T.S. Eliot: Search & Destroy

Destroy: the Queen Mother

destroy: the objective correlative

the

waste

land

attacks (figurative not literal, sadly) on 15 yearold girls = always doomed to failure (eg on ILx).

TSE = more exciting than Plath I think (save her fiction).

more *detail*, kids!!

The real question for me is where we stand on the Quartets. The rest sorts itself out fairly straightforwardly - the 4Qs are harder to place.

The Wasteland was and is a joke. It originated as a joke. It never rose above that origin. Profs who teach it straight are silly buggers. It was written to raise a giggle.

The Four Quartets are burdened with unmusical clunkers that go on for eight or ten lines and are unpardonable in any poet. Some passages from them are quite nice.

The difficulty was that Eliot was English poetry's eminence gris when he published them. Critics were prepared to fall all over themselves no matter what claptrap he wrote. Still, they are better than anything Wordsworth published in his last 30 years.

Overall, Eliot is overrated because his output is so meagre. You can be an influential poet one the strength of a few good poems. You can't be a great poet without a great body of work.

Eliot may be overanalysed, but I'd sure rather read him than Pound or Gertrude Stein, for God's sake.

The

Waste

Land

=

three

words

Prufrock, yes - how he manages to collage things yet still produce something like character cohesion; irony, bathos, lyric

Portrait of a Lady is OK, has its moments. Better search the Preludes, Rhapsody on a Windy Night too. The other v early stuff is not very substantial but worth keeping.

Bazooka Joe

Please tell us why you like this, the Quartets, etc.

You are quite right to bring up the drama as part of TSE's oeuvre.

Other views on that poem welcome. The rest of Poems 1920, I say DESTROY.

interesting to spot "life is very long" the 'queen is dead' closing warble in there.

Destroy: his criticism.

It's strange how there's a Little Nipper on this thread.

just learned about this, destroy it indeed.

Pierre le Tan's line drawn portrait;

'to make the pentameter, that's the next heave' (or, 'Reflections on Vers Libre');

'The Music of Poetry';

Seamus Heaney's 'Learning from Eliot';

1917-1918, Eliot the Banker;

sparity of output;

The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock ('When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherised upon a table');

The Waste Land (what kind of joke? Not a funny one);

dress sense (3-piece suit as standard, nice);

'Burnt Norton'; 'East Coker'; 'The Dry Salvages'; 'Little Gidding';

the (almost) one-way relationship with Pound;

Peter Ackroyd's OK ('I suppose') biography;

- by all of which do I mean 'read'?

Destroy:

early ascription to Henry James' myth of 'the European', silly;

his afters;

most of the shorter works (??);

other things, none of which the fault of T.S. Eliot.

Do you like Sylvia Plath, PF?

Why do I like the Quartets?

>>> 'to make the pentameter, that's the next heave' (or, 'Reflections on Vers Libre');

Well, there is that line (EP's?): 'No vers is libre to the man who wants to do a good job'. Possibly true. Possibly.

>>> Seamus Heaney's 'Learning from Eliot';

Not sure about this: TSE seems to me a poor man to hold up as an exemplar, as SH does. I mean, an exemplar of *life*, let alone peotry. And SH is maybe overgenerous as always. But OK, I'll look again.

>>> sparity of output

He was once asked what was good about poetry. Answer: 'Takes up less space'.

But do I agree with your point? I'm not sure I do: I think TSE may have underachieved - have left a rather slight body of work. Counter-argument: some poets - like Heaney - write 'too much'?

>>> his afters;

= ?

>>> most of the shorter works (??);

= ?

>>> Is Eliot one of the 40 or so in the A-Team?

If that means my favourite poets, he has to be - I don't know 40 others. But I like him quite a bit less than once I did. I have been turned off the whole thing somewhat; I find it less exciting than I did; and also I came to feel that he had less to Offer me (cf. that 'Poetic Models' thread).

>>> Do you like Sylvia Plath, PF?

I love Victoria Lucas. I'm not always sure about Sylvia Plath.

>>> Why do I like the Quartets?

They're sonorously, ponderously open to pondering?

1. 'There is so much to say and shut up about.'

Vs.

