Literatura y crítica

Literatura en Internet en Internet

MARTES, 11 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

Literatura en Internet en Internet

Mi capítulo "Literature in Internet", del libro The Texture of Internet, aparece aquí en el Writing Technologies eJournal.

—Y también en el Information Systems: Behavioral & Social Methods eJournal
    

T. S. Eliot

From the Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.):

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, of New England stock. He entered Harvard in 1906 and was influenced there by the anti-Romanticism of Irving Babbitt and the philosophical and critical interests of George Santayana, as well as by the enthusiasm that prevailed in certain Harvard circles for Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, the Italian Renaissance, and Indian mystical philosophy. His philosophical studies included intensive work on the English idealist philosopher F. H. Bradley, on whom he eventually wrote his Harvard dissertation. (Bradley's emphasis on the private nature of individual experience, "a circle enclosed on the outside," had considerable influence on the private imagery of Eliot's poetry and on the view of the relation between the individual and other individuals reflected in much of his poetry). Later, Eliot studied literature and philosophy in France and Germany, before going to England shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914. He studied Greek philosophy at Oxford, taught school in London, and then obtained a position with Lloyd's Bank. In 1915 he married an English writer, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, but the marriage was not a success. She was highly neurotic and in increasing bad health. The strain told on Eliot, too. By November 1921 distress and worry had brought him to the verge of a nervous breakdown, and on medical advice, he went to recuperate in a Swiss sanatorium. Two months later he returned, pausing in Paris long enough to give Ezra Pound the manuscript of The Waste Land. Eliot left his wife in 1933; and she was eventually committed to a mental home, where she died in 1947. Ten years later he married again and, for the eight years that remained to him, at last knew happiness.

 

Eliot started writing literary and philosophical reviews soon after settling in London. He wrote for the Atheaneum and the Times Literary Supplement, among other periodicals, and was assistant editor of the Egoist from 1917 to 1919. In 1922 he founded the influential quarterly Criterion, which he edited until it cesased publication in 1939. His poetry first appeared in 1915, when The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was printed in Poetry magazine (Chicago) and a few other short poems were published in the short-lived periodical Blast. His first published collection of poems was Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917; two other small collections followed in 1919 and 1920; in 1922 The Waste Land appeared, first in the Criterion in October, then in the Dial (in America) in November, and finally in book form. Poems 1909-25 (1925) collected these earlier poems. Meanwhile he was also publishing collections of his critical essays, notably The Sacred Wood in 1920 and Homage to John Dryden in 1924. For Lancelot Andrewes followed in 1928 and in 1932 lie included most of these earlier essays with some new ones in Selected Essays. In 1925 he joined the London publishing firm of Faber and Gwyer, becoming a director when the firm became Faber and Faber. He became a British subject and joined the Church of England in 1927.

 

 

 

"Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, mut produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning." This remark, from Eliot's essay The Metaphysical Poets (1921), gives one clue to his poetic method from Prufrock through The Waste Land. In the tradition of the of the Georgian poets who were active when he settled in London, he saw an exhausted poetic mode being employed, with no verbal excitement or original craftsmanship. He sought to make poetry more subtle, more suggestive, and at the same time more precise. He had learned from the imagists the necessity of clear and precise images, and he learned, too, from the philosopher-poet T. E. Hulme and from his early supporter and adviser Ezra Pound to fear romantic softness and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality as the important factor. At the same time, the "hard, dry" images advocated by Hulme were not enough for him; he wanted wit, allusiveness, irony. He saw in the Metaphysical poets how wit and passion could be combined, and he saw in the French symbolists how an image could be both absolutely precise in what it referred to physically and at the same time endlessly suggestive in the meanings it set up because of its relationship to other images. The combination of precision, symbolic suggestion, and ironic mockery in the poetry of the late-nineteenth-century poet Jules Laforgue attracted and influenced him, and he was influenced too by other nineetenth-century French poets: by Théophile Gautier's artful carving of impersonal shapes of meaning, by Charles Baudelaire's strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions of objects and images; by the symbolist poets Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. He also found in the Jacobean dramatists a flexible blank verse with overtones of colloquial movement: Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, and others, taught him as much—in the way of verse movement, imagery, the counterpointing of the accent of conversation and the note of terror—as either the Metaphysicals or the French symbolists.

 

Hulme's protests against the Romantic concept of poetry fitted in well enough with what Eliot had learned from Irving Babbitt at Harvard, yet for all his severity with such poets as Shelley, for all his conscious cultivation of a classical viewpoint and his insistence on order and discipline rather than on mere self-expression in art, one side of Eliot's poetic genius is, in one sense of the word, Romantic. The symbolist influence on his imagery, his interest in the evocative and the suggestive, such lines as "And fiddled whisper music on those strings / And bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings," and such recurring images as the hyacinth girl and the rose garden, all show what could be called a Romantic element in his poetry. But it is combined with a dry ironic allusivness, a play of wit, and a colloquial element, which are not normally found in poets of the Romantic tradition.

 

Eliot's real novelty—and the cause of such bewilderment when his poems first appeared—was his deliberate elimination of all merely connective and transitional passages, his building up of the total pattern of meaning through the immediate juxtaposition of images without overt explanation of what they are doing, together with his use of oblique references to other works of literature (some of them quite obscure to most readers of his time). Prufrock presents a symbolic landscape where the meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that meaning is enlarged by echoes, often ironic, of Hesiod and Dante and Shakespeare. The Waste Land is a series of scenes and images with no author's voice intervening to tell us where we are, but with the implications developed through multiple contrasts and through analogies with older literary works often referred to in a distorted quotation or a half-concealed allusion. Furthermore, the works referred to are not necessarily works that are central in the Western literary tradition: besides Dante and Shakespeare there are pre-Socratic philosophers, minor (as well as major) seventeenth-century poets and dramatists; works of anthropology, history, and philosophy; and other echoes of the poet's private reading. In a culture where there is no longer any assurance on the part of the poet that his or her public has a common cultural heritage, a common knowledge of works of the past, Eliot felt it necessary to build up his own body of references. It is this that marks the difference between Eliot's use of earlier literature and , say, Milton's. Both poets are difficult to the modern reader, who needs editorial assistance in recognizing and understanding many of the allusions—but Milton was drawing on a body of knowledge common to educated people in his day. Nevertheless, this aspect of Eliot can be exaggerated: the fact remains that the nature of his imagery together with the movement of his verse generally succeed in setting the tone he requires, in establishing the area of meaning to be developed, so that even a reader ignorant of most of the literary allusions can often get the feel of the poem and achieve some understanding of what it says.

 

Eliot's early poetry, until at least the middle 1920s, is mostly concerned in one way or another with the Waste Land, with aspects of the decay of culture in the modern Western world. After his formal acceptance of Anglican Christianity we find a penitential note in much of his verse, a note of quiet searching for spiritual peace, with considerable allusion to biblical, liturgical, and mystical religious literature and to Dante. Ash Wednesday (1930), a poem in six parts, much less fiercely concentrated in style than the earlier poetry, explores with gentle insistence a mood both penitential and questioning. The so-called Ariel poems (the title has nothing to do with their form or content) present or explore aspects of religious doubt or discovery or revelation, sometimes, as in Marina, using a purely secular imagery and sometimes, as in Journey of the Magi, drawing on biblical incident. In Four Quartets (of which the first, Burnt Norton, appeared in the Collected Poems of 1935, though all four were not completed until 1943, when they were published together) Eliot further explored essentially religious moods, dealing with the relation between time and eternity and the cultivation of that selfless passivithy that can yield the moment of timeless revelation in the midst of time. The mocking irony, the savage humor, the deliberately startling juxtapostion of the sordid and the romantic give way in these later poems to a quieter poetifc idiom, often still completely allusive but never deliberately shocking.

 

Eliot's criticism was the criticism of a practicing poet who worked out in relation to his reading of older literature what he needed to hold and to admire. He lent the growing weight of his authority to that shift in literary taste that replaced Milton by Donne as the great seventeenth-century English poet and replaced tennyson in the nineteenthy century by Hopkins. His often-quoted description of the late seventeenth-century "dissociation of sensibility"—keeping with and passion in separate compartments—which he saw as determining the course of English poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is both a contribution to the rewriting of English literary history and an explanation of what he was aiming at in his own poetry: the reestablishment of that unified sensibility he found in Donne and other early seventeenth-century poets and dramatists. His view of tradition, his dislike of the poetic exploitation of the author's own personality, his advocacy of what he called "orthodoxy," made him suspicious of what he considered eccentric geniuses such as Blake and D. H. Lawrence. On the other side, his dislike of the grandiloquent and his insistence on complexity and on the mingling of the formal with the conversational made him distrustful of the influence of Milton on English poets. He considered himself "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion" (For Lancelot Andrewes, 1928), in favor of order against chaos, tradition against eccentricity, authority against rampant individualism; yet his own poetry is in many respects untraditional and certainly highly individual in tone. His conservative and even authoritarian habit of mind alienated some who admire—and some whose own poetry has been much influenced by—his poetry.

 

Eliot's plays have all been, directly or indirectly, on religious themes. Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals with the murder of Archbishop Thomas à Becket in an appropriately ritual manner, with much use of a chorus and wit hthe central speech in the form of a sermon by the archbishop in his cathedral shortly before his murder. The Family Reunion (1939) deals with the problem of guilt and redemption in a modern upper-class English family; it makes a deliberate attempt to combine choric devices from Greek tragedy with a poetic idiom subdued to the accents of drawing-room conversation. In his three later plays, all written in the 1950s,. The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman, he achieved popular success by casting a serious religious theme in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy, using a verse that is so conversational in movement that when spoken in the theater it does not sound like verse at all.

 

Critics differ on the degree to which Eliot succeeded in his last plays in combining box-office success with dramatic effectiveness. But there is no disagreement on his importance as one of the great renovators of the English poetic dialect, whose influence on a whole generation of poets, critics, and intellectuals generally was enormous. His range as a poet is limited, and his interest in the great middle ground of human experience (as distinct from the extremes of saint and sinner) deficient, but when in 1948 he was awarded the rare honor of the Order of Merit by King George VI and also gained the Nobel Prize for Literature, his positive qualities weere widely and fully recognized—his poetic cunning, his fine craftasmanship, his original accent, his historical and representative importance, as the  poet of the modern symbolist-Metaphysical tradition.

