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!

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