Stearns

[abu nuwas]

I come and go over Eliot, mainly, I go. He is held to be such a towering figure in 20th century poetry, and perhaps that's so. And terribly deep. Hmmm....

I am now wondering if that is what he wanted to be, but really didn't succeed, whereas he was good at the odd pithy, if not overly complicated, line or phrase. The bang and the whimper is memorable, but could have been slipped into a thousand poems. April being the cruellest month is somehow touching. Or Prufrock:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

What do you think? Did he succeed in his ground-breaking attempts? Or were his one-liners his best shot?

(The coffee-spoons resonates with me, btw)

I think T. S. accomplished both. He was definitely a master of the "line" and you could easily cite 100 lines that by themselves would have carried him into memorability. Perhaps it is his "mastery of the hook" that made him so popular to the masses, far more popular than more accessible poets.

But he left gold there for the poetry snobs to dig up as well. Certainly he was unsurpassed in the use of allusion. his symbolism was top notch. He was a master of meter, creating his own "eliot"-esque voice that has resonated through free and metric verse for decades.


wait, what was the question again?

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust"

Milo,
You are much more knowledgeable than me, I'm sure.

I find it off-putting, that he felt the need to leave some notes, which although plainly not comprehensive, are still voluminous. There is no likelihood of anyone, apart from himself, having picked up the references to references to references, and so in that way, I find that much is no more than mumbo jumbo. Having said which, if he were writing chiefly for himself, then it leaps out of the mumbo jumbo category, since he, at least, knew, while he was writing anyway, what all this was for. For me, he chose to communicate in the most obscure way possible, yet, as you say, was not short of memorable lines. Perhaps he was a good minor poet, who suffered from the attractions of modernity's cutting-edge.

What was your comment?

---

" 'Or', that fearful demon of false dichotomy. " - Laurence Tribe

Both.

But damn, that answer admits to the dichotomy, even if negatively.
To say that lines are separate from the poem means you don't
understand them in the context of the poem. Not understanding
their context, by the way, doesn't mean there is or isn't an overall
context; it's possible he could be raving. (Thus admitting personally
to not understanding a whole bunch of it.)

But anyway...

For Prufrock alone I'd consider him a fucking genius innovator. That one's my
2nd fav with the Dry Salvages as my 3rd. My favorite (of course) is his Book of
Practical Cats.

That said, after reading his stuff for awhile, I start to feel myself slipping into a
dissociative state and have to stop and take my meds. And all the religious
stuff (even taken metaphorically) is too authoritarian for me. Still, he's a genius;
it's just that I'm much more of a William Carlos Williams kinda guy.

Ray,

A I don't understand the context, and nor, I hazard, does anyone. I have no problem with religious stuff --it is strange how often we say 'Everyone's different' but then froth at the mouth when we encounter someone who mildly is.

Genius? Hmm...

William Carlos Williams? Wot? Like this? Crikey!

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.