Search Results

Myth

Robert S. Lehman

in Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason

The third chapter focuses on T. S. Eliot’s turn to the “mythical method” as a strategy of literary creation through division. Examining the delimitation in The Waste Land of the history of verse as ... More

The third chapter focuses on T. S. Eliot’s turn to the “mythical method” as a strategy of literary creation through division. Examining the delimitation in The Waste Land of the history of verse as it develops from Chaucer to Whitman, it shows that Eliot turns to myth not to forge connections with something temporally or spatially other but to cut his poem free from its literary-historical past. Within the realm of myth, broken off from the unending historical cycles that provide The Waste Land with its subject matter, Eliot attempts to place the poet’s creative act. The results are volatile: history remains, in the poem, the space of production, however fallen its products, while myth stands apart from history as a space where nothing—not history and certainly not literary history—happens.Less

Mr. Eliot's Wartime Services

Vincent Sherry

in The Great War and the Language of 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 ... More

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

An Organ of Documentation: Eliot and Order

C.D. Blanton

in Epic Negation: The Dialectical Poetics of Late Modernism

Published in the first number of The Criterion in October 1922, The Waste Land quickly codified high modernism’s poetic style. But it also launched the project that absorbed the greater portion of ... More

Published in the first number of The Criterion in October 1922, The Waste Land quickly codified high modernism’s poetic style. But it also launched the project that absorbed the greater portion of Eliot’s career, a critical review that (from 1922 to 1939) systematically elaborated the logic of historical reference and mode of formal intention first tested in the poem. Arguing that The Waste Land and The Criterion effectively form the same text, this chapter returns to the poem’s method of metonymic allusion, especially as condensed in its famous final fragments. The historical situation registered but unvoiced in those last lines—the European collapse of 1914–1919, reverberating in World War I and the Treaty of Versailles—establishes the formative problem of The Criterion, seeking to conceive a postwar world that still lacks an ordering conceptual language.Less

Cryptograms: The Waste Land, Sweeney Agonistes, and ‘The Hollow Men’

Steven Matthews

in T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

Chapter Five discusses the aforementioned methods in relation to The Waste Land itself and the interlinked aftermaths, Sweeney Agonistes and ‘The Hollow Men’. Eliot's move towards a more overtly ... More

Chapter Five discusses the aforementioned methods in relation to The Waste Land itself and the interlinked aftermaths, Sweeney Agonistes and ‘The Hollow Men’. Eliot's move towards a more overtly dramatic interest, from 1923 onwards, is shown to operate alongside a purgatorial siting of his poetry following The Waste Land. This chapter involves a full review of The Waste Land manuscript, in order to discover the thread of interconnection around Eliot's Early Modern sources that resonates behind the ‘final’ version of the poem. The chapter also reviews the editions of the Early Modern texts underlying Eliot's masterwork, in order to trace threads of association made by earlier critics that are taken up in his poem. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar then emerges as a key text behind Sweeney Agonistes and ‘The Hollow Men’.Less

Satire

Robert S. Lehman

in Impossible Modernism: T. S. Eliot, Walter Benjamin, and the Critique of Historical Reason

The second chapter treats the formal role played by satire in the drafts of The Waste Land, focusing in particular on T. S. Eliot’s parody of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in an early version of ... More

The second chapter treats the formal role played by satire in the drafts of The Waste Land, focusing in particular on T. S. Eliot’s parody of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in an early version of “The Fire Sermon.” In Eliot’s hands, satire becomes a means of responding to a specifically modernist crisis in aesthetic judgment: the seeming impossibility of distinguishing, after the collapse of traditional standards of beauty, popular charlatans from individuals of real talent. By placing The Waste Land under the sign of satire, Eliot attempts to distinguish his long poem from the wasteland of literary history that it recollects. The disappearance of satire from the final version of The Waste Land following the editorial suggestions of Pound, and Eliot’s replacement of his earlier satirical method by the so-called “mythical method” reflect satire’s failure to accomplish its task.Less

T. S. Eliot’s Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking

Jason Camlot

in Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings

Chapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot’s 1930s electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land aloud. It traces Eliot’s attempt to invent a way to ... More

Chapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot’s 1930s electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land aloud. It traces Eliot’s attempt to invent a way to read modernist poetry. Explaining the production context of the 1933 recordings, the chapter situates Eliot’s audible reading experiments within contemporary debates surrounding the English verse-speaking movement, and Eliot’s work for the BBC. Finally, it provides a close-listening analysis of Eliot’s reading experiments with duration and amplitude, as well as a series of nonsemantic phrasing and intonation techniques, and especially the use of monotone in reading. Eliot’s method of reading is interpreted as a performance of the abstract conception of “voice” that functions as an organizing principle in New Critical discourse. Eliot’s recorded readings are heard to sound an organizing method of incantation that evokes the possibility of an overarching oracular or otherworldly voice.Less

The Cruelty of Breeding: Queer Time in The Waste Land

Sam See, Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat

Christopher Looby and Michael North (eds)

in Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

Reproductive sexuality is the inevitable precondition for what is actually wasted in The Waste Land. The poem exists in a dialectical queer time that simultaneously propels, reverses, and freezes the ... More

Reproductive sexuality is the inevitable precondition for what is actually wasted in The Waste Land. The poem exists in a dialectical queer time that simultaneously propels, reverses, and freezes the motion of heterotemporality.Less

“all art is in fact satire today”: High Modernism Revisited

Kevin Rulo

in Satiric Modernism

This chapter and the next argue for a reimagining of the high modernist period as one marked by antimodern satire. The chapter focuses on the satire of T.S. Eliot, including the networks and ... More

This chapter and the next argue for a reimagining of the high modernist period as one marked by antimodern satire. The chapter focuses on the satire of T.S. Eliot, including the networks and complementing figures who imitated, influenced, extended, and challenged Eliot’s vision and praxis. One essential configuration in such networks was what Louis Untermeyer once referred to as “satiric futurism,” the poetry from a cohort of verse writers – now hardly spoken of – who in the late 1910s and 1920s modelled themselves on Eliot’s quatrain poems and whose imitations reveal more starkly the nature of Eliot’s satiric aesthetic, which he continued to make use of in The Waste Land. This satirical praxis was accompanied by theoretical formulations carefully outlined in Eliot’s concomitant critical writings and taken up again and developed by Wyndham Lewis. It can also be found to be both counterpointed and advanced by Virginia Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, which critiques masculinist modernisms and at the same time evinces the broad appeal and range of modernist satire as a project of anti-humanist deconstruction.Less

Sojourning the Waste Land: Friendship, Thought, and Poetry in the Age of Eliot

Bradley J. Birzer

in Russell Kirk: American Conservative

Continuing the themes of chapter 5, this chapter looks at the relationship between Kirk and T. S. Eliot, noting the profound influence they had on each other. It also carefully considers the ... More

Continuing the themes of chapter 5, this chapter looks at the relationship between Kirk and T. S. Eliot, noting the profound influence they had on each other. It also carefully considers the influence of T. E. Hulme on modern art and poetry.Less

‘Making Strange’: Non-Translation in The Waste Land

Jason Harding

in Modernism and Non-Translation

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and ... More

This chapter employs concepts and terms drawn from Russian Formalism to assist reading key moments of non-translation in The Waste Land. Treated as avant-garde linguistic ‘shifts’ that disrupt and estrange the poetic form, particular instances of non-translation in the poem—from the epigraph to the wild cacophony of different languages at the end of the poem—are seen as covert and coded expressions of powerful affect. This chapter considers these experimental disruptions of form in the social and political contexts of post-war avant-garde revolt and recognition of individual and collective trauma.Less

‘Ideas, and the Sensibility of Thought’: The Quest for a Metaphysical Poetry, 1920–2

Steven Matthews

in T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

Chapter Four continues the momentum from the discussion of ‘Gerontion’, to consider Eliot's development of a method in 1920–22 to structure a long sequence confronting contemporary history, a method ... More

Chapter Four continues the momentum from the discussion of ‘Gerontion’, to consider Eliot's development of a method in 1920–22 to structure a long sequence confronting contemporary history, a method founded on the principles of metaphysical poetry. The Waste Land deploys those Early Modern facets of ‘wit’ and ‘conceit’ that were receiving particular definition in Eliot's critical thinking at the time he was working on the new poem. This period also saw Eliot achieving greater concision in his understanding of the role of allusion in relation to these other technical facets, and his development of the notion of the ‘cryptogram’ to explore how allusions might be remade and interconnected in the structure of modern work.Less

