Lecture 14 20 th-Century English Poetry T S

Lecture #14 20 th-Century English Poetry— T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound

To map out the mass of 20 th-century poetry, we can identify two broad streams of the period: traditional, associated with Thomas Hardy Modernist, associated with T. S. Eliot.

T. S. Eliot (18881965) − • Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888. • Eliot studied philosophy and literature at Harvard University, the Sorbonne in Paris, and Oxford University in England. • While in school, he began writing poetry, composing such ground breaking poems as “Preludes. ” Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. In London he met poet Ezra Pound, who immediately recognized his genius and brought Eliot’s work to the attention of various publishers. Pound praised Eliot’s Modernist verse and encouraged him to continue writing. Eliot decided to stay in England. At age twenty six married a British woman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood. Eliot took on a number of jobs, including the position at Lloyds Bank.

T. S. Eliot (18881965) − • • After work he wrote poetry and, to supplement his income, literary essays and reviews. These articles had an impact far beyond his expectations, helping to shape literary criticism for years to come. However, his wife’s illness, their financial difficulties, and his long workdays took a toll on him, and he was close to collapse. While resting for a few months in a Swiss sanatorium, he worked on The Waste Land , a long poem about the spiritual breakdown of the modern world. It proved to be one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century. "I came to persuade myself that I was in love with Vivienne simply because I wanted to burn my boats and commit myself to staying in England. And she persuaded herself that she would save the poet by keeping him in England. To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land. "

T. S. Eliot (18881965) − At the age of thirty-six, Eliot left Lloyds to become an editor at Faber & Faber, a London publishing house. He also continued to write, composing a number of distinguished poems and plays. In his late thirties, Eliot became a British citizen. In England Eliot converted to Anglo-Catholicism. On January 10, 1957, Eliot at the age of 68, married Esmé Valerie Fletcher , who was 30. In contrast to his first marriage, Eliot knew Fletcher well, as she had been his secretary at Faber and Faber since August, 1949. • • • In 1948, at the age of sixty, Eliot received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in London sixteen years later. After Eliot's death, Valerie dedicated her time to preserving his legacy; she edited annotated The Letters of T. S. Eliot and a facsimile of the draft of The Waste Land. Valerie Eliot died on November 9, 2012 at her home in London.

Poetry Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) ◦ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ◦ Portrait of a Lady (poem) ◦ Aunt Helen Poems (1920) ◦ Gerontion ◦ Sweeney Among the Nightingales ◦ "The Hippopotamus" ◦ "Whispers of Immortality" ◦ "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service" ◦ "A Cooking Egg" The Waste Land (1922) The Hollow Men (1925) Ariel Poems (1927– 1954) The Journey of the Magi (1927) Ash Wednesday (1930) Coriolan (1931) Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) Four Quartets (1945)

Plays Sweeney Agonistes (published in 1926, first performed in 1934) The Rock (1934) Murder in the Cathedral (1935) The Family Reunion (1939) The Cocktail Party (1949) The Confidential Clerk (1953) The Elder Statesman (first performed in 1958, published in 1959)

T. S. Eliot (18881965) − Eliot’s epoch-making poem is The Waste Land , published in 1922. If the motto of the school of Thomas Hardy was “keep it simple, ” the motto of the Modernists was “embrace complexity. ” Eliot was in a state of personal breakdown when he composed The Waste Land , but there is nothing personalin the poem. Eliot believed fervently that the man who suffers must be strenuously separated from the poet who creates. Eliot was as rigorously international as Hardy was English. “The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. ” —T. S. Eliot

“A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” (1913) Ø Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Ø Use either no ornament or good ornament. Ø Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it. Ø It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths. What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow. Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as an average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

“A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste” (1913) Rhythm and rhyme A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure, it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all. Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don't make each line stop dead at the end and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause. In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.

The Waste Land (1922) The Waste Land has key references to Dante, Wagner, Hindu philosophy, and the ancient Greek and Roman classics. To read it is to hear echoes of myriad cultures, ages, and literatures. Organic culture, the poem says, is no longer feasible. We inhabit, not a green world, but a waste land. But culture still exists, and we must do our best to assemble or recompose it for the present. “April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. ” For The Waste Land, it is not what the poem means but what it is doing that matters. This is not merely free verse. The movements are wholly unpredictable, working by an order that reminds us of cinematic montage rather than any kind of logical connections. The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. Nonetheless, the poem does have organizing themes, such as rebirth.

The Waste Land (1922) For Ezra Pound il miglior fabbro. I. The Burial of the Dead II. A Game of Chess III. The Fire Sermon IV. Death By Water V. What the Thunder Said I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.

