Merz 1

Anna Merz

Seminar

Dr. McGraw

TS Eliot; Report 23

23 February 2015

Disturb the Universe

T.S. Eliot has been called a lot of things. A lot of things. I’m sure we have called him some things as we tried to read this poetry. However, it is important to recognize Eliot even if you aren’t in love with him. He was the first modernist poet, and one of the most innovative writers in the history of writing. His work spoke about the changes of the world in the 20th century, the importance of literature as a whole, and the world in general. Hopefully, we can love this poetry by the time we are through with it.

  1. First, History Stuff
  2. Thomas Stearns Eliot
  3. Born September 26, 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri
  4. Went to Harvard, finished in 3 years, stayed for grad school (1906-1914)
  5. Went to live in Europe, introduced to Ezra Pound, to whom he dedicated The Waste Land
  6. Notably influenced by French Symbolists (Verlaine and Rimbaud (hint hint)) as well as Dante, Vergil, John Donne, and John Dryden
  7. Philosopher, but also extremely religious (Family background was religious) “religious identity was a continuing theme in Eliot’s poetry and drama”
  8. Won Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948
  9. Died in London on January 4th, 1965 (Shuman)
  10. Modernist Poetry
  11. “Founders”: T.E. Hulme; Ezra Pound; T.S. Eliot
  12. “want[] to express not appearances, but the immediacy of experience itself” (Beasley 15)
  13. Founding Movements
  14. Aestheticism
  15. art for art’s sake, 19th century, Oscar Wilde
  16. French Symbolism
  17. rejection of traditional patterns of poetry-writing
  18. belief that “language that could fully represent Truth ‘is missing’”…because language is imperfect poetry is important”; Eliot felt deeply indebted to this movement
  19. 19th Century; Baudelaire, Rimbaud) (Beasley 27)
  20. Imagism (Hulme and Pound)
  21. Founder Poet T.E. Hulme
  22. Words chosen carefully in poetry to demonstrate an experience
  23. Hulme “Literature, like memory, selects only the vivid patches of life.” (Hughes 21)
  24. New way of using language without pre-conceived notions of symbols
  25. Pound said “The symbolists dealt in ‘association’…They degraded the symbol to the status of a word…for example,…using the term ‘cross’ to mean ‘trial’…the author must use his image because he sees it or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it to back up some creed or system of ethics” (Jones)
  26. Cubism
  27. “describes the 20th-c. perspective and critical temperament” (“Cubism”)
  28. No “doctrine” or manifesto, but “possible to find cubist poetry defined as a style marked by ‘new syntax and punctuation, based on typographical dispersion’” or “works obsessed with perception…works constituted by multiple voices and temporal layers” (“Cubism”)
  29. Poetry is even more radical than free verse in appearance, characterized by “rupture of normal stanza, line, and word boundaries” (“Cubism”)
  30. Modernism?
  31. The Waste Land and T.S. Eliot = first real modernist writing
  32. “language of form and color” described by Pound (“Modernism”)
  33. Carefulness with language; authenticity of experience; poetry that stands for intellectual involvement and a commitment to difficult knowledge
  34. “modernist poetry situated itself quite deliberately amid the ruins of the old, its own fragmentary and unfinished shapes signaling not the absence of some idealized ‘major form’ but rather its pursuit of a knowledge whose difficulty would continue to engage, perplex, and fascinate its readers” (“Modernism”)
  35. Language itself cannot perfectly express reality for these poets “poetry will attempt to get behind language…by highlighting the mismatch between what we feel and what we can say” (Beasley 15)
  1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
  2. Epigraph
  3. Canto 27 from Dante’s Inferno
  4. “If I thought that my reply would be to someone who would ever return to earth, this flame would remain without further movement; but as no one has ever returned alive from this gulf, if what I hear is true, I can answer you with no fear of infamy” (Guido, member of the 8th circle of hell: Fraud—asked God to forgive him for stuff before he did it as a sort of “heaven insurance”)

Question:

As the reader, what connections can you make between the speaker of the poem, or the experiences of the poem, and the situations of either Dante or Guido? What does this intro tell us about the rest of the poem?

  1. Section 1 (1st 3 stanzas)
  2. Environment/Setting
  3. “evening spread out against the sky/like a patient etherized upon a table”
  4. “half-deserted streets,/the muttering retreats”
  5. “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells”
  6. “the room”
  7. “yellow fog” on a “soft October night”
  8. Interaction
  9. “streets that follow like a tedious argument/of insidious intent/To lead you to an overwhelming question…./Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Question:

Remember the importance of writing experience with the modernist poets? What kind of experience is set up at the beginning of this poem?

