T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination - Softcover

Kennedy, Sarah

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1108441343 ISBN 13: 9781108441346

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2022

Synopsis

How is a poem made? From what constellation of inner and outer worlds does it issue forth? Sarah Kennedy's study of Eliot's poetics seeks out those images most striking in their resonance and recurrence: the 'sea-change', the 'light invisible' and the 'dark ghost'. She makes the case for these sustained metaphors as constitutive of the poet's imagination and art. Eliot was haunted by recurrence. His work is full of moments of luminous recognitions, moments in which a writer discovers both subject and appropriate image. This book examines such moments of recognition and invocation by reference to three clusters of imagery, drawing on the contemporary languages of literary criticism, psychology, physics and anthropology. Eliot's transposition of these registers, at turns wary and beguiled, interweaves modern understandings of originary processes in the human and natural world with a poet's preoccupation with language. The metaphors arising from these intersections generate the imaginative logic of Eliot's poetry.

About this title

About the Author

Sarah Kennedy is a Fellow in English at Downing College, University of Cambridge. She gave the 2016 T. S. Eliot Lecture on 'Eliot's Ghost Women', and contributed a chapter on 'Ash-Wednesday and the Ariel Poems' to the New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, (Cambridge, 2016).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1108441343
• ISBN 13: 9781108441346
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 280