(19) T. S. Eliot and his Influence on Modern English Poetry.

T h e  T w e n t i e t h  C e n t u r y

[see "Background for Topics 12-27..."]
 

T ( h o m a s )  S ( t e a r n s )  E l i o t  ( 1 8 8 8 – 1 9 6 5 )

L i f e :

- b. Thomas Stearns Eliot in Missouri (USA)

- studied Harvard

- settled in En. after the outbreak of WW I, became a Br. subject and member of the Church of En. (1927)

- founded & ed. of the influential quarterly Criterion (1922 – 1939)

- became director of the publishing firm ‘Faber & Faber’

W o r k :

Influence:

= much of his work self-consciously Br. x but: of cosmopolitan literary roots

< Harvard infl.: Elizabethan and Jacobean lit., Ita. Renaissance, and Ind. mystical philos. > Harvard doctoral thesis: on F(rancis) H(erbert) Bradley (1846 – 1924, an E idealist philos.)

< an arly infl.: Jules Laforgue (1860 – 87, a Fr. poet) > a reticent, ironic, clever, and referential poetry in the form of free-verse dramatic monologues with a wry persona expressing himself rather than acting out the private emotions of the author

< a more lasting infl.: Charles Baudelaire (1821 – 67, a Fr. symbolist poet) > E.: B. = the great inventor of a modern poetry = ‘the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced’

< a more lasting infl: Dante > E.: D. = a medieval spiritual and a poetic authority addressing directly the modern condition, and a constant reminder for the later poet ‘of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate”’

< the 19^th c. Fr. symbolist poets: Paul Verlaine (1844 – 96), Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 91), and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 98)

< the Jacobean dramatists: Thomas Middleton (1580 – 1627), Cyril Tourneur (1575 – 1626), and John Webster (ca 1580 – ca 1625) > flexible blank verse with overtones of the colloquial:

Style:

- against the contemp. tradition of Georgian poetry in favour of a more subtle and at the same time more precise poetry:

(a) < his early supporter / adviser Ezra Pound (1885 – 1972) and T(homas) E(rnest) Hulme (1883 – 1917, a philos. and an imagist poet) > ‘hard, dry’ images

(b) < the Metaphysical poets > wit, allusiveness, and irony

(c) < the Fr. symbolists > an image = both absolutely precise in its physical reference and endlessly suggestive in the meanings based on its relationship to oth. images

- against the Romantic concept of poetry:

(a) uses the suggestive, the symbolist imagery, and the recurring images of the hyacinth girl, the rose garden, etc. = a Romantic element in his poetry

(b) x but: adds a dry ironic allusiveness, wit, and colloquial element = not normally found in Romantic poetry

- builds up the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images: deliberately omits transitional passages

- builds up his own body of references because a common cultural heritage no longer exists:

(a) the nature of his imagery manages to set the required tone and the area of meaning

(b) => even a reader ignorant of the allusions can achieve some understanding

- received the Nobel Prize for Lit. (1948)

= the great renovator of the E poetic dialect with an enormous infl. on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally

=> the poet of the modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition

P o e t r y :

Early poetry:

(until the middle 1920s)

- conc.: in one way or another the Waste Land = aspects of the decay of culture in the modern Western world

Poems Written in Early Youth (1950):

= a coll. of his earliest poems

- incl. hearty student graduation songs and tributes to J. Laforgue

“The Death of Saint Narcissus” (ca 1911):

- an unpubl. experimental poems

> its opening lines later incorporated into The Waste Land

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (ca 1911, 1915):

= his 1^st publ. poem, publ. in the Chicago-based magazine Poetry (1912 – present)

- a disconcerting and subtly evasive monologue, set in a symbolic landscape

- plays with politeness, failures of comprehension, and despair

- reinforces the theme by the often ironic echoes of Hesiod (ca 700 BC, a Gr. poet and rhapsode) Dante (1265 – 1321), Michelangelo (1476 – 1564), W. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616), F. Dostoevsky (1821 – 81), and the Bible

P.:

(a) presents himself as fashionable and sociable x but: suffers an acute self-consciousness about the opinions of oth.

(b) indulges social niceties x but: remains aware of the impossibility of saying what he means

=> builds up meaning from the mutual interaction of the images

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917):

= his 1^st publ. coll.

