Saturday 31 March 2007

What makes Good Poetry ? ~ John.R.Haws


What Makes Good Poetry ?by John R. Haws


Poetry of the present age is appalling. For the most part, I don’t like it. It stinks much like the garbage that’s in it. I rarely ever find anything that I consider good. It’s like everything else in modern life - watered down and bland to meet the standards of the mediocre.




So I’ve asked myself, "Self, what makes good poetry? What distinguishes the very best from all the rest?" Is it the subject matter? No. Poetry can talk about almost anything. Is it the rhyming of lines? No. That’s out of fashion in today’s world. Is it the meter? Not really. Good poetry doesn’t have to meet a beater or beat a meter – although it’s nice when it does. Well, what is it then? It’s, it’s …oh, how can I it put? It’s hard work. It’s the struggle between two words. One is OK, but the other is better. So much better, you wonder why you didn’t think of it before.



Poetry, good poetry that is, bites and stings. It arouses your senses. It burns a hole in your brain. It stimulates your imagination. You think, "I never thought it like that before." Yet, It (whatever it is) was always there for everyone to see. A fork in the road1 - some snow in the woods at night2 - some gold rushers slugging it out in a Yukon saloon3… the difference is the view that the writer brings to the reader. And that has made all the difference ages and ages hence4.




So, is good poetry written by a profound writer? Nnnn... sometimes, but not always. Well, then, how do you decide whether a writer (any writer) writes good poetry? Well, you can look for little nuances; visual slight’s of hand on paper. You can look for hidden meanings, alternative meanings, or broader meanings to the words. A great, but little-known poet, once said, "I’m just an ordinary, ordinary, ordinary man."5 How ordinary is he if he has to say it three times? I’m not talking about scattering a bunch of words on a page and calling it a poem. Although, I have done exactly that. I don’t consider it poetry. It was an experiment that failed. No matter how hard I try, I cannot make indented, peculiarly placed words on a page poetry. I have written tons of stuff that has failed to make it as poetry by my own standards. I don’t know how it would fare in the real world. My guess is, someone would greatly admire "... the Emperor’s new clothes"6. No so me.




First, good poetry has to say something. It gives meaning, value, or worth to a person, place, or thing. It speaks-about or focuses-on something that everyone can relate to. If it does this, it’s got a good start. But it can’t just be wishy-washy, pie in the sky, by and by, dribble. It’s got to hit home. It’s got to get you where you live. You’ve got to feel it in your heart, experience it in your mind, reflect on it in your thoughts. Humm… Yeah, I can relate to something like that.




Second, good poetry has great word choices - the very best. This I struggle with everything time I sit down to write. It just can’t be "Jack and Jill went up the hill". Why not "Jack and Jackie went down to Dallas"? The words should impart sensory impressions that take your breath away – like when you step outside on a winter day and the wind sucks away your breath while it pelts your face with snowflakes and you feel the wind-chill factor of –20oF down into your bones. Like that.





Third, a good poem should visually arouse the reader. "What do you mean by that?" For me, it's not enough to simple write black words on white paper. I want more communication than just that. So I search for ways to visually confirm what the words are saying. I use the tools at my disposal, like different style fonts , fonts with different colors, bold print for emphasis, and small fonts for diminished restraint and quietness. I search for words within words, like cLOUDs for the thunder and lightening in clouds. None of this is necessary for the ordinary, run-of-the-mill poet. It most assuredly is essential for the poet that is not content to be just ordinary. One word of caution though. Don't overdo this! It's easy to get carried away by all of these choices and do too much - like too much salt in a chicken soup or too much garlic in the spaghetti sauce. When this happens, the visually superfluous can rob the reader of the true taste and flavor of the words.





Fourth, a poem can be fun. Even a short limerick7 or nursery rhyme8 can make you laugh. Occasionally, it should be fun to write poetry. It should leave you with a feeling of, "Ah… that felt good – like a nice warm bath." Yes, it can be psychotherapy. No, it is not an infectious disease, despise what Cervantes says9. Yes, it can be a mental relief. But it doesn’t have to be. Now and then it can just be fun.





Finally, a poem must be honest. It must be true to itself and its maker. So much of the stuff that passes for poetry today is just the airy, aimless, meandering thoughts of a young mind uncertain of everything. Even in uncertainty there is a certain amount of certainty. Isn’t there? I think so. Sometimes honesty hurts. Sometimes honesty laughs at itself. But as John’s Little Known Proverb # 1 says, "Life is too serious to be taken seriously." Lighten up. Give the reader something to think about, but don't cause them to contemplate suicide just because you’re having a bad hair day.





Furthermore, you cannot expect everyone who reads good poetry to get it, to really understand what you're working so hard to say. The best you can hope for is that most people do. There is too much depth in some poems, not enough in others. One bite of food does not tell you much about the cook. If it’s oatmeal, he or she may be fixing breakfast. If it’s meat, she or he might be cooking dinner. But you really cannot tell much from just one bite. The same is true of a poet. One poem does not tell you much about a poet, but a dozen will give you the essential essence of that poet's perspective.




There are two more personal "don’ts" that I have to include here. I don’t particularly like poetry that preaches at me or asks me to accept some Universal, Cosmic Ideal. Such writings do not impress me. Neither do they move me. I also despise the use of poetic language as a means to push a political view, foreign or domestic. My stomach turns sour whenever I hear such stuff. It may be poetic but it ain't poetry. Everything else though, is fair game. And believe me, that game (like the greased pig at the county fair) can be very slippery.




Now let me see if I can summarize all this verbiage. Write about something people can relate to. Grab hold of and hang on to their attention. Use the very best word choices. Make the verses concrete, down to earth. Spice the print with the tools at your disposal. Throw in some fun now and then. And don't get your hopes or expectations up to high with regards to your readers. Many of them won't get the point. To paraphrase Abe Lincoln, "You can convince some the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot convince all of the people all of the time."




Footnotes
1 The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 2 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost 3 How McPherson Held the Floor by Robert W. Service 4 A paraphrase of the last stanza in The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 5 Poem No. 12, JUST AN ORDINARY MAN in POETRY - Book 1 by John R. Haws6 The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Andersen7 A LIMERICK by John R. Haws8 FATHER GOOSE by John R. Haws9 Don Quixote's niece in Chapter 6 says, "... and, even worse, writing poetry, which everyone knows is an infectious disease for which there is absolutely no cure." Translation by Burton Raffel


January 2002
Return to essays

A view on Bad Poets ~ Randall Jarrell

Randall Jarrell(1914-1965)


"In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with 'This is a poem' scrawled on them in lipstick."


"Bad Poets"by Randall Jarrell


Someties it is hard to criticize, one wants only to chronicle. The good and mediocre books come in from week to week, and I put them aside and read them and think of what to say; but the "worthless" books come in day after day, like the cries and truck sounds from the street, and there is nothing that anyone could think of that is good enough for them.

In the bad type of thin pamphlets, in hand-set lines on imported paper, people's hard lives and hopeless ambitions have expressed themselves more directly and heartbreakingly than they have ever expressed in any work of art: it is as if the writers had sent you their ripped-out arms and legs, with "This is a poem" scrawled on them in lipstick.

After a while one is embarrassed not so much for them as for poetry, which is for these poor poets one more of the openings against which everyone in the end beats his brains out; and one finds it unbearable that poetry should be so hard to write - a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey in which there is for most of the players no tail, no donkey, not even a booby prize.

If there were only some mechanism (like Seurat's proposed system of painting, or the projected Universal Algebra that Gödel believes Leibnitz to have perfected and mislaid) for reasonably and systematically converting into poetry what we see and feel and are! When one reads the verse of people who cannot write poems - people who sometimes have more intelligence, sensibility, and moral discrimination than most of the poets - it is hard not to regard the Muse as a sort of fairy godmother who says to the poet, after her colleagues have showered on him the most disconcerting and ambiguous gifts, "Well, never mind. You're still the only one that can write poetry."

It seems a detestable joke that the national poet of the Ukraine - kept a private in the army for ten years, and forbidden by the Czar to read, to draw, or ever to write a letter - should not have for his pain one decent poem.

A poor Air Corpse sergeant spends two and a half years on Attu and Kiska, and at the end of the time his verse about the war is indistinguishable from Browder's brother's parrot's. How cruel that a cardinal - for one of these book is a cardinal's - should write verse worse than his youngest choir-boy's! But in this universe of bad poetry everyone is compelled by the decrees of an unarguable Necessity to murder his mother and marry his father, to turn somersaults widdershins around his own funeral, to do everything that his worst and most imaginative enemy could wish. It would be a hard heart and a dull head that could condemn, except with a sort of sacred awe, such poets for anything that they have done - or rather, for anything that has been done to them: for they have never made anything, they have suffered their poetry as helplessly as they have anything else; so that it is neither the imitation of life nor a slice of life but life itself - beyond good, beyond evil, and certainly beyond reviewing.

1953

Back to The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner Page

New Departures

As from today, I have added new elements to "Poetic Licence".

You will now be able to:

* See videos of various kinds related to poetry and writing.
* Read the latest news as regards poetry worldwide.

ENJOY.

Sunday 25 March 2007

Tom Waits and Bono recite Bukowski

Not to everyone's taste!

Bukowski stuff

Very Dark and not to everyone's taste or inclination ~ but I like to support a broad canvas!

Like_youknow

Speak with Authority

Saturday 24 March 2007

Jack Kerouac - (Johnny Depp)

Johnny Depp acts and recites.

The Dead - Billy Collins Animated Poetry

New Departures in Poetry ~ What do you think?

As Kingfishers Catch Fire ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)As Kingfishers Catch Fire



1As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
2 As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
3 Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
4Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
5Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
6 Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
7 Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
8Crying What I do is me: for that I came.
9 I say more: the just man justices;
10 Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
11Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
12 Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
13Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
14 To the Father through the features of men's faces.

