T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns)
b. St Louis, U.S.A. 1888
d. 1965
Anglo-American poet, but also literary critic and dramatist.
Major works of criticism inc. The Sacred Wood, On Poetry and Poets, Tradition and the Individual Talent, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture.
Major plays: Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party, The Family Reunuion.
Major collections of poetry:
Prufrock and other Observations (1917); Poems (1919); The Waste Land (published in Horizon 1922), then Four Quartets (1943).
Eliot became a British subject in 1927, and an Anglican(describing himself as 'Anglo-Catholic').
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1947.
As well as being one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century, "Old Possum" loved practical jokes, including dressing up as famous murderers (Dr Crippin was his favourite). He is also the author of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (which you should read, for fun, if you haven't already), as well as a long, obscene epic entitled "The Adventures of King Bolo", which alas you cannot read as it remains unpublished. His first wife went mad and died many years after in an asylum.
For many years he worked for the Bank of England (a sinecure which was secured for him by his literary friends),but eventually found his true niche as editor of Faber and Faber. (Faber and Faber are probably the most important publishers of modern, especially modernist literature, and especially poetry). In the latter part of his life he married his secretary.
The main pre-occupation of Eliot's poetry and criticism is a reaction against Romanticism and the cult of the individual. For the idea that literature arises from the inspiration of the individual writer, Eliot substitutes the notion that literary works are shaped by tradition. Hence the use in his poetry of allusions to earlier writers:the Elizabethan dramatists, the poetry of Donne,Dante's Commedia, Virgil, Homer, the French poets of the nineteenth century and before. Eliot is deliberately writing in a tradition of European, and even world literature (there are references to Sanskrit and the Gita in some of his poems).
He reacts against the notion that poetry is the expression of personal emotions. This is reflected in his theory of the 'objective correlative', and in his practise of inventing, as the speakers of his poems, personae (sing. persona), who are only partly, if at all, identified with the poet. Using this technique Eliot explores different states of consciousness and employs a great variety of tones and voices.
He also broke with the accepted subject matter and idiom of Victorian, Edwardian poetry. Eliot's poems are not restricted to conventional ideas of what is beautiful, in their choice of subject matter, nor to accepted notions of what kind of language is appropriate for poetry. He writes about ashcans, 'sordid nights in one-night cheap hotels', cats devouring 'rancid butter', etc., in language which ranges from the argot of the lower middle classes ("What about them bones on Epsom heath? I seen that in the papers, you seen that in the papers, They don't all get pinched in the end", to language borrowed or imitated from Shakespeare, Virgil, Dante. An Eliot poem is often a juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, eloquent language and ordinary, even vulgar speech.
There are two useful ways of looking at Eliot's poetry, and they go hand in hand. Firstly it can be seen as an expression of the disillusionment with European culture and civilization following on from the experience of WW1, and as a reaction to the conditions of 20th C living (urbanization, the destruction of values, sense of alienation, indecision, despair); secondly, as a change in literary style paralleling developments in art and music (Cubism, Expressionism and Surrealism; atonalism of Schoenberg, the use by Stravinsky of "primitive" rhythms etc.) Eliot's poetry can be considered modernist as well as modern; the impact of a poem like The Waste Land could be compared to the first performance of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1917 (where the audience rioted).
Eliot has long had the reputation of being the difficult modern poet - refusing to make compromises with the reader in order to be understood.
The sources of the "difficulty" of his poetry are, first of all, his use of imagery and symbolism: sometime he employs imagery, symbolism for which the reader needs to be familiar with some other source - literature, the Bible, sacred texts from other religions, works of anthropology - the sources of Eliot's poetry are often obscure. (He included a set of "notes" for The Waste Land - unfortunately these notes were just as cryptic as the poem). Sometimes Eliot's symbolism seems to come from a world of totally private associations, and as such can never be "decoded" - we are left to make what we can of it.
