T

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)

Overview L. G. Salingar: Eliot restored the intellectual dignity of English poetry [] he formed a means of expression in poetry for the surface and the depths of a representative modern mind, intensely aware of his surroundings, their place in history, and his intimate reaction to them [see V. Woolfs essay Modern Fiction] A framework-setter in English poetry due to the mythical method juxtaposed with intertextuality, fragmentarism, poetry of the city, feelings of alienation, detachment, crisis of identity, stasis induced by the post-WWI reality: April is the cruellest month, breeding // Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing // Memory and desire, stirring // Dull roots with spring rain. // Winter kept us warm, covering// Earth in forgetful snow, feeding //A little life with dried tubers (The Waste Land) Eliots poetry involved with painful and confusing states of mind (see The Love Song of A. Prufrock, The Waste Land, etc.); a poetry of observations - impersonation Precursors: the free verse of Jules Laforgue, Baudelaire, Robert Browning, Henry James > adaptation of urban settings burdened with nostalgia and cultural paralysis, sense-impressions, literary allusions and (self-)irony [I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be] > the feelings imagined are inadequate and particularly unreal > F. R. Leavis: Eliots poetry has the effect of a de-realizing of the routine common-sense world, while hinting at the same time at a hidden spiritual reality. In this sense, his feelings are linked with the absolute, though in the end they are emptier than at first.Poetic Features formulated in his programmatic essay, Tradition and Individual Talent (1917)

search for detachment or impersonality, that is, the alternative to his sense of unreality in personal emotions (e.g. Prufrock as an impotent old man who has no roots and cannot trust his own impulses, as an exile towards the end of his life)

impersonality implies an endeavour to pass through an oppressive sense of unreality, to get rid of it and turn it into detached contemplation

in the foregoing essay, Eliot claims that the poet must transcend his private self and get connected with the tradition of European literature as a whole, for which he needs the historical sense = attention to both changes in literary styles and values and continuity and permanence, fixity and flux:

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, "tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity. returned from America (under Henry Jamess influence), Eliot pays attention to the problem of discontinuity in culture and belief (The Waste Land) hence the question of time exploited in reference to the individuals life, succession of generations, the discredited idea of progress, eternity

dramatic quality of his poems (Prufrock, Gerontion) related to sensations;

Eliots ignorance of narrative augments his search for impersonality in this sense he praises Joyces Ulysses as a moment of cultural significance within the anarchy and futility of contemporary history; in other words, he praises analogies drawn from myths rather than any narrative method

View of Poetry

derived from the 19th century (Flaubert, Baudelaire, Ezra Pound); Flauberts influence in terms of impersonality (neutrality towards the subject-matter, a gap between the man who suffers and the mind which creates); Baudelaires influence in terms of poetic symbolism, mythological and literary parallels, allusions, sensibility, music in poetry (correspondences, images blended with different sense-impressions which reveal an ironic contrast between the actual and the ideal)

the poet captures what lies below or above practical consciousness through his sharp senses crystallised in language (during the process of composition, the poets mind is neutral towards his experience while creation is done by means of sensibility < Wordsworths spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

His poetry imbued with horror and boredom; poetry full of tensions; poetic as dramatic monologue, dramatized meditation, experience of disintegration vs. traditional belief that mind and feelings rest on something solid

Innovative language and imagery, lines of varying length, run-over verse, pauses as if for deliberation/meditation