Ode to a Nightingale ~ John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821)Ode to a Nightingale


1My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
2 My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
3Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
4 One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
5'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
6 But being too happy in thine happiness,--
7 That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
8 In some melodious plot
9 Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
10 Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
11O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
12 Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
13Tasting of Flora and the country green,
14 Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
15O for a beaker full of the warm South,
16 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
17 With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
18 And purple-stained mouth;
19 That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
20 And with thee fade away into the forest dim:
21Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
22 What thou among the leaves hast never known,
23The weariness, the fever, and the fret
24 Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
25Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
26 Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
27 Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
28 And leaden-eyed despairs,
29 Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
30 Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.
31Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
32 Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
33But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
34 Though the dull brain perplexes and retards:
35Already with thee! tender is the night,
36 And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
37 Cluster'd around by all her starry Fays;
38 But here there is no light,
39 Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
40 Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.
41I cannot see what flowers are at my feet,
42 Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,
43But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet
44 Wherewith the seasonable month endows
45The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild;
46 White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine;
47 Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves;
48 And mid-May's eldest child,
49 The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine,
50 The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.
51Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
52 I have been half in love with easeful Death,
53Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
54 To take into the air my quiet breath;
55 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
56 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
57 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
58 In such an ecstasy!
59 Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain--
60 To thy high requiem become a sod.
61Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
62 No hungry generations tread thee down;
63The voice I hear this passing night was heard
64 In ancient days by emperor and clown:
65Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
66 Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
67 She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
68 The same that oft-times hath
69 Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam
70 Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.
71Forlorn! the very word is like a bell
72 To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
73Adieu! the fancy cannot cheat so well
74 As she is fam'd to do, deceiving elf.
75Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades
76 Past the near meadows, over the still stream,
77 Up the hill-side; and now 'tis buried deep
78 In the next valley-glades:
79 Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
80 Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?
Notes
2] hemlock: a poisonous plant which produces death by paralysis.
4] Lethe: a river of the lower world from which the shades drank, and thus obtained forgetfulness of the past.
7] Dryad: a wood nymph.
9] beechen: of the beech tree.
11] draught: what can be swallowed in a single drink.
13] Flora: the goddess of flowers, here used for flowers themselves. Cf. Keats' letter to Fanny Keats ca. May 1, 1819: "O there is nothing like fine weather ... and, please heaven, a little claret-wine cool out of a cellar a mile deep -- with a few or a good many ratafia cakes -- a rocky basin to bathe in, a strawberry bed to say your prayers to Flora in" (Letters, II, 56).
14] Provençal song. In the early Middle Ages the poets of southern France, the troubadours of Provence, were particularly famous for their love lyrics.
15] warm South: a southern wine.
16] Hippocrene: a fountain on Mount Helicon in Boeotia, sacred to the Muses.
26] Tom Keats died of consumption on Dec. 1, 1818.
32] Bacchus and his pards: the Roman god of wine, whho traditionally is shown in a conveyance drawn by leopards.
33] viewless: invisible. This phrase appears in half a dozen poems from 1765 to Mary Robinson's "The Progress of Liberty" in 1806 (II, 426).
37] Fays: fairies.
43] embalmed: full of balms, or perfumes. Lines 43-49 appear to echo Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, II.i.249-52 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J. J. M. Tobin, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997):
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine ...
46] pastoral eglantine. Eglantine is properly the sweet-briar, though popularly applied to various varieties of the wild rose. "Pastoral" presumably because often referred to in pastoral poetry.
51] Darkling: in the dark; cf Milton, Paradise Lost, III, 38-40: "As the wakeful Bird/Sings darkling, and in shadiest Covert hid/Tunes her nocturnal Note."
60] high requiem: a liturgical song for the repose of the dead.
67] alien corn: alien because Ruth was not an Israelite but a Moabitess, gleaning in the barley fields of Judah (Ruth 2:1-2).
Commentary by Ian Lancashire(2002/9/9)
Between the first three words of "Ode to a Nightingale," "My heart aches," and its last, "sleep," John Keats describes a brief personal escape from an existence whose suffering he can no longer endure. The "I" who speaks eight times in this perfect eight-stanza lyric is Keats himself, not a surrogate persona. Ambiguity, irony, and even implication have no place here, but biography does. Keats' letters show that he certainly believed the poet possessed "negative capability," the self-nullifying power to enter other things and speak as and for them. "Ode to a Nightingale" depicts one such experience. True enough, Keats leaves his "sole self" (72) to join with the nightingale in verse that briefly realizes, in human language, the ageless beauty of its unintelligible song. Yet it is Keats who does so, in May 1819, not the living reader, not some character in a dramatic monologue manipulated by a poet who stays outside his created world. During his training as a medical practitioner, Keats saw drugs like opium (3) and wine (11) deaden the pain of feverishly ill men, the aged shaking from palsy, and the consumptive young (23-26). His own brother Tom, dying of consumption at this time, lingers on in "Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies" (26).
Keats' friend Charles Brown recollected, 17 years later, how Keats wrote this ode.
In the spring of 1818 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feeling on the song of our nightingale. The writing was not well legible; and it was difficult to arrange the stanzas on so many scraps. With his assistance I succeeded, and this was his 'Ode to a Nightingale', a poem which has been the delight of every one.
The only surviving draft of the ode, in Keats' handwriting, is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. It appears on two half-sheets and has "an uncancelled rejected beginning ... and the first thirty lines written continuously without stanza divisions" (Stillinger 651). Perhaps this manuscript, which Keats gave to his friend J. H. Reynolds, represents a later stage of the poem than what Brown saw on four or five "scraps." Whatever the textual history may be (and we are unlikely to know much more), Brown recalls the earliest stage of composition. Keats took "his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under the plum-tree" near Brown's house and sat under it "for two or three hours," taking pleasure in the song of a nightingale that "had built her nest" there. Afterwards, Keats returned to the house with some "scraps" on which he had been writing the ode.
Keats did not record these few hours in "Ode to a Nightingale." In the poem, the bird sings "in some melodious plot / Of beechen green" (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is "night" or "midnight" (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33) and only returning to himself when his "fancy" fails, its spell broken by a word, "forlorn" (71-74). The morning in his chair under the plum-tree stimulated the experience described by the poem, in what we now call lucid (or wide-awake) dreaming. At poem's end, Keats recognizes this when he asks, "Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / ... Do I wake or sleep?" (79-80). He has had a disorienting, transcendental experience. One moment, sightless in a pitch-black midnight, high among the leaves of a forest of trees, he was listening to the nightingale's "ecstasy"; and then suddenly he was back alone, if Brown remembers truly, under a plum-tree one morning near his house.
In retrospect, after the event, Keats describes his experience as a somatoform (bodily) dissociation, an out-of-body experience, or what parapsychologists term an OBE. Others might call it a "near-death" experience. During a critical illness, such as a heart attack, the self may appear to rise out of the dying body and to rush down a tunnel towards a light, only returning to the body when its trauma ceases. Both out-of-body and near-death experiences, available to a very large percentage of the population, are widely documented by those who had them and by other observers. A typical OBE begins when sensory input is disrupted, sometimes by drugs. The mind then feels itself float upwards out of the body to a height that has been termed "bird's-eye" or tree-high. Often the ascent may seem like travelling through a tunnel towards a bright light. Experiencing itself being divided into two, or having a dissociated double, the self may feel itself near death. Afterwards, when the mind returns to the body, the person recalls his experience, not as a dream during REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, but as vivid or wide-awake dreaming.
"Ode to a Nightingale" opens when Keats acknowledges feeling "a drowsy numbness" that he associates with having taken drugs like hemlock or opium, or with drinking from the classical river, Lethe, which makes humanity forget what it was like to have lived. Keats then wishes to drink deeply of red wine so that he could "fade away" (20-21), leaving the suffering world for the nightingale's joyful song. What transports him, however, is the imagination. Despite the physical brain, which "perplexes and retards" (34), his mind enables him to "fly" up to the nightingale in the trees. He imagines the moon's bright light blown through "winding mossy ways" (40) but arrives in utter darkness, lacking sight and smell. He imagines himself desiring death, "Now more than ever seems it rich to die" (55), and experiencing it, becoming "a sod" (60). Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word "forlorn," Keats comes "back" to his "sole self," that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced as, perhaps, "a waking dream" (79). Many facets of an OBE are here: drug-associated sensory deprivation, a flight upwards of a double mind through dark "ways" illuminated by a great light, the moon, a bird's-eye perspective among the tree-tops, a near-death experience, the descent of a double to its abandoned self, and a sense of having had a vivid dream.
Keats did not write "Ode to a Nightingale" as testimony about an "out-of-body experience"; it would not be recognized or named for more than a century. On the other hand, neither does Keats appear to invent this dissociative event or to copy it from other poets. Anyone can meditate, one fine, warm morning, about escaping from the harsh world of humanity into the countryside and its healing natural beauty. Samuel T. Coleridge did so in his lyric, "The Lime-tree Bower my Prison":
... Henceforth I shall know That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,No waste so vacant, but may well employEach faculty of sense, and keep the heartAwake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,That we may lift the soul, and contemplateWith lively joy the joys we cannot share.
Some readers believe that Keats drew from Coleridge here, but despite "lift[ing] the soul," opiate Coleridge remained fully possessed, in sunlight, of himself and his senses. Keats' last six lines owe much more to Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper." Wordsworth described the valley maiden singing, in a strange language as "No Nightingale did ever chaunt" (9), such "plaintive numbers" (18; cf. Keats' "plaintive anthem") that, once the speaker had climbed the hill, remained in his mind as "music ... / Long after it was heard no more" (31-32). As the reaper's song "could have no ending" (26), so the voice of Keats' nightingale was "immortal," heard in "ancient days" and Biblical history as in contemporary England. Both poets cluster "plaintive," unheard "music," "hill-side," and "valley" in the context of a nightingale's song, strong evidence for influence, but Wordsworth does not allude to any dissociative experience.
Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" springs from a poet's personal life-changing, mind-wrenching experience of a timeless paradise, a world "with no pain" (56). Only someone who has spent days tending the terminally ill can understand with what depth Keats longs for this respite. In the event's aftermath, he recreates the experience "on the viewless wings of Poesy" (33), using all his craft's resources, but with little sensory recall. The "tender" night (35) and "embalmed darkness" (43) disable his sight and leave him guessing at fragrances. Simple words like "song," "voice," "anthem," and "music" only hint at the nightingale's soul-pouring "ecstasy" (58). He imitates it with astonishingly resonant lines like "Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways" (40), and "The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves" (50). For the rest, Keats must describe the bird-song "of summer" (10) by depicting what he knows, its hearers over the centuries. To recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering. Only by being in two worlds at once, the self below, its double above, can we know the song's essential beauty. Why else did the song that "found a path / Through the sad heart of Ruth ... sick for home," leave her standing "in tears amid the alien corn" (65-67)? She was not, like Keats at the start, "too happy in thine happiness" (6). Quintessentially, we know the nightingale's song truly only when we are aware that we cannot keep it for long. It is, at heart, "plaintive" (75), that is, sorrowful.
For this reason, Keats echoes Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" in the last stanza. Although their ways to beauty are different, their experiences are one.

