Divining Desire
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€192.20
A01=James W. Hood
Aidan Day
Antiphonal Voice
Author_James W. Hood
Category=DSBF
Category=DSC
Crannied Wall
crimson
Crimson Petal
Dead Men
devotion
Dreadful Hollow
early
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eq_nobargain
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erotic
Erotic Devotion
Face To Face
Lady Poems
language and transcendence
Lily Maid
literary eroticism
Lover's Tale
nineteenth-century British literature
petal
poem
poems
poetic representations of desire
poetry
portrait
Portrait Poems
psychoanalytic criticism
Sad Mechanic Exercise
Speaker's Desire
spiritual symbolism
tennyson's
Tennyson's Characters
Tennyson's Description
Tennyson's Earlier Poems
Tennyson's Poem
Tennyson's Poetry
Tennyson's Portrait
Tennyson's Revisions
Tennyson's Speaker
Tennysonian Love
Vanden Bossche
Victorian poetry analysis
Product details
- ISBN 9780754600695
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 31 Mar 2000
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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This study examines Tennyson's portrayals of the erotic and creative impulses, reading the poet's ubiquitous lover-artists as tropes that figure the desire for transcending the state of being human, a condition of personal fragmentation and limited knowledge. Ostensibly seeking to fulfill erotic wishes, construct utopias, or create grand artistic works, Tennyson's characters engage in a fundamentally spiritual quest, yearning to divine desire: to eternalize the fulfilment of their deepest wishes. Freud revealed how Victorians sublimated sexual desire into religious impulse. This book demonstrates, however, the remarkable way in which Tennyson's poems transact the opposing projection, transfiguring spiritual desire into erotic art. Brilliantly negotiating a middle ground between scientific skepticism and reactionary religiosity, his vastly popular poems suggest that fulfilment of "the wish too strong for words to name" lies in a sacramentality: only as means do art and eros allow transport beyond fragmentation. At a deep level, the poems conclude that language itself brokers transcendence through its very brokenness.
James W. Hood
