Abstract

Heidegger referred to the modern era as the "most unpoetic" of all eras and this dissertation examines Heidegger, Pound and Eliot's attempts to find a place for the poet and poetry in this "unpoetic" age. All of these writers found a spiritual destitution at the center of modernity and believed that poetry could offer an antidote to it. They believed that this spiritual destitution was the result of modernity's valorization of the quantifiable and the technological over the spiritual and the artistic. However, they also argued that poetry and technology were not really in competition but that they supplemented one another since both artistic "technique" and "technology" have their origins in the Greek word techne which means "knowing through doing." Thus, the poet's task was to revive this relationship by resuscitating what Heidegger called "poetic thinking" in the modern era. ;Each writer did this differently. Heidegger's essays offered a critique of modern, technological thinking and he argued for a more holistic or "poetic" thinking based on the ideas of the pre-Socratics and Holderlin. In The Waste Land and his social and literary criticism, Eliot criticized modernity for its rootlessness, but he eventually found his spiritual salvation in the Anglo-Catholic church as Four Quartets shows. Early in his career, Pound favored education as a means of overcoming modernity's spiritual destitution, but he gradually became so obsessed with uncovering the economic and political origins of this destitution that many of his later poems and critical works resembled confusing political tracts. Despite this, many of his early critical works, a number of the Cantos and many of his long poems of the 1920s and 1930s show the importance of incorporating the mythic and the poetic into modernity. The final chapter of this dissertation shows how each writer's political beliefs grew out of his confrontation with modernity and how many of their ideas about poetics had disastrous consequences when they were applied in the political arena