LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
T.S. Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
We’re back again in the modern era and appropriately, we have T.S. Eliot, exemplar of the modern style in English poetry, even more than Ezra Pound. Pound is responsible, as we noted before, for making Eliot famous (the wiki page as of this publishing has the facts, though of course interpretations can never be “neutral point of view.”) and he, far more than Pound, who was of more of an archaeofuturist, perfected the blank, erratic, phantasmagoric, rambling and unstructured style we most associate with modern poetry.
If you read his background, you’ll be unsurprised to find him coming of the Northeast Puritan tradition (his father being a Unitarian minister) whose family only as of late moved to St. Louis. Their roots were in, of course—Boston. I think with the Americans we’ll find a lot of these, disproportionate to the population, simply because of the age and influence (as one of our own put it, “Boston conquered the world”) of that population group.
Eliot of course is an American expatriate back to England, which, despite some conservatives’ idea that liberals and progressives here want to be Europeans, it is in fact paleo-conservatives and reactionaries who feel the most connection to Europe. The former group only seem similar because, as it has been noted elsewhere, most of the developed world outside of the Cathedral that is under its influence has none of the usual resistance to its ideas, and therefore expresses them more naively and fully. But it is only really in Europe that reaction can find extant roots of its ideas (America is a completely Radical invention.)
Another note about his life is that like Pound, and like many other “notables” in art, he was not very successful in his marriages. It is said that before the mass age, poets were rather like rock stars are today, including the travel, the superficialities and mystery reinforced by fans, and so forth. Rock stars in our era are, like other celebrities, noted for their poor track records in marriage. In Eliot’s case, the fact that they chose their marriage (rather than it being arranged) did little to make it better; his wife had serious issues and it does seem that a person seeking a mate often overlooks things that might be serious, so without the oversight and help of someone older and wiser, they will tend to fall into marriages that are far more difficult than necessary.
Eliot did not write nearly as many poems as other poets typically did, and all of his most notable works are long. I’ve run into this stylistic habit in other modern poets as well, though certainly those who made “modern” seeming poetry by adapting Eastern styles such as Haiku are exceptions. (William Carlos Williams also did some of this.) The poems are technically not prose, but my general opinion is that once you are no longer in blank verse (no rhyme) but no real rhythm or pattern structure, you end up most of the way to what is called a “proem”. What makes Eliot not “prose poetry” though?
Eliot as a child was sickly, and so spent a lot of time reading; by the time he was famous his erudition, like Pound’s, leaves most people in the dust. (Details can be found in the linked article above.) And when you read The Waste Land, it is obvious he commands a wealth of information about poetry of the past, myth, language, story-telling and history. These are all brought to the task to construct a sort of dream vision, and it is this dream vision quality, and it alone, which is the remaining part of a modern poem that could render it still poetry.
But the success of modern poetry reveals, as well as the cladistic identity of poets, that poetry in society is mainly a literary activity of the elite, and not really a craft. So long as the elite produced people willing to master the craft, poetry would remain serious; but by Eliot’s time most of the craft had been discarded, leaving only the original qualification of poets per Aristotle; people who almost prophecy strange visions in certain moods (or under the influence of ‘muses’.) Such inspirations are very common in aspiration, but in practice people of very elevated and refined vision are rare. The necessity of the modern style to dig deep into erudition (later, this is turned into producing only shocking effects) to produce its novelties makes this even rarer; for often visionaries are ignorant.
Lewis (CS Lewis) disputed this shocking line in The Love Song above “Like a patient etherized upon a table”—which by the way, does indeed depict correctly the sickly evening sky in many modern cities. Lewis’ response is probably the best, leaning on the concept of Stock Responses:
I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me.
For twenty years I’ve stared my level best
To see if evening—any evening—would suggest
A patient etherized upon a table;
In vain. I simply wasn’t able.
To me each evening looked far more
Like the departure from a silent, yet a crowded, shore
Of a ship whose freight was everything, leaving behind
Gracefully, finally, without farewells, marooned mankind.
A Confession (excerpt)
At least in this case, Lewis’ poetics are superior. (In general, Lewis is probably a superior poet to most of the modern poets, though most of his poetry—that is, “poems” as opposed to the traditional range of mediums considered part of “Poetics” by Aristotle and Horace, is not as good as others. It is like Kublai Khan by Coleridge: great poetics, but not much of a poem.) He does actually manage to produce a more powerful vision of a sunset, one that is not merely sentimental, which does I think in fact silence the modern style with a swift and sufficient blow to the head.
Eliot did a number of other things of course, such as write plays and literary criticism. Wiki has some interesting notes—take with a grain of salt of course, regarding his work in this field.
[…]Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems”—of an “objective correlative”, which posits a connection among the words of the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. This notion concedes that a poem means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on different readers’ different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.
More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his “‘classical’ ideals and his religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century; his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems constitute ‘not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion’; and his insistence that ‘poets… at present must be difficult’.”
Eliot’s essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot particularly praised the metaphysical poets’ ability to show experience as both psychological and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot’s view—wit and uniqueness. Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, along with giving new significance and attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of “unified sensibility”, which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term “metaphysical”.