- incl. 12 specifically Am., often precisely Bostonian, poems

< nods to the example and the titles of H. James

> “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, sets the tone of the whole vol.

> “Portrait of a Lady”, a poem of uneasy social intercourse

> “Preludes”, a poem of bleakly restless urban landscapes

> “Aunt Helen”, a character sketch

Poems (1919):

- publ. by the Woolfs’ ‘Hogarth Press’

- incl. also 4 poems in Fr.:

> “Dans le Restaurant”, later incorporated into The Waste Land, & oth.

- incl. 7 short quatrain poems, the temporary shift from free verse allows for a new sharpness and new variety of tone:

> “The Hippopotamus”, a satire on the pretensions of ‘the True Church’

> “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (the nightingales = [a] song-birds, [b] prostitutes), exploits the effects of incongruity and historical anomaly in a densely amalgamated reference: the shabby commonplaces and compromises of the modern world dishonour both (a) the murdered Agamemnon, (b) the whole inheritance of history, tradition, and historical lit.

< derives the epigraphs to the coll. from W. Shakespeare, C. Marlowe, F. Beaumont, J. Fletcher, François Villon (1431 – 74; a Fr. poet, thief, and general vagabond; author of the line: ‘Where are the snows of yesteryear?’), Aeschylus (525 BC – 456 BC), and St Paul

=> fascinated with order x fragmentation, and the survival of tradition x the collapse of tradition [see also: his The Waste Land]

The Waste Land (1922):

- publ. 1^st in his Criterion, then in the Am. Dial (1840 – 44, the Transcendentalist magazine; 1880s, a political magazine; 1920 – 29, a Modernist magazine), and then in a book form

- Ezra Pound severely ed. the manuscript into 5 interrelated sections (a long introductory one, a terse 4^th one, and a long meditative concl. one), each with a separate title

= a series of scenes and images with no author’s voice intervening

- builds up the meaning by the implications developed through multiple contrasts and analogies with older lit. works

- explores a desert:

(a) physical

(b) figuratively urban: the ‘falling towers’ of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London

- connects the different settings by the sense of corruption: the wasteland = a landscape in which a quest for healing, fertility, power, and meaning is pursued

- achieves the most striking effects by playing with juxtaposition, inconsistency of perception, multiplicity of narration, and fluidity of time and place, as much visual as lexical: the disconcertingly surreal image of a woman drawing out her ‘long black hair’, & oth.

< echoes Dante, Shakespeare, pre-Socratic philos. (the ‘Milesian School’, ‘Pythagorean Schools’, the ‘Eleatic School’, the ‘Atomist School’, Heraclitus, Diogenes, & oth.; rejected the traditional mythological explanation in favour of more rational explanations), major and minor 17^th c. poets and dramatists, works of anthropology, history, and philos., and his private reading

- concl.:

(a) a series of quotations from Dante, the Pervigilium Veneris (Lat. for the Vigil of Venus, 2nd or 3rd c. AD, an anonym. poem), A. Tennyson, Gérard de Nerval (1808 – 55, a Fr. Romantic poet), Thomas Kyd (1558 – 94, an E dramatist), and the Upanishads (Hindu scriptures on the relig. and philos. of Hinduism)

(b) his own line in the midst of these quotations: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’

- denies the poem expressed the disillusionment of a generation as ‘some of the more approving critics’ believed

(a) should the poem be seen retrospectively but as a series of fragments?

(b) should the quotations shore up the ruin of the Western civilisation?

(c) should they present the poet need of the shield of tradition as a defence against the hostile world?

(d) => the poem remains fragmentary and ambiguous

Poems 1909 – 25 (1925):

= a coll. of all his earlier poems

Late poetry:

(1927 +, after his formal acceptance of Anglican Christianity)

- conc.: searches for spiritual peace ‘beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness’

- echoes biblical, liturgical, and mystical relig. lit., and Dante

Ash Wednesday (1930):

= a poem in 6 sections = the ‘Ariel Poems’

- conc.: examines the aspects of relig. doubt, discovery, or revelation in a series of surreal images

- presents the quality and pain of revelation in the painful awakening of the spirit in a mysterious landscape haunted by F figures (types of the Virgin Mary)

< echoes the prayers and metaphors of Anglo-Cath. > gives the poems an almost liturgical character

