For Jarrell the Ivory Tower led modern poetry into obscurity. Jarrell's main thrust is that the rich poetry of the modernist period was over-dependent upon reference to other literary works. In Randall Jarrell's essay "The End of the Line" (1942), Jarrell asserts that if modern poetry is to survive then poets must come down from the "Ivory Tower" of elitist composition. The skylines of Oxford and Cambridge universities, along with many Ivy League universities, are dotted with turrets and spires which are often described as 'Ivory Towers'. In Andrew Hodges' biography of the University of Cambridge scientist Alan Turing, he discusses Turing's 1936–38 stay at Princeton University and writes that "he tower of the Graduate College was an exact replica of Magdalen College, and it was popularly called the Ivory Tower, because of that benefactor of Princeton, the Procter who manufactured Ivory soap." William Cooper Procter (Princeton class of 1883) was a significant supporter of the construction of the Graduate College, and the main dining hall bears the Procter name.
The term has a rather negative flavor today, the implication being that specialists who are so deeply drawn into their fields of study often can't find a lingua franca with laymen outside their "ivory towers".
Thus, there are two meanings mixed together: mockery of an absent-minded savant and admiration of someone who is able to devote his or her entire efforts to a noble cause (hence " ivory", a noble but impractical building material). "You seem all here so hideously rich", says his hero.
Paralleling James' own dismaying experience of the United States after twenty years away, it chronicles the effect on a high-minded returning upper-class American of the vulgar emptiness of the Gilded Age. Henry James's last novel, The Ivory Tower, was begun in 1914 and left unfinished at his death two years later. In early versions of chess, this piece was imagined as conveying and shielding a powerful warrior. The name Rook is derived from the Persian rukh ("chariot"), maybe influenced by the Italian rocca ("fortress"). This poetic use of "tour d'ivoire" may have been an allusion to the rook (or castle) in chess, which is another meaning of the French word tour.
#BLUE COLLAR VS IVORY TOWER PLUS#
Villemain", by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, a French literary critic and author, who used the term "tour d'ivoire" for the poetical attitude of Alfred de Vigny as contrasted with the more socially engaged Victor Hugo: "Et Vigny, plus secret, Comme en sa tour d'ivoire, avant midi rentrait". The first modern usage of "ivory tower" in the familiar sense of an unworldly dreamer can be found in a poem of 1837, "Pensées d'Août, à M. Modern usage Hawksmoor Towers, All Souls College, Oxford An Ivory Tower at St. Although the term is rarely used in the religious sense in modern times, it is credited with inspiring the modern meaning. It occasionally appears in art, especially in depictions of Mary in the hortus conclusus. It originates with the Song of Songs 7:4 ("Your neck is like an ivory tower" in the Hebrew Masoretic text, it is found in 7:5) and was included in the epithets for Mary in the sixteenth-century Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary ("tower of ivory", turris eburnea in Latin), though the title and image were in use long before that, since the 12th-century Marian revival at least. In the Christian tradition, the term ivory tower is used as a symbol for noble purity. The term originated from the Biblical Song of Songs ( 7:4) with a different meaning and was later used as an epithet for Mary. Most contemporary uses of the term refer to academia or the college and university systems in many countries. From the 19th century, it has been used to designate an environment of intellectual pursuit disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. For the complicated iconography, see Hortus Conclusus.Īn ivory tower is a metaphorical place-or an atmosphere-where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their own pursuits, usually mental and esoteric ones. 1500) from a Netherlandish book of hours. An ivory tower, as symbol of Mary, in a "Hunt of the Unicorn Annunciation" ( c. For other uses, see Ivory Tower (disambiguation).
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