Frequent changes of tone, mood and voice force us as readers to pay close attention to the sound of the poems - it's useful to hear Eliot himself reading. These rapid shifts in tone and mood mean that the reader must be extremely alert. Another source of difficulty can be overcome if we realise that the poetry is not working with the language of statement, information. We shouldn't look for logical structure -for things to make sense. As a poet Eliot is trying to evoke, to suggest - in the words of imagism poetry should be CONCRETE, rather than ABSTRACT - it should "hand over sensations bodily". So instead of trying to figure out what the poem is trying to say, you need to become aware of what it is doing - creating a mood, an atmosphere, a sensation. In getting away from abstractions, and direct statements of feelings, Eliot was trying to do something much more precise....
How is the following passage (from 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock') typical of Eliot's poetic techniques? What are some of the themes Eliot explores here? You should refer to at least one other poem we have done in class.
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.'
Notes on 'Prufrock...'
Love song? J. Alfred Prufrock? What associations does the title have? The poem is nothing like a love song - nothing like a song, even. The idea of somebody with a name like Prufrock singing a love song is absurd... and J. Alfred? The poem violates the expectations created by the title. Title is provocative - perhaps tongue-in-cheek.
The Persona
Like Portrait, the poem is dramatic - the speaker is not Eliot, nor can we connect the speaker in any way with the poet. The poet is 'invisible'. There are various ways of looking at the speaker, however. One is to see him as the first in a series of personae (Gerontion Tiresias) all of whom possess knowledge, but are powerless. This can be so, either because the speaker himself doubts the validity of what he knows, or because it is useless or trivial knowledge, or because he is sure to be misunderstood or not believed, or because it will make no difference anyway.
What sorts of things does Prufrock know? Find evidence from the poem to support this.
He seems to know a lot about the future - his future - and the past - or at least, to spend a good deal of the poem making prophecies of one kind or another.
Find some examples of this. What do they signify?
Nevertheless, he seems unable to substantiate his vision(s) (or revisions!), in the world of which he is a part - can't substantiate himself, make his knowledge valid in the real world. He can't actually DO anything with it.... What does he do instead?
Find examples in the poem of the kinds of shifts, excuses, evasions, that are typical of Prufrock. How does he justify his failure to act? Find some examples of where you are made physically aware of him. What kind of physical presence does Prufrock have in the poem? How important is this picture we have of him? Is the picture an objective, or subjective one?
Like 'Portrait', the poem lays stress on the question of time, and has a rough time scheme to it. We are made aware of evening, night time, afternoons. The ways in which one marks time are also stressed - as well as the ways in which time passes ('I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'). Time can have other meanings as well - there is a sense of time as the immediate moment - the occasion to be seized, or else missed - the time of success or failure in achieving one's goals. For Prufrock this seems mostly to be a sense of the moment lost - the chance missed or deliberately foregone. Immediate time, in Prufrock's consciousness, frequently involves a sense of crisis or threat - some crucial test to be undergone which the hero is almost certain to fail. There is also the idea of the 'moment' as the occasion of possible insight - the moment of truth or awareness. Prufrock experiences this but it is no comfort to him. There is a sense of time as eternity - hinted at in the references to Lazarus, and to the Marvell poem 'To his Coy Mistress', and the eternal Footman death. This sense is also conveyed by the epigraph - from Dante's Inferno , Hell being a place from which none shall ever return.
When the poem opens it is a time of sorts - evening, and also time to go - 'Let us go then...' There are times to arrive, times to leave - and time in which to prepare, or to procrastinate. There is real, as opposed to psychological time. There is the sense we get of Prufrock's time of life - 'with a bald spot in the middle of my hair' - 'Do I dare to eat a peach' - 'I grow old...'
Find some example of these kinds of time in the poem. What do they signify?
The idea of the quest.
A journey towards some goal - at the end of which some test or ordeal is undergone and a victory achieved - usually symbolised by some talisman or valuable object which the hero gains possession of. Often the end result is to cure some sickness in an individual, or to bring something back which will save the hero's community from death or suffering. One of the commonest types of story in literature.