Untitled ~ W.B.Yeats

An untitled poem by W. B. Yeats


Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce;
A Helen of social welfare dream
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some think it matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance,
That if their neighbours figured plain,
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort
Observant old men know it well;
And when they know what old books tell
And that no better can be had
Know why an old man should be mad.

Lay your sleeping Head, my Love ~ W.H.Auden

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit's sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreaded cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless,
Find your mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

W. H. Auden

My Sad Captains ~ Thom Gunn

My Sad Captains by Thom Gunn


One by one they appear in
the darkness: a few friends, and
a few with historical
names. How late they start to shine!
but before they fade they stand
perfectly embodied, all
the past lapping them like a
cloak of chaos. They were men
who, I thought, lived only to
renew the wasteful force they
spent with each hot convulsion.
They remind me, distant now.
True, they are not at rest yet,
but now that they are indeed
apart, winnowed from failures,
they withdraw to an orbit
and turn with disinterested
hard energy, like the stars.

Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn (1929 - 2004)

GUNN, Thom(son William) (1929–2004), was born in Gravesend and raised principally in Hampstead. His father was a journalist, as his mother had been before her marriage.

In “My Life Up to Now,” an autobiographical essay written in 1977, Gunn warmly recalls growing up in a household full of books and playing with friends on the Heath. However, his parents divorced, and his mother, with whom he lived after the divorce and who encouraged his interest in reading and writing, took her life when he was 15. It is possible that the emphasis, in certain of his poems, on self-definition and self-reliance reflects not only such literary influences as the French existentialists, but also personal circumstances that required independence and resilience of him while he was still relatively young. After two years of national service in the army, Gunn went in 1950 to Cambridge. Here he attended lectures by F. R. Leavis, who impressed him with his passion for literature, his belief in the value of realized imagery, and his insistence on the expressive significance of verse rhythm. Gunn also discovered Donne and read all of Shakespeare, both authors contributing to the formation of his early style, which is exemplified in “Tamer and Hawk” and “The Beach Head,” and which is characterized by a masterful control of the metaphysical conceit, the extended metaphor or analogy. In 1954 he traveled to California, where he held a fellowship at Stanford University and studied for a year with Yvor Winters, about whom he has written a fine reminiscence, “On a Drying Hill.” After living and teaching briefly in Texas, Gunn returned to the San Francisco Bay area, settling in San Francisco itself in 1961.


From 1958 to 1966 he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, but resigned his professorship to devote more time to writing. He subsequently held occasional visiting appointments at different schools; since the late 1970s, he has taught at Berkeley for one term a year. While at Cambridge, Gunn wrote most of the poems that appeared in his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954; revd. edns. 1958, 1962). Impressive for their concentration, their vigour, and their effective fusion of traditional metre with contemporary idiom, these poems established him as one of the most arresting voices of his generation. Though critics associated him with the Movement, his predilections were never as sharply anti-modernist as those of such Movement poets as Larkin and Amis.


Indeed, Gunn soon began to investigate different tonalities, a development encouraged by his move to the United States and by his reading of Williams Carlos Williams, Stevens, and other American experimentalists. Gunn’s second book, The Sense of Movement (1957), and more especially his third, My Sad Captains (1961), feature poems in syllabic measures, poems which, like “Vox Humana” and “Considering the Snail,” show the poet speaking in a quieter, more tentative manner. Gunn has remarked that syllabics provided him with a transitional form to work his way into free verse, and Touch (1967) contains his earliest free-verse poems. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, who began with conventional forms and switched exclusively to free verse, Gunn continued to work in metre too; and Moly (1971), with such memorable poems as “At the Centre” and “Sunlight,” employs strict forms to render illuminations related to experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. Jack Straw’s Castle (1976) in part explores darker aspects of these experiences. The title piece, a sequence of poems examining consciousness nightmarishly isolated from its customary contexts, recalls Gunn’s earlier “Misanthropos” sequence, which appears in Touch and which has as its protagonist a man who has survived a terrible world war and who believes himself to be the only survivor, “the last man” on earth. The Passages of Joy (1982) shows a growing concern with friendship and its social virtues.


Gunn is a homosexual and in the mid- and late 1980s he wrote a number of powerful poems about the AIDS epidemic, collected in The Man with Night Sweats (London, 1992). Overall, Gunn’s poetry has evolved towards a more directly humane treatment of its subjects. This evolution may be seen in the changing aspects of two abiding qualities in his work: his sympathy with the outsider-rebel and his interest in the nature of courage. Whereas the outsider-rebels of earlier poems tend to exhibit, as do the motorcyclists in “On the Move,” romantic self-sufficiency, those in later work are more likely to be injured or lost, as with “Sparrow” or “'Slow Walker.” And if the characteristic gesture of courage in early poems like “Lelia” and “In Santa Maria del Popolo” is that of opening the arms wide to the existential void, in the later work courage is perhaps best expressed by the comforting embrace that the man dying of AIDS in “Memory Unsettled” confers on a friend more sick than he. Gunn has also collaborated with his brother, the photographer Ander Gunn, on Positives (1966), supplying verse to accompany his brother’s photographs. The Occasions of Poetry, Essays in Criticism and Autobiography, (ed. Clive Wilmer (1982; enlarged edn., 1985) displays the wide range of Gunn’s reading and literary sympathies. Key writings on Gunn include the autobiographical essays in The Occasions of Poetry. Jack W. C. Hagstrom and George Bixby’s Thom Gunn, A Bibliography 1940–1978 (London, 1979) offers, as well as data on the poems, a list of interviews with Gunn and entries for his uncollected book-reviews. Three Contemporary Poets: Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and R. S. Thomas, ed. A. E. Dyson (London, 1990) reprints George Fraser’s fine 1961 essay, “The Poetry of Thom Gunn,” and Wilmer’s illuminating “Definition and Flow: Thom Gunn in the 1970s.” Gregory Woods’s Articulate Flesh (New Haven, Conn., 1987) has a chapter on Gunn as a gay poet. In addition, an issue of PN Review (No. 70, 1989) devoted chiefly to Gunn contains useful discussions of his work. His poems are widely anthologized; the most comprehensive selection of them is his Selected Poems 1950–1975 (London, 1979), winner of the W. H. Smith Award in 1980. from The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford UP. Copyright © Oxford UP. Near the end of his life, Gunn’s poetry increasingly focused on mortality and the constancy of love and physical desire, as witnessed in his final collection, Boss Cupid (London, 2000). Here, for the first time, Gunn confronted in verse the subject of his mother’s suicide: “I am made by her, and undone.” This last collection is considered one of his finest. Gunn died of a heart attack on April 25, 2004. (Poetry Foundation, 2006) POETRY Thom Gunn. Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1953. The Sense of Movement. London: Faber, 1957. My Sad Captains, and Other Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Fighting Terms: A Selection, Fantasy Press. Oxford: Faber, 1962. With Ted Hughes. Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1962. A Geography. Iowa City: Stone Wall Press, 1966. Positives, photographs by brother, Ander Gunn. London: Faber, 1966. Touch. London: Faber, 1967. The Garden of the Gods. Cambridge: Pym-Randall Press, 1968. The Explorers. Devon: Richard Gilbertson, Crediton, Devon, 1969. The Fair in the Woods. Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1969. Poems 1950–1966: A Selection. London: Faber, 1969. Sunlight. New York: Albondocani Press, 1969. Last Days at Teddington. London: Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971. Moly. London: Faber, 1971. With others. Corgi Modern Poets in Focus 5. Edited by Dannie Abse. London: Corgi, 1971. Poem after Chaucer. New York: Albondocani Press, 1971. Moly [and] My Sad Captains. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973. Mandrakes. London: Rainbow Press, 1973. Songbook. New York: Albondocani Press, 1973. To the Air. Boston: David R. Godine , 1974. Jack Straw’s Castle. New York: F. Hallman, 1975. Jack Straw’s Castle and Other Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1976. The Missed Beat. West Burke: Janus Press, 1976. Games of Chance. Omaha: Abattoir, 1979. Selected Poems 1950–1975. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979. Bally Power Play. Toronto: Massey Press, 1979. Talbot Road. New York: Helikon Press, 1981. The Menace. San Francisco: ManRoot, 1982. The Passages of Joy. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982. Lament. Champaign, IL: Doe Press, 1985. Sidewalks. New York: Albondocani Press, 1985. The Hurtless Trees. New York: Jordan Davies, 1986. Night Sweats. Florence: R. L. Barth, 1987. Undesirables. Youngstown: Pig Iron Press, 1988. At the Barriers. New York: NADJA, 1989. Death’s Door. Tuscaloosa, AL: Red Hydra, 1989. The Man with Night Sweats. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992. Unsought Intimacies: Poems of 1991. Berkeley: Peter Koch, 1993. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1994. Boss Cupid. London: Faber, 2000. OTHER Editor. Poetry from Cambridge 1951–52: A Selection of Verse by Members of the University. London: Fortune Press, 1953. Editor, with Ted Hughes. Five American Poets. Faber: London, 1963. Editor and author of introduction. Fulke Greville Brooke, Selected Poems of Fulke Greville. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Editor. Ben Jonson: Poems. New York: Penguin, 1974. The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. Edited by Clive Wilmer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982. Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Editor. Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 2000.