 

 

The Waste Land

 

This is a poem about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value to people's daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death heralds no resurrection. Eliot himself gives one of the main clues to the theme and structure of the poem in a general note, in which he stated that "not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston's book on the Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance" (1920). He further acknowledged a general indebtedness to Sir James Frazer's Golden Bough (13 volumes, 1890-1915), "especially the . . . volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris," in which Frazer deals with ancient vegetation myths and fertility ceremonies. Weston's study, drawing on material from Frazer and other anthropologists, traced the relationship of these myths and rituals to Christianity and most especially to the legend of the Holy Grail. She found an archetypal fertility myth in the story of the Fisher King whose death, infirmity, or impotence (there are many forms of the myth) brought drought and desolation to the land and failure of the power to reproduce themselves among both humans and beasts. This symbolic Waste Land can be revived only if a "questing knight" goes to the Chapel Perilous, situated in the heart of it, and there asks certain ritual questions about the Grail (or Cup) and the Lance—originally fertility symbols, female and male, respectively. The proper asking of these questions revives the king and restores fertility to the land. The relation of this original Grail myth to fertility cults and rituals found in many different civilizations, and represented by stories of a dying god who is later resurrected (e.g., Tammuz, Adonis, Attis) shows their common origin in a response to the cyclical movement of the seasons, with vegetation dying in winter to be resurrected again in the spring. Christianity, according to Weston, gave its own spiritual meaning to the myth; it "did not hesitate to utilize the already existing medium of instruction, but boldly identified the Deity of Vegetation, regarded as Life Principle, with the God of the Christian Faith." The Fisher King is related to the use of the fish symbol in early Christianity. Weston states "with certainty that the Fish is a Life symbol of immemorial antiquity, and that the title of Fisher has, from the earliest ages, been associated with the Deities whio were held to be specially connected with the origin and preservation of Life." Eliot, follwing Weston, thus uses a great variety of mythological and religious material, both Occidental and Oriental, to paint a symbolic picture of the modern Waste Land and the need for regeneration. The terror of that life—its loneliness, emptiness, and irrational apprehensions—as well as its misuses of sexuality are vividly presented, but paradoxically, the poem ends with a benediction. Another significant general source for the poem is the composer Richard Wagner, some of whose operas (Götterdämmerung ["Twilight of the Gods"], Parsifal, Rheingold, and Tristand and Isolde) are drawn on. 

 

The poem as published owed a great deal to the severe pruning of Ezra Pound; the original manuscript, with Pound's excisions and comments, provides fascinating information about the genesis and development of the poem. It was reproduced in facsimile in 1971, edited by Eliot's widow, Valerie Eliot, who also supplied notes supplementing those that Eliot himself added when the poem was first published in book form in 1922 and that are included with the present editors' footnotes to the poem.

 

 

 

Pre-Postmodernism in "The Waste Land"

Modernist poetry and criticism: T. S. Eliot

LUNES, 10 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

Modernist Poetry and Criticism: T. S. Eliot

Notes on Eliot's criticism based on René Wellek's A History of Modern Criticism and other sources:
 

1.  Introduction
2.  Classicism and Tradition
3.  Impersonality
4.  Autonomy of the Poem
5.  The Dissociation of Sensibility
6.  Language and Technique
7.  The Function of Criticism
7.  Literature, Morality, Religion




1.  Introduction

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) has been called "by far the most important critic of the twentieth century in the English-speaking world."   He is above all a critic of poetry and drama; he is not much interested in the novel.  Eliot does not write any systematic treatise explaining his theory of poetry; it is expounded in a number of books and essays written through many years, interspersed with practical criticism or other speculations on culture.  Moreover, Eliot denies having an aesthetic theory, he claims to suspect thinking abstractly about poetics.  He seems to have a genuine conviction that ultimate questions are beyond the reach of the intellect, and that any attempt to define poetry is bound to failure.  Eliot distrusts any criticism that aspires to a scientific knowledge of its subject:

The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae: he refrains from statements which pretend to be literally true.  He finds fact nowhere and approximations always.  His truths are the truths of experience rather than of calculation. 
 

Criticism, it seems, does not fully escape the condition of literature.  Eliot should be read therefore with this assumptions: that he aims at most at an approximation to his subject, the writer or the poetic experience.  Being a poet, Eliot claims that in his case theory is only "a by-product of my private poetic workshop",   that his theorizing is arbitrary, "epiphenomenal to [his] taste."   According to Wellek, this is not true: in fact, "Eliot's taste is often in little relation to his theory" (History  5:178).  Eliot's theory is modelled on what he thinks he should like, not on what he likes; in this sense it fulfils its own requirements.  
    
    Eliot's implied theory itself is coherent enough, although "some internal contradictions persist" (Wellek, History 5:176). It develops many of the critical concepts that will become current among critics during the greater part of the century: poetry must be impersonal.   Poetic creation requires aunified sensibility  which permits to find an objective correlative.   But there is a historical dissociation of sensibility  which increases the difficulty of creation for modern poets.  The concepts of tradition   and the status of belief  in poetry are also central in Eliot's criticism.  "All these are crucial critical matters for which Eliot found formulas, if not always convincing solutions" (Wellek, History  5: 176).  



2.  Classicism and Tradition

In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), T. S. Eliot opposes the critical views then current in England.  Apart from their disorganization, he complains that there is no place left for tradition in them; only originality and difference are recognized as a source of value.  Therefore, the poets are considered in isolation from one another, they are misleadingly presented as rootless individuals.  

Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.  ("Tradition" 14).  
 

Belonging to a poetic tradition should not be confused with repetition, with servile imitation of the works of the past.  What Eliot mistrusts is the show of personality, novelty and originality.  For Eliot, to be "original" is easy, and "the poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad."   What is difficult is to belong to the great poetic tradition.  Eliot reverses the usual romantic view of tradition as a dead weight which must be shaken off by the poet in search of his voice.  Tradition is not a given, but an end:  "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour" ("Tradition 14).  In Eliot we find, therefore, an anti-Romantic doctrine of artistic creativity, a classicist conception of poetics.  In order to produce great art, the poet must rely not on his subjectivity and the peculiarities of his personality, but on a poetic tradition, on maturity and the discipline of the spirit.  "True originality is merely a development." 
    
    A poet needs a historical sense, a sense of the pastness and also of the presentness of the past, of its present-day relevance.  The poet must be introduced to the dead poets' society.  He must become aware 

that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.  The historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.  And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.  No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.  His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relations to the dead poets and artists . . . .   [W]hat happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it.  The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.  ("Tradition" 14-15)
 

The whole of European literature is therefore an organic whole, a structural system which is changing constantly.  But at the same time it is always complete; there cannot be any missing parts before they are created.  The usual assumption that the past is unchangeable is done away with: the past is constantly being reworked by the preset.  Eliot would presumably agree with Borges's dictum that a a work creates its own predecessors, that a work orders a series of disparate and previously unrelated works into a teleological series that points to the newly created work.  Tradition, therefore, must not be conceived as a one-way street.  It consists in an interplay of present and past; the past guides the present and the present alters the past, giving it a new significance.    
    
    "And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities" ("Tradition" 15).  A writer must acquire a knowledge of the past.  For some this will mean erudition, for others it will be a matter of natural acquisition. In any case, it is necessary.  It is naive to dismiss the writers of the past and try to cut ourselves away from tradition.  But do we not know more than the writers of the past? "Precisely", Eliot answers, "And they are that which we know" ("Tradition" 16).  It is the knowledge of the past which allows us to be moderns.  
    
    Eliot's influence in defining this tradition is also great: he helps to effect a shift of taste away from romantic poetry, and revaluates the metaphysical poets, Dryden, Jacobean and Caroline drama.  Dante is the greatest poet of history, "the most European, the least provincial."   Eliot was not particularly interested in what are usually called "the classics", the writers of Antiquity or those of the Neoclassical age.  "In spite of this ideological superstructure of classicism, Eliot's taste belongs to a line which could be called medieval-baroque-symbolist"  (Wellek, History  5:206).

    It is easy to imagine the upheaval that this imaginative and evaluative historical perspective would cause in the positivistic philology of the early twentieth century, when scholars were busy with factual data instead of their interpretation, and assumed quite naturally that the past comes before the present and quietly stays there.  However, Eliot is interested in this notion of the dead poets' society "as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism"  ("Tradition" 15).  That is, he intends to use it to explore the nature of poetry, of poetic creation, to apply it as a guiding principle to the writing of new poetry.  

    This conception of tradition is suggestive and has been widely influential.  However, it favours a view of poetry being written in a void, or more precisely, only with respect to previous poetry.  Eliot considers literature as being ultimately beyond time.  The theory is only superficially historic; it reduces literary history to literary tradition.




3.  Impersonality


The poet, then, must renounce the shortcut to originality and surrender his individuality to tradition, to something more valuable than himself. Poetry is divorced form his personality: "The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" ("Tradition" 17).  Only in this way can he find his real self.  Like Hulme and Pound, Eliot conceives of poetic creation as a process of depersonalization.  Far from being a confession, an exhibition of the artist's intimacy, art enables the artist to escape from the obsession of his emotions and from his personality.   This is the opposite of the expressive, subjectivist theory of poetry which we found in many Romantics.  