> “Journey of the Magi” (1927) and “A Song for Simeon” (1928), draw on biblical incident, conc. with literal epiphanies = experiences of the infant Christ disturbing or disorienting aged eyewitnesses

> “Marina” (1930), more obviously secular in imagery and subject, conc. with the awed rediscovery of his lost daughter by Shakespeare’s Pericles

=> celebrates the wonder at the epiphanies of a Christian God

Four Quartets (1943):

- incl.: “Burnt Norton” (1935), “East Coker” (1940), “The Dry Salvages” (1941), and “Little Gidding” (1942)

- the title: from the poems’ effect akin to that of the chamber music

- conc.: further examines relig. moods

- relates each of the poems to a specific place:

(a) East Coker: a village of ancestral significance

(b) Little Gidding: a chapel of the relig.-historical associations

=> their urgency reinforced by the threat of wartime destruction: “Little Gidding”, reinforces the idea of change and decay by veiled references to the Blitzkrieg, & oth.

- ponders the significance of words and the difficulty of building words into poetry in each of the poems in the opening of their 5^th section

- concl.: the inherited pain of human sinfulness can be assuaged only by a redemption from time and by a renewal of history ‘in another pattern’

- employs mocking irony, savage humour, and juxtaposition of the sordid and the romantic

x but: gets quieter and no more deliberately shocking => moves away from the abrupt shifts of tone of his earlier poetry twd a more consistent classicality

C r i t i c i s m :

- wrote lit. and philos. reviews

- rejected the late 17^th c. ‘dissociation of sensibility’ = separation of wit and passion x in favour of the early 17^th c. Metaphysical poets and dramatists combining wit and passion

- replaced J. Milton by J. Donne in the 17^th c., and A. Tennyson by G. M. Hopkins in the 19^th c. poetry

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1917):

= one of his earliest and most celebrated essays

- conc.: defines and prescribes historical, relig., moral, and above all lit. traditions

- E.: ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’ x but: only in relation to a larger tradition

- shapes his lit. tradition around writers feeding his particular concept of ‘Modernism’: W. Shakespeare, B. Jonson, T. Middleton, J. Webster, Lancelot Andrewes (1555 – 1626, an E clergyman; oversaw the transl. of the King James Bible), A. Marvell, J. Dryden, Virgil, Dante, C. Baudelaire, and W. B. Yeats

“The Metaphysical Poets” (1921):

- our complex civilisation must produce complex results => the poet must be more allusive and more indirect in order to force language into his meaning

- justifies the contortions of J. Donne’s poetry:

(a) man’s experience = ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’

(b) experiences are ‘always forming new wholes’

(c) => perceives a divine order beyond the physical evidence of disorder

The Sacred Wood (1920), Homage to John Dryden (1924), and For Lancelot Andrewes (1928):

= coll. of his critical essays

- For Lancelot Andrewes: claims to be a ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion’ and in favour of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity, and authority against individualism

x but: his own poetry = untraditional and highly individual

Selected Essays (1932):

= a coll. of most of his earlier essays and some new ones

Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1964):

= his Harvard doctoral thesis

- left unexamined due to his prolonged absence in wartime En. x but: later publ. in a book form

- conc.: the relationship of the subjective consciousness x the objective world

- B.: of the individual mind correlates with a larger single comprehensive consciousness

- E.: the comprehensive consciousness:

(a) = a responsive God in one sense

(b) = related to a larger human tradition in another

V e r s e  D r a m a :

- aspired to renew poetic drama

- examined relig. themes

The Rock (1934):

= an unsuccessful church pageant

Murder in the Cathedral (1935):

= the most successful x the least experimental

- conc.: the murder of the Archbishop Becket

- a ritual use of chorus

- the central speech in the form of a sermon by B. in his cathedral shortly before his murder

The Family Reunion (1939):

- conc.: guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class E family

- combines choric devices from Gr. tragedy and accents of drawing-room conversation

The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959):

= verse ‘comedies’

- combines a serious relig. theme with the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy

- his lifetime: politely received x but: received little success on the stage since due to his somewhat laboured attempts to interfuse Gr. myths with modern conditions

Sweeney Agonistes (1932):

- unfinished and unperformed

- inventive, individual, and energetic

<=> W. B. Yeats’s contemp. experiments with ritual, masks, dance, and music

=> an ambiguous, restless, and death-haunted attempt to create a new drama appropriate to a broken and iconoclastic age