T.S. Eliot

[nns]

T.S. Eliot stinks.
At the University of Nottingham somebody wrote on a wall:
"TS ELIOT = TOILETS"
:nod:
mere coincidence? don't think so.

[Virgil]

Normally an ignoramus statement like that doesn't even warrent a reply, but if you gave Eliot a chance and tried to learn from either your teacher or some explanatory book, you might begin to understand why he's among the most important poets wrinting in English in the 20th century. Your message amounts to graffiti. What exactly do you think is wrong with him?

[nns]

"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 tornò vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero, / Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo"

What can you expect from somebody who defines la divina commedia "the most perfect work of art"? Don't get me wrong: I am one of the lucky ones who can enjoy it in its original version as I am Italian, but still... The first impression is that you like to consider yourself a member of the "chosen ones", and look down to us, the uneducated, with superiority. TS Eliot writes things he does not want us to understand, that's what's wrong with him: he writes in 57 languages, quoting tens of authors (among whom your beloved Dante Alighieri, see the beginning of "the love song on JAP", above - just in case...). For you, of course, this is just too simple. When your first red the poem you instantly knew who's Guido di Montefeltri and why he is quoted there, not to mention the fact that Dante's italian is the language you always use with your buddies). For us, it's not. I love the War 1 poets: people who had something to say and said it. Plainly. And still, so beautifuly. My favourite poem (in english) is T. Hardy's "The Oxen". Not La Divina Commedia. And I will resist the urge I am feeling to apologise for that.
my original post wanted to quote a graffiti I saw and that made me smile. Don't think Mr. Eliot would have taken it personally. You apparently did. God bless you.

[The Unnamable]

The Waste Ground

“The poet…must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths. He must therefore content himself with the slow progress of his name, and contemn the praise of his own time.” Dr. Johnson

For V. il miglior credulone

I The Burial of the half-dead

February is the cruellest month, mixing
Eternal optimism with experiential despair, stirring
Slow posters with silent scorn.
Christmas kept us warm, feeding
A little life with high hopes.
Bin gar kein English, stamm aus Port Talbot, echt Walisisch.
In the valleys, there you feel hemmed in.
I shop therefore I am. I am therefore I shop.

Andromache, je pense a vous;
Vueve d’Hector, helas! et femme d’Helenus.

Unreal Forum Board,
Under the blue mood of a black day
A crowd flowed over cyber hill, so many,
I had not thought lethargy had undone so many.

Deor – aes ofereode – ysses swa maeg


II A Game of Lit. Crit.

The Barstool he sat on, like burnished aluminium,
Glowed ‘mid the sawdust, whiles upon the bar
The lees and dregs were mix’d with peanut crumbs
And sodden Mexicali tortilla chips.
“My joie de vivre’s gone today, yes, gone.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak?
Speak. What are you lot thinking – what thinking – what?”

I think we are in sloth’s alley
Where the young lose their – enthusiasm.
What shall we do in response to cotton candy?
What shall we ever do?
We shall play a game of Lit. Crit.
Rubbing specs and waiting for the lottery numbers to come up
Trumps. Hurry up, please, it’s time.


IV Death by Airhead

Innomable the Celt, three months Boarded Up
Forgot the fun of Threads and the joy of rebuttals
and the wit and the preferences and the homespun wisdom
Anglo-Saxon or Gael,
You who post the board and look to Ancient Greece
Remember Innomable, who was once weary and cynical as you.


V What the Blunderer Said

If there were curiosity
And no brains
If there were brains
And also curiosity,
An interest,
Enthusiasm,
A spark among the sloths,
If there were the appearance of curiosity only
But there is no curiosity.

DATA.....................DAMNED-DATA....................... DAMNED BLANDNESS

SHANTY........................ SHINTY............................ SHANDY

[Virgil]

The Waste Ground

“The poet…must disregard present laws and opinions, and rise to general and transcendental truths. He must therefore content himself with the slow progress of his name, and contemn the praise of his own time.” Dr. Johnson

For V. il miglior credulone

I The Burial of the half-dead

February is the cruellest month, mixing
Eternal optimism with experiential despair, stirring
Slow posters with silent scorn.
Christmas kept us warm, feeding
A little life with high hopes.
Bin gar kein English, stamm aus Port Talbot, echt Walisisch.
In the valleys, there you feel hemmed in.
I shop therefore I am. I am therefore I shop.

Andromache, je pense a vous;
Vueve d’Hector, helas! et femme d’Helenus.

Unreal Forum Board,
Under the blue mood of a black day
A crowd flowed over cyber hill, so many,
I had not thought lethargy had undone so many.

Deor – aes ofereode – ysses swa maeg


II A Game of Lit. Crit.

The Barstool he sat on, like burnished aluminium,
Glowed ‘mid the sawdust, whiles upon the bar
The lees and dregs were mix’d with peanut crumbs
And sodden Mexicali tortilla chips.
“My joie de vivre’s gone today, yes, gone.
Speak to me. Why do you never speak?
Speak. What are you lot thinking – what thinking – what?”

