The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – T.S. Eliot

Next book on my poetry shelf:

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

Poets like William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane both said that they needed to forcibly divorce themselves from Eliot’s influence in order to be able to write in their own way. He was so huge, so dominant in his own time that it became difficult for other poets to find their own voices. Everything sounded like an imitation of Eliot. Interestingly enough, Eliot felt that way about Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922, of which he said (among many other things), “I wish for my own sake that I hadn’t read it.”

I went through an Eliot phase in high school, mainly because my drama class had gone to see Cats in New York, and also we had had to read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in English class, and there was something about the descriptions (the yellow fog and I loved the part about the yellow smoke rubbing its back against the window panes) that I really liked. I was very into adjectives back then, which maybe one day I will write about because it took a truly frightening obsessive form (frightening in that I had to break myself of the habit, which lasted well into adulthood, and it really took some doing) and I’m not sure what that was all about. Perhaps part of my obsession in capturing beauty and satisfaction, because I know that it is not built to last? It still deserves some attention, that obsession. Eliot’s work was really good with the adjectives. I kept lists.

I like that Eliot had, like many artists, a struggle really committing to be a poet. His parents thought it would be a waste of energy, and they wanted him to have a “real” job. For a while he kept up the pretense, studying philosophy, going for his dissertation, but all the while, the poetry was growing in him.

So guess who entered the picture around this time?

Take a wild guess.

Ezra Pound. What a shock.

Pound read early drafts of Prufrock and browbeat Harriet Monroe (editor of Poetry) to publish it. Monroe didn’t want to at first. She said no. Pound tried again. And again. Until finally she caved in 1915.

I don’t think I knew that T.S. Eliot was American until, oh, yesterday. If I was told it, I certainly didn’t retain it. Cats seemed really British to me, especially because of the composers being British (not that that has anything to do with anything, just describing my own journey here) and then “T.S. Eliot” the name sounds oh so British. No, the dude was from St. Louis. I remember when I found that out, and I had to re-think my entire concept of the guy. “What?? He was American??” Eventually he became a British citizen, and he lived in Europe for most of his life. Interesting, though: his family was originally from Massachusetts, but T.S. Eliot was raised in St. Louis. Eliot ended up going to Harvard and while there, he suddenly felt himself to be a Midwesterner. But this was interesting because during his time in St. Louis, he felt totally like a Northeasterner. There was geographical displacement in this man from the beginning, and you can really see that in his poems. He belonged nowhere. And everywhere. He was not a “local” guy.

He said in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1948:

In the work of every poet there will certainly be much that can only appeal to those who inhabit the same region, or speak the same language, as the poet. But nevertheless there is a meaning to the phrase “the poetry of Europe”, and even to the word “poetry” the world over. I think that in poetry people of different countries and different languages – though it be apparently only through a small minority in any one country – acquire an understanding of each other which, however partial, is still essential.

That all sounds very nice and grown-up, doesn’t it? But Eliot had witnessed the fracturing of “understanding”, in World War I and World War II, and his later poems express the fear and anxiety of that desolate time in Europe. Eliot had a troubled first marriage, and lost a dear friend in World War I. There were other events, too, including the death of his father, that all worked on him and his psyche. A terrible time for him, a terrible time for the world. The result was The Waste Land, completed in 1921 and published in 1922. Like Yeats’s Second Coming, the poem describes the overwhelming sense of doom and fear at that time, of evil stalking the land, slaughter, carnage, chaos. The breaking down of civilization, the fracturing of all that is known, and also the fracturing of the belief that things can be known in the first place. Eliot was, of course, in England at the time, which made a difference in his outlook. Americans were greatly affected by the two world wars, obviously. We made enormous sacrifices, and raced in (to quote Eddie Izzard) like “the cavalry in the last reel”, and those who fought witnessed the carnage, but it wasn’t on U.S. soil. Imagine the trenches and air raids sweeping across our own continent and how that would have affected us differently as a people.

In order to understand the 20th century, The Waste Land is essential.

Interestingly enough, the form of The Waste Land represented a break with Pound. The poets Pound promoted found themselves eventually having to ‘break’ with him, because his influence was huge as well, and he was pushing them all towards a certain kind of expression. He was responsible for many of their breakthroughs. Pound was instrumental in helping Eliot put The Waste Land together, which had existed in only fragments. I love that the fragmentary nature of the poem remained intact, though, because it is an accurate reflection of the world at that time. That is what great cataclysmic events do. Psychologies and cultures fragment. Eliot had suffered a nervous breakdown, and needed help with the poem. Pound stepped in. Pound took all of the different drafts and acted as an editor, piecing it together. It says a lot about Pound that he saw what Eliot was working towards, and although Pound’s goals (and, in some cases, taste) differed from Eliot’s, Pound put all that aside and honored Eliot’s goals/taste. Perhaps Eliot would have leaned towards a more streamlined approach, perhaps Pound sensed that the poem needed its fractured format.

Eliot said later, about The Waste Land:

In The Waste Land I wasn’t even bothering whether I understand what I was saying.

My Norton Anthology says, in its introduction to Eliot:

When the poem itself was first published, in 1922, it gave Eliot his central position in modern poetry. No one has been able to encompass so much material with so much dexterity, or to express the alienation and horror of so many aspects of the modern world. Though the poem is made of fragments, they are pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that might be joined if certain spiritual conditions were met. In this way, Eliot’s attitude toward fragmentation was different from Pound’s – Eliot wanted to recompose the world, whereas Pound thought it could remain in fragments and still have a paradisal aspect that the poet could elicit. In other words, Pound accepted discontinuity as the only way in which the world could be regarded, while Eliot rejected it and looked for a seamless world. He began to find it in Christianity.

Eliot was quick to dismiss his own importance (you can see it in his Nobel speech), and he said, at one point, that The Waste Land wasn’t so much a treatise on the alienation and fragmentation of the modern man, but just a piece of “rhythmical grumbling”.

Here is the poem that started it all (for him and for me). There were many things that I fell in love with when I was 14 that I then outgrew, like colored legwarmers and Rick Springfield. But “Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” I will never outgrow.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised 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.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
. . . . .
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
. . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
. . . . .
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

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.