Eleanor Wilner: A Metastable Talk on Metamorphosis and Poetry (January 1998)

Invoking Eliot’s notion that a new vision of the past changes the past, Eleanor Wilner asserts, unlike Eliot, that it also changes the writer; she posits a “transpersonal” poetics to replace Eliot’s notion of the “impersonal,” believing that transformation of traditional figures also transforms the poet in the act of writing. For examples, she turns to quantum physics and contemporary transfigurations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses by Gerald Stern, Radcliffe Squires, Muriel Rukeyser, Thom Gunn, Joanne Hayhurst and Jorie Graham.