Eliot and Virgil in Love and War

Nancy K. Gish

in T. S. Eliot Studies Annual

The presence of Virgil in The Waste Land is at least as pervasive and important as that of Dante. Although the poem has no overarching structure or narrative, it has a world, a geography, a cast of ... More

The presence of Virgil in The Waste Land is at least as pervasive and important as that of Dante. Although the poem has no overarching structure or narrative, it has a world, a geography, a cast of characters, and a sense of human experience that is most like the world of Virgil: it begins and ends in the world of The Aeneid, overlaps with Eliot’s own experience during World War I, and incorporates—in its images—a background of Roman and Carthaginian history. While Eliot wrote little on Virgil until his late major essays, “What is a Classic” (1944) and “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951), The Aeneid is present much earlier, in The Waste Land, as a journey with sorrow, loss, betrayal, and war. The Waste Land is not only more Virgilian than is still usually acknowledged, it reveals very early Eliot’s lifelong developing conception of a Latin Europe.Less

The Ancients and the Queer Moderns

Scott Herring

in Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

See performs a revivification of queer modernist studies that connects up with ancient times.

Distance, and Intimacy, and T. S. Eliot’s Self-Critical Laughter

Rachel Trousdale

in Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry

Eliot’s humor frequently resembles the superiority-based models of Freud and Bergson. His humor in letters is often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But he also uses laughter to examine failed ... More

Eliot’s humor frequently resembles the superiority-based models of Freud and Bergson. His humor in letters is often racist, misogynist, and homophobic. But he also uses laughter to examine failed communication and the limits of sympathy among reader, speaker, and subject. From depictions of laughing characters in Prufrock and Other Observations to the merriment in Old Possum’s Practical Cats, Eliot treats laughter itself, rather than the joke provoking it, as a form of communication conveying truths language cannot. Eliot’s laughter comes from doubt. His comedy is both superiority-based and empathic: amusement reminds Eliot of his own failures. Eliot’s self-conscious laughter becomes a unique vehicle for communication between artist and audience, if not between individuals. In The Waste Land, tragicomic moments teach readers to be skeptical of their own satirical impulses, and almost bridge the abysmal distance between subjectivities.Less

The “Logic” of Imagery II: Logic, Argument, and Imagery

Martin Warner

in The Aesthetics of Argument

Any “logic” of imagery must be ampliative rather than explicative, and conceived as independent of argument. Its semantics may be closer to intuitionist than to classical logic, and concerned to ... More

Any “logic” of imagery must be ampliative rather than explicative, and conceived as independent of argument. Its semantics may be closer to intuitionist than to classical logic, and concerned to assess how far an imagistically ampliative process remains appropriate to its starting point. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land together with Four Quartets, and Pascal’s Pensées are used to show how such assessments may be carried out. Where imagistic discourse has an argumentative agenda, weakness in its imagistic logic may assist in the diagnosis of conceptual or experiential inadequacy. But where there are no such deficiencies, “leakage” between the conceptual and imagistic levels may not only facilitate the argumentative imagination and the generation of insight, but also have a bearing on the propriety of certain types of paradox.Less

Eliot’s Nerves

Jasmine Jagger

in Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

This chapter argues that T. S Eliot’s poetic composition between 1909 to 1922 dramatizes his nervous inner states as a young man. It furthers criticism by Christopher Ricks (2003), Robert Crawford ... More

This chapter argues that T. S Eliot’s poetic composition between 1909 to 1922 dramatizes his nervous inner states as a young man. It furthers criticism by Christopher Ricks (2003), Robert Crawford (1987, 2015) and Anthony Cuda (2004), builds on thinking by Adam Phillips (1994) and Frank Kermode (2010), and develops studies of literary nervousness by Tom Lutz (1991), Shelley Trower (2013), and Phillipa Lewis (2016). Tracking a nervous poetics in Eliot’s drafts in connection with his life-writing, it adds to criticism by singling out nervousness, for the first time, as a source for, and dramatization within, Eliot’s writing.Less

Tippett, Eliot and Madame Sosostris¹

Oliver Soden

in The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music

The origins of Sosostris in Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52) are traced back to a passage in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) in which a character disguised himself as ‘Madame ... More

