T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination

Description

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.

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).

'It's remarkable for its depth of knowledge of Eliot's work, in prose and in poetry (a pre-condition for such a book one might suppose but often less evident than in this case) as well as of her other sources. Sarah Kennedy draws selectively but astonishingly widely on her predecessors (paying due tribute) but her book stands out also for its penetration into the imaginative workings of Eliot the creative artist.' Chris Joyce, Exchanges (Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society)