Thread: T.S.Elliot

My sister recently introduced me to some of T.S.Elliot's work. I've enjoyed what I've read so far, but was curious where he's coming from religiously/spiritually? (And assumed that someone here was bound to know or have a link!)

Here's some of my current favorite (the latter part of Ash Wednesday I):

And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us

Because these wings are no longer wings to fly
But merely vans to beat the air
The air which is now thoroughly small and dry
Smaller and dryer than the will
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

My favorite is "The Journey of the Magi"

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Eliot was a 1920s existentialist converted to a Monarchical, Anglo-Catholic stance (including becoming a British citizen). I do believe he was still on the Protestant side of the Anglo-Catholic movement, but nonetheless, he was an extremely high church traditionalist Anglican.

Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table . . .

What a great poet!

One of my favorite poets. I used to try to write like him. Then I realized he got to go to Harvard in his early adult years...

I love his poems: his fragmental word images are beautiful, they catch on your imagination and retain the sense of the things themselves; and the rhythms are very lovely. I think his 'notes' have done some harm to poetry, as his style which he could carry off because of being so saturated with great ancient literature (even his rhythms sound rather old and sad to me) but most imitators can't; but he expanded the notes which were originally to give credit for quotations/allusions, to fill up space for publication and afterwards felt badly for sending people on a wild goose chase, in search of structure and symbolism where there was none. Having a user's manual and reading a poem like a message that has to be decoded is simply silly, I think: I was relieved to find out he didn't really mean it. I haven't read much biographical material but from reading his poems and some plays and listening to other people talk/write about him, I picked up that he was very sympathetic to Roman Catholicism (I thought he was a Roman Catholic, but it makes more sense for him to have been an Anglican), and yes, very stiffly high church, a conviction he seems perhaps to have held as a convicted high cultural elitest?

Does anyone understand The Waste Land ? I know it's supposed to be a lament over the fragmented aimlessness of modernism but how so is beyond me.

Eliot supposedly said in an interview that it was structureless, and that he wasn't even bothering whether he understood what he was saying.

Can you access this link?

(edit: I don't know if it's correct but I like his poetry best when I read it like scenes on a roadtrip flashing past. You get a few overall impressions, you get a sense of motion and a lot of beautiful, significant scenes turning out of and back into it. Like this morning, a row of trees with orange crowns and all their leaves scattering down over the road. I don't understand that either.)

Heidi . . . I like how you put it. And I'm glad that maybe they aren't meant to be analyzed! To me they seem kind of like impressionistic paintings - the closer you analyze them, the blurrier it becomes, but they're quite nice if you just step back and get the feel for the whole thing.

Originally Posted by Peter

Does anyone understand The Waste Land ? I know it's supposed to be a lament over the fragmented aimlessness of modernism but how so is beyond me.

I wrote a paper on The Waste Land in college. I'm not an Eliot expert, but my prof liked the paper.

One of my favorite Dylan lines from Desolation Row...

Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot fighting in the captain's tower, while calypso singers laugh at them and fishermen hold flowers...

Originally Posted by Puddleglum

....the closer you analyze them, the blurrier it becomes, but they're quite nice if you just step back and get the feel for the whole thing.

I wonder if it isn't somewhat intuitive to read them that way? I mean intuitive unless you're in an appreciation class where they force you at first contact to be looking for something else (I didn't even realize there were whole systems of symbolism - mostly sexual - built up out of Prufrock and the mermaids and the seaweed red and brown and whatnot when I first read it). Incidentally if the Eliot quotes about writing without structure and even without meaning are accurate, I was wondering whether he hasn't had some influence on post-modernism? Of course that's a bit offset by the fact that he seems to have accidentally set everyone is looking for symbolic coherence and structure even though he says there was none.

Originally Posted by Puddleglum

My sister recently introduced me to some of T.S.Elliot's work.

One of my faves!! He was a High Churchman. He described himself as "classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion". You should try to read his The Idea of a Christian Society

T.S. Eliot as Conservative Mentor by Roger Scruton.

I studied under the poet Richard Hugo. He was always very sceptical about trying to analyze poets like Eliot.

In discussing the meaning of poets, he would often say, "be careful about the poet who says 'I love you'. You never know if he means it or just likes the sound of the words."

Another anecdote involves Robert Frost, who was asked about the message behind "A Road Not Taken." Was it a reference to his choice of career or a major life decision?

He responded with a shrug that he was walking in the woods once and saw a fork in the road. He thought it would make a good poem.

Originally Posted by weinhold

Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table . . .

What a great poet!

Paul, sometimes Prufrock makes my hair stand on end. "And in short, I was afraid."

You may also like Robert Southey (one of the Lake Poets) and this is his major political piece.

You may also like Swinburne if you like sound. If he means something by it, I think it's best overlooked.

Vic, Prufrock seems to run around and around through my head (but then Lauren is often quoting it and that may help the effect.) You see him so vividly. And he has his socks pulled all the way up.

Ruben wanted to have this text from Eliot printed on our wedding invitations:

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.

(we had a verse from Jeremiah instead.)

Originally Posted by a mere housewife

You may also like Swinburne if you like sound. If he means something by it, I think it's best overlooked.

Vic, Prufrock seems to run around and around through my head (but then Lauren is often quoting it and that may help the effect.) You see him so vividly. And he has his socks pulled all the way up.

Ruben wanted to have this text from Eliot printed on our wedding invitations:

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.

(we had a verse from Jeremiah instead.)

I'm glad you went with Jeremiah.

I grow old, I grow old ...

I have read Prufrock more then any other, hundreds of times, and I still love it. I find myself quoting fragments of lines in conversation, every once in a while someone will give me the next line.

We shall go now you and I...

