The desacralization of metaphor in nineteenth century English poetry: The use of war metaphor in "Sordello" and "Maud".
Item
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Title
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The desacralization of metaphor in nineteenth century English poetry: The use of war metaphor in "Sordello" and "Maud".
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Identifier
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AAI9838822
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identifier
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9838822
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Creator
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Langstaff, Eleanor M.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Michael Timko
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Date
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1998
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, English
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Abstract
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Poets of every age use war metaphor to give force to the ideas, notions, and emotions imbedded in their writings. In the early Victorian period the way in which war metaphors were employed changed, as both the ideas and their metaphysical equivalents were affected by secularization, and the kind of war experience that marked these decades. In a secularizing state, desacralization, a process in which a sacred object becomes identified with the profane, is also present. As the sacred becomes fully identified with the profane, there can be no sacrifice to propitiate a god, no victims, no scapegoats; hence the identification of war as a religious act is no longer possible. Sacrificing a country's youth on the battlefield will no longer expiate a country's greed or lust for power. What had been ritual gesture became secular, democratized, individual. War metaphor has several sources in the period; this study focuses on the hymns that were then current.;For Browning's Sordello, waging war is an occasion to position himself on this sacred/secular continuum, to fulfill himself as an individual. As he finds his place, often in the midst of battle, he comes to understand the true poetic role distinct from that of the past. The speaker in Tennyson's Maud seems to resolve his tragic life by resorting to participation in a patriotic war, an outmoded artifact of empire. Perhaps, it is, instead, a spiritual growth culminating in acceptance of an enigmatic future, an embrace accepted in desacralized trust. That something revolutionary was being attempted is suggested from the distancing each poem provides the audience: Pre-Renaissance, Pre Reformation Italy, and the intense introspection of the madhouse. In part, this revolutionary transference was accomplished by desacralized images, at once familiar and strange. Each artist defines himself in his death in these poems of the period, which are consistent in the choice of desacralized tropes reflecting the violence and finality of war--the ultimate gesture, "sought for across the memory of old signs.".
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