The Force that through the Green Fuse drives the Flower ~ Dylan Thomas

The Force That through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower by Dylan Thomas


The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman’s lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather’s wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover’s tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Poem in October ~ Dylan Thomas

Poem in October by Dylan Thomas


It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.
My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.
A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.
Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sun light
And the legends of the green chapels
And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singingbirds.
And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

Short Biography of Dylan Thomas

Dylan Thomas (1914 - 1953) Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) grew up in Wales, however, he lived much of his life in London. At age 20, he published Eighteen Poems to instant acclaim. Thomas gave four reading tours of the United States, earning renown for mesmerizing performances and a boisterous personality. His last drinking binge at the White Horse Tavern in New York City led to his death at age 39.

John Clare's Home

All clear for poet Clare's museum to be developed.

PEOPLE’S POET: John Clare’s cottage in Helpston.




A £1.3 million scheme to turn the home of poet John Clare into a tourist attraction has been given the green light.

The 16th-century cottage and dovecote in Helpston, near Peterborough, will be converted into the John Clare Heritage Centre.Visitors are expected to flock to Helpston from across the world, along with coach parties of schoolchildren.

The existing cottage will be turned into a time capsule depicting rural life in the 18th and 19th centuries.Additions made in the 20th century will be ripped out and concrete floors will be replaced by traditional stock brick and stone flag floors.A new annexe will be constructed behind the historic cottage, which will include a refreshment area, toilets, a cloakroom and manager and warden’s lodgings.An 18th-century-style garden will boast authentic tools, a hen coop, bees, rabbits, a mini-orchard and a herb and medicinal garden.

The work received the go-ahead this week after planning officers at Peterborough City Council rubberstamped the scheme.The building is owned by the National Education and Environment Trust, and will be run in partnership with the John Clare Trust and the John Clare Society.The £1.3 million Heritage Lottery Fund windfall will also pay for a manager and education officer for five years.

Today, the editor of the John Clare Society journal, Professor John Goodridge, said “More than any other English poet, he describes the beauty of the countryside.

“It is a bit of cliché, but he is the people’s poet, and his work is accessible to many readers.”

The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock ~ T.S.Eliot

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
by T. S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot)

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair —
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin —
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old ... I grow old ...
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.


Source: Collected Poems 1909-1962 (Harcourt, Inc., 1963).

The Waste Land ~ T.S.Eliot

The Waste Land
by T. S. Eliot

"Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidiin ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλατι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω."
For Ezra Poundil miglior fabbro.

I. The Burial of the Dead
April is the cruellest month, breedingLilacs 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. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade, And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten, And drank coffee, and talked for an hour. Bin gar kine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch. And when we were children, staying at the archduke's, My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,And I was frightened. He said, Marie, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free. I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow.Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know onlyA heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from eitherYour shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. Frisch weht der Wind Der Heimat zu, Mein Irisch Kind, Wo weilest du? "You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; "They called me the hyacinth girl."–Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence. Oed' und leer das Meer.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring. Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone, Tell her I bring the horoscope myself: One must be so careful these days.
Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled, And each man fixed his eyes before his feet. Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson! "You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! "That corpse you planted last year in your garden, "Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? "Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed? "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men, "Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!"You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable—mon frère!"

II. A Game of Chess
The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out (Another hid his eyes behind his wing)Doubled the flames of seven branched candelabra Reflecting light upon the table as The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it, From satin cases poured in rich profusion; In vials of ivory and coloured glass Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes, Unguent, powdered, or liquid—troubled, confused And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air That freshened from the window, these ascended In fattening the prolonged candle-flames, Flung their smoke into the laquearia, Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling. Huge sea-wood-fed with copper Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone, In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. Above the antique mantel was displayed. As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingaleFilled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, "Jug Jug" to dirty ears.And other withered stumps of time Were told upon the walls; staring forms Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. Footsteps shuffled on the stair.Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Clawed into words, then would be savagely still.
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think."
I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.
"What is that noise?" The wind under the door. "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?" Nothing again nothing. "Do "You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?"
I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?" But
O O O O that Shakespearean Rag—It's so elegant So intelligent "What shall I do now? What shall I do?" "I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street "With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? "What shall we ever do?" The hot water at ten. And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.
When Lil's husband got demobbed, I said—I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself,HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you. And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don't give it him, there's others will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something o' that, I said.Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said, Others can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face, It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don't want children? HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon, And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot—HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou. Goodnight May. Goodnight. Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight. Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.

III. The Fire Sermon
The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette endsOr other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept. . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. A rat crept softly through the vegetation Dragging its slimy belly on the bank While I was fishing in the dull canal On a winter evening round behind the gashouse Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him. White bodies naked on the low damp ground And bones cast in a little low dry garret, Rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year. But at my back from time to time I hear The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the spring. O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole!
Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc'd. Tereu
Unreal City Under the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants C.i.f. London: documents at sight, Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waitsLike a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed)Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent's clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire, The time is now propitious, as he guesses, The meal is ended, she is bored and tired, Endeavours to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronising kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit. . .
She turns and looks a moment in the glass, Hardly aware of her departed lover; Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass: "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over." When lovely woman stoops to folly and Paces about her room again, alone,She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, And puts a record on the gramophone.
"This music crept by me upon the waters" And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street. O City city, I can sometimes hear Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, The pleasant whining of a mandoline And a clatter and a chatter from within Where fishmen lounge at noon: where the walls Of Magnus Martyr hold Inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold.
The river sweats Oil and tar The barges drift With the turning tide Red sails Wide To leeward, swing on the heavy spar. The barges wash Drifting logs Down Greenwich reach Past the Isle of Dogs, Weialala leia Wallala leialala
Elizabeth and Leicester Beating oars The stern was formed A gilded shell Red and gold The brisk swell Rippled both shores Southwest wind Carried down stream The peal of bells White towers Weialala leia Wallala leialala
"Trams and dusty trees. Highbury bore me. "Richmond and Kew Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe."
"My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised 'a new start.' I made no comment. What should I resent?"
"On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing." la la
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burningO Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest
burning

IV. Death by Water
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. 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. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

V. What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead We who were living are now dying With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock Rock and no water and the sandy road The road winding above among the mountains Which are mountains of rock without water If there were water we should stop and drink Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand If there were only water amongst the rock Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit There is not even silence in the mountains But dry sterile thunder without rain There is not even solitude in the mountains But red sullen faces sneer and snarl From doors of mudcracked houses If there were water And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hoodedI do not know whether a man or a woman—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air Murmur of maternal lamentation Who are those hooded hordes swarming Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth Ringed by the flat horizon only What is the city over the mountains Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air Falling towers Jerusalem Athens AlexandriaVienna London Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind's homeIt has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one. Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence, Then spoke the thunder DADatta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms DA Dayadhvam: I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus DA Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow Le Prince d'Aquitaine à la tour abolie These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih

NOTES ON "THE WASTE LAND"
Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Macmillan). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston's book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest of the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble. To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.

I. The Burial of the Dead
Line 20. Cf. Ezekiel II, i. 23. Cf. Ecclesiastes XII, v. 31. V. Tristan und Isolde, I, verses 5-8. 42. Id, III, verse 24. 46. I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man, a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V. The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the "crowds of people," and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself 60. Cf. Baudelaire: "Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves, "Où le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant." 63. Cf. Inferno III, 55-57: "si Iunga tratta di gente, ch'io non avrei mai creduto che morte tanta n'avesse disfatta." 64, Cf. Inferno IV, 25-27: "Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, "non avea pianto, ma' che di sospiri, "che l'aura eterna facevan tremare." 68, A phenomenon which I have often noticed. 74, Cf. the Dirge in Webster's White Devil. 76. V. Baudelaire, Preface to Fleurs du Mal.

II. A Game of Chess
77. Cf. Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, I. 190. 92. Laquearia. V. Aeneid, I, 726: dependent Iychni laquearibus aureis incensi, et noctem flammis funalia vincunt. 98. Sylvan scene, V. Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 140. 99. V. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VI, Philomela. 100. C£ Part III, I. 204. 115. Cf, Part III, I. 195. 118. Cf. Webster: "Is the wind in that door still?" 126. Cf, Part I, I. 37,48. 138. Cf. the game of chess in Middleton's Women beware Women. 176. V. Spencer, Prothalamion. 192. Cf. The Tempest, I, ii, 196. Cf. Marvell, To His Coy Mistress. 197. Cf. Day, Parliament of Bees: "When of the sudden, listening, you shall hear, "A noise of horns and hunting, which shall bring "Actaeon to Diana in the spring, "Where all shall see her naked skin . . . " 199. I do not know the origin of the ballad from which these lines are taken: it was reported to me from Sydney, Australia. 202. V. Verlaine, Parsifal. 210. The currants were quoted at a price "carriage and insurance free to London"; and the Bill of Lading etc. were to be handed to the buyer upon payment of the sight draft. 218. Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a "character," is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, se1ler of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so a1l the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias, What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: '. . . Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est Quam, quae contingit maribus,' dixisse, 'voluptas.' Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota, Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem Vidit et 'est yestrae si tanta potentia plagae: Dixit 'ut auctoris sortem in contraria mutet, Nunc quoque vos feriam!' percussis anguibus isdem Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago. Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, At pater omnipotens (neque enim Iicetinrita cuiquam Facta dei fecisse deo) pro Iumine adempto Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore. 221. This may not appear as exact as Sappho's lines, but I had In mind the "longshore" or "dory" fisherman, who returns at nightfall. 253. V. Goldsmith, the song in The Vicar of Wakefield. 257. V. The Tempest, as above. 264. The interior of St. Magnus Martyr is to my mind one of the finest among Wren's interiors.. See The Proposed Demolillon of Nineteen City Churches: (P. S. King & Son, Ltd.). 266. The Song of the (three) Thames-daughters begins here. From line 292 to 306 inclusive they speak in tum. V. Götterdämmerung, III, i: the Rhine-daughters. 279. V. Froude, Elizabeth, Vol. I, ch. iv, letter of De Quadra to Philip of Spain: "In the aflemoon we were in a barge, watching the games on the river. (The queen) was alonne with Lord Robert and myself on the poop, when they began to talk nonsense, and went so far that Lord Robert at last said, as I was on the spot there was no reason why they should not be married if the queen pleased." 293. Cf. Purgatorio, V, 133: "Ricorditi di me, che son la Pia; "Siena mi fe', disfecemi Maremma." 307. V. St. Augustine's Confessions: "to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears." 308. The complete text of the Buddha's Fire Sermon (which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount) from which these words are taken, will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's Buddhism in Translation (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident. 309. From St. Augustine's Confessions again. The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.

