Session 3: Digital Merrill

1:15 p.m. — Session 3: Digital Merrill Shannon Davis, digital library services manager, WU: The James Merrill Digital Archive: Process and Product Annelise Duerden, PhD candidate in English, WU — “Admit It Arguably A priori Admittedly I have failed”: Re-vision in the Merrill Archive Heidi Lim, PhD candidate in English, WU — To Tag or Not to Tag: The Digital Markup Process as a Form of Reading Timothy Materer, professor emeritus, University of Missouri — The Poem as a Netscap

Burnt and Blossoming: Material Mysticism in Trilogy and Four Quartets

This paper brings two WWII poems into dialogue: H.D.'s Trilogy and Eliot's Four Quartets. Both poems express a creative response to the destruction of war. My reading of Trilogy suggests a material mysticism in which vision and renewal are situated within the natural world, rituals and bodily experience. Bringing this understanding of mysticism to bear on Four Quartets reveals tension between transcendence and materiality. For Eliot, redemption comes through time and location, while for H.D., redemption lies within material particularity. Four Quartets oscillates between an apophatic discourse that seeks to transcend desire and history and an emphasis on material particularities