"Trauma, Transcendence and Trust takes up the idea of trauma as one of the lenses through which the twenty first century interprets experience. One place to excavate the roots of this sensibility is in three poets of mourning whose work bridges the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Wordsworth's haunted wanderings, Tennyson's trance, and Eliot's negative epiphanies: these experiences receive fresh attention in Trauma, Transcendence and Trust. Can a new ethic of trust address the repetition of trauma? In the process, can it replace our fantasies of transcendence? These poets repeatedly pose such questions in the hope that someone will listen"--