V. What the Thunder Said
In the first part of Part V three themes are employed: the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous (see Miss Weston's book) and the present decay of eastern Europe. 357. This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit-thrush which I have heard in Quebec County. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) "it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats. . . . Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled." Its "water-dripping song" is justly celebrated. 360. The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton's): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted. 367-77, Cf. Hermann Hesse, Blick ins Chaos: "Schon ist halb Europa, schon ist zumindest der halbe Osten Europas auf dem Wege zum Chaos, fährt betrunken im heiligem Wahnam Abgrund entlang und singt dazu, singt betrunken und hymnisch wie Dmitri Karamasoff sang. Ueber diese Lieder lacht der Burger beleidigt, der Heilige und Seher hört sie mit Tränen." 402. "Datta, dayadhvam, damyata" (Give, sympathise, control). The fable of the meaning of the Thunder is found in the Brihadaranyaka – Upanishad, 5, 1. A translation is found in Deussen's Sechzig Upanishads des Veda, p, 489. 408. Cf. Webster, The White Devil, V, vi: ". . . they'll remarry Ere the worm pierce your winding-sheet, ere the spider Make a thin curtain for your epitaphs." 412. Cf. Inferno, XXXIII, 46: "ed io sentii chiavar l'uscio di sotto all'orribile torre." Aho F H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 346."My external sensations are no less private to myself than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experiences falls within my alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it. . . . In for each is peculiar and private to that soul." 425. V. Weston: From Ritual to Romance; chapter on the Fisher King. 428. V. Purgatorio, XXXVI, 148. "'Ara vos prec per aquella valor 'que vos guida al som de l'escalina, 'sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.' Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina." 429. V. Pervigilium Veneris. Cf. Philomela in Parts II and III. 430. V. Gerard de Nerval, Sonnet El Desdichado. 432. V. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. 434. Shantih. Repeated as here, a formal ending to an Upanishad. "The Peace which passeth understanding" is a feeble translation of the content of this word.
"The Waste Land" - 1922 Edition

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ~ Robert Frost

'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'

Whose woods these are I think I know,
His house is in the village though.
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer,
To stop without a farmhouse near,
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake,
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep,
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

Not Waving but Drowning ~ Stevie Smith

'Not Waving but Drowning'

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
and not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
and now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no, no, no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

Ezra Pound

'And the days are not full enough'

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.


Ezra Pound

Dulce Et Decorum Est ~ Wilfred Owen

'Dulce Et Decorum Est'

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! --- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime ---
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,---
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.


Wilfred Owen

Stop All the Clocks ~ W.H.Auden

'Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone'

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


W H Auden

And Death Shall Have no Dominion ~ Dylan Thomas

'And Death Shall Have No Dominion'

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad and shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews gave way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

One Day More ~ One Day Less

One day more,One day less

I Here Now

She there then

We Everywhere Sometime


On the very edge
Of a breakthrough.

I , stepping precariously, with the professional’s eye
just avoiding.
She , playing at it, so secure,
no risk there.

And we?
We, our we-ness, never ever exerted itself beyond an intimate caressing,
A wrestling match.

And so we live our lives extrava - gently

One day more, one day less
One day more,
One day less.

© By Vernon Goddard

Thursday 22 March 2007

T.S.Eliot


T. S. Eliot
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T.S. Eliot

T.S. Eliot (by E.O. Hoppe, 1919)
Born
September 26, 1888 St. Louis, Missouri, USA
Died
January 4, 1965 (age 76) London, United Kingdom
Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM (September 26, 1888January 4, 1965), was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. He wrote the poems "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", The Waste Land, "The Hollow Men", "Ash Wednesday", and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
Contents[hide]
1 Life
1.1 Early life and education
1.2 Later life in England
1.3 Eliot's Poetry
1.3.1 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
1.3.2 The Waste Land
1.3.3 Ash Wednesday
1.3.4 Four Quartets
1.4 Eliot's plays
1.5 Eliot as critic
1.6 Other works
2 Criticism of Eliot
3 Charges of anti-Semitism
3.1 Public expressions
3.2 Protests against
3.3 Rebuttals
4 Recognition
4.1 Formal recognition
4.2 Popular recognition
4.2.1 Literature (etc.)
4.2.2 Songs
4.2.3 Other
5 Other facts
6 Bibliography
6.1 Poetry
6.2 Plays
6.3 Nonfiction
7 Further reading
8 Notes
9 External links
//

[edit] Life

[edit] Early life and education
Eliot was born into a prominent family from St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Henry Ware Eliot (18431919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis; his mother, born Charlotte Champe Stearns (18431929), wrote poems and was also a social worker. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were 44 years old when he was born. His four sisters were between eleven and nineteen years older than he; his brother was eight years older.
William Greenleaf Eliot, Eliot's grandfather, was a Unitarian minister, who moved to St. Louis when it was still on the frontier. He was instrumental in founding many of the city's institutions, including Washington University in St. Louis. One distant cousin was Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard University from 1869 to 1909, and a fifth cousin, another Thomas Eliot, was chancellor of Washington University. His family had Massachusetts ties and summered at a large cottage they had built in Gloucester, MA. The cottage, near a rocky shore, had a view of the sea, and the young Eliot often went sailing.[1]
From 1898 to 1905, Eliot was a day student at Smith Academy, a preparatory school for Washington University. At the academy, Eliot studied Latin, Greek, French, and German. Upon graduation, he could have gone to Harvard University, but his parents sent him to Milton Academy (in Milton, Massachusetts, near Boston) for a preparatory year. There he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, where he earned a B.A.. The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken. The next year, he earned a master's degree at Harvard. In the 1910–1911 school year, Eliot lived in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne and touring the continent.
Returning to Harvard in 1911 as a doctoral student in philosophy, Eliot studied the writings of F.H. Bradley, Buddhism and Indic philology, (learning Sanskrit and Pāli to read some of the religious texts.[2]) He was awarded a scholarship to attend Merton College, Oxford in 1914, and, before settling there, he visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program in philosophy. When the First World War broke out, however, he went to London and then to Oxford. Eliot was not happy at Merton and declined a second year there. Instead, in the summer of 1915, he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and, after a short visit, alone, to the U.S.A. to see his family, he returned to London and took a few teaching jobs. He continued to work on his dissertation and, in the spring of 1916, sent it to Harvard, which accepted it. Because he did not appear in person to defend his dissertation, however, he was not awarded his Ph.D. (In 1964, the dissertation was published as Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley.) During Eliot's university career, he studied with George Santayana, Irving Babbitt, Henri Bergson, C. R. Lanman, Josiah Royce, Bertrand Russell, and Harold Joachim.
In a letter to Aiken late in December 1914, Eliot, aged 26, wrote "I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society)" and then added a complaint that he was still a virgin.[3] Less than four months later, he was introduced by Scofield Thayer, then also at Oxford, to Vivienne Haigh-Wood (May 28, 1888January 22, 1947).[4] Haigh-Wood was a Cambridge governess. On 26 June 1915, she and Eliot, respectively aged 27 and 26 years old, were married in a register office.
Bertrand Russell took an interest in Vivien (the spelling she preferred[5]) while the newlyweds stayed in his flat. Some scholars have suggested that Vivien and Russell had an affair (see Carole Seymour-Jones, Painted Shadow), but these allegations have never been confirmed. Eliot, in a private paper, written in his sixties, confessed: "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself (also under the influence of Pound) that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."[6]

A plaque at SOAS's Faber Building, 24 Russell Square commemorating T S Eliot's years at Faber and Faber.
After leaving Merton, Eliot worked as a school teacher, most notably at Highgate School, where he taught the young John Betjeman and later at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. To earn extra money, he wrote book reviews and lectured at evening extension courses. In 1917, he took a position at Lloyds Bank in London, where he worked on foreign accounts. In 1925, he left Lloyds to become a director of the publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), where he remained for the rest of his career, becoming a director of the firm.