    The poet must limit himself to be a catalyst of emotions and feelings that are played through him, while he himself remains impassible, without being consumed in the reaction.  He must be attentive to the quality of the poetic process, and not to his own emotions, because "the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a particular medium . . . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways" ("Tradition" 20).  What is crucial is the nature of this combination, of the chemical reaction of poetry: the final compound, and not the bare elements.  It is the structure that counts, and not the origin or nature of the materials.  The emotions of the poet as such are uninteresting and irrelevant; they will count only insomuch as they become poetry.  The poetic emotions are not the psychological emotions experienced by the author before, during or after the process of composition.  They are the emotions inherent in the poem itself.  The two need not coincide.  The emotions which play on the individuality of the poet may be alien to his poetry, and vice versa.  Eliot plays down the quality of the emotion experienced by the poet.  It may be crude, simple or flat; the poet may still be an excellent poet provided that the poem itself is not crude, simple, or flat.  Eliot draws here a difference between the emotions of the poet and those in the poem:  

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.  And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.  
("Tradition" 21)
 

Poetical feelings are complex and general, concrete an precise; psychological feelings are irrational, vague and indistinct.  Of course, a poem deals with human situations, emotions, attitudes.  And inevitably a personality emerges behind the poem.  But these emotions, this personality, need not be those of the author.  Since poetry is an escape from personality, the best poems tell us nothing about their author.  At times he speaks as if the personality of the poet did not intervene in the composition of the poem.  The poetic experience is described as a chemical reaction in which the poet is only a "catalyst": he favours the reaction of the poetic elements but is not emotionally involved, he remains apart from the poem.  But in his practical criticism Eliot has to recognize that authors are not that impersonal.  Other critics will speak in this respect of the "implied author" or the "lyrical subject."  Eliot does not use the terms himself, but he shares the views: "Eliot's criticism uses often a standard of personality which is not, of course, the anecdotal, empirical personality but the personality pattern emerging from the work itself" (Wellek, History  5:183).  He even uses this personality which unifies the different works of the same author as a criterion of value.  He accepts that the emotions used in poetry may be the emotions actually experienced by the author, as long as they have been transformed: "out of intense personal experience," the poet "is able to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of the experience, to make of it a general symbol." 

    Eliot recognizes that the right poetic concentration is not achieved by simple deliberation and is not completely conscious.  But he is more interested in rejecting the Romantic account of the process of composition, Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."  Eliot stresses instead the conscious aspect of writing, the importance of consciousness, of awareness, which is at the same time a flight from subjectivism: 

In fact the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.  Both errors tend to make him "personal."  Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality.  But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.  ("Tradition"  21).  
 

The emotion of art is therefore impersonal: it is a matter of the poem, not of the writer's life.  It is not an outpouring, but a construction, an achievement.  And poetic tradition offers the poet a guidance in this escape from personality.  The poet "is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment [= importance] of the past, unless he is conscious not of what is dead but of what is already living"  ("Tradition" 22).  

    Writing is a compromise between the personal, creative and chaotic side of the writer on the one hand and his critical instinct, his awareness of tradition on the other.  "Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour."   The Romantics ignore this aspect of the process of composition; they do not want to accept the need of a regulative principle inside the human spirit.  They rely on the individual instead of tradition.  But for Eliot the individual as such has no principles—a belief that underpins his ethics as well as his poetics.   




4.  Autonomy of the Poem

4.1.  The Meaning of a Poem
4.2.  Organic Structure
4.3.  The Objective Correlative

4.1.  The Meaning of a Poem


The rejection of the authorial meaning is part and parcel of Eliot's theory of impersonality.  If the poet has retreated himself from the poem once it is finished, the poem becomes an independent object, autonomous and public, available to judgement.  The literary work of art lies then "somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality the writer is trying to 'express', or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or the writer as reader."  It is easy to see that unless some limits are set or assumed, there is no difference between this theory and complete freedom of interpretation.  Eliot, however, does not seem to worry about this problem.  He assumes that the objectivity of the poem is evidence enough of its core of meaning.  The poem "in some sense, has its own life . . . the feeling or emotion or vision resulting from the poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet."   That is, the poet is one thing and the intention, the idea of the author is another thing.  They must not be confused.  Only the first is relevant for the reader and the critic; the poem must not be interpreted or evaluated in relation to the writer's subjective experience.  The origin of the poem "has no relation to the poem and throws no light upon it."   Biographical criticism is therefore irrelevant: no amount of data about the author will explain the existence of the poem.  As we shall see later, the critical consequence of this view of the poem as an autonomous whole is that criticism must concentrate on the work itself, not on its causes or effects. 
    
    This separation of the poet and the poem has further anti-Romantic consequences.  The issue of the sincerity of the emotion becomes irrelevant.  If the emotion represented in the poem need not be the poet's own, the question of sincerity does not arise.  In fact, it does not arise for the reader if he faces the poem itself, without any prior knowledge of the author.  Eliot recognizes at first that our knowledge of the poet's insincerity of feeling affects our enjoyment of the poem.  But he soon becomes more concerned with what he calls "genuineness": he separates the sincerity of the man from that of the poet, the sincerity which is built into the poem and is the only relevant one.  The subjective, psychological belief of the author is finally irrelevant.  "Strength of belief has no relation to successful art" (Wellek, History  5:192).



4.2.  Organic structure


According to T. S. Eliot, a poem is an autonomous verbal structure, a dynamic organism with a life of its own.  It is a describable object, a symbolic world which is amenable to analysis and judgment.  The relevant objects of study are its meaning, the organization of the materials which constitute it, the relations between each of the parts and the other parts, as well as the relations with the overall structure of the work.  The object of study is the work itself, its immanent values, not the poet or the process of composition.  No amount of external criticism, of biography, of history, source studies, influences, psychological or sociological studies will be sufficient for the critic.  His proper job is to study the work itself.  Of course, the relevant emotions, the meaning of the work is a part of the work: Eliot is no formalist in this sense.  But "once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyric from the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals itself as drama" (Wimsatt and Brooks 675).  Lyric poetry, the subjective genre, is objectivised by Eliot's ideal of impersonality; all art aspires to the classical ideal of the objective drama.  The feelings in lyric are not the feelings of the poet: in poetry there is simply the expression of an emotion through an object, not the expression of the author. 

    An instance of organicism is Eliot's discussion of the role of verse.  Eliot is vague when speaking of metrics, but nevertheless he insists that its relation to meaning is organic.  The beauty of verse is not the beauty of pure sound: sound and metre become one with the meaning of the words they organize. Eliot sees the poem as a "musical pattern of sounds and a musical pattern of secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and these two patterns are indissoluble and one."   The music of the word "is at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of the context; and from another relation, that of the immediate meaning to that context to all the other meanings which it has in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of associations."   Poetry aspires to the condition of music (here Eliot agrees with the Romantics) but it is a music of meaning, not of sound.  Actually, what Eliot is referring to is not music but the peculiar semantics of the poem, in which the value of the words is fully present and is moreover contextually overdetermined.      
    
    A work may fail to achieve an organic structure, a unified meaning of its own.  According to Eliot, Hamlet  is an artistic failure because Shakespeare has not succeeded in integrating all the materials of his sources and his own vision in a successful way.   The work shows that it is a product of various hands instead of being guided by one unifying principle.  It drags along a number of superfluous scenes and irrelevant motifs.  According to Eliot, Hamlet's melancholy is left unexplained; there is not sufficient motivation for it in the play, given Gertrude's insignificance.  Emotion is not adequately conveyed, it is in excess of the facts, it is not embodied in the play, but remains outside.  Most people would not agree with Eliot,  but here we are interested mainly in the critical principles he applies.  The relation between character and plot in drama should also be organic: "in great drama character is always felt to be—not more important than plot—but somehow integral with plot." 




4.3.  The Objective Correlative    


The theory of the objective correlative is inspired in the doctrines of evocation put forward by the French symbolists, as well as in Colerige and in Johnson's description of the Metaphysical conceit.  A passage in Santayana has been pointed at as the immediate predecessor: "The glorious emotions with which [the poet] bubbles up must, however, at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects."   Actually, the term "objective correlative" itself is unimportant.  Eliot seems to have used it literally only in the essay on Hamlet,  which provides also the clearest definition of the concept.  

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.  ("Hamlet" 145)

An "objective correlative" is then a kind of metaphor for an emotion, a metaphor where the tenor is an emotion (or rather, a "feeling") and the vehicle is any literary device: a metaphor proper, a motif, a plot structure, a character. . .   For Wimsatt and Brooks it is "the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling" (668).  For Wellek, the objective correlative is the poem considered as "a symbolic world which [Eliot] thought of as continuous with the feelings of the poet, objectifying and patterning them" ; it is 

the right kind of devices, situations, plots, and objects which motivate the emotion of a character in a play or a novel, or even, as Eliot used it more broadly, simply as the "equivalent" of the author's emotion, the successful objectivation of emotion in art.  (History  5:192). 

The notion of the objective correlative is the logical result of the conception of the literary work as an autonomous structure and of the impersonality of poetic feeling.   The work provides the formula for a feeling particular to itself.    
    
    Eliot's own formulation is couched in terms which are surprisingly psychological and not so distant from the empiricist doctrines of the association of ideas.  Eliseo Vivas has criticised Eliot's conception of the objective correlative as not being sufficiently objective: Eliot assumes that the poet is in possession of an emotion that he tries to express, or that he intends an effect which is fully formed before he composes the work.  For Vivas, "the poet only discovers his emotion through trying to formulate it in words."   The poet and the reader need not feel alike; poetry is not to be conceived as the transaction of an emotion from the writer to the reader.  In general, however, Eliot is not guilty of conceiving poetry as a communication of emotions.  The doctrine of the objective correlative is concerned with an emotion which is objective, that is, contained in the work: the emphasis is put on the structure of the poem, and not in the emotion of the poet.  The emphasis is on an emotion which is not spontaneous, but mathematically calculated: we may usefully remember here the mathematical analogy in Poe's "Philosophy of Composition."  The stress on craftmanship is anti-Romantic.  Eliot favours bold images with the power to amalgamate disparate experiences (witness the opening of his "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock").  He sees imagination where Colerige saw only fancy: "in the verses of Marvell . . . there is the making of the familiar strange, and the strange familiar, which Coleridge attributed to good poetry." 
    





