Transcript Thomas Stearns Eliot - Giuseppeveronese.it

Thomas Stearns Eliot
Notes
Childhood
obsessed with books
It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me
more deeply than any other environment has
ever done. I feel that there is something in
having passed one's childhood beside the big
river, which is incommunicable to those
people who have not. I consider myself
fortunate to have been born here, rather than
in Boston, or New York, or London.
• studied Greek, Latin, German and French
• started writing poetry at school
• 1906 – 1909 studied Philosophy at Harvard
(Bachelor’s degree in three years)
1908 discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist
Movement in Literature (1899). This introduced
him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul
Verlaine
• worked as a philosophy assistant at Harvard
• 1910 - 1911 studied Philosophy at the
Sorbonne, Paris
Henri Bergson’s lectures
Alain Fournier’s poetry
1911 – 1914 back at Harvard (Indian
philosophy and Sanskrit)
• was awarded a scholarship for Merton
College, Oxford
• first went to Germany (wanted to take a
course there), but WWI made him go to
Oxford immediately
• didn’t like university life; moved to London,
met Ezra Pound
• married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915
• worked as a teacher
• …To her, the marriage brought no happiness.
To me, it brought the state of mind out of
which came The Waste Land.
• 1917 started working at Lloyds Bank
• Paris, August 1920 met James Joyce
• 1925 left his bank post, joined the publishers
Faber and Faber
• June 1927 converted to Anglicanism (+ became
a British subject)
• defined himself “classicist in literature, royalist
in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”
• 1932 separated from his wife
• 1947 she died, while in a mental hospital
• 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his
outstanding, pioneer contribution to presentday poetry"
• January 1957 (at 68) married Esmé Valerie
Fletcher (32)
• died in January 1965
• since his death his wife has preserved his
legacy, edited his letters, published a facsimile
of the draft of The Waste Land
Depersonalization
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a
continual extinction of personality.(...) Poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion;
it is not the expression of personality, but an escape
from personality. (...) The poet has not a personality to
express, but a particular medium, which is only a
medium and not a personality, in which impressions
and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways. The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet
cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering
himself wholly to the work to be done.
(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919)
Objective correlative
The only way of expressing emotion in the form
of art is by finding an "objective correlative";
in other words a set of objects, a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of
that particular emotion; such that when the
external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is
immediately evoked.
(Elizabethan Dramatists: Hamlet, 1919)
The mythical method
It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of
giving shape and significance to the immense
panorama of futility and anarchy which is
contemporary history. (...) Psychology,
ethnology, and "The Golden Bough" (James
Frazer, 1890) have concurred to make
possible what was impossible even a few
years ago. Instead of the narrative method,
we may now use the mythical method.
(Ulysses, Order and Myth, 1923)
Tradition, time and literature
Tradition involves the historical sense (...) which involves a
perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its
presence; the historical sense compels a man not merely
with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer
and within it the whole of the tradition of his own
country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order. (...) No poet, no artist of any art,
has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the
dead poets and artists.
(Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919)
Poetry
Poetry is of course not to be defined by its uses. (...) It
may effect revolutions in sensibility such as are
periodically needed; it may help to break up the
conventional modes of perception and valuation
which are perpetually forming, and make people see
the world afresh, or some new part of it. It may
make us from time to time a little more aware of
the deeper, unnamed feeelings which form the
substratum of our being, to which we rarely
penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant
evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible
and sensible world. But to say all this is only to say
what you know already, if you have felt poetry and
thought about your feelings.
(The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism)
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his
sensibility. When a poet's mind is perfectly
equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man's
experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The
latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two
experiences have nothing to do with each other, or
with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of
cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences
are always forming new wholes. (...) In the
seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set
in, from which we have never recovered… .
(The Metaphysical Poets, 1921)
The Waste Land
Nam Sybillam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σιβυλλα τι ϑελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν ϑελω.
I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD
APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
…
a picture of a materialistic age dying of lack of
belief in anything
analogy between
• aridity/sterility of the earth
• crisis of civilization
• failure of the human condition
a sort of door into European literature: a concise
summary of a civilization contrasted sharply
with the present age
THEMES
• meaningful link with the past
mythical
historical
however, significant
the juxtaposition with the present shows it as
squalid, lifeless, meaningless
• emptiness, sterility of modern life
• emptiness, sterility of modern life
natural: the land is barren
social: no real communication is
possible; inability to love
spiritual: no religious values give
effective answers; materialism
STRUCTURE
• no “plot”, a series of images, often
ambiguous, apparently
disconnected, open to different
interpretations
• link: association of ideas
a DIFFICULT poem (essay The
Metaphysical Poets)
•
•
•
•
•
lack of explicit links
rapidly shifting point of view
unfinished thoughts
mingling of past, present and future
frequent quotes from European + Asian
literatures
• lines echoing virtually all English poets of the
past
• religious symbolism
• language used (verse often sounds like prose;
lyrical, narrative, autobiographical passages,
different tones)
• no regular metrical pattern (a kind of free
verse derived from blank verse)