[edit] Later life in England
In 1927, Eliot took two important steps in his self-definition. On June 29 he converted to Anglicanism and in November he dropped his American citizenship and became a British subject. In 1928, Eliot summarised his beliefs when he wrote in the preface to his book, For Lancelot Andrewes that "the general point of view [of the book's essays] may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion."
By 1932, Eliot had been contemplating a separation from his wife for some time. When Harvard University offered him the Charles Eliot Norton professorship for the 1932-1933 academic year, he accepted, leaving Vivien in England. Upon his return in 1933, Eliot officially separated from Vivien. He avoided all but one meeting with his wife between his leaving for America in 1932 and her death in 1947. (Vivien died at Northumberland House, a mental hospital north of London, where she was committed in 1938, without ever having been visited by Eliot, who was still her husband.[7])
From 1946 to 1957, Eliot shared a flat with his friend, John Davy Hayward, who gathered and archived Eliot's papers and styled himself Keeper of the Eliot Archive.[8] He also collected Eliot's pre-"Prufrock" verse, commercially published after Eliot's death as Poems Written in Early Youth. When Eliot and Hayward separated their household in 1957, Hayward retained his collection of Eliot's papers, which he bequeathed to King's College, Cambridge in 1965.
Eliot's second marriage was happy but short. On January 10, 1957, he married Esmé Valerie Fletcher, to whom he was introduced by Collin Brooks. In sharp contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Miss Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August 1949. Like his marriage to Vivien, the wedding was kept a secret to preserve his privacy. The ceremony was held in a church at 6.15 a.m. with virtually no one other than his wife's parents in attendance. Valerie was 38 years younger than her husband. Since Eliot's death, she has dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she has edited and annotated The Letters of T.S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land.
Eliot died of emphysema in London on January 4, 1965. For many years, he had health problems owing to the combination of London air and his heavy smoking, often being laid low with bronchitis or tachycardia. His body was cremated and, according to Eliot's wishes, the ashes taken to St Michael's Church in East Coker, the village from which Eliot's ancestors emigrated to America. There, a simple plaque commemorates him. On the second anniversary of his death, a large stone placed on the floor of Poets' Corner in London's Westminster Abbey was dedicated to Eliot. This commemoration contains his name, an indication that he had received the Order of Merit, dates, and a quotation from Little Gidding: "the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond / the language of the living."

[edit] Eliot's Poetry
For a poet of his stature, Eliot's poetic output was small. Eliot was aware of this early in his career. He wrote to a J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, that "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."[9]
Typically, Eliot first published his poems in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets consisting of a single poem (e.g., the Ariel poems) and then adding them to collections. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920 Eliot published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925 Eliot collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added "The Hollow Men" to form Poems: 1909–1925. From then on he updated this work (as Collected Poems). Exceptions are:
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) — a collection of light verse.
Poems Written in Early Youth (posthumously published in 1967) — consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, the student-run literary magazine at Harvard University[10]
Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917 (posthumously published in 1997) — poems, verse and drafts Eliot never intended to be published. Densely annotated by Christopher Ricks.

[edit] "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Main article: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". Although Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only 22. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table," were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when the poetry of the Georgians was hailed for its derivations of the 19th century Romantic Poets. The poem then follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock, (relayed in the "stream of consciousness" form indicative of the Modernists) lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the narrator even leaves his own residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections or even as symbolic images from the sub-conscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go."
Its mainstream reception can be gauged from a review in The Times Literary Supplement on June 21, 1917: "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry…"[11][12].
The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri (in the Italian). References to Shakespeare's Hamlet and other literary works are present in the poem: this technique of allusion and quotation was developed in Eliot's subsequent poetry.

[edit] The Waste Land
Main article: The Waste Land
In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot — his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne suffered from disordered nerves —The Waste Land is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Even before The Waste Land had been published as a book (December 1922), Eliot distanced himself from the poem's vision of despair: "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style" he wrote to Richard Aldington on November 15, 1922. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem — its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time; its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures--it has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month"; "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and "Shantih shantih shantih," the utterance in Sanskrit which closes the poem.
When the facsimile edition of the original manuscript for The Waste Land was published in 1974, it was revealed that Ezra Pound's redaction of the work was quite substantial. The poem is dedicated to Pound, whom Eliot calls il miglior fabbro "the better craftsman", a quotation from Dante.
Eliot's work was hailed by the W.H. Auden generation of 1930s poets. On one occasion Auden read out loud the whole of The Waste Land to a social gathering. The publication of the draft manuscript of the poem in 1972 showed the strong influence of Ezra Pound upon its final form, before which it had been titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices". Part IV, Death by Water, was reduced to its current 10 lines from an original 92 — Pound advised against Eliot's thought of scrapping it altogether. Eliot thanked Pound for "helping one to do it in one's own way". Critic Robert Brustein claimed in 1957, "It's doubtful any greater poem can be written in this century or any century. Eliot inspires all to cease attempting." [13]

[edit] Ash Wednesday
Main article: Ash Wednesday (poem)
Ash Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, this poem deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith in the past strives to move towards God.
Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem", Ash Wednesday, with a base of Dante's Purgatorio, is richly but ambiguously allusive and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from his poetry which predates his conversion. Ash Wednesday and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.
Many critics were "particularly enthusiastic concerning Ash Wednesday"[14], while in other quarters it was not well received [15]. Among many of the more secular literati its groundwork of orthodox Christianity was discomfiting. Edwin Muir maintained that "Ash Wednesday is one of the most moving poems he has written, and perhaps the most perfect." [16]

[edit] Four Quartets
Main article: Four Quartets
Although many critics preferred his earlier work, Eliot and many other critics considered Four Quartets his masterpiece and it is the work which led to his receipt of the Nobel Prize. [17] The Four Quartets draws upon his knowledge of mysticism and philosophy. It consists of four long poems, published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942), each in five sections. Although they resist easy characterisation, each begins with a rumination on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect — theological, historical, physical — and its relation to the human condition. Also, each is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire. They approach the same ideas in varying but overlapping ways, and are open to a diversity of interpretations.
Burnt Norton asks what it means to consider things that might have been. We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the idea that all these "merely possible" realities are present together, but invisible to us: All the possible ways people might walk across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't there are hiding in the bushes.
East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness Eliot continues to reassert a solution ("I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope").
The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It again strives to contain opposites ("…the past and future/Are conquered, and reconciled").
"Little Gidding" (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets. Eliot's own experiences as an air raid warden in The Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses…/Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love — as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich "all shall be well and/All manner of things shall be well".
The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in Burnt Norton, the "hints" and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing, and the exploration which inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification.

[edit] Eliot's plays
With the exception of the poems of Four Quartets Eliot did not write any major poetry after "Ash Wednesday" (1930). His creative energies were spent in writing plays in verse, mostly comedies or plays with redemptive endings. He was long a critic and fan of Elizabethian and Jacobean verse drama (witness his allusions to Webster, Middleton, Shakespeare and Kyd in The Waste Land.) In a 1933 lecture he said: "Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had some direct social utility. ... He would like to be something of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger groups of people collectively; and the theatre is the best place in which to do it."[18]
After writing The Waste Land (1922) Eliot wrote that he was "now feeling toward a new form and style." One item he had in mind was writing a play in verse with a jazz tempo with a character that appeared in a number of his poems, Sweeney. This was a failure; Eliot did not finish it. He did publish two pieces of what he had separately. The two, "Fragment of a Prologue (1926) and "Fragment of a Agon (1927) were published together in 1932 as Sweeney Agonistes. Although noted that this was not intended to be a one-act play, it is sometimes performed as a one. [19]
In 1934 a pagent play called The Rock that Eliot authored was performed. This was a benefit for churches in the Diocese of London. Much of the work was a collobrative effort and Eliot only accepted authorship of one scene and the choruses.[20] The pagent would have a sympathetic audience but one largely consisting of the common churchman, a new audience for Eliot who had to modify his style, often called "erudite."
George Bell, the Bishop of Chichester, who was instrumental in getting Eliot to work as writer with producer E. Martin Browne in producing the pagent play The Rock asked Eliot to write another play for the Canterbury Festival in 1935. This play, Murder in the Cathedral, was more under Eliot's control.
Murder in the Cathedral is about the death of Thomas Becket. Eliot admitted being influenced by, among others, the works of 17th century preacher Lancelot Andrewes. Murder in the Cathedral has been a standard choice for Anglican and Roman Catholic curricula for many years.
Following his ecclesiastical plays Eliot worked on commercial plays for more general audiences. These were The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1958).
The dramatic works of Eliot are less well known than his poems, but worth investigating, e.g. in the recorded version of The Cocktail Party with Sir Alec Guinness in the lead role of An Unidentified Guest (Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly).

[edit] Eliot as critic
An important member of the New Criticism, Eliot is considered by some to be one of the great literary critics of the 20th century. The famous critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind." [21] His essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. A preoccupation with Elizabethan and Jacobean verse drama (for instance, John Webster, who is mentioned in his poem Whispers of Immortality) is also central to his critical writing, and greatly influenced his own forays into drama.
In his critical and theoretical writing, Eliot is known for his advocacy of the "objective correlative," the notion that art should not be a personal expression, but should work through objective universal symbols. There is fierce critical debate over the pragmatic value of the objective correlative, and Eliot's failure to follow its dicta. It is claimed that there is evidence throughout his work of contrary practice (e.g. part II of The Waste Land in the section beginning "My nerves are bad tonight"); but of course the worth of the idea is by no means negated by alleged lapses in practice, here as elsewhere.