2. 'What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.'

This is not properly a versus and not properly an answer but this is a T.S. Eliot thread.

>> his afters;

>>>> = ?

"The poem was widely imitated by young or aspiring poets."

+

"It became such a plague that the moment the eye encountered, in a newly arrived poem, the words 'stone', 'dust', or 'dry' one reached for the waste-paper basket." (Brian Howard)

This, to be honest, is now (finally?) lost to history as slightly comical residue. (Is it?)

We've agreed on a point like this previously - there are words that exist as over-worn poets' coins. (I think they were the abstract words: 'lack', 'memory', &c.)

Can the influence be felt now in a different, less surface, way?

>> most of the shorter works (??);

>>>> = ?

Well, I haven't read them, see, as each time I go to, by reading the first few lines of each, they bore me into stopping. I should know better and so persist (and so sate my Calvinist glint).

The Heaney essay is interesting (I find his essays interesting; the writing is like an aware, intelligent uncle), mind: 'I don't necessarily agree with any of the essays / criticism I recommended you search.' I'm always copping out.

Search:

The Notes to The Waste Land (I think I get this joke, if it is a joke);

And, this feeling / phenomenon: "The veritable brain-washing, the total preoccupation, the drugged and haunted condition which the new poet produced on some of us... of whom one could find out nothing but that he was poor and unhappy." (Cyril Connolly)

+

"A cult of 'The Waste Landers' developed. Peter Quennell read the poem to guests at a Conservative party fete and, in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the aesthete Anthony Blanche recited it from the window of his college rooms." (Ackroyd)

+

Hehe

+

How silly and seductive and 'serious young man'.

I’m not at all sure why I like the Quartets; I think Buddhism’s ideas are very hard to write well.

Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses' heels
Over the paving. And the flags. And the trumpets.
And the flags. And the trumpets. And so many eagles.
How many? Count them. And such a press of people.
We hardly knew ourselves that day, or knew the City.
This is the way to the temple, and we so many crowding the way.
So many waiting, how many waiting? What did it matter,
onsuchaday?
Are they coming? No, not yet. You can see some eagles.
And hear the trumpets.
Here they come. Is he coming?
The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiving.
We can wait with our stools and our sausages.
What comes first? Can you see? Tell us. It is
5,800,000 rifles and carbines
102,000 machine guns
28,000 trench mortars
53,000 field and heavy guns
I cannot tell how many projectiles, mines and fuses,
13,000 aeroplanes
24,000 aeroplane engines,
50,000 ammunition waggons,
now 55,000 army waggons,
11,000 field kitchens
1,150 field bakeries
What a time that took. Will it be now? No,
Those are the golfclub Captains, these the Scouts,
And now the société gymnastique de Poissy
There is he now, look:
There is no interrogation is his eyes
Or in the hands, quiet over the horse's neck,
And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.
O hidden under the dove's wing, hidden in the turtle's breast,
Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water
After the still point of the running world. O hidden

Now they go to the temple. Then the sacrifice.
Now come the virgins bearing urns, urns containing
Dust
Dust
Dust of dust, and now
Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses'heels
Over the paving
That is all we could see. But how many eagles! And how many
trumpets!
(And Easter Day, we didn't get to the country,
So we took young Cyril to church. And they rang a bell
And he said right out loud, crumpets.)
Don't throw away that sausage,
It'll come in handy. He's artful. Please, will you
Give us a light?
Light
Light
Et les soldats faisaient la haie? ILS LA FAISAIENT

+

"It became such a plague that the moment the eye encountered, in a newly arrived poem, the words 'stone', 'dust', or 'dry' one reached for the waste-paper basket." (Brian Howard)

Gee - I always thought it was Edmund Wilson that said that!

>>> This, to be honest, is now (finally?) lost to history as slightly comical residue. (Is it?)

I like it.

>>> We've agreed on a point like this previously - there are words that exist as over-worn poets' coins. (I think they were the abstract words: 'lack', 'memory', &c.)

Oh, yes -- though, was it poets that overused them, or others?

>>> Can the influence be felt now in a different, less surface, way?

It could be. Yes.