The origins of Sosostris in Tippett’s opera The Midsummer Marriage (1946–52) are traced back to a passage in Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow (1921) in which a character disguised himself as ‘Madame Sesostris, Sorceress of Ecabatana’. In between is Madame Sosostris, the ‘famous clairvoyante’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Tippett, on Eliot’s advice, had written his own libretti for The Midsummer Marriage and all his subsequent operas, later writing that ‘echoes of [Eliot’s] prosody sound in everything I have written for myself to set to music’. In a parallel to Eliot’s harnessing of the post-war vogue for spiritualism in order to communicate with the dead, the opera’s business tycoon, King Fisher (another allusion to The Waste Land), consults the clairvoyante in order to find his disappeared daughter. Tippett’s Sosostris has been described as a genuine oracle, in contrast to Eliot’s, but to regard the dialogue between The Waste Land and The Midsummer Marriage as a simple case of Tippett’s having translated a fraud into a genuine seer is to miss the complexity and duality of Sosostris in each work.Less

Modernity and Antiquity: ‘smite the sounding bollox’

J. Alison Rosenblitt

in E. E. Cummings' Modernism and the Classics: Each Imperishable Stanza

This chapter looks at Cummings’ responses to antiquity and modernity framed in terms of aliveness and deadness. I look at Cummings’ theories of art, with a particular focus on his response to Greek ... More

This chapter looks at Cummings’ responses to antiquity and modernity framed in terms of aliveness and deadness. I look at Cummings’ theories of art, with a particular focus on his response to Greek friezes and statuary. The importance of Greek marble statues to Cummings raises issues of the problematic aesthetic of whiteness, which—as the writing of Derek Walcott helps us to understand—has inextricable links with Classical claims to permanence. I turn to issues of permanence versus sterility in Cummings’ response to T.S. Eliot, drawing on poems from Cummings’ 1926 collection, is 5. Finally, I conclude the chapter with a discussion of Cummings’ previously unknown parody of The Waste Land, which is made available for the first time in the Cummings edition in this book.Less

Resetting the Type: An Exploration of the Historical Sense in Mrs. Dalloway

Savannah Pignatelli

in Virginia Woolf and Heritage

Scholars often study instances of intertextuality within Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which they connect to both classical and contemporary authors. Though some of these scholars have noted a ... More

Scholars often study instances of intertextuality within Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, which they connect to both classical and contemporary authors. Though some of these scholars have noted a connection between Mrs. Dalloway and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, there has been little criticism that attempts to explain how this connection affects the meaning within Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf’s diaries reveal that she crafted her novel during the period in which she developed a personal and collaborative relationship with T.S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land: Eliot recited the poem to Leonard and Virginia Woolf in June of 1922, two months before Virginia began writing Mrs. Dalloway, and she set the type for The Waste Land herself in 1923. In my paper I will examine how Mrs. Dalloway interacts with Eliot’s work, including his theoretical text “Traditional and the Individual Talent.” Meaning, in Eliot’s model, is cumulative and cultural. By tapping into the larger historical dialogue embodied by “tradition” meaning is transformed, created anew, challenged, and reproduced. In many ways, Mrs. Dalloway is a performance of Woolf’s ability to exercise Eliot’s concept of the historical sense. More importantly, however, Woolf’s appropriation of “tradition” allows her to collaborate with past authors to create meaning in the face of a changed world.Less

Obscenity and the Voice: Eliot’s Bawdry

Chris Forster

in Filthy Material: Modernism and the Media of Obscenity

This chapter argues that an oral mode of textual circulation, which T. S. Eliot discovered both in obscene, comic, bawdy folk song and in music hall performance, provided him with a vision of social ... More

This chapter argues that an oral mode of textual circulation, which T. S. Eliot discovered both in obscene, comic, bawdy folk song and in music hall performance, provided him with a vision of social cohesion that contrasts with the fragmentation that is otherwise central to his work. The ability of these genres to figure an otherwise lost social cohesion, however, reflects the fact that they are spaces where men bonded and created a sense of homosocial community. Eliot’s published comments on obscenity confirm his valuation of the comic or humorous obscene as a mode and index of social health; but the instances where Eliot discovers this cohesion are predicated on the exclusion of women.Less