[edit] Other works
In 1939, he published a book of poetry for children, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats — "Old Possum" being a name Pound had bestowed upon him. After his death, this work became the basis of the West End and Broadway hit musical by Andrew Loyd Webber, Cats.
In 1958 the Archbishop of Canterbury appointed Eliot to a commission which resulted in "The Revised Psalter" (1963). A harsh critic of Eliot's, C.S. Lewis, was also a member of the commission but their antagonism turned into a friendship.[22]

[edit] Criticism of Eliot
Eliot's poetry was first criticized as not being poetry at all. Another criticism has been of his widespread interweaving of quotes from other authors into his work. "Notes on the Waste Land," which follows after the poem, gives the source of many of these, but not all. This practice has been defended as a necessary salvaging of tradition in an age of fragmentation, and completely integral to the work, as well adding richness through unexpected juxtaposition. It has also been condemned as showing a lack of originality, and for plagiarism. The prominent critic F. W. Bateson once published an essay called 'T. S. Eliot: The Poetry of Pseudo-Learning'. Eliot himself once wrote ("The Sacred Wood"): "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different."
Canadian academic Robert Ian Scott pointed out that the title of The Waste Land and some of the images had previously appeared in the work of a minor Kentucky poet, Madison Cawein (1865–1914). Bevis Hillier compared Cawein's lines "… come and go/Around its ancient portico" with Eliot's "… come and go/talking of Michelangelo". (This line actually appears in Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", and not in The Waste Land.) Cawein's "Waste Land" had appeared in the January 1913 issue of Chicago magazine Poetry (which contained an article by Ezra Pound on London poets). But scholars are continually finding new sources for Eliot's Waste Land, often in odd places.
Many famous fellow writers and critics have paid tribute to Eliot. According to the poet Ted Hughes, "Each year Eliot's presence reasserts itself at a deeper level, to an audience that is surprised to find itself more chastened, more astonished, more humble." Hugh Kenner commented, "He has been the most gifted and influential literary critic in English in the twentieth century."
C. S. Lewis, however, thought his poetry ludicrous, and his literary criticism "superficial and unscholarly". In a 1935 letter to a mutual friend of theirs, Paul Elmer Moore, Lewis wrote that he considered the work of Eliot to be "a very great evil".[22] Although, in a letter to Eliot written in 1943, Lewis showed an admiration for Eliot along with his antagonism toward his views when he wrote: "I hope the fact that I find myself often contradicting you in print gives no offence; it is a kind of tribute to you—whenever I fall foul of some widespread contemporary view about literature I always seem to find that you have expressed it most clearly. One aims at the officers first in meeting an attack!"[22]

[edit] Charges of anti-Semitism

The neutrality of the style of writing in this article is questioned. Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Although he is regarded throughout the English-speaking world as one of the chief poets and critics of modern times, Eliot has sometimes been charged with anti-Semitism. Discussion of Eliot's prejudices was suppressed for many years by certain of his survivors.[citation needed] However, recent biography and criticism of Eliot have, often as fact rather than conjecture, addressed what is seen as his anti-Semitism (and misogyny.) Biographer Lyndall Gordon has noted that many in Eliot's milieu successfully eschewed such views.[23]

[edit] Public expressions
The poem "Gerontion" contains a negative portrayal of a greedy landlord known as the "Jew [who] squats on the window sill." Another much-quoted example of anti-Semitism in his work is the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar", in which Eliot implicitly finds the Jews responsible for the decline of Venice ("The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot"). In "A Cooking Egg", he writes, "The red-eyed scavengers are creeping From Kentish Town and Golder's Green" (Golders Green was a largely Jewish suburb of London). And this from "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" is the most ambiguous instance in his verse: "Rachel née Rabinovitch, Tears at the grapes with murderous paws."
In his minor work "After Strange Gods" (1933), Eliot deprecates the presence of "free-thinking Jews," who are said to be "undesirable" in large numbers, for 'reasons of race and religion.'. The philosopher George Boas, who had previously been on friendly terms with Eliot, wrote to him that, "I can at least rid you of the company of one." Eliot did not reply. In later years Eliot expressed his regret over these remarks (disavowing the book, and refusing to allow any part to be reprinted), saying he was not in good health when he gave the lectures in which they were first expressed.
Eliot also wrote a letter to the Daily Mail in January 1932 which congratulated the paper for a series of laudatory articles on the rise of Mussolini. In The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) he says "…totalitarianism can retain the terms 'freedom' and 'democracy' and give them its own meaning: and its right to them is not so easily disproved as minds inflamed by passion suppose." In the same book, written before World War II, he says of J. F. C. Fuller, who worked for the Policy Directorate in the British Union of Fascists:
Fuller… believes that Britain "must swim with the out-flowing tide of this great political change" [ie. to a system of fascist government]. From my point of view, General Fuller has as good a title to call himself a "believer in democracy" as anyone else. …I do not think I am unfair to the report [that a ban against married women Civil Servants should be removed because it embodied Nazism], in finding the implication that what is Nazi is wrong, and need not be discussed on its own merits.[24]

[edit] Protests against
One of the first and most famous protests against TS Eliot on the subject of his anti-Semitism came in the form of a poem from the Anglo-Jewish writer and poet Emanuel Litvinoff, [25] at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. Only a few years after the holocaust, Eliot had republished lines originally written in the 1920s about 'money in furs' and the 'protozoic slime' of Bleistein's 'lustreless, protrusive eye' in his Selected Poems of 1948, angering Litvinoff. When the poet got up to announce the poem, the event’s host, Sir Herbert Read, declared 'Oh Good, Tom's just come in’. Litvinoff proceeded in evoking to the packed but silent room his intense work, which ended with the lines "Let your words/tread lightly on this earth of Europe/lest my people's bones protest". Many members of the audience were outraged; Litvinoff said "hell broke loose" and that no one supported him. One listener, the poet Stephen Spender, claiming to be as Jewish as Litvinoff, stood and called the poem an undeserved attack on Eliot.[25] However, Eliot was heard to mutter 'It's a good poem, it's a very good poem'.[26]

[edit] Rebuttals
Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia Woolf, who was himself Jewish and a friend of Eliot's, judged that Eliot was probably "slightly anti-Semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon. He would have denied it quite genuinely."[27]
In 2003 Professor Ronald Schuchard of Emory University published details of a previously unknown cache of letters from Eliot to Horace Kallen, which reveal that in the early 1940s Eliot was actively helping Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria to re-settle in Britain and America. In letters written after the war, Eliot also voiced support for modern Israel.[28]

[edit] Recognition

[edit] Formal recognition
Order of Merit (awarded by King George VI (United Kingdom), 1948)
Nobel Prize for Literature "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry" (Stockholm, 1948)
Officier de la Legion d'Honneur (1951)
Hanseatic Goethe Prize (Hamburg, 1955)
Dante Medal (Florence, 1959)
Commandeur de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, (1960)
Presidential Medal of Freedom (1964)
13 honorary doctorates (including Oxford, Cambridge, the Sorbonne, and Harvard)
Two posthumous Tony Awards (1983) for his poems used in the musical Cats
Eliot College of the University of Kent, England, named after him
Celebrated on commemorative postage stamps
Has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame

[edit] Popular recognition

[edit] Literature (etc.)
In 1941, Henry Reed published Chard Whitlow, an intelligent and witty satire on Burnt Norton. Eliot wrote, "Most parodies of one's own work strike one as very poor. In fact, one is apt to think one could parody oneself much better. (As a matter of fact, some critics have said that I have done so.) But there is one which deserves the success it has had, Henry Reed's Chard Whitlow."
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a greatly quoted and referenced piece. References have appeared in Hill Street Blues and The Long Goodbye by detective novelist Raymond Chandler.
In the movie Apocalypse Now, based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, one of the side-characters, a photographer obsessed with the life of the elusive Colonel Kurtz, quotes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," specifically the lines, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Marlon Brando's character Kurtz later reads Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": "We are the Hollow Men, / We are the stuffed men...". Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" quotes Heart of Darkness in its epigraph — "Mistah Kurtz—he dead." The American photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) also refers to the end of "The Hollow Men" when speaking to Willard.
In the autobiographical A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken's admiration for Eliot's poetry lends credibility in Vanauken's eyes to Christianity and plays a part, along with letters from C. S. Lewis, in his conversion.
A favorite of present-day Christians is "Choruses from 'The Rock'," a poem decrying what Eliot saw as the decadence of Western thought from the sublime (the Word as the Revelation of God, wisdom, life) to the humdrum (information, living).
Novelist Dean Koontz often refers to Eliot: his 2004 novel The Taking is heavily influenced by Eliot's work and quotes extensively from it.
On September 20, 2005, a series of unpublished letters from Eliot and an author-inscribed first edition of The Waste Land plus many related items were sold at auction for nearly $438,000. [1]
The musical CATS by Andrew Lloyd Webber is based on Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
Stephen King's Dark Tower series makes references to The Waste Land. The third novel is even titled The Waste Lands.
The T.V. movie of Stephen King's The Stand begins with the quotation of Eliot of "This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper."
In the opening of his novel On the Beach, Nevil Shute quotes the final lines of "The Hollow Men". The novel takes its name from the tenth stanza.
Iain M. Banks's novels Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward derive their titles from The Waste Land.
In Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel "Galapagos", the book's invention, Mandarax, quotes Eliot: "In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers..."
In Catch 22 he is mentioned when Col. Cargill says "name one poet who makes money." Ex. PFC. Wintergreen calls him without identifying himself and says "T.S. Eliot." There is later a T.S. Eliot phone tag between other Colonel and Generals.
In Lemony Snicket's book The Austere Academy, the Baudelaire orphans attend Alfred J. Prufrock Preparatory School.