>>> The Heaney essay is interesting (I find his essays interesting; the writing is like an aware, intelligent uncle), mind: 'I don't necessarily agree with any of the essays / criticism I recommended you search.' I'm always copping out.

OH! I see - I recommended the Heaney?!

The other story = Auden declaiming the pome from a tower at Oxford?

Auden / Eliot = non-surface connection?

David Peace's GB84 is like TSE occasionally, believe it or not.

Eliot, with his amazing range (from Tiresias to the comedy music hall routines of 'He Do The Police In The Different Voices', supposedly the original title for The Waste Land) and fragmented, quoting style, has to count as an honorary proto post-modernist. Il miglior fabbro. (But 'Four Quarets' never meant anything to me. And 'Notes Towards the Definition of Culture' has not dated well.)

I think I endorse a version of what you're saying: but not this one.

So, in other words, a modernist.

"I should have been a pair of ragged claw
scuttling across the floors of silent seas"

Brilliant. As for the Waste Land = Joke thing - doesn't this idea come from Eliot himself? He claimed it was meaningless and didn't understand why people made such a big deal out of it. What do we learn from this? Don't believe what artists say about theit own work, they talk a lot of bollocks. Even if it is meant as a joke (which I really think it isn't), it has meaning to me, to there T!

Eliot is just about the only poet i can read and enjoy - and if you want to lump me in with the 15 year old Plath lovers thats fine with me (i don't particularly like plath though, evern though i am a depressive).

Search: Prufrock; Preludes; Rhapsody and Portrait of a Lady ( "I have been wondering, of late/.../Why we have not developed into friends"); The Sweeney Poems, especially the late fragment "Sweeney Agonistes" which Pound said was woth more than all his plays put together; A Cooking Egg "Where are the eagles and the trumpets?/ Buried beneath some snow-deep Alps./Over buttered scones and crumpets/ Weeping, weeping multitudes/ Droop in a hundred A.B.C.’s"; The Waste Land, of course; Ash Wednesday "Teach us to care and not to care/ Teach us to sit still"

The Four Quartets have always seemed pretty impenetrable - thats a criticism of me not them- But i can appreciate Little Gidding for its extreme beauty without understanding the bulk of it.

Destroy: The damned cats.

Maybe I'll finally get around to writing my essay 'The Obsession With Definition'.

my long muted essay on the inarticulacy and juvenility of History as an idea, 'The Obsession With Definition';

- and should you find it mail me.

Agreed.

Eliot collapses the binaries now/then, high/low and me/others

I'm not convinced on high/low in his case at all. His use of pop culture allusions can be intended to show the degradation of society (or so I gathered along the way, probably relying more on critics than on my own analysis): "O O O Shakespearean rag!" I usually get the impression (even just in his poetry) that he does not regard "low" culture as a very positive thing.

There is something about the shifting narrator of the first section of the "Waste Land" that I like and that does blur self/other.

Personally, I think Gertrude Stein is closer to post-modernism (not an original idea, I know): more decentered, more disinterested in some sort of master narrative. That doesn't mean I like her more. I'm ambivalent, at best, about post-modernism.

I can't make up my mind about the spelling.

to be more exact, though not typographically.

That Shakespeherian Rag thing reared up out of my subconscious and into one of my songs not two weeks ago:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2004/05/25/

She's so elegant
So intelligent
She's an elephant
Your fat friend

Yet: to repeat, I agree with the gest, I mean, gist of much that Momus says. It's just the 80s terminology that feels lame.

As for PoMo, if you tell me what cultural era we're in now, I'll consider using your term if it feels right to me, and gains some general currency. Please don't tell me we're living in a time where style is 'normal' or there is 'no style'. Was Modernism 15 years out of date in 1925?

I think I would be in favour of a certain nominalism, if I knew what it meant.

A fire engine is going by.

A neurotic, stroboscopic saxophone rag
Disappearing in an orange blur of mechanical dread.
It is, word fox, the fire engine of history
And as nameless.

