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Chapter 6 - Luminous Recognitions

from Part II - Broken Images: Illuminating Time and Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2018

Sarah Kennedy
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

This chapter closes Part II with a descent into Eliot’s post-Waste Land violet hour. His conception of the symbolic and spiritual function of twilight, light and darkness was informed by advances in the theorisation of colour at the emerging nexus of art and psychology in the work of (for example) William Wundt, and Eliot’s own psychologist Roger Vittoz. In Four Quartets the psychological action is accordingly located within a twilight space existing in the momentary psychic threshold between day and night. A disaffection with the ‘twittering world’ and an immersion in ‘the violet hour’ allows the poetic consciousness to perceive the dark substance of the shadows lying beneath the surface of reality. The dusk world is given muted colour, complicating and elevating it beyond shades of grey into the realm of aesthetics. The ‘dim light’ that transforms the familiar world into an uncertain psychic space is the sensory precursor to the aphotic deprivation of the poetic underworld briefly depicted in ‘East Coker’. When read in relation to a mixture of Einsteinian and Dantean images of light, this darkness becomes intelligible as the ‘Light Invisible’ of a spiritualised poetic universe.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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  • Luminous Recognitions
  • Sarah Kennedy, University of Cambridge
  • Book: T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
  • Online publication: 05 April 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108643016.007
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  • Luminous Recognitions
  • Sarah Kennedy, University of Cambridge
  • Book: T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
  • Online publication: 05 April 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108643016.007
Available formats
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To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Luminous Recognitions
  • Sarah Kennedy, University of Cambridge
  • Book: T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination
  • Online publication: 05 April 2018
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108643016.007
Available formats
×