Ezra Loomis Pound (1885 -1972)

Ezra Loomis Pound Паунд подчеркивал, что «образная поэзия похожа, на застывшую в слове скульптуру» . Кроме образного построения стиха (фанопейя), Паунд выделял также мелодическое (мелопейя) и интеллектуальное (логопейя). Современный поэт, по Паунду, обретает истинное значение, наследуя традиции трубадуров, итальянских поэтов «нового сладостного стиля» (Данте, Франсуа Вильона), так же китайских и японских поэтов древности. На станции метро Виденье этих лиц в толпе несметной – Как россыпь лепестков на черной мокрой ветке. (Перевод А. Кудрявицкого)

Pound's commentary on this poem in his article "Vorticism, " The Fortnightly Review 571 (Sept. 1, 1914): Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening, as I went home along the Rue Raynouard, I was still trying, and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation. . . not in speech, but in little spotches of colour. It was just that -- a "pattern, " or hardly a pattern, if by "pattern" you mean something with a "repeat" in it. But it was a word, the beginning, for me, of a language in colour. I do not mean that I was unfamiliar with the kindergarten stories about colours being like tones in music. I think that sort of thing is nonsense. If you try to make notes permanently correspond with particular colours, it is like tying narrow meanings to symbols. That evening, in the Rue Raynouard, I realised quite vividly that if I were a painter, or if I had, often, that kind of emotion, or even if I had the energy to get paints and brushes and keep at it, I might found a new school of painting, of "nonrepresentative" painting, a painting that would speak only by arrangements in colour. . .

Pound's commentary on this poem in his article "Vorticism, " The Fortnightly Review 571 (Sept. 1, 1914): That is to say, my experience in Paris should have gone into paint. . . The "one image poem" is a form of super-position, that is to say it is one idea set on top of another. I found it useful in getting out of the impasse (тупик) in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it because it was what we call work "of second intensity. " Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-like sentence: -- "The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet, black bough. " I dare say it is meaningless unless one has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective. " This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention.

Meditatio by Ezra Pound When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs I am compelled to conclude That man is the superior animal. When I consider the curious habits of man I confess, my friend, I am puzzled. MEDITATIO Постигнув странные повадки псов, Я должен признать, Что человек – венец творенья. Постигнув странные повадки людей. . . Не знаю, что и сказать, о други!

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888– 1965) программная статью «Tradition and the individual talent» : Ø Поэзия – это не субъективный произвол в отношении к реальности, не хаотичное нагромождение заимствованными из нее образами, но создание сплава разнородного опыта. Ø Искусство – единственная защита от дисгармонии и нравственной апатии, ставшими нормами буржуазного бытия. Ø «в политике я тяготею к монархизму, в религии к англо-католицизму, в искусстве – к классицизму» . Отличительные черты стиховой системы Элиота: Ø тяготение к многосложности метафоры Ø высокой ясности поэтического языка Ø обилие мифологических и литературных реминисценций Ø поэтика верлибра (свободного стиха)

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888– 1965) ПОЛЫЕ ЛЮДИ – Hollow Men Мы полые люди, Мы чучела, а не люди Склоняемся вместе - Труха в голове, Бормочем вместе Тихо и сухо, Без чувства и сути, Как ветер в сухой траве Или крысы в груде Стекла и жести. Нечто без формы, тени без цвета, Мышцы без силы, жест без движенья; Прямо смотревшие души За краем другого Царства смерти Видят, что мы не заблудшие Бурные души - но только Полые люди, Чучела, а не люди.

William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) generally associated with modernism and imagism was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people Williams didn’t use traditional meter in most of his poems The breaks in the poem search out a natural pause spoken in the American idiom that is also reflective of rhythms found within jazz sounds that also touch upon Sapphic harmony.

The Red Wheelbarrow so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold In a 1950 interview, John W. Gerber asked the poet what it is that makes it a poem, Williams replied, "In the first place, it's metrically absolutely regular. . . So, dogmatically speaking, it has to be a poem because it goes that way, don't you see!" Visually speaking, the three little quatrains look alike; they have roughly the same physical shape. It is typography rather than any kind of phonemic recurrence that provides directions for the speaking voice Additionally, this typographical structure influences any subsequent interpretation on the part of the reader.

This is just to say - Interpretation Ø concluding on “so cold, ” the poem implies that sweet, fruity taste contrasts the coldness of a human relationship that forbids sharing or forgiveness for a minor breach of etiquette Ø Another, more straightforward, interpretation is that the writer of the note on the refrigerator seeks to replace the experience of eating the plums with a clear, succinct description--"They were delicious / So sweet and so cold. " Ø Forgiveness in the poem depends on the success of the description. This is a good model for the poet's task, as he forsakes actual experience for mere words. The poem will be a success if the reader forgives the poet's transgression.

Edward Estlin Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) i am never without it (anywhere i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing, my darling) i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true) and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

Edward Estlin Cummings i am so glad and very merely my fourth will cure the laziest self of weary the hugest sea of shore so far your nearness reaches a lucky fifth of you turns people into eachs and cowards into grow our can'ts were born to happen our mosts have died in more our twentieth will open wide a wide open door we are so both and oneful night cannot be so sky cannot be so sunful i am through you so i