Modernism waxed and waned between the 1880s and 1980s (depending on which discipline you're studying, and whose account -- I like 1910 and 1962 as bookends, personally), with denials, revivals, returns, neo-classicisms, jokey proposals, jokey returns, redefinitions... It's interesting to think that 'The Waste Land' might have been as jokey, possibly even to Eliot, as Duchamp's 'Fountain'. History then solidified around these 'jokes' and made them icons. The early years of movements are the most glamourous. I love that sense of 'Surely that's a mistake? They can't possibly be serious!' or 'Has mankind really stooped so low? This is the sort of thing produced by madmen, children and savages!' Post-Modernism's moment of iconic prankery, for me, is the moment when Andy Warhol decided to paint money 'because that's what people love the most'.

I agree with quite a lot of that, and I like the poem, quite a lot.

Not those clowns.

hay eng lit people, what is the deal with 'the waste land'?

not the deep thematic stuff, the surface narrative.

i'm getting displaced persons of eastern europe, city of london drudges, pub people, and it feels like a 'story' but is it?

-- That one guy that hit it and quit it, Wednesday, October 17, 2007 10:50 AM (12 seconds ago) Bookmark Link

btw dom is right upthread. and "liking music-hall" was the poptimism of the 1890s, so well played out son by 1922.

no, dom is not right upthread.

Looking for a narrative in "The Waste Land" is doomed to failure.

Loving something when you're eighteen doesn't mean it or you were wrong because you no longer love it.

Why Eastern Europe?

i thought it was about the dark tower

this is gonna be my next j

If you're still interested, quitney:

I read the original text of "The Waste Land" some years ago, and I don't remember it well enough to be sure but I think it had a potential narrative, Eliot linked the characters together somehow. The original was much longer, and he wasn't happy with it, so he worked with Ezra Pound to cut the thing right down. The published version works by montage: there's no narrative thread but threads of ideas, probably using Dante - especially the Inferno - as a set of structural allusions. Modernists love Dante, mostly; Pound's Cantos also uses the Divine Comedy as scaffolding, arguably Ulysses too, a bit.

Subtext, roughly: modern life has lost touch with Tradition, which makes it sterile and bad. Young 'uns today got no sense of values. But it's okay, cos like the Fisher King myths this is just the dead part of the cycle and soon a real rain's gonna come and wash the empty, dead people off the streets. Shantih.

He writes fluid prose that's so self-assured that you have to squint to catch the self-mockery in the later essays (or in the notes to "The Waste Land").

Why Eastern Europe?

-- Rockist Scientist, Wednesday, October 17, 2007 1:39 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Link

mentions lithuanians in munich in the first section.

plus it was written during one of eastern europe's periodic "let's go crazy and kill the fuck out of everyone" episodes during which a fair few people were indeed displaced to the west.

i guess i don't mean narrative in the sense that 'die hard' is narrative. but there are maybe connections. if london is sterile, other places are even worse. but maybe there is salvation in buddhism or something.

failure of romanticism part/whole thing
--> whole is inaccesible/gone
parts isolated, cut off from one another
supposed to be more than sum of parts, but is in fact less
this is what is radical about it.
paradoxically fights against it's own wholeness.

yeah i get that kind of stuff. the problem is it buys wholesale the modernists' version of something they called 'romanticism' -- their way of cutting themselves off from the immediate past, ie their commercial rivals. hence 'great divide' theory.

xxpost

Eliot's pretty Anglican even at this point I think. I've always thought he likes the Upanishad stuff more for its roots-of-Western-culture vibe.

Yeah there are meant to be connections. I've read criticism that's tried to draw that sort of explicit abstract narrative, but I don't wholly buy that, partly because the finished poem is so highly edited.

Maybe you could spin a reading of it out of the dead hand of Communism spreading from the East.

i cant believe no one in this thread has mentioned "journey of the magi" which is fucking terrific

i read letters from his wife written during the writing of it.

tbh i think that's what it's about.

but i kind of would at the moment : (

i don't think he was too anglican then -- it was 1926-27 he really went over.

k it's been a while since I was better acquainted with his biography.

