When Eliot and Vivienne married, he assumed the role of couples therapist. The three shared housing, and Bertie spent time with Vivienne when Tom was working or away.
The trouble with the marriage was not infidelity. It was the opposite, an asphyxiating mutual dependency. They were both anxious, brittle people. Her medical and psychological issues were serious and ultimately incapacitating she ended up being committed to an asylum ; his were merely chronic. He complained a lot during the marriage, in nearly every letter that is not purely professional and in many that should have been. One waits; one sympathizes, but it is dreary work.
And all the time he was conquering the world of letters. I know a great many people, but there are many more who would like to know me, and I can remain isolated and detached.
The literary scene in England was highly factionalized. He wrote for tiny modernist magazines, like The Egoist, which Pound had commandeered and turned into the flagship of free verse, and which had a circulation of a hundred and eighty-five.
He reviewed for papers hostile to modernism, like The New Statesman , and for Bloomsbury-dominated journals, like The Athenaeum , edited by the critic John Middleton Murry. He did it all at home after a day at the bank, and on weekends. They are smart and showoffy, and seeded with dicta from which tall forests of academic criticism would one day grow:. 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.
A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. On Henry James:. A consistent theme is the sorry state of English letters. They use literature as a means of expressing ideas and personal feelings, or they confuse it with something else, with social commentary, or mysticism, or philosophy. Eliot sought treatment in Lausanne, from a doctor, recommended by Morrell, named Roger Vittoz. Vittoz practiced a precursor of cognitive behavioral therapy, teaching his patients to redirect compulsive thoughts.
It worked for Eliot. He finished his poem. On the way home, he stopped in Paris, where Pound was now living, having given up on the English as a hopeless job, and—a canonical moment in modernist legend—Pound made his celebrated editorial intervention. It was January 24, What was the revolution all about? Inner and lower were the directions modernist writers took literature, toward what goes on inside the head and below the waist.
That is certainly how readers experienced modernism, at least, and why the books attracted the censors. For the writers themselves, it was largely about technique. It perpetually wrong-foots you. The modernist poem puts pressure on the form, distorts it in places, grows impenetrable in places.
But it never abandons it. The form is the electric current that the writer taps into. The point is philosophical. I know that what I am looking at is a house because I am already familiar with things that look more or less like it and are houses.
This is what enables me to say that the particular house I am looking at is a big house, an ugly house, a modern house, and so on. The same thing happens when I read a poem: I relate it to all the other poems I have read—in the head of an ideal reader, to all the poems that have ever been written. Past poems condition my response to any new poem. And the really new poem conditions my response to all the poems that preceded it.
After I see a house by Marcel Breuer, my own house looks, ever so slightly, different. Louis Globe-Democrat Tempo Magazine. June 4, Louis Post-Dispatch Everyday Magazine.
December 14, Louis Post-Dispatch Magazine. September 25, Books and Articles Behr, Caroline. New York: St. The Placing of T. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, Gass, ed. Literary St. Louis: A Guide. The Complete Poems and Plays, New York: Harcourt and Brace, The Confidential Clerk, A Play. Through allusion, quotation, echo and resonance, modern life is presented as a repeated ritual, one we can hear more deeply than we see it.
To a greater or lesser degree, this is still how poetry works. Poetry manifests an awareness that language — in its play of sound as much as in its denotation, its meaning — spools and unspools the self. Though poets in the generations that followed Eliot might have denied it, his influence was unavoidable. Heaney reacted against this. The TS Eliot of was just the sort of immigrant who today Theresa May would like to send back to his home country. He was more thoroughly educated than any other 20th-century poet — he had studied a daunting range of subjects, from Sanskrit and advanced mathematics to Japanese Buddhism and classical Greek.
While most of us in later life screen out huge areas of our education, Eliot maintained that the artist should be very sophisticated intellectually — but also strikingly primitive. When, in our own era, the Australian poet Les Murray produces a poetry that articulates both a totemistic animal presence and an awareness of 21st-century stacked, screen-saturated lives, he inherits an understanding of what Eliot thought poets had to do.
Eliot became a global presence remarkably quickly. The Waste Land in particular made an impression on cultures very different from St Louis, Boston, Paris and London — the cities that shaped him most. Much of The Waste Land was written during the aftermath of the first world war. In Asia, though, the poem offered metaphors for quite different national catastrophes. Suddenly her translation could be seen to articulate modern Chinese cultural and political trauma.
To English readers, it may seem strange to connect Robert Burns and TS Eliot; yet to Scottish or Chinese readers the juxtaposition can make sense: both these poets are tradition-bearers whose ideas blended continuity and disruption, fusing modern literary culture with oral heritage. Having perforated the refined polite mask of Bostonian society, Eliot himself admired the poetry of a quite different New Englander, Robert Lowell , whose Life Studies managed to articulate in verse something that Eliot could not quite capture in his own greatest poetry — familial love.
Eliot is a great love poet, but his sense repeatedly is of love frustrated, lost or gone wrong. Few poets have dealt so profoundly with the themes of childlessness, of longing, of ageing.
They will also appear in Google search results. The author can choose to leave the storyboard public or mark it as Unlisted. Unlisted storyboards can be shared via a link, but otherwise will remain hidden. All storyboards and images are private and secure.
No one else can view anything. Teachers may opt to lower the security if they want to allow sharing. All storyboards are private and secure to the portal using enterprise-class file security hosted by Microsoft Azure. Within the portal, all users can view and copy all storyboards.
Eliot Authors.
0コメント