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Ts Eliot - Guardian Article 2015
Ts Eliot - Guardian Article 2015
Ts Eliot - Guardian Article 2015
world, 50 years on
TS Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th
century a world poet, who changed the way we think. Yet, fifty years after his death,
we are still making new discoveries about him
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Its 2015, the year of the Bullshit Centenary. One hundred years ago a
young immigrant poet submitted his poem The Triumph of Bullshit for
publication in a London avant-garde magazine. The editors letter
explaining his rejection of the work makes clear he decided to stick to my
naif determination to have no Words ending in -Uck, -Unt and Ugger.
Probably the word bullshit was imported from the poets native US; but
so far no one has found bullshit in print as a single word before 1915.
This year also marks the centenary of the first publication of TS Eliots most
famous early poem. Prufrocks Love Song first appeared in the US, tucked
away towards the back of a small magazine, probably because the editor did
not greatly care for it. Two years passed before this disconcerting poem was
published in Eliots first book, but today most critics realise that it
announces the arrival in verse of English-language literary modernism.
At Harvard, where Eliot did most of his studying, there will be an exhibition
at the Houghton Library later this year to mark the centenary of Prufrocks
emergence in print. The US, long wary of Eliot as a sort of cultural traitor, is
coming to terms with its greatest poet.
cats Photograph: pr
It remains to be seen how much attention will be paid to another, more
solemn anniversary. Fifty years ago this month (after being nursed through
bouts of ill health by his shrewd second wife, Valerie, who had been his
secretary and who lived until 2012), TS Eliot died in London. He was by
then no longer a young bullshitter but the incarnation of his art form. He
was not just the most famous poet alive, but regarded (as many still regard
him) as the finest poet of the 20th century. Internationally lauded, he had
been awarded the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe prize, the
US Medal of Freedom and the British Order of Merit. Adults knew him as
the poet not just of Prufrock, but also of The Waste Land and Four
Quartets; theatre audiences had flocked to his plays such asMurder in the
Cathedral and The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh festival, in London and
on Broadway; at home and at school, children relished Macavity, one of
the poems from his Old Possums Book of Practical Cats, just as eagerly as
later audiences have delighted in Cats, the musical based on those poems.
On 4 February 1965 Eliots memorial service filled Westminster Abbey.
Fifty years later, difficult remains the word most people attach to his
verse. Yet we quote him: Not with a bang but a whimper, the last line of
Eliots poem The Hollow Men is among the best-known lines of modern
poetry. April is the cruellest month begins The Waste Land with
unsettling memorability; no reader forgets the strangeness of the patient
etherised upon a table at the start of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
Eliots mastery of the pliancy of language gives his poetry an insistency of
sound and image that seems ineradicable.
Yet, in writing his biography, Ive come to realise the difficulty in
reconciling the po-faced Pope of Russell Square (as the older Eliot came
to be nicknamed) with the young immigrant poet of The Triumph of
Bullshit. Was it simply that Eliot ossified as he aged? To some extent, yes,
respectability clamped him into place; but he understood imaginative
freedom. He both recognised and skewered inFour Quartets the routines of
eminent men of letters who became chairmen of many committees. As a
banker, then as a publisher, he worked at jobs where committees were de
rigueur and he accomplished his work with aplomb. Yet part of him always
sought an escape hatch, a way to elude his official self. His nephew Graham
Bruce Fletcher remembers Uncle Tom taking him as a boy to a London joke
shop in the 1960s. They bought stink bombs and let them off at the
entrance of the Bedford Hotel, not far from Eliots workplace in
Bloomsburys Russell Square. With a fit of giggles, Eliot put on a marked
turn of speed as, Macavity-like, he and his nephew sped from the scene of
the crime, Eliot twirling his walking stick in the manner of Charlie
Chaplin.
