The economy of revision : Keats, Browning and T.S. Eliot

Plasa, Carl Andrew (1988) The economy of revision : Keats, Browning and T.S. Eliot. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

Any study of interpoetic relations inevitably takes its cue from the work of Harold Bloom, currently the leading figure in this field. However, this thesis does not concern itself with elaborating or refining Bloom's `theory of influence' in the context of the poets who are its subject. In order to counteract the increasing Bloomian tendency to efface the problematic nature of literary language, the aim, instead, is to examine the specifically linguistic transformations which later texts perform upon earlier ones, and to show that they are determined by a constitutive ambivalence, in Keats, Browning and Eliot alike, toward the possibility of that poetic self-origination which Bloom unequivocally posits as the desideratum of the later poet. Such an ambivalence in turn leads to a revision of Bloom's major contention that `the meaning of a poem is another poem': against this, it is shown that the revisionary text is its own meaning. That is, the mode of revision brought into focus and explored is one in which later texts emerge as systematically narcissistic, constantly reflecting upon their shifting relations to the language of the past. Yet such textual self-centredness does not give rise to an idiom which is uniquely Keatsian, Browningesque or Eliotesque. Rather, it comes to be articulated solely through the language of earlier and other poets: Milton for Keats in the letters and `Hyperion' (chapters one and two), Wordsworth for Browning in Pauline (chapter three), Tennyson for Eliot in Four Quartets (chapter four). On the one hand, the later text appropriates past figures and alchemises them into a pattern of new meanings whose point of reference is that text itself. Conversely, the uniqueness of the revisionary text - confected of its appropriations - is substantially eroded. This is the economy of revision, past and present texts caught up in a rigorously even-handed play of mutual losses, circumscriptions and curtailments. With regard to Eliot it is additionally demonstrated that ambivalence toward the notion of an autonomous poethood is supplemented by an ambivalence toward poetic revision itself.

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