BTW anyone (else) like the "cat poems"? They are always the first poetry I read aloud to my children. They can nearly all do the gumby cat from memory now.

Originally Posted by Kevin

BTW anyone (else) like the "cat poems"? They are always the first poetry I read aloud to my children. They can nearly all do the gumby cat from memory now.

hilarious, but it's been a while.

Love those cat poems! I think Eliot was the first guy to sample stuff, as he did in The Wasteland. Consider it 1920's rap, maybe? (Eliot would hate that!)

I have virtually no experience with poetry. You guys are making me jealous. Where should someone start who needs to aquire some poetry appreciation? The Psalms are the only poetry I have any experience with.

Originally Posted by victorbravo

I studied under the poet Richard Hugo. He was always very sceptical about trying to analyze poets like Eliot.

In discussing the meaning of poets, he would often say, "be careful about the poet who says 'I love you'. You never know if he means it or just likes the sound of the words."

Another anecdote involves Robert Frost, who was asked about the message behind "A Road Not Taken." Was it a reference to his choice of career or a major life decision?

He responded with a shrug that he was walking in the woods once and saw a fork in the road. He thought it would make a good poem.

Originally Posted by weinhold

Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table . . .

What a great poet!

Paul, sometimes Prufrock makes my hair stand on end. "And in short, I was afraid."

R.Vic, I agree that Prufrock is neither necessarily (nor even probably) autobiographical nor optimistic. Still, I consider it a great poem.

Originally Posted by Augusta

I have virtually no experience with poetry. You guys are making me jealous. Where should someone start who needs to aquire some poetry appreciation? The Psalms are the only poetry I have any experience with.

Just start reading. Get a few books of popular poets and begin to read them. T.S. Elliot is of course a great place to start. You might want a couple to try a couple or three at a time Frost, Alden Nowlen, Yeats all of these are "accessable". Avoid "harder" works/authors such as Ezra Pound until you feel a bit more comfortable with the whole thing.

Remember to read aloud. Poetry is about the sound of the words. So you should hear them when you read them. This is doubly true of older poety (i.e. Psalms), remember that "silent reading" is a very recent innovation.

Try to read slowly and much less then if you were reading prose. If I am reading poetry I might only read a few pages in an hour. Often reading the same poem more then once.

Enjoy yourself. If you don't like something, try an other author or an other work by the same author. Just start.

I should add this, don't try to "get it". Poetry is not a code and it is not your job to solve the riddle. Sometimes there is a "deep meaning" more often there is only a shadow of an image. Read "the Journey of the Magi" to see what i mean.

Originally Posted by Kevin

Remember to read aloud. Poetry is about the sound of the words. So you should hear them when you read them. This is doubly true of older poety (i.e. Psalms), remember that "silent reading" is a very recent innovation.

Unfortunately my voice (I am still accused of sounding like a child: I can't sing and I can't do dramatic reading) ruins the sound. I have to read them aloud in my head.

I think it's important to read what you like. You'll like more the more you read; whereas if you try to make yourself appreciate something you don't, you might like less the more you read. You can get a collection book and skim through and find out what you want to read more of. Christina Rossetti is a Christian poet you may like: her pieces are very rewarding in their Christian thought, and very rhythmic and beautiful. One of my favorites:

None other Lamb, none other Name,
None other Hope in heaven or earth or sea,
None other Hiding-place from guilt and shame,
None beside Thee.

My faith burns low, my hope burns low,
Only my heart’s desire cries out in me
By the deep thunder of its want and woe,
Cries out to Thee.

Lord, Thou art Life tho I be dead,
Love’s Fire Thou art however cold I be:
Nor heaven have I, nor place to lay my head,
Nor home, but Thee.

(P.S. In case you're interested here's a website that has more information about Rossetti. Her brother Dante Gabriel was also a superb poet.)

Heidi, thanks for the link to the Annotated Waste Land. Andrew, if your paper is available I would like to read it.

Kevin, interesting comment about reading aloud. I think I remember hearing recently about how St Ambrose reading silently astonished his contemporaries.

Originally Posted by Puddleglum

Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.

This is a reference to the "Hail Mary." He is calling on Mary's intercession.

Originally Posted by Augusta

I have virtually no experience with poetry. You guys are making me jealous. Where should someone start who needs to aquire some poetry appreciation? The Psalms are the only poetry I have any experience with.

Here is a good place to start - the Poetry Archives Top Poems

Originally Posted by Peter

Andrew, if your paper is available I would like to read it.

Sure thing, Peter, I'll send you a pm.

Kipling is an eminently readable poet. I don't think modern poets are the best introduction to poetry. For one thing many of them were experimenting: for another, many of them are not worth much.

As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --
Once, twice and again!
And a doe leaped up, and a doe leaped up
From the pond in the wood where the wild deer sup.
This I, scouting alone, beheld,
Once, twice, and again!

As the dawn was breaking the Sambhur belled --
Once, twice and again!
And a wolf stole back, and a wolf stole back
To carry the word to the waiting Pack,
And we sought and we found and we bayed on his track
Once, twice and again!

As the dawn was breaking the Wolf-Pack yelled
Once, twice and again!
Feet in the jungle that leave no mark!
Eyes that can see in the dark -- the dark!
Tongue -- give tongue to it! Hark! O Hark!
Once, twice and again!

His spots are the joy of the Leopard: his horns are the Buffalo's pride,
Be clean, for the strength of the hunter is known by the gloss of his hide.

If ye find that the bullock can toss you, or the heavy-browed Sambhur can gore;
Ye need not stop work to inform us; we knew it ten seasons before.

Oppress not the cubs of the stranger, but hail them as Sister and Brother,
For though they are little and fubsy, it may be the Bear is their mother.

"There is none like to me!" says the Cub in the pride of his earliest kill;
But the Jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be still.

Thanks to you all for the help.