Look up the story of Parsifal, of Ulysses, of Tristan and Isolde. What are the differences between Prufrock's 'quest' and these? What are the similarities? What similarities and differences are there in the heroes?
What Eliot does is displace elements of these myths - for example, a teacup instead of the Holy Grail, becomes a mock-heroic object of Prufrock's quest - yet with the same connotations of potency, (or impotence) and sexuality.
What is the importance of this quest motif in the poem? What do you think Eliot is suggesting by his technique of displacement? Find passages in the poem which seem to exemplify aspects of the quest. Which aspects do you think are dealt with in the sections you've chosen?
Eliot's use of allusions.
1. Dante
From the Inferno, Canto XXVII
Guido da Montefeltro speaks - he was one of the counsellors of fraud and is in the 8th circle of Hell - i.e. pretty low down. He only speaks to Dante, he says, because he believes that his story will never be told to another living creature - i.e. he believes Dante is a soul on its way to an even lower circle of Hell:
If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should shake no more.
But since none ever did return alive
From this abyss, without fear of infamy
I answer thee...
i.e., Guido imagines that he is safe - that he can speak in absolute confidence. He doesn't need to trust Dante - or so he thinks. He's mistaken. In what ways is Prufrock's plight similar to Guido's? How is his world a kind of Hell? What differences might there be?
2.Shakespeare
Hamlet What are the similarities and differences between Prufrock and Hamlet? Why does Prufrock compare himself to Polonius?
Twelfth Night Orsino - "That strain again/ It hath a dying fall..." c.f. reference in Portrait of a Lady. Perhaps because Orsino is in love, at the beginning of the play, and this monologue of Prufrock's is a 'love song'. Orsino is lovesick, and in love with love, rather than with a real woman - and this wishy-washiness may resemble Prufrock's state of mind.
In general, the dramatic references contrast with the fact that Prufrock is forever off-stage - is never the centre of things - he is someone who utterly fails to project himself, and completely lacks confidence.
3. Marvell
English metaphysical poet. The reference is to his most famous poem "To his Coy Mistress". The speaker in that poem is very forceful and direct, compared with Prufrock.
4. The Bible
Lazarus - come from the dead. Like Lazarus, Prufrock has come from a place of spiritual and psychological death - he may have knowledge from beyond the grave, but it is useless here because of his own lack of confidence, and the probability that his message would be misunderstood, or not believed. There is strong irony in this reference.
There seems to be no place in Prufrock's world for any kind of transcendent vision or knowledge.
John the Baptist: like the prophet, Prufrock has suffered for his knowledge, and paid the ultimate price for it - but any status this might gain for him is cruelly undercut ("I have seen my head (grown slightly bald"...). In the face of the world's rejection Prufrock's only response is diffidence - "here's no great matter".
5. "Works and Days". A poem by Hesiod - an early Greek poet (8th century B.C. - about the same time as Homer.) The poem deals with common rural life and reflects the personality of its author unlike the Homeric poems which deal with Gods and heroes.
Eliot often uses allusions because a phrase works particularly well in the context of his poem - not because there is anything deeply significant in the reference. It reflects that Eliot is quite willing to steal and plagiarise - that the poem is constructed, in parts, like a pastiche or collage. All of the other references and allusions, as well as, having in some cases relevance to Prufrock's state, have this stylistic function as well, and reflect Eliot's belief in the importance of tradition. On a thematic level his practice reflects the idea that civilization itself is crumbling - "These fragments I have shored against my ruin" (The Waste Land)
Notes on "The Portrait of a Lady"
Eliot's use of chains of imagery and symbolism to suggest, evoke, the states of mind of the speaker and the woman herself, is the most striking "modernist" feature of the poem. The woman could be regarded as a female counterpart of Prufrock - like Prufrock she shrouds her desires in indirectness, hints, the language of polite conversation in which things left unsaid are as important as the things said.
