The Orphic subject position establishes the narrative as unfolding on the threshold between this world and the afterlife, a space in which poets graced with divine gifts of song are permitted to pass beyond the human world and retrieve essential truths for the living. I argue this point by showing that in the Persiles, Cervantes drew on Ovid’s myth of Orpheus to stage a final demonstration of the truth of poetry. The second premise is that Cervantes' final, posthumous work, the romance Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, represents his most fully-elaborated idea of poetry. The first premise of this essay is that the question of Cervantes and poetry turns on that one ingenious conceit, “Miguel de Cervantes,” el manco sano, who in the Persiles serves as the point from which Cervantes undertakes the testing of poetry, of poetic speech, and of the poets who claim poetic license that is such a consistent feature of his writing. Such asides, woven into works from the Galatea through Don Quijote and the Viaje del Parnaso, suggest that Cervantes wished he were a better poet. The topic ‘Cervantes and poetry’ has given rise to a great deal of criticism, much of it shaped by tantalizing moments in which Cervantes appears to have commented on his skills with rueful self-knowledge – for example, in the well-known lines of the Parnaso: “Yo, que siempre trabajo / y me desvelo / por parecer que tengo la gracia de poeta / que no me dió el cielo” (Parnaso I.25-27). Author: Belinda Jane McKay College: Lady Margaret Hall Degree: D. emerges as a genuinely creative and original artist. Thus H.D.'s flight from reality is not judged from an existential point of view as a diminution of being, since it is out of her "split dual personality" that H.D. does not intend to justify her work by her life, but to signify that the literary message cannot be isolated from the circumstances in which the process of creation takes place. The space that this thesis devotes to the life of H.D. never recovered her vitality and originality as an artist. It is argued that after her mental breakdown in 1946, H.D. With the exception of the war Trilogy, H.D.'s work becomes locked in private meanings which render it increasingly inaccessible to the reader. It is argued that these interests exacerbated the solipsism inherent in H.D.'s rejection of external reality. She conflated with the occult her discoveries of the cinema as self projection, and psychoanalysis as an instrument of knowledge of the inner being. turned increasingly towards the occult which she understood as the science of the invisible dimension. Seeking new forms for her projection of the self, H.D. succeeded in transfiguring the autobiographical material through the re invention of reality in the image of her own subjectivity. The formlessness and repetition of much of H.D.’s prose is thus attributed to the exacerbation of the writer’s dichotomy of being. H.D.'s subsequent shift of interest towards auto¬biographical prose is interpreted as a response to the threatened disintegration of her identity after World War I. invented a new reality which she projected as a world devoid of all traces of human presence. However her Imagist poems are not imitative but genuinely original: H.D. discovered in ancient Greece a metaphor and a direction for her own inner world. It is argued that paradoxically the unevenness and discontinuity that characterize H.D.’s work derive from the same roots as her artistic originality and power: in her "split dual personality" which posited reality in the disembodied self. created an intense inner life which asserted itself in the dimension of artistic realization. From childhood her personality presented itself to her as a duality detaching herself from the merely visible and material world, H.D. Hilda Doolittle's adoption of her initials is interpreted as a sign of the writer's rejection of any identity located in the shared reality of the historical and the quotidian. This thesis argues that H.D.'s creativity originates in a flight from reality.
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