Transcript Document

 T.S. Eliot
 Wallace
Stevens
 e.e. cummings
An Introduction to Eliot, Stevens, and Cummings
Freudian Approaches to Reading (essayoption)
T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice Cream
e. e. cummings: i carry your heart with me, in time
of daffodils(who know, anyone lived in a pretty how
town
 Note: all material not covered today will be moved
to next week!
 Peer Partner Assignment: Selecting a focus for
your Term Paper
 Question Set #4 on the Readings/Discussion
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 Take
notes
 Be patient and take it all in
 Ask Questions (lots of them)
 Write down terms that you need more
help in understanding; I can work with
you one-on-one
 You can “do” poetry 
You have a handout on “how to read
poetry”**
 Reading at this level requires writing
 Engage
 Question
 Take nothing at face value
 Take risks
6 May 1856 –
23 September 1939
psychoa'nalysis.
Treating disorders of the personality or behavior by bringing into a
patient’s consciousness his unconscious conflicts and fantasies
(which are attributed chiefly to the development of the sexual
instinct) through the free association of ideas, analysis and
interpretation of dreams and allowing him to relive them by
transference.
A theory of personality and psychical life derived from this, based on
concepts of the ego, id, and super-ego, the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels of the mind, and the repression
of the sexual instinct; more widely, a branch of psychology
dealing with the unconscious.
The Interpretation
of Dreams, 1899/1900
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Like the work of many other important thinkers,
Freud’s work is complex and not fully consistent.
His thinking evolved over the course of 50 years,
and he often changed or rejected parts of his earlier
thinking.
Many later parts of his work, when he was old and
mortally ill, were expressed quite schematically.
Broadly speaking, Freud’s work traces the
relationship among a number of different systems
or structures of the human psyche.
The elements include:
 The
Id
 The Ego
 The Superego
 The
Unconscious
 The Preconscious
 The Conscious
 Eros
 Thanatos
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At birth the individual is psychically not fully formed-totally unconscious mass of instinctive desires
The individual is unaware that she or he is an individual
The child assumes that it is the world, complete and selfsufficient
The child has no real awareness of self
The child is a bundle of drives seeking to fulfill the
pleasure principle
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All its actions are pure manifestations of the two major
drives EROS and THANATOS, though at this stage EROS
seems completely dominant
The child is thus totally driven to seek pleasure; it is a
collection of wants in search of immediate satisfaction
The primary satisfaction it seeks is through its oral
area, by putting things in its mouth
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Advances in technology
World War I, World War II
Industrialization
Media and wide-spread knowledge distribution
The term modernism refers to the radical shift in
aesthetic and cultural sensibilities in art and
literature after World War I.
The ordered, stable and inherently meaningful
world view of the nineteenth century could not,
wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with “the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history.’.. rejecting nineteenthcentury optimism, [modernists] presented a
profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in
disarray.”
1888—1965
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BIRTH:
• Thomas Stearns Eliot
• September 26, 1888 in Missouri
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CHILDHOOD:
• father, Henry Ware Eliot
 the president of the Hydraulic Brick Company
• mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns
 volunteer at the Humanity Club of St. Louis
 was a teacher.
• At the time of Eliot’s birth, his parents were in their mid-forties
 siblings were already grown.
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EDUCATION:
• attended Harvard University
• left with a masters and undergraduate degrees.
• returned to Harvard to receive a Phd in philosophy
 Toured
the continent after Harvard
 1915 married first wife, Vivienne HaighWood
 1917 began working at Lloyd’s bank in
London
 1925 left the bank to work at a publishing
firm
 1927 converted to Anglicanism, dropped
U.S. citizenship, became a British subject
 1933 separated from Vivienne
 1948
won Nobel prize
 1957 married Esme Valerie Fletcher
• Had been his secretary at the publishing house
since 1949
• 37 years his junior (he was nearly 70, she was 32)
• Preserved his literary legacy after Eliot’s death
 In
1965, he died of emphysema in London
at the age of seventy-seven
 1983 won two posthumous Tony Awards
for “Cats”
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Eliot’s theories about modern poetry are enacted
in his work:
• his writing exemplifies not only modernity, but also the
modernist mode
• it seeks to put the reader off balance so as to capture the
incoherence and dislocations of a bewildering age.
 the modern individual is “no longer at ease here”
 he has witnessed the birth of something new and unprecedented,
and finds the change to be a “[h]ard and bitter agony”
 he also attempts to counteract its disorderliness:
 bringing disparate elements into some sort of conceptual unity.
