s poetic impersonality, which attempts to disentangle it from the traps of human emotion and personality. My understanding of impersonality is as a precursor to detachment, a principle more closely and explicitly articulated in “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding.”
참고문헌 (23)
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