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Vivacious Willem Dafoe and Miranda Richardson as Eliot and HaighWood in Tom & Viv
This subversive Eliot, the stink-bombing Nobel prizewinner, takes us closer
to the young Eliot of bullshit. In the early months of 1915 the Eliot who
relished that word was living in Oxford (very pretty, but I dont like to be
dead). He had come there to further his studies in philosophy at the
university, but was longing for literary London, where he had made friends
with his fellow American poet, the energetic, incisive, and eventually
fascist-inclined Ezra Pound. Eliots parents were suspicious of their sons
wild avant-garde artistic associates, and made it clear that they expected
him to return to Harvard to become a respected professor. Eliot didnt want
that. What kept him in England, though, was less literature than love. After
knowing her for three months, he married the nervously vivacious Vivien
Haigh-Wood who was, like himself, a fine dancer, a poetry lover, a
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Illustration by Kathryn Rathke
Because Eliot was a trained philosopher he wrote a Harvard PhD on
philosophy and his parents wanted him to pursue an academic career in the
subject he knew that the self in self-consciousness was unstable. The
Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock maps an unstable self. The poem
anatomises male anxieties about sex anxieties that its author knew from
experience and from inexperience; it hints, too, at how selves are
constructed not just out of actions but also out of their lack, and out of
language and reading, out of borrowed images. Prufrock, inhibitingly aware
that, however indecisive, he is neither Hamlet nor Lazarus nor Salome,
alludes (a little stagily) to all those roles. His self seems made out of role
playing, or attempted acting; and yet, freighted with irony, there is still a
sense of vulnerability and pain. Wittily, Prufrock refers to literature, to
roles, but the irony hints at hurt. As it develops, up until The Waste
Land and beyond, Eliots poetry goes on doing this, exhibiting the self as
constantly conscious of other possible and impossible selves; and
suggesting that literature is a sort of performance self-consciously built on
its earlier performances. 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. Its not so much
that knottily difficult poets including Geoffrey Hill and Jorie Graham
embed one resonance within another as they write, as that even poets very
different from Eliot inherit an acute self-consciousness in their language.
Poetry manifests an awareness that language in its play of sound as much
as in its denotation, its meaning spools and unspools the self. However
distinctively inflected, you can hear that in John Ashbery and in Louise
Gluck, in Jo Shapcott or in John Burnside.
Though poets in the generations that followed Eliot might have denied it,
his influence was unavoidable. In England one impact of this greatest of all
immigrant poets was a presence in the work of the most English of
poets: Philip Larkins articulation of dingy urban images and bleakly
isolated masculinity explored territory that Eliot had mapped out; Ted
Hughes, apparently so different from the poet of Prufrock, drew, like
Eliot, on the study of anthropology to help make his poems. In Scotland,
Hugh MacDiarmid was one of the first major poets to appreciate Eliots
importance and to transfer some of his insights to a different culture: TS
Eliot its a Scottish name claims A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle,
though the poet from Missouri politely rebuffed attempts to convey on him
Scottish ancestry. In Ireland, more recently, Seamus Heaney told me once
how his teachers gave him snippets of Eliots influential prose in capsule
form, to carry on to the battlefield. Heaney reacted against this. His early
bog poems are a long way from the humour of some of Eliots mudless
early poems; yet even those bog poems, as with other works by Heaney,
show the present as a repetition and reinterpretation of primitive ritual.
Such repetition obsessed Eliot, and is indicative of why, when he was
constructing The Waste Land, he responded so excitedly to
Stravinskys The Rite of Spring.
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Eliot enjoyed the primitive ceremony of Stravinskys The Rite of Spring.
Photograph: Bill Cooper
The TS Eliot of 1915 was just the sort of immigrant who today Theresa
May would like to send back to his home country. Having come to the end
of his course of study at Oxford, he was hanging around in Soho while of
no occupation. Today, though, Eliots impact is global. 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.
Poetry in a complex era had to reflect, or at least refract, a sense of
complexity; yet it needed to reach back, too, to something primal, to sound
and re-sound what Eliot termed the beating of a drum. Decades later, the
remarkable Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo recognised this when, shortly
before his death in the Biafran war, he produced in Lament of the
Drums, Path of Thunder and other poems work at once distinctive and
immersed in the cadences and broken images of Eliots verse. When, in
our own era, the Australian poet Les Murray produces a poetry that
articulates both a totemistic animal presence and an awareness of 21stcentury 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. In England,
the 27-year-old Japanese poet Nishiwaki Junzabur read it as soon as it
appeared in 1922. Nishiwaki carried its influence back to Japan where
reference to Aprils suffering marked a recasting of The Waste Lands
opening words; after Hiroshima it made all too much sense for poet Nobuo
Ayukawa to contend that the modern world had become a waste land.
