One of the best loved Christmas music is the song “God rest ye merry, gentlemen.” The lyrics are quite odd as we study it. Thus every Christmas season also brings the circulation of apocryphal tales about how candy canes were created to symbolize Jesus, and how persecuted Catholics secretly encoded tenets of their faith into the song “ The Twelve Days of Christmas.”Īnother example in the latter vein is the claim that the Christmas carol “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” originated in the 15th century as a reaction to the “dark, somber songs usually written in Latin” of the time, and that its title phrase would more meaningfully be rendered in modern English as “God make you mighty, gentlemen”: Ultimately, these works produce moments of the transcendent in their fragmented twentieth century view of the world that do not coalesce into a stratified view but allow for the incorporation of elements of both the immanent and transcendent.In recent years every Christmas season has been accompanied a number of stories about the so-called “War on Christmas,” a term which refers to supposed efforts by government, businesses, and non-religious groups and organizations to disassociate the celebration of Christmas from Christianity and instead focus on its secular aspects (or to replace the celebration of Christmas with a generic winter “holiday”).Īlthough it is much less common and it doesn’t have a catchy name, the reverse phenomenon also occurs: attempts are made by Christians to infuse secular elements of Christmas with religious symbolism and meaning they did not originally possess. Modernity, beginning around 1500 according to Taylor, in its emphasis on rationality and the empirical, and its de-emphasis on belief in the spiritual or enchanted, has a had negative effect, a sense that something is missing in twentieth century views of life that these works seek to address. This paper relies on the distinction between twentieth century literary modernism and modernity, seeing literary modernism as an avant-garde movement that experiments with style and a more responsive, adaptable, de-centered, view that is suspicious of the stratified, hierarchical, mechanistic view of modernity, a view of human life which can lead to a flattened and oppressive view of reality and the universe. Utilizing a theoretical lens provided primarily through the writings of Jacques Derrida and an historical context established by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the paper argues that the literary texts of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce deconstruct a Western cultural history of a transcendent-immanent binary and seek to revive elements of the transcendent as a cure to the consequences of the dominant materialist-immanent worldview of Enlightenment modernity. Yeats, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W.

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