5.  The Dissociation of Sensibility


Eliot's version of organicism is part and parcel of a whole theory of history.  The idea of a dissociation of sensibility has a venerable Romantic ancestry: witness for instance Schiller's opposition between the material drive and the formal drive, and their unification in the play-drive.  It seems to derive more directly from Rémy de Gourmont's analysis of Laforgue's mind in Promenades littéraires.  Eliot transforms this individual description into a universal narrative.  Originally, the sensibility of the human being was unified: his emotions, his ideas, his sensations, were all channelled in the same direction, instead of running against each other.  Then, at a given moment in history, there occurred a dissociation of this unified sensibility.  Eliot usually locates the change in England and in the seventeenth century.   The metaphysical poets were able to think and feel in an orderly way: in them, there is an identity of thought and sensation.  In them Eliot finds "a direct apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling."  "A thought for Donne was an experience: it modified his sensibility."   Eliot praises what he calls Cowley's "wit", a near-equivalent to the New Critical "irony."  "Wit" means range and comprehensiveness, a refusal to be one-sided, a suggestion of multiple perspectives on experience.  Wit is a "constant inspection and criticism of experience.  It involves, probably, a recognition implicit in the expression of every experience, of other kinds of experience which are possible.   But after the metaphysicals the dissociation of sensibility occurs.  The eighteenth century consecrates itself to abstract thought, and becomes unable to feel.  This leads to the opposite reaction in the nineteenth century, which is submerged by a wave of disorderly feelings.  In the poets of the Victorian and the Georgian age, we find a confusion  of thought and feeling, instead of a harmonic fusion.  Eliot's ideal is the restoration of this unified sensibility by means of poetry.  The artist "should have the unified sensibility which reaches from the most elementary response to the highest intellectual abstraction" (Wellek, History  5:198).   The poet of unified sensibility should be aware not only of truth and beauty, but also of good and evil.  Dissociation involves forgetting the problem of good and evil in poetry.  Some of the French Symbolists (Baudelaire, Laforgue) attempted the reconstitution of a unified sensibility, and they did that partly by reintroducing the problem of good and evil in poetry; only by dealing with moral problems and establishing a moral order is it possible to reunite the whole of man's personality.

    Eliot presumably aspires to write a poetry of unified sensibility, which in his case means also religious poetry.  However, "In the defense against Paul Elmer More's accusation that there is a cleavage between Eliot's correctly classical criticism and his perverse modernist poetry, Eliot endorses the strange view that in a chaotic age poetry must be chaotic."   His poetry would therefore be flawed as the whole age is flawed.  Indeed, Eliot seems to believe that the poet cannot help expressing in some way the time he lives in.  There is an uneasy relationship between this awareness and the timeless version of literature that he puts forward in "Tradition and the Individual Talent." 
      
    The idea of the objective correlative is also related to the theory of the unified sensibility.  "The poet becomes the man who returns to this original immediate experience, to a unified sensibility by objectifying his feeling" (Wellek, History  5:186).  Ideas must become feeling⎯even sensory experience: 

actually Eliot . . . exploits the ambiguity of the term 'sensibility' and conceives this fusion of thought and feeling as equivalent to a fusion of thought and sensation.  The metaphysical poets represent this fusion to perfection . . . .  The poet must both feel and sense his thought. (Wellek, History  5:187).  

The poetry of unified sensibility satisfies Eliot's and man's yearning for wholeness and integrity.  

    At times Eliot gives different accounts of the dissociation of sensibility.  He often seems to see the dissociation as a gradual process, or to locate it at other points in history.  It has, too, practical consequences for the historian of literature, such as the fragmentation of literary genres.  In order to read the novels of Wilkie Collins we must be able to reunite the elemnents that have become dissociated in the modern novel.  The Victorian novel reunited the thriller, the sentimental novel, the philosophical novel.  Now these elements have split into as many genres.  The subgenre of the "thriller" did not exist in the Victorian age because the best novels were thrilling.  





6.  The Language and Technique of Poetry

6.1.  Diction
6.2.  Myth and Symbol
6.3.  The use of convention.

6.1.  Diction

"Eliot in approaching a work of poetry thinks of it, first of all, as language" (Wellek, History   5:193).  An important mission of the poet is to restore and to develop language.  In order to do this, the poetry must stand in some relation with common language.  The language of poetry must not "stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear."   Eliot favours "some standard of poetic diction, neither identical with, nor too remote from current speech."   The language of Dryden or that of Dante are examples of this balanced poetic diction.  Milton, on the other hand, is the example of the way the poet should not use language, tearing it apart from the common language.  "Milton", Eliot holds, "writes English like a dead language."   Eliot liked Joyce'sUlysses,  but not the baroque Finnegans Wake.  He rejects those styles in which language itself becomes the center of attention, instead of pointing towards its object; he warns against "language dissociated from things, assuming an independent existence." 

    The difference between prose and poetry bothers Eliot.  He wants to write prosaic poetry, which nevertheless is the contrary of Pater's poetic prose: a poetry which exploits the resources of colloquial language without ceasing to be poetry.  He does not identify poetry and verse; for him poetry is an honorific term.  He complains somewhere that we lack the the word to qualify good prose as "poetry" qualifies good verse.   However, Eliot justifies the use of verse, even in drama: "if we want to get at the permanent and universal we tend to express ourselves in verse."  

    Eliot defends two very different kinds of poetry.  The first is the poetry of images, the kind of poetry written by St. John Perse: "The work of poetry is performed by the use of images: by a cumulative succession of images each fusing with the next; and by a rapid and unexpected combination of images apparently unrelated."   The other is the poetry of statement, the poetry which preserves the coherence of a prose argument, with few images and a solid logical construction⎯the kind of poetry that Dryden writes.  And when speaking of long poems or of drama, he holds that there must be a difference in degrees of poetic intensity between the parts.  The less "intense" fulfil the role of prose inside the poem.  

    In any case, whether we write a poetry of images or a poetry of ideas, Eliot demands that poetry in our present-day civilization 

must be difficult.  The poet must become more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.  It is not sufficient to 'look into our hearts and write'.  One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.  (Selected Essays  275-76)

As an example of this comprehensive and difficult poetry, he puts forward the model of the metaphysical poets; but in order to understand his meaning we must think of his own poetry instead.

    The reference to allusion is important .  Eliot became known in the early 1920s because his poetry was "so full of quotations."  Eliot uses fragments of older poetry, lines or passages from Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, as an ironic device, in order to emphasize the difference between the ideal world of the past and the decayed world of the present.  His poetry, therefore, invokes a large number of world-views and implied contexts which are brought to bear on the poem.  Eliot's disgust with contemporary reality may be "a traditional literary device" (Sampson 853) but his technique to convey this disgust is new enough: it is only possible because Eliot exploits his position at the end of a poetic tradition.



6.2.  Myth and Symbol

Eliot sees the connection between poetry, myth, and ritual, but he does not favour the primitivistic interpretations of Jung or Herbert Read, or the latter's notion of "unconscious symbols."  Consciousness and unconsciousness are not the parameters in which symbolism functions: "If we are unconscious that a symbol is a symbol, then is it a symbol at all? And the moment we become conscious that it is a symbol, is it any longer a symbol?"   Eliot provides an unmystical description of the use of symbolism a a deliberate device to control the meaning of words.  Symbolism is for Eliot one of the main resources of the poet.  The poet turns the word into a symbol; that is, he makes it work as much as possible, uniting the disparate in the concrete, meaning more than it would in other kind of writing.  In Eliot, "Symbol is simply the rightly charged word and not a pointing to the supernatural" (Wellek, History  5:198).  
    
    Likewise, Eliot recommends myth as a method, a technique.  The role of myth in his poetry can be compared to that of literary allusion.  A myth can provide the framework of a contemporary work.  In this respect, Eliot praises the use Joyce makes of the Odyssey  as a reference basis for Ulysses: myth can be "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."   The artist is a user of myths, but he is not a mythmaker.  "The artist is more primitive, as well as more civilized than his contemporaries."   The artist is not bound to the remnants of the past: he encompasses the whole of history.  



6.3.  The Use of Convention

There are other conventions, apart from myth, available to the poet.  "Rhetoric", used by the critics of the Romantic tradition as a term of abuse, is revaluated by Eliot.   The conscious artificiality of a genre, its "rhetoric", is not a shortcoming, but a precondition for a required effect.  Eliot reacts against the naturalistic tradition in drama, and wants to recover the right for a character to speak in monologue or being aware of his own dramatic role, the kind of play inside the play that we often find in Shakespeare.  The rhetoric of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic speeches is the result of a conscious delight in speech.  This is pernicious if it is done for its own sake, "if it is not done for a particular effect but for a general impressiveness" ("Rhetoric" 42).  Generic conventions must be used as elements of poetic construction.  They must become a channel through which to articulate the emotion in drama. Inarticulate emotion is, as always, Eliot's bête noire.   

    Eliot reacts against the dramatic tradition of Shaw or Ibsen, and calls for a more concentrated, more stylized, more intense drama, closer to the religious ritual which was at the origin of drama.  To the naturalistic drama of the late nineteenth century Eliot opposes the poetic drama he was to exemplify himself in Murder in the Cathedral   and The Cocktail Party.  Poetic drama he defines as "a design of human action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and musical order."   An extreme example of the use of conventions with a view to reaching a particular effect can be seen in melodrama.  Melodrama does not arise naturally, in the way drama does: "we are asked to accept an improbability, simply for the sake of seeing the thrilling situation which arises in consequence" (Eliot, "Wilkie Collins" 467).  Eliot speaks of exploring the devices of melodrama, presumably to turn them to worthier uses.  





7.  The Function of Criticism


Just like literature, the body of criticism forms an organic whole, a society of dead critics.  There is an unconscious community between critics as there is one between artists.  But criticism is not autotelic, like art.  Its end is "the elucidation of the works of art and the correction of taste" ("Function").  
    
    Eliot insists on the need to adopt critical standards, to choose the principles of criticism.  He draws here a significant analogy between criticism, literature, religion and politics.  The English tendency is to Protestantism, to Romanticism, to individualistic, liberal Whiggery and to critical anarchy.  The French tendency is to classicism and Catholicism, to the establishment of a central authority and the regulation of taste: the Frenchman seeks external standards in the tradition, and does not rely on his inner voice alone ("Function").  All of Eliot's thought is pervaded by this classicist ideal: that we should refer our subjective principles to general laws, to avoid impressionism and vague moralism in criticism.  Eliot seems to have derived much inspiration for this from the French critic Remy de Gourmont.  

    In "Tradition and the Individual Talent", T. S. Eliot has sown the seeds of both his poetics and his critical theory.  Criticism must concentrate itself on properly literary matters, not extraliterary considerations.  Eliot calls critics such as the "New Humanists" Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More "imperfect critics" because their concern is primarily moral, not artistic.  He also reacts against impressionistic criticics, who are unable to establish critical principles, to formulate the general laws underlying their impressions, in a word, to objectify what is subjective.   Eliot's poetics based on tradition and impersonality has a direct bearing on his critical ideas.  It is the poem and not the poet who will become the center of critical attention.  Biographical criticism, or any kind of data concerning the circumstances of the work instead of the work itself are useless as an explication of the work.  The only relevant tools of the critic are comparison and analysis.  