The title, and epigraph, are both allusions; the title is a reference to the novel by Henry James, in which Isabel Archer, a rich American heiress, is seduced and betrayed by a couple of corrupt, poor but sophisticated and worldy Europeans.
Perhaps the young man in the poem sees himself as the victim of the woman's worldy sophistication. But the parallel, as below, gives a rather unsatisfactory and incomplete version of events.
The epigraph is from Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta. Barabbas, the Jew of the title, is not very nice (he poisons a whole convent full of nuns) - is the archetypal villain of Renaissance tragedy, similar in ways to Iago. The parallel and contrast with the speaker of the Eliot poem is clear; this epigraph helps to create the poem's ambivalence. Can the speaker really be compared to the totally cynical Barabbas?
The "Preludes" are a set of piano pieces by Chopin - one of the greatest Romantic composers of piano music. The pieces are very difficult both technically and musically - it takes a real master to play them well. The great pianists have all inculded them in their repertoire. Many are very intimate in tone and mood, but their emotional range is very wide. They're nearly always played as a complete set in recital. Chopin was Polish - and Polish pianists have therefore had a special claim to be considered interpreters of his music.
The reference to Romeo and Juliet is best explained in the context of the discussion which follows:
The poem opens in winter - like Prufrock there is a strong sense of time but in contrast to Prufrock a very definite time scheme. Another similarity is the way the poem begins in the second person - "You have the scene arrange itself...", only to change to a more indirect third person by section II.
The poem explores, once again, failure in relationship and communication. The woman is older, more sophisticated, perhaps - obviously cultured. There is a mixture of admiration and cynicism in the young man's tone - "- as it will seem to do". This suggests that she has gone to a lot of trouble to make everything seem effortless - so much so that the atmosphere is artificial and strained rather than relaxed. The woman is striving for an intimate tone, but the effect on the young man is perhaps depressing - "An atmosphere of Juliet's tomb", suggesting the death of love rather than the start of anything. The poem opens with a typical Eliot setting; the smoke and fog suggest the indirectness and obscurity and uncertainty associated with the whole episode - a good example of Eliot's clever use of symbolism.
"We have been let us say..." indicates that the concert was a typical outing. The woman is cultured, fashionable - this is the "latest Pole" - perhaps the man is bored, disinterested. The Pole doesn't just play the Preludes - he "transmits" them. It's possible to detect a trace of mockery in the tone - the image is to me slightly disgusting "through his hair and fingertips. " (The great pianists of this era - Godowski, Levhine, de Pachmann especially, almost had pop-star status - groupies and all).
After they get back, the woman opens the conversation with a pretentiously "arty" remark, one obviously aimed at the young man, loaded with implication about the possible "intimacy" of their relationship. His reply isn't quoted; instead the conversation is captured by an extended metaphor comparing it to a piece of music. The violins and "remote cornets" convey its indirectness, its toned down subtlety, as well as its undertones of melodrama and sentimentality. The woman speaks again, in an obviuous appeal to the young man which reveals her loneliness and desperation "-life, what cauchemar!". The musical comparison resumes - only this time the music has become tedious as the violins wind, and the cornets are "cracked" - (notice Eliot's use of language here - deliberately forcing the rhyme and the rhythm, using harsh alliteration - to convey the young man's excruciating boredom.)
He cannot bear it - feels stifled -"-Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance,...".
