Smth about T.S.Eliot

[EDward]

Hallo! I'm very glad that I found this forum. I'm postgraduate student of Herzen university in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. I study T.S. Eliot's plays, at this moment such problem as "Myth and Ritual in "Murder in the Cathedral". I would be glad to get into contact with Eliot's admirers and those who are interested in modernist literature.

[Virgil]

Edward - First welcome to lit net. I'm glad you found it. I've read quite a bit of Elliot's poetry, but none of his plays, I'm afraid. If there is anything in his poetry you would like to discuss, I would enjoy that.

[EDward]

Hallo, Virgil! Thank you for response. May be you'll tell me some about general attitude to Eliot in Western world? Here in Russia he is considered to be "not-for-everyone" poet. Most people don't know him. I think that he's one of the greatest English (and American) poets. Just remember:
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.

[Virgil]

Hallo, Virgil! Thank you for response. May be you'll tell me some about general attitude to Eliot in Western world? Here in Russia he is considered to be "not-for-everyone" poet. Most people don't know him. I think that he's one of the greatest English (and American) poets. Just remember:
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.
Yes, he's considered a great poet, perhaps the greatest writing in english in the 20th century. When you say "not-for-everyone" well in general most poetry is not for everyone. He's widely read in College/University. You can't have a course on modern poetry (in english, of course) without starting with Eliot and his friend Ezra Pound. His three most important works are "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prurock," "The Waste Land," and "The Four Quartets." But there are other poems I enjoy just as much. One thing you must remember about Eliot that I'm surprised that so many forget (I think they focus on the modernist style and disregard Eliot's ideas) is that he is extremely religious and that religion plays an absolutely critical role in his poetry. Here's a section (Part 2) of "Ash Wednesday" which is one of my all time favorite Eliot passages:


From "Ash Wednesday,"
Part II

Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to sateity
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live? shall these
Bones live? And that which had been contained
In the bones (which were already dry) said chirping:
Because of the goodness of this Lady
And because of her loveliness, and because
She honours the Virgin in meditation,
We shine with brightness. And I who am here dissembled
Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love
To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd.
It is this which recovers
My guts the strings of my eyes and the indigestible portions
Which the leopards reject. The Lady is withdrawn
In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown.
Let the whiteness of bones atone to forgetfulness.
There is no life in them. As I am forgotten
And would be forgotten, so I would forget
Thus devoted, concentrated in purpose. And God said
Prophesy to the wind, to the wind only for only
The wind will listen. And the bones sang chirping
With the burden of the grasshopper, saying

Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.

Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.

As you can see there are all sorts of Christian symbols and almost medieval ideas here. If you like, you can read the whole poem at this web site:
http://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~gjm11/poems/ashwed.html

[EDward]

Yes, it's great. But if we speak about Eliot's religiousness we usually turn to his poems and plays after his conversion into Catholic in 1927 (and Ash Wednesday is of 1930). Was he religious before it, in Waste Land and Hollow Men? I think yes, but that time his religiousness was hidden.It may be revealed only by close reading and reffering to different quotations,especially from Dante.

[TodHackett]

EDward--

Forgive me for this. Between my atrocious understanding of Russian grammar & vocabulary, and the fact that I have only Roman characters on my keyboard, this will probably grate on your ears (eyes?):

Ochen priyatno! Dobro pozhalovat v Literatura Forumye!

Doomayoo, schto Eliot buil otleecnie poet, no eslee tuy hochish emu panimat, nado panimat, tozhe, bolshie droogie poetee. Eliot zanimal ot Angliskie metaphisicheskie poetee ("from the English metaphysical poets"-- I can't remember the proper genitive declension for plural adjectives and nouns)-- napremier, John Donne ee John Milton. Ee konechno, Eliot zanimal tozhe ot biblioo. Tak, studientie, kto pervuy yezik buil Angliska, chasto tozhe doomayoo schto Eliot buil ochen troodnuy poet panimat.

Still, having said that (I hope you could understand it; my Russian has gone to ****, and lacking the Cyrillic doesn't help), let me say that even first-timers who read Eliot in English can't deny that his imagery is memorable, even spooky. "...like wind in dry grass, or rat's feet over broken glass, in our dry cellars." Who could forget a line like that? So even students who don't understand Eliot (very few do; certainly I'm not amongst them!) often like his work.

[Xamonas Chegwe]

So even students who don't understand Eliot (very few do; certainly I'm not amongst them!) often like his work.

Thanks Tod, I thought it was just me! I love to read Eliot's poems for the images they create. I'll let the unnamable worry about what they mean.

[Virgil]

Yes, it's great. But if we speak about Eliot's religiousness we usually turn to his poems and plays after his conversion into Catholic in 1927 (and Ash Wednesday is of 1930). Was he religious before it, in Waste Land and Hollow Men? I think yes, but that time his religiousness was hidden.It may be revealed only by close reading and reffering to different quotations,especially from Dante.
Did he convert to Cathoilcism? I wasn't aware of that. I thought he was a high Anglican.