This is of course an attempt at a form of neo-classicism; classicists did not consider the responses of poems to be subjective, even if emotional, but yet the liberal world creates many strange combinations of experiences through “diversity” and the process of immigration and lack of assimilation, that in the modern world the expectation of a Stock Response (a set of responses that one should be expected to have, even emotionally, of an event) to something as complex as a poem is almost forgotten. Eliot attempts to resurrect it empirically through different but corollary interpretations of poetic works. (Those who have read Christopher Alexander’s Nature of Order will immediately recognize this conceptually scientific process; scientific inasmuch as you can present a way to falsify the claim and can repeat the experiment with reasonably similar results.)
A science of poetry! And yet, a people, say all Christians, ought to feel the same way about some number of things: as it says, “be ye of the same mind.” That is, given a certain properly-trained person, truths about such things can become self evident, and even have a scientific character (in that they can be independently discovered)—that is almost the definition of a culture or a society or a people; to really be civilized, they must be able to fashion a science of poetics, and one that is credible. When it loses its credibility due to dyscivic and dysgenic effects, the metaphysical roots of that civilization are rotten.
Eliot also was a director of a publishing firm, Faber and Faber (this happened somewhat later) which gave rise to a notorious event. That is, Eliot rejecting the rather ham-fisted allegory Animal Farm, of George Orwell’s:
we have no conviction […] that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation […] the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not very convincing.
I’m amused sometimes to see the rejection of Orwell’s Animal Farm at times trotted out against Eliot, stripped of this context. Eliot was silencing criticism of Communism! And yet, right in the letter his reasoning is very clear, even if unsatisfying: he is not going to print a Trotskyite criticism of Communism, since of course, to a reactionary or traditionalist, both of those are communism!
He continues:
And after all, Your pigs are much more intelligent the other animals, and therefore best qualified to run the farm.
Almost Moldbuggian, if I do say so myself. (But really, this is simply common sense—available to anyone willing to consider the matter thoroughly.)
I cannot attempt to duplicate his style; but I will leave you with two pieces. (Make sure to read Prufrock, Hollow Men, and Four Quartets.)
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.
It has no windows, and the door swings,
Dry bones can harm no one.
Only a cock stood on the roof-tree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
-Excerpt from The Waste Land, V (What the Thunder Said)
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn’t just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, or George or Bill Bailey –
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter –
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,
A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum –
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover –
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
-Excerpt from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
Note that of course, Eliot still could write real verse—as Pound could, but evidently what most people consider poetry was not regarded by the Hoi Polloi as worthy of being called “poetry” anymore. Such is modernity. Also note in the last bit, the metaphysical “vortex” effect going on, around the concept of a name. (Note that this concept is not his, but comes from the Apocalypse of John, among other places.)
I will leave you instead with one of my own works, which shares the similarity of being a strange dream-vision, which has an uncertain meaning:
“The Rews”, she said, you must go find,
The picture, thus, within his mind
And before, the tall majestic hall
Apartments nine, upon each wall
Plates so large, so platters were
Of fine enamels hung-rows there
And no sound had reached his ear
Save meditative strumming lyre
Whose notes were never more than two
Such was the quietness of the rews.
And silence hung heavy like an air
And mist like mystery gathered there
Not visitor, but in the second room
Seemed to congregate, ever soon
And not made clear from prior place
It communed, hung heavy ’round his face
Some was smoke, a hookah’s mist
But also the cool cloud lips had kissed
And breathed it in, also his nous
Such was the quietness of the rews.
He stepped with softness into the third
Apartment and without a word
Found himself prepared to choke
For the mist was here a roiling smoke
And hardly a glint seen from the wall
Of plate could there be seen at all
And the strumming two-note song
And the hallway broad and long
Was offal-obscured of thousand flues
Such was the quietness of the rews.
And uncovering his mouth he stood before
A sitting, strumming, music-Moor
Regarded him gently, strumming lyre
Bald in head, inclined his ear
More deeply absorbing his humming song
Which truth be told, was two notes long
And here overlooked a dewy lawn
A courtyard pillared stretching awn
And the walnut lyre knew well its cues
Such was the quietness of the rews.
He passed undaunted into the fifth
A room of music’s nearest kith
And though no men upon a chair
And furnishings all were vacant there
A murmuring yet was heard around
The gentle, sanguine chatter-sound
Of pashas beyond by auspicious trick
Was transported here and laid out thick
Of the means however was left no clues
Such was the quietness of the rews.
And the sixth bore him yet more surprise
As walking in he rubbed his eyes
For darkness walked about that place
As company called and show’d its face
The only light was that beyond
Which spread not there, as lily-pond
Was the shadow, and he could see
And count the pashas, by twain and three
Ten were they, and sat in twos
Such was the quietness of the rews.
His foot gave warning, but heeding not
He proceeded in, such was his lot
And tension this apartment bore
Was as much, or maybe more
Than man can bear! And so whence
Did anxiety come, or thus commence?
It sat in chairs and hung like palls
It was on the floor, and in the walls
To enter its attention drew
Such was the quietness of the rews.
The eighth and prior apartment then
Stood between him and and ten
It drew him! Drew him, deeper still
He breathed and sighed here to his fill
For wetness drew upon all things
Tear on the cheek, which came in streams
Myrrh and dew and oil were there
And the heavy silence wept but a tear
And saw the pashas’ reds and blues
Such was the quietness of the rews.
With measured boldness stepped he in
And found himself to be within
A company of brightening lords
Who stopped their talk and idle words
To attend their visitor, intruding boy
And weapons rattled, a rude envoy
And bare he then with certain dread
Back into the shadow’d rooms he fled
To send and send again the news
Such was the quietness of the rews.