Utopian Imagination in Modernist Poetry: Passage from Transcendence to Language
Utopian Imagination in Modernist Poetry: Passage from Transcendence to Language

Summary/Abstract: “Modernist literature” is a capacious term that designates both an epoch and a variety of political attitudes espoused or rejected by the authors grouped under this title. On the one hand, the widely used concepts of high and late modernism refer to the period approximately between 1900 and the 1960s, divided by World War II. On the other, they concern the politics of literary modernism discussed on the basis of how writers and poets relate to their own social-historical conditions and to the utopian vision of a radically different kind of individual and collective existence that aims to transcend the given modes of subjectivity and sociality. In this article, I have traced specifically the changing politics of modernist literature with respect to that utopian desire for transcendence which some theorists call the modernist absolute. Differing from much of the scholarship on the politics of modernist literature that privileges the novel genre, in the present study, I have focused on the poetry of W. B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens. Through textual and theoretical analyses of “In the Seven Woods” and “A Collar-bone of a Hare” by Yeats and “Of Mere Being” by Stevens, I have demonstrated how the high modernist imagining of transcendence turns with late modernism into a theme or a motif that reveals the linguistic character of such visions and the ideological function of their utopianism. In my discussion, I have tried to show that Yeats, who is part of high modernist literature in terms of periodization, belongs to this category due to his political imagining that prioritizes transcendence. Furthermore, unlike Yeats, Stevens stands close, especially in his last poems, to the late modernist mindset that anticipates the politics of postmodern literature and the poststructuralist awareness of the role of language in constructing meaning and value.

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