    We have already seen that every poet has a critic inside him which is his connection with tradition and guides him during the composition of his work.  "The critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in the labour of the artist" ("Function" 31).  This is Eliot's backhanded way of showing criticism out of the literary scene.  If every poet has a critic inside himself, there is no need for other critics to show him his job. 

    There are more kinds of criticism apart from the one built-in in the poet.  Most of them are not legitimate.  The first is creative criticism,  the impressionistic criticism of Sympson or Pater⎯which is not criticism, in fact: "It does not count" for Eliot; these critics are actually frustrated, "incomplete artists."   Criticism must be subordinated to creation: autotelic, creative criticism is not to be accepted.  The second kind is historical criticsm,  scholarship, which again is not criticism proper; it is a legitimate activity in its own right, but should not be confused with criticism.  Eliot is fond of drawing a distinction between scholarship and practical criticism.  Scholarship is ideally concerned with facts; its aim is to interpret the meaning of the work in its original historical context.  Criticism is concerned with value judgments: its aim is to determine the meaning of the work for us, now; the use we can make of it; its significance to the modern poet.  This confrontation will be replayed again and again during the following decades.   According to Wellek, "making criticism serve only temporary ends while scholarship serves the permanent seems a specious conclusion based on a false dichotomy.  It pervades Eliot's criticism" (History  5: 178).  At one time Eliot claims that "the only genuine criticism is that of the poet-critic who is criticizing poetry in order to create poetry." "The important critic is the person who is absorbed in the present problem of art, and who wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear on these problems."   There is only one exception for Eliot: Aristotle, who seems to have been good at everything.  Predictably, Eliot was strongly criticized for these views.  They are unduly restrictive, both of the authors and the scope of criticism.  "Later he merely asked the critic to have some experience in composing poetry"  (Wellek, History  5:179).  But still Eliot rejects interpretation and judicial criticism.

    A further imperfect kind of criticism is interpretation.  When applied to criticism, Eliot's theory of impersonality makes him warn us against the dangers of critical interpretation: 

   it is fairly certain that "interpretation" . . . is only legitimate when it is not interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he would otherwise have missed. ("Function" 32).  

    Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret, we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for "interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know.  ("Hamlet" 142)

Even irrelevant historical facts are to be preferred to allegorizing the work.  Even the critics who investigate Shakespeare's laundry bills are better than those who try to "interpret" the work and succeed only in interpreting themselves.  Eliot has a respect for factual scholarship that he does not manifest when facing journalistic criticism.  Facts cannot corrupt taste, but random opinons and fanciful interpretations can.  Just as the critic has no business giving advice to the poet on how to write, he has no business giving advice to the reader on how to read.  The critic, like the author, must be impersonal; his role is to attract the attention of the reader to the work, not to himself.  Criticism which draws attention to himself is vicious, and must be avoided.   Interpretation is not true criticism because it falsifies the work.  You lose contact with the work itself, and "instead of insight, you get a fiction."  Interpretation is deceiving because it limits the meaning of the work even as it claims to explain it.  Eliot does not believe in the possibility of a single or permanent interpretation: "every interpretation, along perhaps with some utterly contradictory interpretation, has to be taken up and reinterpreted by any thinking mind and by every civilization."   He looks on interpretation as "a necessary evil, a makeshift, a compensation for our imperfections" (Wellek, History  5:180).  We have already mentioned Eliot's conception of the autonomy of the poem, his rejection of the continued authorial control on the finished work.  The meaning of the poem is left for the reader to decide; it does not seem to be completely fixed in Eliot's conception.  "A poem may appear to mean different things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant."  "The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally valid⎯it may even be better."   According to Wellek, "Eliot is right in not wanting to lose this accrual of meaning", but this does not solve the problem of correctness, which was not really faced by Eliot (History  5:181).  

    Judgments of value are also forbidden in criticism.  "The critic must not  coerce, and he must not make judgments of worse and better."  He "must simply elucidate; the reader will form the correct judgment for himself."   These are, presumably, among the statements that we are not supposed to take literally.  Eliot "seems rather to protest against subjective and arbitrary interpretation and against the dogmatic ranking of authors."  Moreover, "the interdiction of judgment and ranking is completely belied by Eliot's practice.  Ranking, judging, was the secret of his success and appeal as a critic" (Wellek, History  5:180).  Actually, his idea of the poetic tradition, of the "absolute poetic hierarchy" that we must assume  presupposes the activities of judgement and ranking.  

    It is to be noted that in rejecting interpretation and judgment as tasks proper to the critic, Eliot is not dismissing them completely: instead, he is displacing them into the area of the reader.  What Eliot does is to suppress the mediation of the critic in areas where his judgment or his interpretation will be in conflict with those of the reader, who in any case would have to  judge and interpret again the critic's interpretation.      

    What is left, then, for the critic to do?  The aim of criticism is "the return to the work of art with improved perception and intensified, because more conscious, enjoyment."   This enjoyment comes from an awareness of how poetry achieves its effect.  The critic can explain the technique of the poet, the way he says things, instead of the things he says.  But Eliot's own criticism oversteps the limits he sets here⎯as all criticism should.
    
   

    
8.  Literature, Morality, Religion    

The early Eliot defended the autonomy of art.  The later Eliot subordinated it to religion.  Poetry is not actual religion nor an adequate substitute (Eliot always defended this) but in the later years it is seen as a preparation for religion.  The need of critical regulation we have been commenting on exceeds the purely literary judgment. Literary criticism must be supplemented by moral and religious criticism.    Because of this Eliot has been accused of upholding a double standard of value. 

Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint . . . .  The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards. 

 The New Critics will reproach Eliot that he has accepted the division in the first place and will keep trying to fit together the fragments of the work.  According to Wellek, Eliot speaks here "as if morality and theology were ingredients merely added to minimal aesthetic value . . . .  To accept Eliot's dichotomy of 'greatness' and 'artness' means giving up an organic point of view, establishing a new divorce of form and content" (History  5:190).  But Eliot refuses to subordinate the religious standard to a wholesale moral aesthetics, and insists on opposing two regulative principles.  He gave a name to this regulative principle when he declared himself to be a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.   

    Morality is a constituent part of literature, and good literature must be moral.  We separate irrationally (and incompletely) our literary from our religious judgments.  Aesthetic and moral pleasure must not be divorced: a purely "aesthetic" judgment is an aberration.  Reading literature, Eliot argues, affects not only our taste but the whole of our being.  Therefore, Eliot reacts against purely aesthetic approaches to literature, and differentiates taste and morality: "For literary judgement we need to be acutely aware of two things at once: of 'what we like', and of 'what we ought to like'.  Few people are honest enough to know either."   We must learn to know what we feel and to understand our shortcomings, in taste as in everything else.    

    It is here that we meet the problem of belief.  The early Eliot had defended that belief in the ideas used by the poet is irrelevant to the enjoyment of poetry: "You are not called to believe in Dante's philosophical and theological views"; he draws "a difference between philosophical belief  and poetic assent" .   Later he will hold, perhaps more sensibly, that this complete separation is not possible: "One probably has more pleasure in the poetry when one shares the beliefs of the poet."   According to Wellek, "we are not always able to reach the state of disinterested contemplation that poetry demands" (History   5:190).  The truest philosophy becomes then the best poetic material.  The problem is that Eliot uses the Catholic dogma as the rule to measure the degree of truth or falsensess of ideas or philosophical systems.  Still, his theory allows a measure of distance in belief which is still acceptable and does not preclude the enjoyment of poetry: 

When the doctrine, theory, belief, or 'view of life' presented in the poem is one which the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience, it interposes no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment, whether it be one that he can accept or deny approve or deprecate.   

Eliot separates here logical criteria from aesthetic ones, and once more he will meet the rebuke of Wellek, who thinks that 

coherence is an aesthetic as well as a logical criterion. . . The maturity of a work of art is its inclusiveness, its awareness of complexity, and . . . the correspondence to reality is registered in the work itself.  An incoherent, immature, 'unreal' poem is a bad poem aesthetically.  (History   5:191).  

    Eliot warns against the effects of bad art.  Literature affects our personality; it contributes to shape it when we are young.  The literature read for amusement may have the greatest influence, since it is read without effort and uncritically.  To read critically is to realize that literature is not a presentation, but an interpretation of life: another's  interpretation of life.  Literature only becomes knowledge when we consider it as another person's perspective on reality.  Unless we realize this we are in danger of letting our personality be invaded by the personality of the writer.  For instance, when the author in a novel condones the behaviour of some characters and condemns others, our judgment of those characters is affected by that alien viewpoint.  And the novel has become gradually secularized, alien to a religious view of life.  Indeed, contemporary literature as a whole tends to be degrading, since it has forgotten the supernatural side of man and concentrates on the inferior natural life.    Eliot complains that our age is the most parochial of ages: we read only contemporary authors, and forget the classics.  Today it is more difficult than ever to become an individual, since most people are simply caught in the main drift of modern culture which leads them to worldly values.  The Christian reader must be aware that most authors today are unbelievers.  Still more: they are unbelievers who do not realize that there are still believers near them.  The Christian reader may enjoy modern literature and profit from it, but he must know the place of others and his own.  
    