Much of The Waste Land was written during the aftermath of the first
world war. In Europe the poem was heard less as Eliots mixture of
rhythmic grumbling and cri de coeur (which it was) and more as a lament
for modern European civilisation. In Asia, though, the poem offered
metaphors for quite different national catastrophes. Just days after she
published the first full Chinese translation of The Waste Land in June 1937,
Zhao Luori saw the catastrophic second Sino-Japanese war break out.
Suddenly her translation could be seen to articulate modern Chinese
cultural and political trauma. As the 21st-century scholar Lihui Liu argues:
The terrible situation of the 1930s moved some young Chinese poets to
identify Eliot as virtually their spokesman.
Eliots profound but unsettling interrogation of ideas of tradition also
struck and still strikes a deep chord with China. Tradition and the
Individual Talent was the first of his works to be translated there. Mid20th-century Chinese poets who engaged with Eliots work were fascinated
by continuity and disruption in their own, and other, cultural histories. So,
when I met the influential poet-critic Yuan Kezia in 1986, he was visiting
Britain as a poet and translator of modernist literature and as someone to
whom Eliots work had mattered a good deal; yet he was also, as he made
sure to tell me, the translator of Burns. 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 traditionbearers whose ideas blended continuity and disruption, fusing modern
literary culture with oral heritage. Some of the most powerful lines in
Eliots work, after all, come from nursery rhymes whether The Waste
Lands London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down (a telling
line in a poem obsessed with loss of connection), or that distorted nursery
rhyme beginning Here we go round the prickly pear in The Hollow
Men.
Eliots work, and not least The Waste Land, resonates on every continent.
In South America, Jorge Luis Borges wrote a significant essay on La
eternidad y TS Eliot, while the 21st-century Mexican poet and critic Pedro
Serrano likes to align Eliot with one of his most important Mexican readers,
the great poet Octavio Paz. In Eliots native land, Christopher Ricks has
argued that Eliot has affinities with a poet of a later generation, Anthony
Hecht. 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. Eliot remains one of the greatest
religious poets in the language, and that, too, has added to his global reach
as well as enriching his adopted and adapted European sensibility. In
Greece George Seferis recast Eliot and learned how to fuse (as Eliot does) a
feeling for urban modernity with a deep love of the sea. From his childhood,
Eliot contemplated the Atlantic Ocean and knew what it meant to face up to
death. In boyhood he had lived through a cyclone that destroyed much of
his native St Louis; the poet of Death by Water was also a young man who
had risked his life at sea. In Italy, while it was it was Mario Luzi who recast
Eliots most beautiful maritime poem of loss and longing, Marina, as a
new poem in Italian, it is the Nobel prizewinning Eugenio Montale, a
presenter of desolate landscapes and an interrogator of past literary
tradition, who is often seen as a kindred spirit to Eliot. Yet there may be an
affinity, too, between the poet of The Waste Land and that much younger,
Dresden-born poet Durs Grnbein who, like Eliot, hauls back from the
world of the Greek and Latin Classics material that resonates with the worst
horrors of the 20th century.
In English, Eliot, the greatest poet of London, is also the greatest poet of the
second world war not because he fought in it, but because he registered so
fully its struggle and destruction: the houses that turned to dust, the raids,
the need to persist against wholly unfavourable odds. Those are some of the
elements that power East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding.
The last named of the Quartets in particular draws on Eliots experience as
a fire watcher during the London blitz, while The Dry Salvages, drawing
on and addressing his own American past, was written in the period before
America entered the second world war and as Britain was facing defeat.
Though in no way directly propagandistic, Eliots poem nonetheless seems
geared to encourage Americans to understand the necessity of persisting in
struggle. After the second world war, as after the first, Eliot went out of his
way to voice his Europhilia, his belief in European unity and the mind of
Europe. All this contributed to his being regarded, rightly, as an
Anglophile poet who could contend at one moment that History is now
and England, but who could see, too, the importance of a sense of panEuropean civilisation. So, in the decades after 1945, the importance of this
poet to whom Dante mattered as much as Shakespeare can be seen as
TS Eliot
Poetry
Biography