Trauma, Transcendence, and Trust: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot Thinking Loss (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

In the wake of psychoanalysis and the birth of therapy, trauma is a powerful concept in twenty-first-century culture. Thomas J. Brennan, S.J. finds roots of the "sensibility of trauma" by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses - the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust "Trauma, Transcendence and Trust takes up the idea of trauma as one of the lenses through which the twenty first century interprets experience. One place to excavate the roots of this sensibility is in three poets of mourning whose work bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wordsworth's haunted wanderings, Tennyson's trance, and Eliot's negative epiphanies: these experiences receive fresh attention in Trauma, Transcendence and Trust. Can a new ethic of trust address the repetition of trauma? In the process, can it replace our fantasies of transcendence? These poets repeatedly pose such questions in the hope that someone will listen"-- Provided by publisher Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction: Traumatized Trust....Pages 1-32 Gazes of Trauma, Spots of Trust: Wordsworth’s Memorials in The Prelude....Pages 33-72 “Wound” in the “Living Soul”: Tennyson’s In Memoriam....Pages 73-117 Castrated Referentiality: Eliot’s The Waste Land....Pages 119-162 Epilogue: “The Tone We Trusted Most”: Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim....Pages 163-175 Back Matter....Pages 177-206