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Falling Down the Rabbit Hole of Some T.S. Eliot Criticism

8/1/2010

10 Comments

 
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I recently fell down the rabbit hole of some T.S. Eliot criticism. I’ve read and reread a lot of Eliot’s poetry over the years, but as amazing as he is, he’s one of the most difficult poets ever to write in English. So perusing good criticism of him is essential. The Eliot criticism I slogged through in the past wasn’t as helpful as the book I recently read. But the recent book, though insightful, was almost as difficult as Eliot’s poems.

And what makes Eliot's poetry, and literary interpretation of his poetry, so difficult? His work’s mind-blowing preponderance of allusions, not just to literature but also to religion, mythology, anthropology, philosophy, history and science. Here I’m thinking of The Waste Land, arguably his masterpiece, as well as poems like The Hollow Men and Four Quartets. Eliot read everything and virtually all of it made its way into his poetry, usually in the form of allusions but sometimes in the form of quotations and partial rephrasings. (Incidentally, early in his career, the quotations, often without quotation marks, and partial rephrasings led to his being accused of plagiarism. Eliot — the über-modernist, writing in the early to mid 20th century — was sampling decades before hip-hop artists, the quintessential postmodernists, made sampling widespread within pop culture. But I digress...) To quote poet and Harvard professor Stephen Burt, before John Ashbery “the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible was probably T. S. Eliot.” Probably? No, definitely.

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The book of Eliot criticism that I recently read, and found insightful but difficult, is B.C. Southam's A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. Don't let the lightweight-sounding title fool you. The book is anything but lightweight. It's a compendium of the galaxies of criticism from preceding Eliot critics and goes through "all" the layers of allusions that undergird Eliot's work. If you want to grasp every single allusion Southam unearths, no matter how esoteric or complicated, and fully understand how and why Eliot is manipulating the texts he references, then reading Southam’s book is hard work, especially since you’ll need to flip back and forth between Southam’s book and Eliot’s poems, rereading the relevant passage from Eliot’s oeuvre each time Southam explains an allusion.

As difficult as Southam’s book can be (and will be if used correctly), you should read it first and then move on to other books of Eliot criticism. Just my advice as someone who unfortunately reversed the order. The Eliot criticism I read before Southam’s book — Denis Donoghue's Words Alone will do as an example — wasn’t all that helpful, but that was only because I should have read Southam’s book first. Southam is a good (and incredibly thorough) starting place. Donoghue, after all, cites the book repeatedly.

Some of you may be wondering, “Why even bother reading a poet as difficult as Eliot, especially since fully understanding him requires that you read scholarly books?” My answer? Eliot is worth the trouble. He’s one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century and has had a deeper influence on my poetry than I care to admit. For me, gaining a greater understanding of his work is a tremendous boon. As Ezra Pound put it, “The more we know of Eliot, the better.”

10 Comments
Matthew Kobin link
7/26/2010 04:50:53 am

Pound's compliment might be an indirect self-compliment, since he was a mentor and editor of Eliot's, an admitted elitist concerned with the education of the poet, and the writer of the very influential ABC of Reading (1934). Yes, reading should be difficult, especially Milton (whom Eliot despised), but this doesn't mean you should trust teachers. Hypocrite pedagogue, mon sembable, mon frere!

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Dana Crum link
7/27/2010 04:27:40 am

Astute comment, Matthew. Pound was incredibly influential in Eliot’s development and knew it. So he probably knew that the more we know about Eliot, the more we will know of his indebtedness to Pound. I was introduced to Pound and Eliot at around the same time, but was drawn more to Eliot. That was years ago. It’s time I gave Pound’s work a second chance. It’s not unusual for me to like certain poets now whom I didn’t really care for when I was young. When I was young, I was so in love with form, with rhyme, with meter. If the poem wasn’t formal, I wasn’t interested. Now I’m a big fan of free verse. Eliot’s free verse was the first free verse I liked, probably because it’s not truly free. As he put it, 'No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.” Eliot’s poetry still has meter, though unlike completely formal poetry, the number of feet in his lines will vary in no real pattern. At times in his career, Eliot also used rhyme but usually not in a strict, formal (patterned) way. So his poetry is kind of a hybrid between free verse and formal poetry.