I can't believe the Communist thing hadn't occurred/been pointed out to me before. Cos I did have a tutor many years ago who pointed at what he considered to be contemporary political allusions in "Gerontion" and other poems from that period.

i like how the poem is constructed in such a way that you can read almost anything into and then frustrates that meaning....sort of enacting the process of "meaning making" right in front of you.

communism is part of it, maybe... but what was happening in eastern europe was more like a total clusterfuck, old-school barbarism shit. cf jancso' 'the red and the white'. moscow was pretty harsh on other communists -- ie the ukranian communist party -- if they got in the way. it was more like lots of people killing each other and starving and dying of disease.

Yes I see Eastern Europe = the End of the World at this point. I'm thinking about Communism in particular cos part of what he's after I think is a "coarsening of sensibility" that he probly already sees as a move away from Spiritual Traditions - Lil and "HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME" - which is more than just barbarism maybe.

xpost

I don't think you can read just anything into it. Well obviously you could, but that wouldn't make it a good or convincing reading. There obviously are multiple meanings you could play with, but I do get the feeling that sometimes TSE writes in code partly to obscure or avoid "unpalatable" ideas.

welp a lot of the people moving east -- to paris mostly -- were, ow you say, jewish...

west

almost anything...but look how playful the "notes" are...it's clearly a sort of joke on anyone wanting to "delve" into the poem. i think it's GOOD to delve into it and produce interesting readings, however...just that the poem really has nothing behind the curtain (or maybe it does? that's the catch)...it's sort of an "unveiling of unveiling" to steal J. Hillis Miller's phrase.

xpost

Weirdly, Jew-hating was one of the things he didn't seem to need to encode, at least early on.

Thing is ryan, Eliot's non-poetic writing clues you in that he's not interested in unveiling unveilings much.

eliot's criticism, some of which i have read, is characterised by a quite unbelievable smugness.

haha. yeah that's true...(maybe also why i avoid his non-poetic writings)

x-post! but applies to both previous posts i guess.

he can be a pretty objectionable snob when he wants to be (which is most of the time).

Snobbery's what makes the early critical work so good!

New Criticism has its good points but I think central to it is this idea that you have to be "one of us" in order to understand Literature.

anyone ever tracked down the very-out-of-print After Strange Gods? Not even my college library stocks it.

Those guys are pretty explicit that this is 733t stuff they're dealing with.

has anyone taken a look at the manuscripts with Pound's editing and comments? pretty fascinating...my fav is "'Perhaps' be damned"

I don't think I've read it Alfred but our college has a weirdly good selection of old Faber stuff by/about Pound & Eliot.

Yeah ryan I said upthread I've read the He Do the Police text. Thing is I love Pound's work a lot more than Eliot's nowadays.

anyone ever tracked down the very-out-of-print After Strange Gods? Not even my college library stocks it.

-- Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Wednesday, October 17, 2007 5:46 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

reason it's out of print is it's actively anti-semitic and TSE regretted it.

it's not exactly snobbery, it's just they expected people to know a lot. they saw themselves as outside of class, being americans who wrote in funny cod-accents to each other. to them the anglos were the snobs y/n. i mean obv it *is* snobbish. but nowhere near as snobbish as the New Critics. there was the eliot who read detective novels, but they ignored him.

Eliot loved the Marx Brothers too! he and Groucho exchanged warm, literate letters.

Well, yeah, I know ASG it's anti-Semitic, but with the popularity of Eliot-the-Jew-hater books like Anthony Julius' in the late nineties I thought someone would want to recirculate it.

TSE's ex rules his estate with a rod of iron, hence really shitty lack of his stuff in public domain.

but apparently faber have hired ronald schuschardd (trans: he buttered her up) to do a compleat works.

so i wonder if it will be published in that.

ts eliot on criticism was basically: "all the other critics are a Sunday rabble of football-fans on a train down to Swansea, only I should be allowed to write criticism because I know my CLASSICS". knowledge of classics is, i agree, very useful, but this guy was pretty absolutist about it.

If you want genuine snobbery Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom's New Crit essays make Eliot look like Groucho Marx. The New Crit stuff in America was agrarian and implicitly anti-New Deal. I'm sure they wren't happy when the G.I. Bill's democratization of secondary schooling threatened their store of golden knowledge.

