Eliot talks of Eliot

Eliot Talks of Eliot

A Dialog between the Essayist and the Poet*

Isaias Carvalho, 2000

* Humble paper written as an assignment in English Literature at the Languages Undergraduate Program at UFBA (Salvador, Bahia)

1 Introduction

It is rarely an easy task to write about artists, in general, and poets, in particular, let alone when they are among the most spoken of and the best known. That is precisely why this will not be a text about T.S. Eliot, but with him. I will be the mediator in the dialog between Eliot, the essayist, in "The Music of Poetry"[1], and Eliot, the poet, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

I will try to find signs of some of his theoretical assertions and ideas in his poetry. Actually, looking from another perspective, there will be at least four participants in this dialogical relation: the two 'Eliots', the reader of the present text and I. Therefore, to make things clearer (or perhaps more didactic), I will transcribe some passages from the above-mentioned essay. Then, references to what is one of his most famous poems will be made and some of the possible overlapping features in the two domains of the same mind will be analyzed.

It is Eliot, the essayist, who takes the first step towards this conversation. At the beginning of his essay, he states what could be taken as the major assumption here:

But I believe that the critical writings of poets, (...), owe a great deal of their interest to the fact that the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write."

As a poet myself, and since I am interested in developing my own abilities in critical writing, this assumption is quite pertinent to my own process of reflection. This dialog may help me to improve my understanding of the intrinsic relationship between these two kinds of register - the poetical and the theoretical -, namely when exercised by a subject whose work is solely based upon language and its magic.

One more detail that is worth mentioning - in order to avoid misunderstandings as to the consistency of my work - is the fact that, once there will be a dialog in progress, Eliot's voice, in the form of several quotations, will be very often heard. First, in each part of the dialog, a passage from his essay will be quoted, being referred to his verses, which will be cited then. It would not be a dialog if one of the participants took over the whole action.

Hopefully this will be a feasible job for this humble mediator and admirer.

2 Dialog: Eliot talks of Eliot

2.1

(...) the scholar's and the practitioner's acquaintance with versification differ. Here, perhaps, I should be prudent to speak only of myself. I have never been able to retain the names of feet and metres, or to pay the proper respect to the accepted rules of scansion. At school, I enjoyed very much reciting Homer or Virgil - in my own fashion.

In this assertion, Eliot proves what he himself claims as the defense poets make of their own poetry when they talk theory. In his poems, he accomplishes what he preaches above, for his works are among the fundamental ones to make free verse settle into the XXth century. Let us take the three first verses of "Prufrock" as a very clear testimony of that:

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table

2.2

(...) poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear.

The poet and the essayist could not agree more in this respect. For his time, Eliot was one of the major poets (if not the most important), in English literature, who could make metaphorical beauty out of the language spoken by his contemporaries in ordinary settings. If among the greatest responsibilities of a poet there is having words and images that usually have nothing in common come together and produce magical and meaningful symbols, his poetry should indeed have been as highly regarded as it has been. Some samples of that:

"[They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!']"

"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;"

"Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?"

A sentence and words, such as “'How his hair is growing thin!'”, “coffee spoons” and “butt-ends”, are not among the traditionally regarded as “poetic” language. Although for our time this kind of shift in verse writing is very natural and already consolidated, it was not fully true then, that being one of his main contributions to the strengthening of the new energy brought into poetry by the Modernism.

2.3

What I think we have, in English poetry, is a kind of amalgam of systems of divers sources (...): an amalgam like the amalgam of races, and indeed partly due to racial origins.

In this passage, Eliot is referring to the rhythm(s) and metrical structure(s) of English poetry. One could even remind us of the striking work Shakespeare has done in that direction, when borrowing (or stealing) form and content from various other languages and cultures into his plays. We could also assume that, for Eliot, this ‘usurpation’ is a very positive aspect and that we should pay proper regard to the past contributions, establishing a link between our ancestors and our descendents in the history of language and literature.[2]

Signs of that can be found plentifully throughout his poetical works, but let's concentrate on the poem being tackled in this dialog:

1) the lines of the epigraph to the verses in ‘Prufrock’ are taken from Dante's "Inferno", which is kept in the original language in the body of the poem;

2) "In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo." Here, Eliot imitates Laforgue, introducing an element of parody, set off as a kind of chorus (repeated later at lines 35-6) following a section of "vers libre", i.e., free verse; "Arms that are braceleted and white and bare" - a reference to "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" in John Donne's "The Relic"; "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;" - probably Shakespeare's most famous character. The hero Hamlet, like Prufrock, is crippled by indecisiveness. Prufrock echoes Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" at the end of this line.[3]

3) the echoes of the Bible can be heard in two passages. One about John the Baptist and the other about Lazarus, respectively:

"Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald]

brought in upon a platter,"

"To say: 'I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all' -"

2.4

The different interpretations may all be partial formulations of one thing; the ambiguities may be due to the fact that the poem means more, not less, than ordinary speech can communicate.

Although the poet will collect the 'raw material' for his production in the everyday language, his or her mastering will lie in the opening it will provide the 'receiver' of his or her poetical images. Eliot, like any other skilled poet, could not get hold of all the possible 'readings' his verses might call for. In:

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

I do not believe he could have anticipated the strong meaning those verses, among the many others this relatively long poem, would bring to me. The images of old men from my childhood and even images of concentration camps in World War II. I can also picture myself a few years from now. But none of these descriptions can give the exact 'sensual' meaning and power those lines exercised upon me. Other readers are likely to have quite diverse interpretations for those verses, and may even not like them at all.

3 Conclusion

As to the initial assumption that Eliot, in this dialog, would too be "trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing", I believe the 'chat' between the essayist and the poet has revealed that it was right. Which leads us to conclude, using his voice once more, that "what [the poet] writes about poetry, in short, must be assessed in relation to the poetry he writes."

Though he might say, again at the beginning of the essay analyzed here, that "(...) I may often contradict myself", referring to his critical writings, any clear noteworthy discrepancy between the talk of the poet and that of the essayist could be spotted. However, we must not forget that a certain kind of contradiction can (and should) be found within any poetical work, but that is another story. Meanwhile,

“Let us go then, you and I,”

“(...) Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

4 References

ELIOT, T. S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1973.

ELIOT, T. S. From The Music of Poetry. Selected prose of T. S. Eliot. New York: Harvest Books, 1975. p. 107-114.

[1] The third W. P. Ker Memorial Lecture, delivered at Glasgow University in 1942, and published by Glasgow University Press in the same year.

[2] The reading of Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, in ELIOT, T. S. Essays of Generalization 1918-1930, may particularly enlighten this aspect of his debt and respect to the past.

[3] This annotation was taken directly from B.C. Southam's "A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot".

Anglophone Literature