The Redemptive Poet : Blood Begotten Blood

Abstract

The author applies the work of five authors -- Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime, Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, and Jacques Derrida's Writing and Difference – to the general question “how shall language have meaning?” Or, in the words of Terry Eagleton: "How was one to write, in an industrial society where discourse had become degraded to a mere instrument of science, commerce, advertising and bureaucracy?"