  1. Section 2 (next 2 stanzas, or lines 23-54)
  2. Conflict
  3. “And indeed there will be time/To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
  4. With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--/(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
  5. “(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)”
  6. “Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?”
  7. “In a minute there is time/ For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”
  8. “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”
  9. “So how should I presume?”
  10. Repeated images/lines already!
  11. “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo”
  12. “Do I dare?”
  13. Time
  14. Yellow Fog

Question:

What is emerging as a kind of conflict in this poem? So far, what is the effect of the repetitions that we are seeing?

  1. Section 3 (Next 5 stanzas; lines 55-86)
  2. Images
  3. Eyes “And I have known the eyes already, known them all…When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall”
  4. Arms “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare…Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl”
  5. Men “lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows”
  6. Afternoon, evening—cat thing again
  7. Teatime and Religion “Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,/ I am no prophet” and “I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,/ And in short, I was afraid”
  8. More repetition
  9. “I have known the ______already, known them all”
  10. “And how should I presume?”
  11. Ocean imagery
  12. “Should I…/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?”

Question:

What is the experience created by the images in this section? What mood has been established, and how do these images add to it? We haven’t talked about the ocean imagery so far. What are you making of it? What purpose does it seem to serve so far in the poem?

  1. Section 4 (lines 87-121)
  2. Allusions
  3. Lazarus “To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,/ Come back to tell you all,”
  4. Hamlet “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”
  5. Language
  6. At teatime “To have bitten off the matter with a smile,/To have squeezed the universe into a ball/ To roll it toward some overwhelming question”
  7. “That is not what I meant at all;/ That is not it, at all”
  8. “It is impossible to say just what I mean!”
  9. Decisions
  10. Would it have been worth it?
  11. “I grow old… I grow old…/ I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”

Question:

Remember Modernist ideas about language? Where do you see that “mismatch between what you feel and what you can say” in this poem? How does Eliot’s language reflect a true experience?

How are the allusions to the bible and to Shakespeare integrated into the poem? Do they seem out of place?

What kinds of culminations are you beginning to see in this section? Does it seem at odds with the experience that has been established in the work so far?

  1. Section 5 (lines 122-131; end of the poem)
  2. Reality/Fantastic
  3. Questions/Decisions in reality
  4. “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”
  5. “I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach”
  6. The Fantastic
  7. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each”
  8. “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown”
  9. Mingling of the two
  10. “I do not think that they [the mermaids] will sing to me”
  11. “We have lingered…Till human voices wake us, and we drown”

Questions:

At the end, we have a mingling of cold hard reality, with what seems to be imagination, in a way that seems different from the rest of the poem. First, have we come to any kind of conclusion about “the point” (cringe) of this poem? How does the mixture of fantasy and reality help to create true experience?

If we compare the end of the poem with all its ocean imagery to the beginning of the poem, and ocean imagery scattered throughout, do we notice a way that imagery is being used that seems to reflect that “point” we talked about earlier?

  1. The Wasteland
  2. General Disclaimer: We have needed EVERY SECOND of seminar so far to even come close to trying to “get” this poem. And we still aren’t going to “get” all of the allusions/perspective changes/general majesty of this poem. No one is. Ever.
  3. Another General Disclaimer: This poem contains an allusion almost every other line, five different languages, and more interpretations on top of that. We can’t do it all. So we are going to focus on some different repeated/patterned elements of the poem to try to figure it out a little bit.
  4. Contrast of “Old” Western Literature with Modern experience
  5. I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
  6. First, image of growing things, 20th Century European conversation about Germany, memories of Childhood (lines 1-18)
  7. Second, questions from the Bible (lines 19-20) from Ezekiel “asks you what you could possibly grow from your spirit” then lines 21-23 from Ecclesiastes answers the question with “You cannot say, or guess, for you know only/ A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,/ And the dead tree gives no shelter” (21-23)
  8. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Bible again, to dust you shall return) coupled with lines from Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde” in which a sailor mourns his lover who he has left behind
  9. Ends with an image of Modern European city “Unreal city/ Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge

Question:

Old and new are setting up a setting for The Waste Land. What is it? We already know that the place of the poem is constantly changing, so what “setting” do we have? Is there a constant here? What is the speaker’s tone towards the setting (if there is one)? Who is involved in creating this setting?

  1. II. A GAME OF CHESS
  2. Begin with an allusion “like a burnished throne” from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra which helps to describe a new place for the poem—which is a room with an elaborate, ancient royalty type feel
  3. “Above the antique mantel was displayed/ As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene/ The change of Philomel” (lines 97-99)
  4. Allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses- Philomela is raped by King Tereus and then turns into a nightingale
  5. Modern Conversation happens—“I think we are in rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones” refers to the trenches in WWI
  6. Shakespeare The Tempest “I remember/ Those are pearls that were his eyes” and “O OOO that Shakespearean Rag” combine The Tempest with an Irving Berlin song “The Mysterious Rag”

Question:

We all read The Tempest, and we read some of Ovid…what tone is the speaker using with “THE BARD” and with ancient Greek mythology?

