Mystical modernisms

About this book

My dissertation examines how the high modernist poetry of T. S. Eliot, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W. B. Yeats translate the traumatic experiences of modernity into mystical images of contemplation. While scholars have recognized the importance of the mystical to these poets as well as the debilitating effects of industrial modernity and the First World War, my dissertation will provide a new conceptual framework by using mysticism as a crucial hermeneutic and thematic lens for reading trauma in their lyric poetry. I argue that the mystical modernisms of these poets can be traced to a mystical discourse called apophaticism , which breaks apart the descriptive and narrative functions of language to perform the ineffable through its figural destructions. In privileging the performance of trauma or its aesthetic transcendence rather than the mimetic depiction, these texts enable the reader to feel the dissonant reverberations of the poem before he can move rationally towards a systematic analysis of its linguistic procedures. In doing so, the poem unfolds the unsayable within the reader's consciousness rather than act a locatable point in the written lines of the poem. In my dissertation I refer to these poets' mystical performance of traumatic and transcendent consciousness as apophatic modernism .