Mystical modernisms

Christina Kim Becker

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...