Vincent Sherry
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195178180
- eISBN:
- 9780199788002
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195178180.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems ...
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This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.Less
This chapter tracks Eliot's poetic development from his arrival in London in August 1914 until the publication of The Waste Land in 1922. The initial difficulties he experienced in composing poems are attributed to the oppressive hegemony of Liberal rationalist language in the capital, which Eliot records in letters and reviews. The poet breaks the blockage by writing verse exercises in French, indulging the sheer acoustic of the foreign language, and manipulating the sense-making gestures of French in creative play. This breakthrough initiative is developed in the pseudo-logical prosody of the major quatrain poems of 1917-1919, “Sweeney among the Nightingales”, “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar”, and “A Cooking Egg”, while the monologue of “Gerontion” exercises the new poetics in a vivid evocation of its founding historical context. The draft manuscripts and revisions of The Waste Land are discussed in relation to the same poetic principles.
Steven Matthews
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199574773
- eISBN:
- 9780191760037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199574773.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature, Poetry
Chapter Three looks at Eliot's use of quotations from Early Modern drama as the source of epigraphs in his early poetry to Poems, 1920. It also explores the original contexts for those citations, and ...
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Chapter Three looks at Eliot's use of quotations from Early Modern drama as the source of epigraphs in his early poetry to Poems, 1920. It also explores the original contexts for those citations, and discovers the beginnings of a practice that will continue across Eliot's career, through which related quotations from single sources provide undercurrents of connection between various of his poems. The chapter includes extensive consideration of ‘Gerontion’, particularly in its deployment of an epigraph from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and allusion to two sermons by Lancelot Andrewes. ‘Gerontion’ represents a very significant moment in the development of Eliot's writing. It is a development derived from the means provided him by his Early Modern sources to engage with, and also to reflect upon, the pressures of modern history and untimeliness—a development that lays the ground for The Waste Land.Less
Chapter Three looks at Eliot's use of quotations from Early Modern drama as the source of epigraphs in his early poetry to Poems, 1920. It also explores the original contexts for those citations, and discovers the beginnings of a practice that will continue across Eliot's career, through which related quotations from single sources provide undercurrents of connection between various of his poems. The chapter includes extensive consideration of ‘Gerontion’, particularly in its deployment of an epigraph from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and allusion to two sermons by Lancelot Andrewes. ‘Gerontion’ represents a very significant moment in the development of Eliot's writing. It is a development derived from the means provided him by his Early Modern sources to engage with, and also to reflect upon, the pressures of modern history and untimeliness—a development that lays the ground for The Waste Land.