*Searched the internet*
Found this:
http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/people/A0817091.html

He accepted religious faith as a solution to the human dilemma and espoused Anglo-Catholicism in 1927.

What exactly is Anglo-Catholicism? Can someone help? This might be important layer to my further understanding him.

[Petrarch's Love]

Virgil--Here's a link that gives a pretty good explanation of Anglo Catholicism:

http://www.gracechurchinnewark.org/whatisanglocatholic.html

[blp]

Hello, EDward. I love Eliot's poems and also recently read his play The Cocktail Party, though my sievelike mind has forgotten everything about it. My recollection is better of the really love the long poem by him, Sweeney Agonistes that's written as a sort of dramatic scenario and is brilliant. I've often been curious to know whether this was ever actually performed.

[EDward]

EDward--


Ochen priyatno! Dobro pozhalovat v Literatura Forumye!

Doomayoo, schto Eliot buil otleecnie poet, no eslee tuy hochish emu panimat, nado panimat, tozhe, bolshie droogie poetee. Eliot zanimal ot Angliskie metaphisicheskie poetee ("from the English metaphysical poets"-- I can't remember the proper genitive declension for plural adjectives and nouns)-- napremier, John Donne ee John Milton. Ee konechno, Eliot zanimal tozhe ot biblioo. Tak, studientie, kto pervuy yezik buil Angliska, chasto tozhe doomayoo schto Eliot buil ochen troodnuy poet panimat.

Still, having said that (I hope you could understand it; my Russian has gone to ****, and lacking the Cyrillic doesn't help), let me say that even first-timers who read Eliot in English can't deny that his imagery is memorable, even spooky. "...like wind in dry grass, or rat's feet over broken glass, in our dry cellars." Who could forget a line like that? So even students who don't understand Eliot (very few do; certainly I'm not amongst them!) often like his work.

Hallo, TodHackett! Your Russian is nice (надеюсь, мой английский тоже). I have studied Eliot's works for last 3 years and I can't say that I understand him properly, but I like him very much. I like among other things his "Murder in the Cathedral". What do you think about this play?

[Virgil]

Virgil--Here's a link that gives a pretty good explanation of Anglo Catholicism:

http://www.gracechurchinnewark.org/whatisanglocatholic.html
Thanks Petrarch. That was good. So to sum it up, it's being Catholic without the Catholic church. Hmmm.

[quasimodo1]

T.S. ELIOT: We shall not see exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Above all that, is something else in the nature of his poetry itself that says, and continues to say after nearly 100 years, that this is what poetry is, what it means, and that poetry means us. What Eliot's poems tell us, to put it a bit too easily, is that language is a deception, perhaps an agreed-upon deception-- that we do not mean what we say or say what we mean. This suggests that all meaning is hidden, which Freud suggested too. Eliot laid it out in art. The syntax is abnormal, the logic is illogical. Take the opening of "Prufrock":

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

ROGER ROSENBLATT: Look at an evening, say in April. The only way one can understand Eliot's lines is to see the evening as something that one feels, and then if one feels etherized like a patient, the time of day corresponds. In other words, you cannot interpret the image except by entering a dreamlike statue of non-interpretation.

Underlying that thought is that language is always inadequate to the truth of experience - inadequate to who we are. So Beckett wanted to reduce his plays to a single word. So Wallace Stevens wrote about the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. But it also goes back into poetry. Shakespeare, no less, wrote about making nothing of nothing. "I get it, but I can't say it. I say it, but I can never say it all." That is poetry, both ancient and modern.

{from PBS special}

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/essays/jan-june01/tseliot_04-18.html

[AuntShecky]

One of my favorite lines is (I think) from the Four Quartets in which Eliot talks of:
"a raid on the inarticulate."
For that is what all poetry attempts: to express the inexpressible.

And also, Roger Rosenblatt's statements reminded me of how Eliot once lamented that in the seventeenth century poetry underwent "a dissociation of sensibility from which
we have never recovered." Think of emotion as depicted by the Romantic poets, for instance. I believe that means that at one time thought and feeling were inextricable; thought was an emotional "experience." Eliot came up with this notion while discussing the Metaphysical poets, whom he did not admire as much as we do in 2007. But think of emotion as depicted by the Romantic poets, for instance; intellectual thought was considered to be somehow less valid than feeling, say, in Coleridge and in Blake, especially. Modern and contemporary man somehow perceives thinking and feeling as two quite different mental activities.

I'm no conservative, but in a way, I also wish we could reunite the two experiences.

[quasimodo1]

[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
—Simpson’s Contemporary Quotations (7146)
T.S.
Eliot

[quasimodo1]

Burnt Norton


{A very long work, usually beginning with a geographical context}

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?


...and:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

by T.S. Elliot

[mansoor alam]

excellent! but i don't think that a word like 'excellent' means what i mean to say. this is how all great art is .we need to understand that language can never stisfy one's original intent .that is why we find a number of ambiguities in browning and t s eliot.they constantly tell us that we can not say what we want to say.they expect their readers to ferret out the original purpose behind a text.