Transcending the self in Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot.
Item
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Title
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Transcending the self in Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot.
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Identifier
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AAI3159203
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identifier
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3159203
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Creator
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Bolton, Matthew J.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Edmund Epstein
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Date
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2005
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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 | Literature, Comparative | Literature, American
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the relationship between Robert Browning and T. S. Eliot as manifested in some of their poetic monologues, focusing on the opposing modes by which each poet suggests an individual may transcend the limits of his own psyche to apprehend a higher order which would give his life significance. Such an examination challenges Eliot's own representation of his relationship to Browning and redefines some of the boundaries between Victorian and modern literature.;The first chapter contrasts Childe Roland with Prufrock, arguing that Eliot is indebted to Browning for his melding of psychology and geography in a speaker's self-illuminating descriptions of landscape and architecture. In Prufrock's city, as in Roland's wasteland, one's self and one's surroundings are inextricably bound.;Having developed a monologue form that objectifies the inner workings of the psyche, each poet composes a long poem---The Ring and the Book and The Waste Land---in which a series of monologues are arranged contrapuntally. The density of each poem seems to have compelled the poets to create an authorial double within the text, Pope Innocent and Tiresias, whose vatic roles involve bringing order to the text's disparate representations of reality and thus of constructing a whole truth out of subjective fragments.;Comparing Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" with Browning's "An Epistle of Karshish" reveals both the degree to which the poets share an interest in dramatizing an individual speaker's imperfect comprehension of divinity and their contrasting beliefs of how a vision of the divine might transform a person's relationship with the temporal, quotidian world.;Despite the common condition from which so many of their characters suffer, Browning and Eliot differ in how they represent the relationship between the individual, the material world which he inhabits, and the transcendent order with which he would put himself in communication. The Browning protagonist constructs meaning and approaches God, beauty, or "the good" through striving and through an engagement with materiality, while the Eliot protagonist does so through renunciation and through a retreat from the material. Transcendent vision produces in Browning's characters a renewed interest in the world, but in Eliot's characters a dissatisfaction with the temporal world. The two poets therefore differ in the transformative capability each ascribes to the individual and, by extension, to the poetic act.
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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.