Yes, Eliot was no fan of Milton’s. He said Milton's poetry "could only be an influence for the worse, upon any poet whatever [...] an influence against which we still have to struggle." Eliot added that Milton’s poetry did “damage to the English language from which it has not fully recovered.” Despite Pound’s tutelage (or maybe partly because of it?), Eliot became quite the literary critic himself.

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Noel Jones
8/2/2010 12:23:47 pm

Funny--I started out preferring free verse--and still love it when it's done well--but the older I get, the more appreciation I have for poets who write in meter, verse or other form of form. Not to say that I prefer the old poets--I'm talking about encountering modern poetry that is accomplished in a form without sounding contrived, forced or corny.

I love The Waste Land. I don't need a literary critic to tell me why. I'm one of those stubborn (and slow) readers who skips all intros and prologues because it annoys me when critics try to tell me what I'm about to read, instead of just letting me read it. Occasionally I go back and read the prologue afterward--that can be interesting sometimes--but initially, I like to let the writer's work speak itself.

Nice blog, Dana--I like the image too--I've been missing big open green spaces lately, and am constantly lamenting the beautiful farmland in NJ and PA that is slowly but surely being paved in concrete and turning into malls and suburbs. It will all be gone soon if we don't grow a backbone as a people and put a stop to it...

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Dana Crum link
8/2/2010 02:18:39 pm

Hey, Noel. I still like formal poetry too; it’s just that I now have an appreciation for free verse that I didn’t have when I was younger. I don’t write much formal poetry anymore. Maybe I’ll return to form one of these days. And yet the free verse I now write has some trappings of formal verse.

Like you, I loved and enjoyed “The Waste Land” long before I read what the literary critics had to say. I knew something amazing was happening in the poem even in those many passages when I didn’t understand why the poem was so fragmented or what Eliot was alluding to (like the Grail legend, various vegetation myths, certain nuances of Buddhism, Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition, Spenser’s “Prothalamion” and the list goes on). If Eliot weren’t such a major influence on me (he’s the poet that helped me cross the bridge from formal to free), I wouldn’t have felt compelled to understand “The Waste Land” better. I wouldn’t have felt compelled to read what the critics had to say. If Eliot weren’t so important to my own development, I would have been content to just enjoy the sounds and descriptions and figurative language of his work. God knows, his work has a lot of that. But alas, I wanted to know what made Eliot tick, what he was up to – that way I could learn even more from him (and also strike out on my own and not replicate what he’d done). If Eliot were an “easier” poet, I could have, without the aid of critics, figured out what his poetry meant. But again, he’s complicated, so I needed some help from the critics. Now, I don’t mean to overstate the importance of literary critics or the importance of understanding what a poem means. As John Ciardi put it, “There is always some part of every good work of art that can never be fully explained or categorized.”

Like you, I like to let a piece of literature speak for itself rather than relying on critics. The problem is certain poets (like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens) are so opaque, dense or just plain difficult that if you want to understand them better (and that’s an if), then you have to consult the critics. But not just any critics. Great critics like Helen Vendler, who illuminates Stevens’ work beautifully so that you can better appreciate his poems. Some may not agree that Stevens is difficult, but I’d like to hear someone convincingly argue that Eliot isn’t.

Yes, the land (the green, unpaved variety) is shrinking. It’s sad and we do have to do something about it. How appropriate it is that you bring that up. In the Grail legend, which Eliot alludes to so heavily in “The Waste Land,” the land is sick (barren) because the king is sick/injured. Today the land is dying not because humanity is sick physically but because it is sick spiritually. Okay, it’s really only certain humans who out of spiritual illness are exploiting and destroying nature. But the rest of us – myself included – too often let them get away with it.