    Eliot deplores Arnold's conception of the end of religion and his attempts to substitute "culture" or literature for religion.  "The effect of Arnold's religious campaign is to divorce Religion from thought."   In this, Arnold was after all a Puritan.  He surrenders to a blind moral feeling and sees in Christianism only a source of emotions which do not need any belief to uphold them.  Eliot will likewise reject Arnold's double offspring, I. A. Richards conception of poetry as psychological balance, and the "new humanism" of Irving Babbitt.  Humanism is an offshoot of religion, it is dependent on Christianity, its values need the values of religion to uphold them.  Without its religious basis, humanism will lose its sense of direction: "You cannot make humanism itself into a religion" ("Babbitt" 475); "the humanist makes use, in his separation of the 'human' from the 'natural', of that 'supernatural' which he denies."  If the supernatural is denied, the opposition betwen man and nature collapses.  The logical outcome is Pater's doctrine of "art for art's sake" which actually means "feeling for feeling's sake", and can only lead to an irresponsible hedonism.  These attempts to turn literature or art into a kind of substitute for religion are the symptoms of the dissolution of thought which is in progress in the 19th century: "the isolation of art, philosophy, religion, ethics and literature, is interrupted by various chimerical attempts to effect imperfect syntheses" ("Arnold").  Arnold's religion of poetry is therefore a consequence of the dissociation of sensibility, a further symptom of decay.  Literature is not a source of ethical principles.  The humanist solution is a historical accident, which may serve for certain individuals, but which cannot provide the basis for society at large.  The life of a culture must stand on a basis which is firm and true, not derivative or nostalgic.
    
    There is no getting round the real issues.  We must face the problem of religion, of the meaning of existence, because all our actions depend on the answer we give to that question.  "There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life: the Catholic and the materialist."   This is Eliot's diagnosis of contemporary society: it is confused, lost; it lacks orientation.  It is unable to educate young people.  Education must be related to the social system.  Our education deteriorates because our society is unsettled, and we have no clear notion of what we want.  The problem of education turns out to be a religious problem.  Education is dominated by the idea of getting on in the world, no longer by the wish to acquire wisdom.  Only technical efficiency and social promotion count.  Modern education focusses on scientific knowledge of the world and of man⎯which does not mean understanding of life or self-knowledge.  Eliot opposes the idea of "education for a society of leisure" and of raising up the school age as a remedy against unemployment.  He is also against the notion that everyone should reach higher education, that the university should be expanded to the whole of the population. These notions merely show that modern education has no clear aim: it neglects the questions of who  should be educated, and why.   The modern tendency, according to Eliot, is to let students develop their own interests, instead of being guided.  Studying things for which we have no taste or aptitude, he argues, is essential: in this way we learn to take an interest in them.  This is one of his arguments to defend the continued study of the classics at university.   Ultimately, Eliot argues, education must rest upon a religious conception.  "As only the Catholic and the Communist know, all  education must be ultimately religious education" ("Modern Education" 515).   Eliot concludes his critique of modern society with an appeal to the revival of the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages.  

    Eliot "looked complacently upon those who refuse to choose between Rome and Canterbury on the one hand and Moscow on the other (Communism is for him a religion) and who refuse to appplaud his glorification of an earlier state of British culture" (Wellek, History   5:220).  He did not decline as a critic after his conversion, but he did not solve the problematic relationship between his theory, his practical criticism, and his own poetry.  Instead, he refused to concentrate on literature and embraced extrinsic standards of criticism:

his interests shifted away from literary criticism and thus he was apt to use literature as documents for his Jeremiads on the modern world.  He embraced a double standard which dissolved the unity of the work of art as well as the sensibility that goes into its making and the critical act itself.  he thus weakened (on behalf of what he felt to be higher interests) the impact of his achievement as a literary critic.  Taken in its early purity his literary criticism seems to be very great indeed" (Wellek, History  5:220).

Works cited

Eliot, T. S. Selected Essays. 1932. 3rd ed. London: Faber and Faber, 1951.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. 3rd. ed. Rev. by R. C. Churchill. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970. 1979.
Wellek, René. "T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)." In Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950. Vol. 5: English Criticism, 1900-1950. London: Jonathan Cape, 1986. 176-220.*
Wimsatt, W. K. and Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New York: Knopf; London: Routledge, 1957.

Understanding Misreading: A Hermeneutic-Deconstructive Approach

William Butler Yeats

LUNES, 10 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

William Butler Yeats

(1865-1939)

From the Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th ed.): 
 

William Butler Yeats was born in Sandymount, Dublin. His father's family, of English stock, had been in Ireland for at least two hundred years: his mother's, the Pollexfens, hailing originally from Devon, had been for some generations in Sligo, in the west of Ireland. J. B. Yeats, his father, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precarious living. The Yeatses were in London from 1874 until 1883, when they returned to Ireland—to Howth, a few miles from Dublin. On leaving high school in Dublin in 1883 Yeats decided to be an artist, with poetry as his avocation, and attended art school.; but he soon left, to concentrate on poetry. His frist published poems appeared in the Dublin University Review in 1885.

Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats himself, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life for traditions of esoteric thought that would compensate for a lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism—not in any strict chronological order, for he kept returning to and reworking earlier aspects of his thought. In middle life he elaborated a symbolic system of his own, based on a variety of sources, that enabled him to strengthen the pattern and coherence of his poetic imagery. The student of Yeats is constantly coming up against this willful and sometimes baffling esotericism that he cultivated sometimes playfully nad sometimes as though it were a convenient language of symbols. Modern scholarship has traced most of Yeats's mystical and quasi-mystical ideas to sources that were common to William Blake and Percy Shelley and that sometimes go far back into pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. But his greatness as a poet lies in his ability to communicate the power and significance of his symbols, by the way he expresses and organizes them, even to readers who know nothing of his system.

Yeats's childhood and early manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo; and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. in London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day; and in 1891 was one of the founders of the Rhymers' Club, whose members included Lionel Johnson, Ernest Dowson, and many other characteristic figures of the 1890s. Here he acquired ideas of poetry that were vaguely pre-Raphaelite: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he got something much more vigorous and earthy—a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin he was influenced by the currents of Irish nationalism and, although often in disagreement with those who wished to use literature for crude political ends, he nevertheless learned to see his poetry as a contribution to a rejuvenated Irish culture. The three influences of Dublin, London, and Sligo did not develop in chronological order—he was going to and fro among these places throughout his early life—and we sometimes find a poem based on Sligo folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy poems written dunder the influence of the Rhymers' Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling in a lyric otherwise wholly pre-Raphaelite in tone.

We can distinguish quite clearly, however, the main periods into which Yeats's poetic career falls. He began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism , which he learned from the London poets of the 1890s. Edmund Spenser and Shelely, and a little later Blake, were important influences. One of his early verse plays ends with a song:

The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy.
 

About the same time he was writing poems (e.g. The Stolen Child) deriving from his Sligo experience, with a quiet precision of natural imagery, country place names, and themes from folklore. A little later—i.e., in the latter part of his first period—Dublin literary circles sent him to Standish O'Grady's History of Ireland: Heroic Period, where he found the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history, and to George Sigerson's and Douglas Hyde's translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." Even when he plays with Neoplatonic ideas, as in The Rose of the World (also the product of the latter part of his early period), he can link them with Irish heroic themes and so give a dignity and a style to his imagery not normally associated with this sort of poetic dreaminess. Thus the heroic legends of old Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside provided Yeats with a stiffening for his early dreamlike imagery, which is why even his first, "nineties" phase is productive of interesting poems. The Lake Isle of Innisfree, spoiled for some by overanthologizing, is nevertheless a fine poem of its kind: it is the clarity and control shown in the handling of the imagery that keeps all romantic fuzziness out of it and gives it its haunting quality. In The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland he makes something peculiarly effective out of the contrast between human activities and the strangeness of nature. In The Madness of King Goll the disturbing sense of the otherness of the natural world drives the king mad. (Such contrasts are common in the early Yeats; in his later poetry he tries to resolver what he calls these "antinomies" in inclusive symbols; e.g., Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop.)

It is important to realize that Yeats had a habit of revising his earlier poems in later printings, tightening up the language and gettin rid of the more self-indulgent romantic imagery. The rivesed versions are found in hisCollected Poems, which, therefore, present a somewhat muted picture of his poetic development. For the complete picture one should consult The Variorum Edition edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (1957).

It was Irish nationalism that first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style. He tells in one of his autobiotraphical essays how he sought for a style in which to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image as did Hyde's translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which "nothing was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading Yeats, the passive love-poet, to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books prompted his search for a more active stance, a more masculine style. Looking back in 1906, he found that he had mistaken the poetic ideal. "Without knowing it, I had come to care for nothing but impersonal beauty . . . We should ascend out of common interests, the thoughts of the newspapers, of the market place, but only so fast as we can carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." The result of the abandonment of "impersonal beauty," and of the desire to "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self" into his poetry, is seen in the volumes of collected poems, In the Seven Woods (1903) and The Green Helmet and Other Poems (1910).The Folly of Being Comforted and Adam's Curse are from the former of them, and one can see immediately how Yeats here combines the colloquial with the formal. This is characteristic of his "second period." 

By this time Yeats had met the beautiful actress and violent Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. The affair is reflected in many of the poems of his second period, notably No Second Troy, published in The Green Helmet. He had also met Lady Gregory, Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and she invited him to spend the following summer at her country house, Coole Park, in Galway. Yeats spent many holidays with Lady Gregory and discovered the attractiveness of the "country house ideal," seeing in an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in a great house a method of imposing order on chaos and a symbol of the Neoplatonic dance of life. He expresses this view many times in his poetry—e.g., at the end of A Prayer for My Daughter—and it became an important part of his complex of attitudes. The middle classes, with their Philistine money grubbing, he detested, and for his ideal characters he looked either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them. 

It was under Lady Gregory's influence that Yeats became involved in the founding of the Irish National Theatre in 1899. This led to his active participation in problems of play production, which included political problems of censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of "theater business, management of men." All this had an effect on his style. The reactions of Dublin audiences did not encourage Yeats's trust in popular judgment, and his bitterness with the "Paudeens," middle-class shopkeepers—who seemed to him to be without any dignity, or understanding or nobility of spirit—produced some of the most effective poems of his third or middle period. He was now becoming more and more of a national figure. Three public controversies had moved him to anger and poetry; the first over the hounding of Parnell (To a Shade), the second over Synge's play The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, and the third over the Lane pictures (September 1913). In each, the cause for which he fought was defeated by the representatives of the Roman Catholic middle class, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, Yats moved to England. Then came the Easter Rising (Easter 1916), mounted by members of the class and religion that had so long opposed him. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders of the rising) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats himself returned. To mark his new commitment, he refurbished, occupied, and renamed "Thoor Bayllylee" the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land that was to become one of the central symbols of his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State and served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the Protestant landed class.