Most "critics" were shite when TSE started doing it, but you've also got to think of his attitude in terms of claiming turf for his own manifesto, like the old Pistols "Love/Hate" t-shirt.

otm

xpost

also otm

otm

xpost

also otm

Classic.

aight i'm reading william empson on this (from 'using biography') and it's a+++++ 8080. it's a review he did of the 'bigger, longer and uncut' version noodle was talking about from the early 70s. the idea of the book is empson invented the New Critics but they got it all wrong and old bill has to school them (viz. it's okay to use biography, poindexters).

i will see if i can get a plaintext version.

he was one of the og eliot followers in the 20s, of course, so he feels he has a right to try and talk about it directly, what it's all about.

so for the hordes coming o'er the mountains, he is qualmless about identifying them as--quote--"commies".

this is my saturday night, also.

Excellent.

I like Empson a lot, he is badass.

Not a bad poet either.

OK here's the final sentences of empson:

‘Originally, the poem said that Eliot (or Tiresias) did not know whether the young man carbuncular was a small house-agent’s clerk or a culture-snob who claimed to have spent the day with Nevinson* in the Café Royal; it was hard to tell the difference. But Pound had swallowed the nonsense of T. E. Hulme, who said that poetry must be concrete and definite, so this bit had to go. I daresay the young man was T. E. Hulme in person, really.’

*vorticist/futurist

Pound's imagist poetry is lush. What I've read of Hulme's is too, so Empson being a bit harsh but I guess he's decrying manifestoes/absolutism rather than the idea itself. Being concrete is a good idea for learner poets I think.

empson's thing was decrying 'the cult of unnaturalism' -- basically your first-gen modernist-fascists. he was always kinder about eliot, who was a big influence + also a bit of a mentor (empson wrote a bit for the criterion and was a faber poet -- though that makes it sound more cosy than i think it was).

also he was a born zinger.

Complete Search. And Save. And reread repeatedly.

"The Waste Land"
"The Hollow Men"
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
"The Journey of the Magi" (I think that's the title. :/ )
"Gerontion"
and all the cat poems

empson's thing was GREAT BEARDS

nice little piece (reminds me of fizzles on lanchester except it's positive, maybe it's just bcz it's set in a pub lol,) on tracking down the waste land's real albert and lil

http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_clegg_wasteland.php

(written i think by the guy who runs the lrb bookshop twitter account, who is -- per a friend and sometime ilxor, and if it's the same fellow still -- 1 x GOOD EGG)

Think I've bought books from him (he was talking about TS Eliot with someone else).

http://bostonreview.net/influences-the-power-of-t-s-eliot-by-seamus-heaney

Heaney wrote some of my favorite essays on poets by a poet.

Thought this revive would be about his Emily Hale thoughts.

Likewise. In which case I was about to say that courting her for decades then marrying Esmé Valerie Fletcher at the last minute because Emily Hale 'would have been bad for his poetry' is a characteristically dickish move.

The Lyndall Gordon bio is devastating on that point.

To add insult to injury, he remarried in 1957, by which point he was very much finished as a poet anyway.

CATS (2019) if TSE had only married emily hale:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENdUbJiUYAAS6kx?format=jpghttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENdUbJfU0AAR-UO?format=jpghttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENdUbJgUUAAioZL?format=jpghttps://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENdUbJfUYAAg-vq?format=jpg

Now there's an enticing counterfactual.

What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

that Heaney essay >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> the current round of Eliot/Hale hot takes

A competition is underway? News to me.

I had no idea Hale hot takes were going around. He led her on for twenty years and didn't marry her -- this is all known.

An archive containing more than 1,100 of his letters to Hale has just been made available at Princeton.

xp

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/01/03/ts-eliot-defends-himself-grave-after-love-letters-are-released-insisting-i-never-any-time-had-sexual-relations-with-miss-hale/

he was creepy and cruel, in his dry-as-dust way, but this is a tedious argument of insidious intent

“Emily Hale would have killed the poet in me; Vivienne nearly was the death of me, but she kept the poet alive,” he writes.

I take it back. He wasn't referring to Valerie at all.