 “The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up
numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all
the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present
together”
A poem should be an organic thing in
itself, a made object
 Once it is finished, the poet will no
longer have control of it
 It should be judged, analyzed by itself
without the interference of the poet’s
personal influence and intentional
elements and other elements
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 Modern
life is chaotic, futile, fragmentary
• Eliot argues that modern poetry “must be difficult”
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to match the intricacy of modern experience.
poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of life:
• “ The poet must become more and more
comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in
order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language
into his meaning”
 this
nature of life should be projected, not
analyzed
 disconnected
images/symbols
 literary allusions/references
• Sometimes VERY obscure!!!
 highly
expressive meter
 rhythm of free verses
 metaphysical whimsical images/whims
 flexible tone
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
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love
indecision
Powerlessness, impotence
Stream-of-consciousness
• The impotence and sterility of the modern world; cultural
fragmentation
• disaffected sexual relationships in the modern, faithless
world
• The disrupted cycles of:
 death and regeneration
 decay and growth;
• the possibility of spiritual and aesthetic unity:
 through religious belief and mythic structure;
The devotion to the making of money and
poetry as a businessman, a lawyer, and a poet:
money→sensuous experience→the basic
element of his poetry
Stay-at-home type: not through traveling but
through art, literature, and philosophy to
acquire the essence of the European culture
Influenced by French symbolist poets: the
philosophical thoughts are instilled in his
poetry
 Focus: the
relationship between reality and
poetry, nature and imagination
 2 kinds of reality:
a. The objective reality: the perceptions by
the five senses
b. The subjective reality: mental world
dominated by imagination (to arrange the
chaotic information from the sensual
perception)
 Hedonism: the
significance on the enjoyment
of sensual emotions
 Poetry of statement: an act of faith in the
sense of “nothingness” in reality
 Simple lines: an emphasis on vocabulary and
imagery rather than prosody
 The faith in poetry: when no one believes in
God, it is necessary to believe in something
else, such as poetry, a thing created by
imagination
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
-------------------------------------------------------concupiscent: a strong desire, especially
sexual desire; lust.
curds: a coagulated liquid
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
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Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
-------------------------------------------------------wench: a young woman or girl, especially a
peasant girl; a wanton woman
dawdle: to waste time by idling
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of icecream.
-------------------------------------------------------be: what is
finale: the concluding part
seem: what appears
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
--------------------------------------------deal:plain, unfinished wood.
fantails: any of a breed of domestic
pigeons having a rounded,
fan-shaped tail
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If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
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The only emperor is the emperor of icecream.
-------------------------------------------------------horny: tough and calloused; (vulgar slang:
sexually aroused)
protrude: to push outward
affix: secure, append
1894-1962
 Born
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He
received his B.A. in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916,
both from Harvard.
 During the First World War, Cummings worked
as an ambulance driver in France, but was
interned in a prison camp by the French
authorities (an experience recounted in his
novel, The Enormous Room) for his outspoken
anti-war convictions.
 After the war, he settled into a life divided
between houses in rural Connecticut and
Greenwich Village, with frequent visits to Paris.
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In his work, Cummings experimented radically with
form, punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning
traditional techniques and structures to create a new,
highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.
Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling
into his signature style and not pressing his work
towards further evolution.
Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially
among young readers, for the simplicity of his language,
his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as
war and sex.
At the time of his death in 1962, he was the second most
widely read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.