Meanwhile Yeats was responding in his own way to the change in poetic taste represented in the poetry and criticism of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot immediately before World War I. A gift for epigram had already begun to emerge in his poetry; in the volume titled The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) he has a poem citing Walter Savage Landor (the nineteenth-century poet who wrote some fine lapidary verse) and John Donne as masters. To the precision, and the combination of colloquial and formal, that he had achieved early in the century, he now added a metaphysical as well as an epigrammatic element, and this is seen in th later poems of his third period. He also continued his experiments with different kinds of rhythm. At the same time he was continuing his search for a language of symbols and pursuing and pursuing his esoteric studies. Yeats married in 1917, and his wife proved wo sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing which for several years she produced (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937) and that he used in all sorts of ways in much of his later poetry. The system was both a theory of the movements of history and a theory of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related in various complicated ways to a different phase of the moon. Some of Yeats's poetry is unintelligible without a knowledge of A Vision, but the better poems, such as the two on Byzantium, can be appreciated without such knowledge by the experienced reader who responds sensitively to the patterning of the imagery reinforced by the incantatory effect of the rhythms. Some criticism decries attempts by those who are not experts in the background of Yeats's esoteric thought to discuss his poetry and insists that only a detailed knowledge of Yeats's sources can yield his poetic meaning: but while it's true thatsome particular images do not yeiald all their significance to those who are ignorant of the background, it is also true that too literal a paraphrase of the symbolism in the light of the sources robs the poems of their power by reducing them to mere exercises in the use of a code.

The Tower (1928) and The Winding Stair (1933), from which the poems from Sailing to Byzantium through After Long Silence have been here selected, represent the mature Yeats at his very best—a realist-symbolist-Metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words. These volumes represent his fourth and greatest period. Here, in his poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols; not only are they connected with Yeats's philosophy of history and of personality, but they also serve as a means of resolving some of those contrariesthat had arrested him from the beginning. Life is a journey up a spiral staircase; as we grow older we cover the ground we have covered before, only higher up; as we look down the winding stair below us we measure our progress by the number of places where we were but no longer are. The journey is both repetitious and progressive; we go both round and upward. Though symbolic images of this kind Yeats explores the paradoxes of time and change, of growth and identity, of love and age, of life and art, of madness and wisdom.

The Byzantium poems show him trying to escape from the turbulence of life to the calm eternity of art. But in his fifth and final period he returned to the turbulence after (if only partly as a result of ) undergoing the Steinach operation to increase his sexual potency in 1934, and his last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. Yeats's return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. "I shall be a sinful man to the end, and think upon my deathbed of all the nights I wasted in my youth," he wrote in old age to a correspondent, and in one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Son of Sixpence." When he died in January 1939, he left a body of verse that, in variety and power, makes him beyond question the greatest twentieth-century poet of the English language.

Marjorie Perloff on "Easter 1916"
 

Robert Frost

From the Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:

Robert [Lee] Frost (1874-1963), member of a New England family, was born in San Francisco and taken at the age of ten to the New England farm country with which his poetry is identified. After a brief attendance at Dartmouth, where he disliked the academic attitude, he became a bobbin boy in a Massachusetts mill, and a short period at Harvard was followed by further work, making shoes, editing a country newspaper, teaching school, and finally farming. This background of craftsmanship and husbandry had its effect upon his poetry in more than the choice of subjects, for he demanded that his verse be as simple and honest as an axe or hoe. After a long period of farming, he moved to England (1912-15) where he published his first book of poems, A Boy's Will (1913), whose lyrics, including "Into My Own," "Revelation," "Mowing," and "Reluctance," are marked by an intense but restrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New England life. He returned to the U.S. to settle on a New Hampshire farm, having achieved a reputation as an important American poet through the publication of North of Boston (1914), described by the author as "a book of people." and showing brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it. Among the poems in this volume are "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "The Code," "The Wood-Pile," "Home Burial," and "A Servant to Servants."

—"Mending Wall," blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914). Describing the time he and a neighboring farmer spent the day in replacing fallen stones on the wall which divides their land, the poet declares, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall." and expresses his philosophy of tolerance, generosity, and brotherhood in the contrast between his neighbor's dogmatic "Good fences make good neighbours" and his own more considered

 

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
 

 
 

—"The Death of the Hired Man," blank-verse dramatic narrative by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914).
Warren and Mary, a farmer and his wife, discuss the return of Silas, an aged farmhand who has worked for them often in the past, always wandering off when other employment offered itself, and coming "home" at tims of difficulty. Warren wants to dismiss him, but Mary describes the poignant contrast between his former proud competence and his present broken helath, loneliness, and pitiful eagerness to serve. She tells of his infirm mind, which she thinks a sign of approaching death, and her husband is moved to reconsider. Whan he enters the house to talk with Silas, he discovers the old man dead.


—"The Code," blank-verse dramatic narrative by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914).
An experienced farmhand tells a "town-bred farmer" of the pride his fellows take in their competence, and the resulting code:

The hand that knows his business won't be told
To do work better or faster—those two things.

For illustration he describes an incident that took place when he worked for a certain Sanders, of Salem, a prodigious worker himself. They were engaged in unloading a wagon of hay, and Sanders, made the mistake, while standing below to pile th load, of saying to the hand on the wagon, "Let her come!" Offended at this breach of the code, the hand dumped the entire load down on the helpless farmer, regardless of the danger of suffocating him. Sanders extricated himself, and showed that he recognized the justice of his employee's act:

"Discharge me? No! He knew I did just right."

—"The Wood-Pile." blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914).
The poet suggests a cosmic symbol in his discovery of a weathered, long-abandoned cord of maple, "cut and split and piled," held from being scattered by a growing tree on one side and on the other "a stake and prop, these latter about to fall." This wasted labor can be the work on ly of "someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks," and could leave his creation "To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay."


—"Home Burial," dramatic narrative in blank verse by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914).
The incompatibility of a New England farm couple is revealed in the tragic conflict between them following the death of their only child. The husband has buried the child in the nearby family plot, and the wife becomes obsessed by his seemingly unfeeling attitude. Oppressed by loneliness, she comes to hate him and now feels that the transitoriness of his grief is a further proof the "the world's evil." She is determined tha she "must go—somewhere out of this house," but her husband declares obstinately, "I'll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—"

—"A Servant to Servants," blank-verse dramatic monologue by Robert Frost, published in North of Boston (1914).
A lonely, overworked New England farm wife talks with a visiting naturalist, and through her eager conversation reveals the tragic story of her life. Reared in a loveless family, in which her mother's life had been embittered by the necessity of caring for an obscenely mad brother-in-law, she herself had been influenced for a time by the inherited strain of insanity, and welcomed the opportunity to marry Len, the unfeeling husband who neglects her for his many business enterprises. Though she craves personal freedom, love, and the touch of beauty, she is burdened by innumerable menial tasks, including the feeding of the brutal farmhands, whose "servant" she has become.
 

The same expressive idiom and brilliant observation appear in Mountain Interval (1916), containing such characteristic poems as "The Road Not Taken," "Birches," "Bond and Free," "A Time to Talk," "Snow," "Putting in the Seed," and "An Old Man's Winter Night."

—"The Road Not Taken," poem in iambic tetrameter by Rober Frost, published in Mountain Interval (1916).
The poet tells how the course of his life was determined when he came upon two roads that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, he "took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."





—"Birches," blank-verse lyric by Robert Frost, published in Mountain Interval (1916). The poet describes his boyhood pleasure in climbing birch trees, swinging from the tops until the supple trunks bent in a curve to the ground. He dreams of being again "a swinger of birches," and finds in this occupation a symbol for his desired surcease from "considerations," in which he might

   go by climbing a birch tree . . .
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again,
That would be good both going and coming back.

The shrewd humor and Yankee understatement that distinguish such poems as "The Cow in Apple Time," "A Hundred Collars," and "Brown's Descent" are exhibited also in Frost's witty self-critical remarks, such as "I might be called a Synecdochist; for I prefer the synecdoche in poetry—that figure of speech in which we use a part for the whole." In both emotion and language he was restrained, and conveyed his messages by implication. Although his blank verse is colloquial, it is never loose, for it possesses the pithy, surcharged economy indigenous to the New Englander. His genre pieces, in the form of dramatic idylls or monologues, capture the vernacular of his neighbors north of Boston. Frost explained his realism saying, "There are two types of realist—the one who offers a good deal of dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one; and the one who is satisfied with the potato brushed clean. . . . To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form." His next book, New Hampshire (1923, Pulitzer Prize), shows his ability to deal with genial, informal subjects, as in "The Star-Splitter," "Maple," "The Axe Helve," "New Hampshire," and "Paul's Wife," and to concentrate emotional impact into a few clean-stripped lines, as in "To Earthward," "Two Look at Two," "Stopping by Woods on as Snowy Evening," "Gathering Leaves," "Fire and Ice," and "Fragmentary Blue."

—"The Star-Splitter," blank-verse narrative by Robert Frost, published in New Hampshire (1923).
Brad McLaughlin's "life-long curiosity About our place among the infinities" culminates in his burning his house down for the insurance, to buy a telescope. He earns a living as a railroad ticket agent and uses his leisure "for star-gazing" through his glass, "the Star-splitter." Brad and his friend, the poet, often spend their nights in his activity, but though it provides material for "some of the best things we ever said," they remain in ignorance of the real nature of the universe: "We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?"
—"Maple," narrative poem in blank verse by Robert Frost, published in New Hampshire (1923).
Although others commonly misunderstand it as "Mabel," Maple, the name of a New England girl, given her at birth by her dying mother, guides her life and endows her with a mysterious poetic quality. Her father is unable or unwilling to make clear the intended meaning, and Maple is able to find only partial clues, but the man she marries discerns her kinship with the spirit of the trees, and they share this secret as a motive of their love.
—"The Axe Helve," blank-verse dramatic narrative by Robert Frost, published in New Hampshire (1923).
The poet, chopping wood, is interrupted by a neighboring farmer, the Frenchman Baptiste, who objects to his using an inferior machine-made axe-helve. He promises him a good hickory helve of his own cutting, and that evening the poet visits Baptiste's home, meeting his sociable wife, who speaks no English. He talks with the earnest workman, who proves to be a conscientiouss laborer who knows "how to make a short job long for love of it," and insists that his children shall not attend school, asserting the superiority of his own proud independence and appreciation of such essential things as the materials of a properly durable axe-helve.

