Difficult Modernist Poetry...

[Zeruiah]

Hi,

How does one get to reading difficult, obscure poetry like that of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot?

For most of my poetry-reading career, I've stayed within the realms of Classical and Romantic poetry; now, I want to push towards more contemporary poetry and have some fun with it. It's to my understanding that most people read poets like Eliot and Pound for university study or meditation on modern technique. I don't want to do this. I want to read these two for my own enjoyment and to maybe soak up a bit of their style into my own.

From what I've seen, the two have ostensibly enjoyable poetry with abstract content and themes. The two of them both obscure their work by unusual language and by luring the reader into superficial reading with a singular, colloquial voice (rather than the large-scale, formal chorus seen in Romantic and Classical poetry). Pound is even more cruel with his strange Provencal and Tuscan allusions. Beyond that, I have no clue.

I'm really lost and I can't find any free guides over the internet. Would someone be willing to help me out with a nudge in the right direction?

[JBI]

T. S. Eliot and Pound are difficult, but are necessarily so, well Eliot was anyway. I don't think he personally could have expressed his vision without the polyphonic qualities he uses in the wasteland, or the densely philosophical qualities he uses in Four Quartets. Pound also, has many easy works, and stylistically, relative to Eliot, he seems to have a lighter touch. When I first was introduced to The Waste Land, I actually used to try and guess which lines were Pound's, and which Eliot's. But either way, they both are difficult as you say.


The way you handle this is by reading them incessantly, since they warrant such reading, especially Eliot. After the 10th or so reading, the Waste Land starts to unravel, though I don't think it ever fully unravels. You really need to take the poem as a whole in your mind, if you are going to get anywhere. The Same with Four Quartets. The name means that each poem needs to sing with the others, as four single poems, all containing all four poems at once.

But yeah, lots of work is the way to deal with difficult writers. Some are worth it, others aren't, but Eliot and Pound I would argue most certainly are worth it.

Besides, they have accessible works to, like The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, or Pound's "Ancient Music".

[LitNetIsGreat]

I would strongly suggest reading up on the ideas of modernism and theory, I know you hinted at not wanting to do that but I think it is near vital in the understanding of such texts. I've just had a very quick scan over the internet and can find nothing much of value, which doesn't really surprise me, you're probably better off heading down to the library to try and pick something up if you are really interested in reading such works. In may help reading around the likes of Woolf and Joyce to get into the flavour of the modernist stuff too. The following is taken from Barry Beginning Theory which may help you get an angle on modernism, there are far better books out there but Barry is fine for starters:


1 A new emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity, that is, on how we see rather that what we see (a preoccupation evident in the use of the stream of consciousness technique).

2 A movement (in novels) away from the apparent objectivity provided by such features as: omniscient external narration, fixed narrative points of view and clear-cut moral positions.

3 A blurring of the distinction between genres, so that novels tend to become more lyrical and poetic, for instance, and poems more documentary and prose-like.

4 A new liking for fragmented forms, discontinuous narrative, and random-seeming collages of disparate materials.

5 A tendency towards "reflexivity", so that poems, plays and novels raise issues concerning their own nature, status and role.

As I say they are only basic guidelines covering the modernist movement and but number 4 is of particular importance when looking at The Waste Land especially the idea of the fragmented forms and the discontinuous narrative, polyphony etc. I've not really covered modernism as deeply as I want to as yet so I am far from an expert in this area, but I think you will find it very valuable to study some of the wider context of modernism if looking at Eliot and co. I certainly applaud you for doing so, enjoy.

[Virgil]

I don't think the difficulty arises in technique or language. The language of these poets is tha modern language, our language. The difficulty resides in allusions, the references to distant and sometime obscure things. What you need is an annotated copy of their works. Once you understand the allusions, the meaning comes together.

[JBI]

It's more than that though - one doesn't just need to know the allusion, the allusion needs to be, on one hand, taken as an allusion, bringing the voice of the entire text into the poem, but it also transforms itself within the poem, into something belonging to the poem. That is where the tricky part comes from, deciding how to take them - there isn't a scholarly consensus on that at any rate, and much variance depending on which allusion, but I think generally one needs to take both into account, and read both ways at once.

That makes for strange reading, surely, and yes, annotations are a bonus, but even so, in Four Quartets in Particular, I think allusion became something of the poem more than an intertext - The Bhagavad Gita means something to "The Dry Salvages", but I'm not sure if it means what the Bhagavad Gita means, or something idiosyncratic to the poem itself.