Maria Dalamitrou

Modernism and the Necessity of Distance: the Poetry and Criticism of T. S. Eliot Maria Dalamitrou

It would only be reasonable for Modernists to invest in ideas of losing, leaving or escaping, as they really did with their own countries. The actual experience of emigration reinforced in them the necessity of distance in order to write. T. S. Eliot dwelled on the idea of distance to form his poetic and critical works. As, in psychoanalysis, the child-mother separation antedates speaking and language, so did in Modernism the necessity of distance facilitate self-referentiality in poetics. Modern poetry speaks about itself, because it was formed after events of real dislocation. The thesis reads Modernism as a major consequence of large-scale homeleaving and as a tradition of exile.