[edit] Songs
The lyrics to the Genesis song "Cinema Show" (from 1973's Selling England by the Pound) are an adaptation of the typist and young man scene from "The Fire Sermon" section of The Waste Land. Compare "Home from work our Juliet clears her morning meal" (Genesis) to "The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast" (Eliot); "weekend millionaire" (Genesis) to "Bradford millionaire" (Eliot), etc.
The Rush song "Open Secrets" (from 1987's Hold Your Fire) includes the line "That's not what I meant at all" (cf. "That is not what I meant at all" from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").
The Manic Street Preachers song "My Guernica" includes the line "Alfred J. Prufrock would be proud of me".
The Simon and Garfunkel song "The Dangling Conversation," famously covered by Joan Baez, is in some ways a reinterpretation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
The band Crash Test Dummies released a song called "Afternoons & Coffeespoons" from the album God Shuffled His Feet in the early 1990s. This song, too, borrows from and pays homage to "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was also referred to by Chuck D of the seminal rap group Public Enemy, in Niggativaty, Do I Dare Disturb the Universe, on his solo album The Autobiography of Mistachuck.
The band Circle Takes the Square uses lines from several Eliot's poems in many of their songs, i.e. Patchwork Neurology ("Do I dare disturb universe" from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") or A Crater To Cough In ("I who have sat by Thebes below the wall and walked among the lowest of the dead (to Carthage then I came)" from The Waste Land).
Liverpool poet Adrian Henri included "Poem in Memoriam T.S. Eliot" in the best-selling 1968 anthology The Mersey Sound.
In Bob Dylan's song "Desolation Row", Ezra Pound and Eliot fight in the captain's tower.
In Melbourne band TISM's song "Mistah Eliot - He Wanker," there are numerous references to T. S. Eliot. One such line is; "T. S. Eliot lost his wallet when he went into town/Serves him right for hangin' round with the likes of Ezra Pound."
London rock band Million Dead's album A Song to Ruin was greatly influenced by The Waste Land, especially the 14 minute closer to the album, "The Rise and Fall".
Canadian singer Sarah Slean wrote a song about T. S. Eliot, simply entitled "Eliot."
Tori Amos's song Pretty Good Year from 1994's Under The Pink album features the lines, "I heard the Eternal Footman/Bought himself a bike to race". The Eternal Footman comes from Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", where it symbolises death.
In the song "Time Waits For No One", the 1970s/'80s pop band Ambrosia uses the line "With decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".
In the song "The Chemicals Between Us", the British alternative rock band Bush makes reference to "The Hollow Men" in the line, "we're of hollow men we are the naked ones".
Norma Jean's song Disconecktie is literally a reworded rendition of Eliot's "Choruses from the rock"
Leeds rock band The Third take their name from the stanza in The Waste Land beginning "Who is the third who walks always beside you?". They often use a recorded reading of this by Scottish poet Johnny Solstice over an electronica piece as introductory music to their live sets.
The Allman Brothers Band titled their well-known 1972 album Eat a Peach from the line "Do I dare to eat a peach?" from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". This was also a reference to their Georgia roots.
East River Pipe, a musical project of Fred Cornog, has a song titled "What Does T.S. Eliot Know About You?" on his 2006 Merge Records release What Are You On?
The screamo band Circle Takes the Square directly quote The Waste Land in "A Crater To Cough In", and reference the poem many times throughout their full-length As the Roots Undo.
King Crimson's "The Deception of the Thrush" takes its title from the Eliot Poem "Burnt Norton" and the lyrics are sampled from a reading of The Waste Land. There are no set selections from the poem, however, because it changes every night. It tends to be from part one, The Burial of the Dead.
Lead singer Andrew Schwab of the Christian Rock band Project 86 was heavily influenced by Eliot and wrote the song "Hollow Again", which includes, among others, the repeated line "This is how the world ends..." from Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men".
Van Morrison mentions Eliot, along with William Blake, W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and James Joyce in his song, "Summertime In England."
The opening line of Eliot's poem The Waste Land, "April, the cruellest month" was used by the British band Hot Chip as the first line of the song 'Playboy' on their Coming On Strong album.

[edit] Other
There is a blue plaque on one at the north west corner of Russell Square in London, commemorating the fact that T. S. Eliot worked there for many years while he was the poetry editor for the publisher Faber & Faber.
English singer-songwriter Liz Kearton produced a complete musical setting of The Wasteland and The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock in 2006.

[edit] Other facts
Later in his life, Eliot exchanged numerous letters with the comedian Groucho Marx. A portrait of Marx, which Eliot had requested, was proudly displayed in Eliot's home next to pictures of the poets William Butler Yeats and Paul Valéry.
In the mid 1920s, he would spend time with other great artists in the Montparnasse Quarter in Paris, where he was photographed by Man Ray.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Poems (1920)
"Gerontion"
"Sweeney Among the Nightingales"
The Waste Land (1922)
"The Hollow Men" (1925)
Ariel Poems (1927-1954)
The Journey of the Magi (1927)
Ash Wednesday (1930)
Coriolan (1931)
Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)
The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs and Billy M'Caw: The Remarkable Parrot (1939) in The Queen's Book of the Red Cross
Four Quartets (1945)

[edit] Plays
Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934)
The Rock (1934)
Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
The Family Reunion (1939)
The Cocktail Party (1949)
The Confidential Clerk (1954)
The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

[edit] Nonfiction
The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)
The Second-Order Mind (1920)
Tradition and the individual talent (1920)
Homage to John Dryden (1924)
Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca (1928)
For Lancelot Andrewes (1928)
Dante (1929)
Selected Essays, 1917–1932 (1932)
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
After Strange Gods (1934)
Elizabethan Essays (1934)
Essays Ancient and Modern (1936)
The Idea of a Christian Society (1940)
Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)
Poetry and Drama (1951)
The Three Voices of Poetry (1954)
On Poetry and Poets (1957)

[edit] Further reading
Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot: A Life. (1984)
Asher, Kenneth T.S. Eliot and Ideology (1995)
Bush, Ronald. T.S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. (1984)
Christensen, Karen. "Dear Mrs. Eliot," The Guardian Review. (29 January 2005).
Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot. (1987).
Gardner, Helen. The Composition of Four Quartets. (1978).
---The Art of T.S. Eliot. (1949)
The Letters of T.S. Eliot. Ed. by Valerie Eliot. Vol. I, 1898-1922. San Diego [etc.] 1988.
Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1998)
Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. (1969)
Levy, William Turner and Victor Scherle. Affectionately, T.S. Eliot: The Story of a Friendship: 1947-1965. (1968).
Matthews, T.S. Great Tom: Notes Towards the Definition of T.S. Eliot. (1973)
Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot. The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2005.
North, Michael (ed.) The Waste Land (Norton Critical Editions). New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.
Quillian, William H. Hamlet and the new poetic: James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press (1983).
Raine, Craig. T.S. Eliot. Oxford University Press (2006).
Ricks, Christopher.T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. (1988).
Schuchard, Ronald. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. (1999).
Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. (2001).
Sencourt, Robert. T.S.Eliot: A Memoir. (1971).
Spender, Stephen. T.S. Eliot. (1975).
Sinha, Arun Kumar and Vikram, Kumar. T. S Eliot: An Intensive Study of Selected Poems, Spectrum Books Pvt. Ltd, New Delhi, (2005).
Tate, Allen - edited by. T. S Eliot: The Man and His Work, First published in 1966 - republished by Penguin 1971.

[edit] Notes
^ Miller, James E., Jr. T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. The Pennsylvania State University Press. (2005). pp. 41-2
^ Perl, Jeffry M. and Andrew P. Tuck "The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies", Philosophy East & West V. 35 No. 2 (April 1985) pp. 116-131. Online at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/ew33375.htm (March 14, 2007)
^ Eliot, T.S. The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898-192. p. 75
^ Richardson, John, Sacred Monsters, Sacred Masters, Random House, 2001, page 20. ISBN 0-679-42490-3
^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Constable (2001). p. 17
^ Eliot, T.S. The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1, 1898-192, p. xvii, ISBN 0-15-150885-2
^ Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. Constable (2001). p. 561
^ Gordon, Lyndall. T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Norton. (1998) p. 455
^ Eliot, T.S. "Letter to J.H. Woods, April 21, 1919." The Letters of T.S. Eliot, vol. I. Valerie Eliot, ed. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1988. 285
^ http://www.theworld.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/works/poems/eliot-harvard-poems.html T.S. Eliot: The Harvard Advocate Poems, accessed February 5, 2007.
^ Times Literary Supplement 21 June 1917, no. 805, 299 Accessed from www.usask.ca, June 8, 2006. Longer extract and other reviews can be found on this page.
^ Wagner, Erica (2001) "An eruption of fury" Guardian online, September 4, 2001. Accessed June 8, 2006. This omits the word "very" from the quote.
^ http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/190_21.html Britannica: Guide to the Nobel Prizes: Eliot, T.S. by Dame Helen Gardner and Allen Tate, accessed November 6, 2006.
^ Untermeyer, Louis "Modern American Poetry" pp. 395-396 (Hartcourt Brace 1950)
^ http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/190_21.html Britannica: Guide to the Nobel Prizes: Eliot, T.S. by Dame Helen Gardner and Allen Tate, accessed November 6, 2006.
^ Untermeyer, Louis "Modern American Poetry" p. 396 (Hartcourt Brace 1950)
^ http://www.britannica.com/nobel/micro/190_21.html Britannica: Guide to the Nobel Prizes: Eliot, T.S. by Dame Helen Gardner and Allen Tate, accessed November 6, 2006.
^ Eliot, T.S. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Harvard University Press, 1933 (penultimate paragraph)
^ Gallup, Donald. T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition) Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1969. Listings A23, C184, C193
^ Gallup, Donald. T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography (A Revised and Extended Edition) Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1969. Listings A25
^ quoted in Roger Kimball, "A Craving for Reality," The New Criterion Vol. 18, 1999
^ a b c Spruyt, Bart Jan. One of the enemy: C. S. Lewis on the very great evil of T. S. Eliot's work. Lecture delivered at the conference "Order and Liberty in the American Tradition" for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute held 28 July to 3 August 2004 at Oxford. Online at http://www.burkestichting.nl/nl/stichting/isioxford.html (February 25, 2007)
^ Gordon, Lyndall, "T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life", Norton, 1998, pp. 2,104-5
^ Eliot, T. S., The Idea of a Christian Society, 1939.
^ a b http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/archive/londonsvoices/web/interview.asp?pid=6#i414
^ Dannie Abse, A Poet in the Family, London: Hutchinson, 1974, p. 203
^ Ackroyd, Peter, T.S. Eliot, Abacus, 1985, p. 304
^ Modernism/Modernity January 2003.

[edit] External links

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Categories: NPOV disputes Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 All articles with unsourced statements 1888 births 1965 deaths Milton Academy alumni American poets Anglican poets Anglican writers Anglo-Catholicism American dramatists and playwrights English Anglicans English dramatists and playwrights English literary critics English poets Deaths from emphysema Alumni of Merton College, Oxford Harvard University alumni Modernist poets Neoclassicism New Criticism Nobel laureates in Literature Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients Missouri writers People from St. Louis T. S. Eliot Wagnerites American expatriates in the United Kingdom University of Chicago faculty Christian writers
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