Dear Wednesdays friends,
I've got several things to say, in no particular order, that I'm hoping will ease your
entry Eliot's poetry. So without further ado..........
1. "Is Eliot truly one of the all-time great English-language poets?"
Yes, so if you had any lingering doubts, you may now lay them to rest. It's true that
for the most part he's no longer considered the living god who dominated world poetry
during the first half of the 20th century, but his rank & position are assured.
He's a really, really great poet, & you can quote me.
2. EPIGRAPHS. They're always important since they're a writer's road sign into a work,
but this is more true of Eliot than of any other writer I know. Always pay close attention to
his epigraphs. Take Prufrock, for eg. The epigraph comes from Dante's "Inferno"
(for Eliot, Dante is the supreme poet, more important even than Shakespeare), Canto xxvii, lines 61-66.
Dante & Virgil have just come upon Guido da Montefeltro who's consigned to the bowels of Hell,
imprisoned in a trembling flame, for the sin of fraud. (The story of his fraud is
complicated & needn't concern us: basically, after a life of duplicity, Guido became a monk,
& the Pope then persuaded him to offer advice about how to trick Palestrina into submission.
I.e., he betrayed the trust of the city of Palestrin for the Pope, who promised absolution
in advance. For Dante, fraud is one of the worst sins.) So when Dante & Virgil encounter
Guido, Dante asks why he's in Hell. Guido says (& here's a rough translation of the
epigraph) "If I thought my answer were to one who could ever return to the world,
this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth,
if what I hear is true, I answer you without fear of infamy."
To wit: Guido has heard that no one ever escapes from Hell, so he assumes, incorrectly,
that Dante can't return to earth & tell Guido's story. Therefore, he'll answer Dante's
question "without fear of infamy"--without fear that Dante will retell it among the living.
(I don't know what it means for Guido's flame to stop shaking: it's obviously something bad.)
IN OTHER WORDS, the epigraph gives us a man who's talking ONLY because he thinks his story won't be re-told.
We're thus invited to hear Prufrock as a contemporary version of Guido:
someone who doesn't want his story known, & who therefore is talking only because he thinks
his secret is safe.
3. ELIOT'S ERUDITION. Look at all the time I just spent in a brief explication of a single epigraph.
Yes, Eliot was extremely learned. He could read French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, & Urdu.
He would have become a professor of philosophy if it hadn't been for World War I.
He quotes from foreign languages in his early poetry, & often we can't discern his drift w/o knowing their meanings.
In short, he's a hard nut to crack. Unlike Frost, who's available to all, Eliot is sometimes
seen as a coterie poet, accessible only to the initiated. He himself said he thought there
were only about a dozen people capable of understanding "The Wasteland." He was not & is
not a "popular" poet.
4. Eliot is definitely a "religious" or "spiritual" poet. For Frost the greatest good in life is
learning how to balance between contending opposites ("Fire and Ice" for eg).
For Pound, the greatest good is beauty. For Wallace Stevens, it's a vivid, powerful
imagination. For Eliot, it's the salvation of the soul.
5. People often divide Eliot's career into three quite different periods.
In our course, we'll spend the first two classes on the first period. In this period,
the human soul, Eliot's great subject, is in dire circumstances. People live soulless lives,
hardly aware of their spiritual poverty. This early poetry is one of various voices crying,
pleading, begging, asking, trying to pray. It's a poetry of fragments, since people in
early Eliot live fragmented lives. This early poetry is also quite dramatic,
with identifiable characters sometimes performing little plays, like Prufrock if you will.
In fact, severanl of these early poems are dramatic monologues. But none of these
characters is noble or capable of heroic actions. One of the archtypal figures is
Prufrock (think of his name: what are the connotations for you of that name?
Would you name a child J. Alfred Prufrock?), a man so painfully self-conscious
he can't even act on behalf of his own desires.
In this early period, the surface of Eliot's poetry is flashy. We have shocking
metaphors, as at the beginning of "Prufrock" in which "the evening is spread out
against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table." (Joyce said that Eliot made
poetry impossible for ladies' reading clubs, & he probably did so with that very metaphor.)
This early poetry is also highly ironic, arch, full of shocking contrasts.
It calls attention to itself, to its own virtuosity. It's poetry that's showing off,
as in the frequent use of foreign-language quotations. (In middle Eliot, those quotations
mostly go, & in place of a cacophony of fragmented, contending voices, a single voice begins
to emerge. In late Eliot, that single voice becomes dominant.)
So in our first two classes you should expect Eliot's poetry to be dramatic, flashy, shocking, bravura.
6. Note the title of the book from which our first week's readings come: "Prufrock and Other Observations."
In this first period, Eliot's speakers are more observers of life than participants in it, & this will turn out to be one
of the curses of early 20th century life, that people don't participate fully in their own lives.
The epigraph to the whole volume is another quotation from Dante about the great love of the
Roman poet Statius for Virgil, Dante's guide through Hell & Purgatory. Eliot dedicates the volume to a great friend
(& thus the meaning of the epigraph) who was killed in World War I. The catastrophe of WWI is everywhere in Eliot's first period
work.
In a sense, the entire Western world is a bleeding wound in Eliot's first period.
cheers................Alan