I think we are in sloth’s alley
Where the young lose their – enthusiasm.
What shall we do in response to cotton candy?
What shall we ever do?
We shall play a game of Lit. Crit.
Rubbing specs and waiting for the lottery numbers to come up
Trumps. Hurry up, please, it’s time.


IV Death by Airhead

Innomable the Celt, three months Boarded Up
Forgot the fun of Threads and the joy of rebuttals
and the wit and the preferences and the homespun wisdom
Anglo-Saxon or Gael,
You who post the board and look to Ancient Greece
Remember Innomable, who was once weary and cynical as you.


V What the Blunderer Said

If there were curiosity
And no brains
If there were brains
And also curiosity,
An interest,
Enthusiasm,
A spark among the sloths,
If there were the appearance of curiosity only
But there is no curiosity.

DATA.....................DAMNED-DATA....................... DAMNED BLANDNESS

SHANTY........................ SHINTY............................ SHANDY
This is hilarious. :lol: Did you make this up? I guess you did. And who says you don't have sense of humor? :thumbs_up A+ for mock epic. Thanks.

[Ron Price]

After reading the above thread I thought I'd make two or three comments about these two authors. I'll make my comments in the form of prose-poems. :lol:
__________________________
A NEW LAND, BRIGHT WITH PROMISE

In writing autobiography Price enjoyed seeing himself in the way Hannah Arendt liked to write about others: “thou shalt like an airy spirit go.” Like Arendt with her biographies, Price preferred to keep his autobiography free of moral grossness, as far as possible. He grappled with melancholy by thinking things through and waiting, patiently waiting in his private, inaccessible, thinking place. Inevitably, too, in his 1000 page autobiography readers would come across what was for them a certain moral grossness. -Ron Price with thanks to Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of This World, Yale UP, London, 1982, pp.xv-xvii.


This is no Virgilian nostalgia
for a lost arcadia, no patch-work
job for a Rome and an emperor
slowly acquiring divine afflatus.

This is a poetry of praise for an
institutional charisma, fully legitimate,
this time no artificial flavouring or
colour, heading out into the galaxies.

This time, this day which past ages
and centuries can never hope to rival,
in which the fragrances of mercy
have been wafted everywhere, is
no recrudescence of the ancients
but, by God, we will survive by
the skin of our teeth.

This is that which hath descended
from the realm of glory, uttered
by the tongue of power and might
and revealed unto the Prophets2
of old but, now, with a new voice.

With transports of joy, with an ocean of
some presence, surging through all the
atoms of existence and the essence of all
created things, comes this Great Announcement.

This is no guru who thinks he might be,
some miracle worker, one of the hundreds
of might be’s, a false Messiah, a saviour-in-
a-hurry. This is the thrilling voice of a Pen…

a trumpet-call, all of creation shaking
to its very foundations, a tempest blowing
away the detritus and creating the roots
of faith in world-reverberating institutions
for this age of unific influences.

And so my internal dialogue urges out
onto this page for selected others, over-
coming solitariness as I drift through the
first years of this twenty-first century,
on the coast of a new land, bright with
the promise of threads of gold to come.

Ron Price
1996: revised
in December 2005.
_____________________________
SLIPING INTO LOW GEAR


All poetry is difficult, almost impossible, to write...to distinguish between what one really feels and what one would like to feel...between genuine feeling and falsity.
-T.S. Eliot in a lecture.


Before twilight I wake and here a lone bird
sing so clearly I am more aware
of my cloudy brain which has begun
to turn the world over, yet again, yet again.
And I keep turning the world, as if on its axis,
until there’s sweat on my brow
and I am totally exhausted:
I have lived a day already
and have yet to get up!
I shower in the hope of renewal
and my brain sorts out the day again.

I’ve always had an active thinking mechanism,
I say to myself in justification as I shave
I get something into focus:
thinking slows down for a moment;
I head for some clothes and a cup of tea.
Somehow my soul has its dwelling place
positioned for the day. I read.....

make of what Thou didst reveal unto me in my sleep
the surest foundation for the mansions of Thy love
that are within the hearts...and the best instrument
for the tokens of Thy grace...*

...no evidence of this stuff yet, I say to myself;
it’s one of those days...

I read, in another place:

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest.
But we must accept this truth and not keep fighting it
and wishing all would be well. The transcending of the
difficulty lies in the radiant acceptance of the difficulty.
his is why this truth is so difficult to live out...so few...
so very few...attain.**

I walk outside to the car and leave a battlefield behind,
as a new one beckons. I slip into low gear...

Ron Price
20 December 1995

* Baha’u’llah, Morning Prayer
** a quotation from several books combined into my own word picture.
__________________________
That's all folks! :goof:

[sumalan monica]

Endless talk-words ,words of wisdom?

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot
we are lost in dreams ,in illusions, in our own life-and we are not able to see the rest of it!

[beauti_life]

hi
how are you
can you help me please
i want Critical analyses
about this poem
using easy language

can you help me??
__________________

[stormy sky]

I read Prufrock 2 days back,and i liked it.
though the famous etherised patient part didn't really impress me,it did fit with his line of thought and the fragmentation comes out clearly in this poem.Besides Eliot wanted for poetry to be difficult,as he wanted it to reflect reality in a way,so if reality is chaotic and complex,so must poerty be.