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Guy
8/2/2010 02:47:15 pm

I also noted the Pound reference. Have you ever seen the facsimile of the "first draft" of the Waste Land with Pound's edits? It's actually really impressive the way Pound helped shape the poem. The original was a lot longer than the final version--and even less accessible. Pound basically challenged Eliot on almost every stanza--especially when Eliot tried to equivocate in the poem) at one point, he calls out Eliot for using the word "perhaps" by writing "Perhaps be damned!" in large print in the margin, which I've always found amusing). If you haven't seen it yet, I'd definitely encourage you to seek it--it's a great look at how both of them worked.

I still haven't gotten to Southam, though I plan to eventually. I promise. It seems well worth reading. (I will also say, in Donoghue's defense, that his commentary on Joyce's "The Dead" is second to none.)

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Dana Crum link
8/3/2010 02:57:53 am

Hey, Guy. I may have seen excerpts of the facsimile of the first draft of “The Waste Land” with Pound’s edits. But no, I haven’t seen the entire thing. I should take a look at it. Thanks for the recommendation. I’ve definitely read secondary sources that quote some of Pound’s margin comments, etc. It’s hard to imagine Eliot’s writing without Pound’s influence, but Southam argues that the influence went both ways. There was at least one instance where Eliot wrote a poem and then Pound wrote one that contained a passage that was nearly a verbatim replication of a passage from Eliot’s poem. I think Eliot and Pound were generally happy to influence each other as long as their phrasings weren’t too close. But I’m sure Southam would concede that it was Pound who exerted the greater influence in that literary relationship.

This dynamic of a critic/editor helping to shape and “perfect” an author’s work is not new or unusual. Maxwell Perkins was the editor for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Fitzgerald wrote only one great novel, “The Great Gatsby,” which owes much of its sophisticated and effective structure to Perkins’ influence. Thomas Wolfe was incredibly verbose, and it was Perkins who cut through the verbiage (pages upon pages of verbiage) to get at the core of the story. In fact, many believed Wolfe would not have accomplished what he did artistically had it not been for Perkins. This was something Wolfe would grow to resent, yet somehow his friendship with Perkins would survive.

Not all editors exert as much influence as Maxwell Perkins. And as good as Perkins was with structure and with whittling a manuscript down to its core story, I doubt that he was as radical an influence on his authors as Pound was on Eliot. Pound did more than structure and cut. He provided vision, a modernist one at that.

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Dana Crum link
8/3/2010 03:08:44 am

Guy, one last thing. I hope you didn’t get the impression that I thought reading Denis Donoghue’s book on Eliot was a waste of time. Not at all. Donoghue’s book was good stuff; it’s just that I should have read Southam first. Donoghue is a good critic. I’ll bet his analysis of Joyce’s “The Dead” is amazing. I’ll try to check it out one of these days. I’m a big Joyce fan, too. But don’t get me started.

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Sugar Johnson
8/4/2010 03:42:08 pm

good stuff...i enjoy allusions...and the unmasking of the reason...not being a 'follower' of Eliot makes this article and his work all the more interesting...i get the feeling Eliot was documenting his rendition, inwardly and outwardly, of the information he digested...almost religiously...thus the creation of multi-tiered poems...to quote Jay Z, "...triple entendre don't even ask me how"

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Dana Crum link
8/5/2010 03:13:57 am

Hey, Sugar. Yeah, I think you’re on to something. You can’t read Eliot without getting a sense of all that he read. Especially with a poem like "The Waste Land." Jay-Z nailed it in that line you quoted. I read somewhere that the best poetry and fiction has passages that work on several levels simultaneously. The same may often be true of the best hip-hop lyrics.

Reply
Guy
8/5/2010 12:15:36 pm

Ha! I actually did my master's thesis with Donoghue (on Joyce), so I figured I ought to put in a good word for him. So, admitting my bias, I agree he is a great critic. I also agree there's a lot of influence back-and-forth between Eliot and Pound; you'll definitely enjoy the facsimile.

Also, somewhat unrelated, they're actually making a movie about Maxwell Perkins. So maybe we'll have an surge of interest around editors for a bit. (Well, surge is a bit strong, but...)

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