Prologue: Some Ragged Clauses in Praise of Mr. Eliot
September 04, 2003
I promised the other day to post my subjective defense of T.S. Eliot’s stature as a poet. Looking back over John Derbyshire’s assault, it seems to me that much of his problem stems from a particular dislike of The Waste Land, the loose baggy conclusion of which he quotes to condemn. I have never really warmed to that particular poem myself. I can see its importance in the Modernist canon, the way in which Eliot imports the lessons of Baudelaire into English, his pushing against the up-with-the-life-force/Whitmanesque strain in American poetry that seemed to make so little sense in the cold light of the early 20th Century and so on, but I remain unmoved. Discrete passages (the first seven lines, for instance, or the sequence beginning with “Here is no water but only rock”) are very fine, but the poem as a whole leaves me cold whenever I look into it -- which may be the point, I suppose.
I stand firmly in favor, however, of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which I think succeeds exceptionally in finding the right tone and form for its subject and deserves to stand with the best of, say, Browning’s dramatic monologues as a poetic embodiment of a personality. And Prufrock is just made for reading aloud, which ranks high among my personal touchstones in judging poetry.
I submit that Eliot’s best, and the best refutation of the various canards unleashed by Mr. Derbyshire, is his Four Quartets. To dive into the intricacies of those poems is more than I can even attempt while holding myself to a reasonable length. The musical reference in the title is apt, as themes and phrases recur in variations throughout the work, echoing and contrasting with one another and, in the closing stanza of “Little Gidding,” coming together in a satisfying if mystical whole:
We shall not cease from explorationIn the end, of course, Eliot's place is secure and he does not need me to defend him, happy though I am to do so.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
All of this is actually by way of prelude to another, different post, on the subject of Edward Lear and his authorship of one of the finest poems of unrequited passion in English. Whilst I prepare to illuminate that oddball opinion further, perhaps you would enjoy a display of Lear’s other talent -- as a wildlife artist and peer of Audobon. Get a load of these parrots.
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