  1. Now some Modern Stuff: lines 139-152
  2. “Lil” is rehashing a conversation in a bar that she had with a “friend” whose husband is coming back from WWI. She tells her friend “Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart” (142)
  3. Bar- “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME”
  4. “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night” (172) Alludes to Hamlet and Ophelia

Question:

We’ve got another Old/New thing going on here. What experience is the speaker trying to communicate with this conversation about WWI, women, and Ophelia? Is it an “authentic modernist experience?”

  1. III. THE FIRE SERMON
  2. Begin with the River Thames in London “The river’s tent is broken:…The nymphs are departed./ Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” (173-176)
  3. Nymphs and empty bottles appear in the same river
  4. “At the violet hour, when the eyes and back/ Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (215-217)
  5. Modern working world contrasted with the rest of the stanza “Tiresias” from Ovid Tiresias was a man who was transformed into a woman and then cursed by Hera and made into a prophet by Zeus
  6. “Elizabeth and Leicester”
  7. QUEEN ELIZABETH!!! Paired with a Wagner Opera

Questions:

What happens in the poem because this story of the woman and her “lover” is told by the old prophet from Metamorphoses? What does it tell the reader if all of Elizabeth’s reign and her life can be condensed into a “WeialalalaleiaWallalaleialala”?

  1. IV. DEATH BY WATER
  2. Another return to water, another ancient Greek reminder of mortality
  3. V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
  4. “After the torch-light red on sweaty faces/ After the frosty silence in the gardens/ After the agony in tony places…He who was living is now dead/ We who were living are now dying”
  5. Reference to Christ’s resurrection, but combined with a reference to modern living/dying
  6. Another place of the poem “Here is no water but only rock” (331)
  7. “Who is the third who walks always beside you?”
  8. Another combination of modern and ancient-Antarctic expedition and book of Luke Christ who is unrecognized by disciples
  9. “Bringing rain/ Ganga was sunken, (395)
  10. Reference to the East, and the Thunder is allowed to speak in this new, Eastern language in a Hindu fable
  11. Gods, men, demons all asked how to live well, the Thunder (father) answered, and each group heard something different one, “have compassion” (men); “have self-control” (demons); “give” (Gods)
  12. Followed by image of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus

Questions:

What do you make of this new insertion of Eastern Philosophy into this Western-dominated poem? Does it seem out of place? Is there a new message in this new philosophy?

  1. FINAL SECTION
  2. “London Bridge is Falling Down” –Nursery Rhyme
  3. “Poi…” –Dante’s Inferno talks about a poet who is burning in hell “he hid himself in the fire which refines them”
  4. “When shall I be as the swallow” back to Philomela (who had her tongue cut out)
  5. “The Prince of Aquitaine in the ruined tower” (from “el Desdichado” by Nerval about crumbling towers
  6. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
  7. “Why then Ile fit you” from “The Spanish Tragedy” by Thomas Kyd—basically a revenge play for Kyd’s son, saying, you want a play, I’ll write you a play!
  8. Orders from the myth-“Give, show compassion, and control yourself”
  9. Shantih= “The Peace which passeth all understanding”

Questions:

What do you see in these final images and combinations? What is the significance of the many languages combined at the very end? Does the end seem to clash with the message of the rest of the poem? Why/why not?

What do you think??? YOU SURVIVED ELIOT! 

Conclusion:

Hopefully, now, it is clear there is SOME method with this madness! Eliot, who seems so unreachable just requires a little (haha) research. Its like a puzzle. A crazy puzzle.

Works Cited

Beasley, Rebecca.Theorists of Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound. New York: Routledge, 2007. Print.

"Cubism."The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Ed. Roland Greene. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. Prufrock and Other Observations.From Poems. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1920; Bartleby.com, 2011.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. The Waste Land. New York: Horace Liveright, 1922; Bartleby.com, 2011.

Hughes, Glenn.Imagism and the Imagists: A Study in Modern Poetry. New York: BibloTannenellers &, 1931. Print.

Jones, Peter.Imagist Poetry. Penguin Classics ed. New York: Penguin Group, 2001. Print.

"Modernism."The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.Ed. Roland Greene. 4th ed. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print.

Shuman, R. Baird. "T. S. Eliot."Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia(2014):Research Starters. Web. 22 Feb. 2015.