#cancelled

anyway yes that was a great read from heaney

Tbf there's in a sense in which Eliot has been cancelled for decades now.

yes but the more important one is happening on twitter and itt today iirc

True, true.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/01/03/ts-eliot-defends-himself-grave-after-love-letters-are-released-insisting-i-never-any-time-had-sexual-relations-with-miss-hale/

what a url

ikr

this is a tedious argument of insidious intent

https://media2.giphy.com/media/4ZknCxVm3fBUI7EdpW/giphy.gif

:D

It does lead you to an overwhelming question, though.

do I dare to eat a peach?

is the Gordon bio entertaining? (an underwhelming question)

an overwhelming question...

Eliot’s always stuck me as a terrible person. I do love his poetry with an adolescent/undergrad fire.

Reading The Waste Land one February afternoon my senior year of high school remains one of the great Newton-apple moments of my reading life, and I'll always love "Preludes," "Portrait of a Lady," and at least two of the Four Quartets.

To me, what came out of his newly released statement was his pain and earnestness as a person. Much guilt, much grief - much of it perhaps unnecessary. Perhaps part of him took life too seriously (another part was comic anyway).

I don't know enough about ms Hale to judge further about her or their relationship.

The Gordon and Peter Aykroyd bios made clear that the guilt over what he and Vivienne's mom did to her almost killed him. No wonder he sought God.

* Ackroyd

Loads of idiots (well three actually but loads, yeah) on my Facebook queuing up to have a go at TSE for his relationships; said idiots meanwhile think Hughes and/or Plath are great

Which is bizarre to me because I mean while the relationships in question with TSE - with Emily, Vivienne and Valerie - are all pretty sketchy, none of these people behave quite as badly as Hughes n Plath

Wait till they hear what Byron did to his own SISTER!!!

There's a whole school of Attitudes to Eliot which obviously have their roots in the person not understanding one of these complicated poems often put in front of as important and you have to show you can get it

I'm sympathetic, but

*Put in front of one by teachers n professors that should be

Loads of idiots (well three actually but loads, yeah) on my Facebook queuing up to have a go at TSE for his relationships

what? on facebook? ok, good but not my experience of facebook!

Sometimes it pains me to think about all the poet-scamps who've eluded cancellation just because we don't have full, omniscient access to their inner monologues. I yearn for that day.

trying to decide if i'd rather be plagued with poetry hot takes on fb or not

i don't think i'm ever going to care about t.s. eliot, there's no vacancy in my charming but tiny 'bitches from idaho i should care about' b&b

pound is the one from idaho, although his family moved to new york when he was young

Eliot was from East Coker iirc.

eliot was born in st louis

I know, I was just making a silly joke about his obsession with his English roots.

i know i just could not let the appearance of his having escaped his american roots stand!!!!

not from idaho, still a heaux

Surely his roots lie somewhere near the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, midway between the US and the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqvhMeZ2PlY

A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live?

One of my old drunken parlor tricks is to recite the opening lines of "Prufrock" as I heard them in college on vinyl: a wannabe posh Missourian reading in an English accent.

^^^ i do this too

oh dew not ahhhsk, what is it
let us geaux, and make ahhhhhhh visit

All this persuades me that what is to be learned from Eliot is the double-edged nature of poetry reality: first encountered as a strange fact of culture, poetry is internalized over the years until it becomes, as they say, second nature. Poetry that was originally beyond you, generating the need to understand and overcome its strangeness, becomes in the end a familiar path within you, along which your imagination opens pleasurably backwards towards an origin and a seclusion. Your last state is therefore a thousand times better than your first, for the experience of poetry is one that truly deepens and fortifies itself with reenactment.

I could read Heaney on poetry all day. A fantastic piece. Poetry, more than any other art form, is a dialogue between different aspects of the same self - at different times, in different moods.

Another piece of Heaney's I think about often (and is applicable to experience in general, I think) - from the Redress of Poetry - explores a similar metaphor of the spatial within experience and the self:

We go to poetry, we go to literature in general, to be forwarded within ourselves... What is at work in the most original and illuminating poetry is the mind's capacity to conceive a new place of regard for itself, a new scope for its own activity.

And I'm stealing 'the poem stood like a geometry in an absence' and will use it as if it's my own.

Rick's, Eliot and #metoo

https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/metoo-modernism