5) Modernist Poetry: Thomas Stearns Eliot – Critic, Poet and Playwright. The Auden Generation
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965)
Biography
- no official biography, poet, playwright, literary critic, editor, publisher
- 1914 – Ezra Pound
- originally American citizen, born in St. Louis, Missouri, best schools, Harvard, doctorate in philosophy
- 1927 – conversion, British citizen and member of the Anglican Church – self-definition: “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion”
1948 – Nobel Prize for literature
His Art in General
- transition: late 1930s → theatre
- conservative; religion
- complex themes, conflict in thought and emotion
- means of expression: antithesis, paradox, incompatible metaphor, irony, depending on the association of ideas; humour, irony, wit
- allusive technique (“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal”), their structural function; sources: Jacobean stage verse, Dante, Shakespeare, Metaphysical poetry, Browning, Henry James, Baudelaire, French Symbolism, influence of Ezra Pound; !!!conspicuously absent from his tradition: Milton, the Romantics, Tennyson and Whitman; “mythical method”
- technique – free verse, loose verse forms with a blank verse basis → regular stanza forms; mask lyric, dramatizing tendency, dramatic monologue
Eliot as Critic
The Sacred Wood (1920)
- “Tradition and the Individual Talent” → Eliot’s personal concept of tradition, based on a sense of history, which is “a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
– “Impersonal theory of poetry”, poet’s mind = catalyst →
- objective correlative formulated in “Hamlet and His Problems”: “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.”
“The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) - dissociation of sensibility
- major criteria for authentic poetry: 1) vital relation to tradition 2) poetry should affect us as a direct sensation –
After Strange Gods (1934)–moralist
The Idea of a Christian Society (1939)– behind tradition, culture a unified religious background of Christianity, orthodoxy; social criticism; exclusionary, prescriptive cultural judgments; valuable diagnostic cultural judgments
Poetry
Prufrock and Other Observations (1917, written 1909-11)
- observer, detachment, depersonalisation, impersonality; Prufrock as a mask ↔ Sweeney in Poems 1920
- - dramatic monologue – “A species of lyric poetry in which the speaker is a persona created by and clearly distanced from the poet; the speaker's character is revealed unintentionally through his or her attitudes in the dramatic situation. Furthermore, the speaker may address and interact with silent listeners, usually not the reader. Fine examples of the dramatic monologue are Robert Browning's "My Last Duchess" and T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
- epigraph: Dante, Inferno – Guido’s soul is asked his name in hell, his answer is the epigraph – “If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame should shake no more; but since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.”
The Waste Land (1922)
- L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance – Fisher King myth, Grail story, Tarot cards; Frazer’s The Golden Bough – fertility/vegetation myth, the dying and reviving god, vegetation rites
- parts: The Burial of the Dead, A Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What the Thunder Said)
- What the Thunder Said DA – Sanskrit “give”, “sympathise” and “control”
- “I, Tiresias”
- epigraph: Petronius, Satyricon – Sybil
“The Hollow Men” - Lord’s Prayer (1925)
Ariel Poems and Ash-Wednesday - “The Journey of the Magi” (1930)
Four Quartets (originally four separate poems, published individually)
1935 – Burnt Norton
1940 – East Coker
1941 –The Dry Salvages
1942 – Little Gidding
T. S. Eliot as a Playwright
- - innovation: the poetic drama
- - Murder in the Cathedral (1935) ← historical subject matter, moralities and miracle plays, allegorical form, Greek drama, e.g. the Chorus, topic – martyrdom, sainthood, religion; specific social purpose – Canterbury Festival
- - plays in modern setting: The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk (1953) – Greek plays, myth, religious topics
War Poetry
Background and Definition
- War Poetry = the poetry of WWI, war poets = poets whose career was determined by poems on war; Robert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Herbert Read, Robert Graves also started his career as a war poet, John Silkin
The Auden Generation
- poetry of the Thirties in general: any poetry written at that time, including Eliot, Dylan Thomas, etc.; poetry of the Thirties in a narrower sense = the Auden generation or the Oxford Group, : MacSpaunday = Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis
General Characteristics
- political poetry
- Great Depression, Spanish Civil War (1936-39), WWII
- Marx and Freud; literary predecessors: G. M. Hopkins, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot (most important) → traditional and experimental, innovative qualities
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973)
General Features
- poet, playwright, essayist, writer of opera librettos, film techniques
- in line with the Romantic tradition in the 20th century (Yeats, Auden, Dylan Thomas)
- free verse, but also regular forms
Life and Poetic Career
- 1907 - born in York, moved to Birmingham = centre of the “Black Country”
- started to write poetry at 16, loss of faith, homosexuality
- Oxford
- major influences: Keats, Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Edward Thomas, Carl Sandburg, Rainer Maria Rilke; Marx, Freud → “Miss Gee”; → “In Memory of Sigmund Freud” (1939); → “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) – elegy; occasional poem in conversational style
- 1930, Poems – first volume, hand-printed, limited number →T. S. Eliot, The Criterion
- 1930s –Isherwood, plays, influence of expressionism, the poems he is most often remembered for were written in this period, closing with the volume Another Time (1940)
- 1937 –Spain, an ambulance driver in the Civil War
- 1939 – permanent move to the U.S.A. → 1946 – U.S. citizen
- 1940s – returned to Christian faith
- the role of art: “Musée des Beaux Arts” and “The Shield of Achilles”
→“Musée des Beaux Arts” - Breughel’s Icarus, also: The Numbering at Bethlehem, The Massacre of the Innocents
→ “The Shield of Achilles” (1955 – The Shield of Achilles) - intertextuality: Homer, Iliad; Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Hephaestos, Tethis, Ariel (beauty) ↔ Prospero (truth)
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