The second section opens with a possible reference to Walt Whitman's great poem on the death of Abraham Lincoln "When Lilacs last in the Dooryard Bloomed". Lilacs are a key symbol in Eliot's The Waste Land, where their association with suffering is even more pronounced - Spring in that poem is a time of despair not hope and renewal, as it is for the woman as she twists the lilac stalks in a neurotic gesture. She is bitterly aware of the gap in their ages and (indirectly) accuses him of cruelty. The young man turns to us, the readers, as if in a dramatic aside - "I smile, of course,/ And go on drinking tea." What else can one do, to cover one's embarrassment ?- she is attacking his pretence of sympathy and friendship and he knows it. The music has taken a turn for the worse, as well - it is an "insistent out-of-tune/Of a broken violin". Pathetically, she has tried to claim some common ground with the man, saying in the previous remarks how wonderful she feels - how youthful...she realises she has been striking the wrong note - a note of self-pity which is unlikely to succeed. She cannot resist the appeal based on self-pity, yet can't be direct; is still speaking in hints "But what have I, but what have I, my friend,/To give you, what can you receive from me?" The meaning is so plainly the opposite of what she says. The man "takes his hat" - takes refuge in the social ritual to get him out of a tight corner, and escapes - but is aware enough to realise that the situation is partly his fault "how can I make a cowardly amends/For what she has said to me?" He realises that he should have spoken more directly - that he has allowed her to presume too much. Yet what was he doing there? Like Prufrock he lacks the courage to make a decisive move - allows himself to be trapped in a situation where his own falseness exposes him to accusation. He would have been better to have been honest with her. Perhaps in his own way he is as cruel as Barabbas.
The young man contiues to be seen about town - his behaviour is not such as to attract public attention like the countess or the bank defaulter. We notice that his literary taste is hardly the same as the woman's would be likely to be. He tries to brush it off- "I keep my countenance./I remain self possessed," But like the Jew of Malta, his crime is none the less heinous for being a secret one. It seems that any music now reminds him of her - the smell of hyacinths recalls the episode to him, so that he lamely asks himself "Are these ideas right or wrong?" (Hyacinths had a particular significance for Eliot as they reminded him of a friend killed in the War). Maybe the hyacinths remind the young man of his own mortality and sharpen his sense of guilt.
Nevertheless, it is now Autumn, and he has not extricated himself from the situation. He feels worse than ever - as though he were mounting a scaffold - for he has to tell her he is going away (this is probably a lie - she knows it, he knows that she knows it, and the only hope for him is that she will let him off lightly. She doesn't.) In response to her interrogations his smile "falls heavily among the bric-a-brac". It is he who is awkward and out of his depth. She suggests they correspond - escape! "My self-possession flares up for a second;/This is as I had reckoned" - how often have we got out of situations by a vague promise to "get in touch", which we never do keep, even if we "intend" to at the time. But the escape is short-lived. She moves on to the very territory he must have dreaded, for she exposes the failure of the relationship to develop and by implication throws the blame on him. It is all very polite but she has got him squirming - what can he possibly say? His smiles are useless now - all they do is expose his hypocrisy - as though he could see his own falseness in a mirror. She continues, I think, to take her revenge - by now she has him on toast "They were all sure our feelings would relate/So closely! I myself can hardly understand". Her final line has changed from pathetic self-pity to a kind of perverse triumph - he will not be one of the friends she sits serving tea to! The young man's reaction is beautifully described in the lines which follow - with their exasperated finale "Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance-"
In the final section, the fog and smoke return - it is once more winter, the man has preumeably escaped from the situation but not from the memories and the guilt associated with it. He thinks of her "dying", perhaps realising that even her death won't free him of a situation which has become part of him and which he will have to work through and come to terms with. Should she die, it will leave him with unfinished business, emotionally and psychologically. He does not know what to feel, if he understands, whether he has done the right thing. A fog, indeed!
The final reference to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night indicates that the woman's plaintive note of self-pity has had an effect after all - he has been too senitive himself to brush it aside, and so feels she has had "the advantage, after all?" The second last line is maybe his realisation that he too is mortal - his time will come. The "smile" indicates that in the eyes of the world this is a very typical experience - a young man being shown the ways of the world by an older and more sophisticated woman - it is a kind of rite of passage - the sort of thing that cynical wits would indeed smile at. He is not sure, though, that he has the right. Do you think a comparison with Barabbas is justified?