—"New Hampshire," blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in 1923 as the title piece of a volume which won a Pulitzer prize.
In this familiar monologue, the poet presents a witty defense of his manner of life and philosophic attitude. He describes New Hampshire as "one of the two best states in the Union. Vermont's the other," and as a compact community ahving "one each of everything as in a show-case." Answering the "glorious bards of Massachusetts" who "taunt the lofty land with little men," he names friends among the New Hampshire people he admires and would not change. "I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer," he says, in condemning extremists who demand that he take a radical attitude.
—"Two Look at Two," blank-verse poem by Robert Frost, published in New Hampshire (1923).
A pair of lovers climb a wooded mountain, and at the approach of night prepare to turn back but are halted on seeing a doe staring at them across a fence. The spell broken when she calmly walks off, they are about to go on again, but are stopped a second time by the appearance in the same place of "an antlered buck of lusty nostril" who "viewed them quizzically with jerks of head." After a moment he too disappears, but the lovers stand spellbound,

As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
Had made them certain earth returned their love.

In 1928 he issued a fifth new volume, West-Running Brook, with the same warm lyric quality that had characterized his first book. His Collected Poems (1930, Pulitzer Prize) assembled in one volume the work that has a lifelong continuity in its rhythms, its clear focusing on the individual, and its observation of the native New England background.

After collecting his poems, although he held positions as an affiliated teacher at Amherst, Harvard, and Michigan, he continued his literary career and in 1936 published A Further Range (Pulitzer Prize), whose lyrics, though more playful in blending fact and fantasy, have beneath their frivolity a deep seriousness. A new edition of Collected Poems (1939) was followed by A Witness Tree (1942, Pulitzer Prize); two blank-verse plays, A Masque of Reason (1946), about Job, and A Masque of Mercy (1947), in which Biblical characters in modern setting discuss ethics and man's relation to God; and Steeple Bush (1947) and In the Clearing (1962), later lyrics. The standard collected edition is The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969), edited by Edward C. Lathem. His correspondence appears in Letters to Louis Untermeyer (1963) and Selected Letters (1964), edited by Lawrance Thompson. Thompson published a controversial full biography—as official biographer—Robert Frost (3 vols., 1966-77), giving a harsh view of the poet. A less tendentious treatment is by William H. Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984).


______

Robert Frost  at Poetry Foundation.


________

Kevin Murphy. "Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken'." Video lecture. YouTube (Ithaca College) 29 Feb. 2008.*   http://youtu.be/a5140uJOUDE

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.  
His house is in the village though;  
He will not see me stopping here  
To watch his woods fill up with snow.  
My little horse must think it queer  
To stop without a farmhouse near  
Between the woods and frozen lake  
The darkest evening of the year.  
He gives his harness bells a shake  
To ask if there is some mistake.  
The only other sound’s the sweep  
Of easy wind and downy flake.  
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.  
But I have promises to keep,  
And miles to go before I sleep,  
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stephen Crane

SÁBADO, 8 DE DICIEMBRE DE 2012

Stephen Crane

 

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger:
 

Stephen Crane (1871-1900), born in New Jersey, spent most of his youth in upstate New York; he attended Lafayette College and Syracuse University, each for a year, before moving to New York City to become a struggling author and do intermittent reporting for the Herald and Tribune. His first book, Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893), was too grim to find a regular publisher, and remained unsold even when Crane borrowed from his brother to issue it privately. Early in 1893, with no personal experience of war, deriving his knowledge primarily from reading Tolstoy and Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, he wrote The Red Badge of Courage (1895), his great realist study of the mind of an inexperienced soldier trapped in the fury and turmoil of battle.

The success of this book led to the reissue of Maggie, and Crane's reputation was established. In quick succession appeared his book of free verse, influenced by Emily Dickinson, The Black Riders (1895); The Little Regiment (1896), naturalistic Civil War stories, issued in England as Pictures of War; George's Mother (1896), the story of the dull lives of a young workingman and his mother in New York; and The Third Violet (1897), a conventional novelette about the romance of a young artist.

Because of his successful treatment of war in his masterpiece, Crane was thrust for most of his remaining life into the field of war reporting. After a period as a correspondent in the South-West and in Mexico, he was sent with a filibustering expedition to Cuba at the end of 1896. The sinking of the ship and his subsequent 50-hour struggle with the waves furnished the theme of his best-known short story, "The Open Boat." Inexperience and illness made his trip to Greece, to report the Turkish war, almost futile. Folowing a short residence in England, he went to Cuba to report the Spanish-American War, and his journalistic sketches and stories of this period are collected in Wounds in the Rain (1900). his observation of the Greco-Turkish War resulted in Active Service(1899), a satirical novel about a war correspondent. 

Upon his return to New York, Crane's health was already broken by the hardships he had endured, and possibly owing to his early treatment of squalor in Maggie and rumors about the immorality of his common-law wife,  myth now arose to the effect that he was a drunk, a drug addict, and generally depraved. Disgusted by unpleasant notoriety, he returned to England, having meanwhile published two collections of short stories, The Open Boat(1898) and The Monster (1899), and a second volume of free verse, War is Kind (1899). Whilomville Stories(1900) is a collection of tales concerned with typical childhoood incidents in a small New York town. Crane's last work shows a decrease in power, for he was broken in health and soon died of tuberculosis in Germany, where he had gone to seek a cure. Posthumously published volumes include Great Battles of the World (1901), an uninspired historical study; Last Words (1902), a collection of his early tales and sketches; The O'Ruddy (1903), an unfinished romance, completed by Robert Barr; and Men, Women, and Boats (1921), a selection, including several stories never before published. His Letters were collected in 1960, and the University of Virginia issued a scholarly edition of his works (10 vols., 1969-75).



Works


Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, novel by Stephen Crane, privately issued (1893) under the pseudonym Johnson Smith, but not regularly published until 1896. 

In a slum district of New York City called Rum Alley, Maggie Johnson and her brother Jimmie are maltreated and neglected children of a brutal workingman and his dipsomaniac wife. Maggie, attractive though ignorant and ill cared for, somehow preserves an inner core of innocence in her miserable, filthy environment. She finds work as a collar worker in a sweatshop, while Jimmie becomes a truck driver, typically hard-boiled and fight-loving. Their mother, now widowed, is constantly drunk and has acquired a lengthy police record. Maggie falls in love with Jimmie's tough friend Pete, a bartender, who easily seduces her. For a brief time she lives with Pete, having been melodramatically disowned by her mother. Jimmie offers only the questionalble assistance of administering a beating to his former friend. Pete abandons Maggie, who becomes a prostitute for a few months. Then, heartbroken and unable to succeed in this uneasy, exacting occupation, she commits suicide. Her mother makes a great display of grief, send Jimmie to fetch home the body, and allows herself to be persuaded by her drinking companions to "forgive" her "bad, bad child."


 The Red Badge of Courage: An Episode of the American Civil War,novel by Stephen Crane, published in 1895. The original manuscript, containing an added 5000 words (about 10% of the entirety) deleted by the original publisher, was printed for the first time in 1982. This psychological study of a soldier's reactions to warfare was written before Crane had ever seen a battle. His knowledge was at least partly derived from a popular anthology,Battles and Leaders of the Civil War. The unnamed battle of the novel has been identifies as that of Chancellorsville. 

Henry Fleming, generally called simply "The youth" or "he," is an ordinary, inexperienced soldier, "an unknown quantity," torn between a "little panic-fear" and "visions of broken-bladed glory" as he faces his first battle. He begins with the state of mind of the raw recruit who is anxious to get into battle so that he may show his patriotism and prove himself a hero. He swaggers to keep up his spirits during the delay that precedes his suddenly being thrust into the slaughter. Then he is overcome by unthinking fear and runs from the field. He is ashamed when he joins the wounded, for he has not earned their "red badge of courage," and then he becomes enraged when he witnesses the horrid dance of death of his terribly maimed friend, Jim Conklin. Later, by chance, he gets a minor head wound in a confused struggle with one of the retreating infantry-men of his own army. The next day, when his pretense is accepted that the wound is the result of enemy gunfire, he suddenly begins to fight frantically, and then automatically seizes the regiment's colors in the charge that reestablishes its reputation. He moves through this sultry nightmare with unconscious heroism, and emerges steady, quiet, and truly courageous.


The Black Riders and Other Lines, volume of free verse by Stephen Crane, published in 1895. Influenced by reading Emily Dickinson, Crane in these concise, intense unrhymed poems foreshadows the work of the Imagists. Elliptical renderings of his naturalistic philosophy, they show his bewildered bitterness of youth buffeted by the great impersonal forces of the world.



The Monster, and Other Stories, seven tales by Stephen Crane, published in 1899.

"The Monster," a novelette set in Whilomville, N.Y., is a bitterly ironic comentary on the cruelty and lack of sympathy of ordinary people for an act of humanity they do not understand. Henry Johnson, a black servant in the home of Dr. Trescott, rescuest the physician's young son from a fire. He is terribly disfigured and loses his sanity, so that no home can be found for him in the town. Horrified by the "monster," the townspeople ostracize the doctor and his family because they harbor the man. It finally appears that Trescott has sacrificed his entire happiness for an ethical principle he formerly considered unquestionable. "The Blue Hotel" describes the events that lead to quarrels and a murder at a bar in a small Nebraska town. The victim, a stupid, paranoid Swede, who dies with his eyes fixed on the ironic and symbolic text on a cash register, "This registers the amount of your purchase," is partly responsible for his own death, and his murderer is hardly more responsible than others involved in a sequence of events, although he is sentenced to the penitentiary, because "every sin is the result of a collaboration," and the one who gets the punishment is the one who hapens to be at "the apex of a human movement." "His New Mittens" is concerned with the inner reactions of a small boy who runs away from home, and the remaining stories are studies of men in sensational situations or moments of intense excitement.


The Little Regiment, and Other Episodes of the American Civil War, six short stories by Stephen Crane, published in 1896 and issued in England as Pictures of War (1916).

The title story tells of two brothers in the Union army, whose seeming antagonism conceals a deep affection. During a battle, one of them is believed killed, and the other shows signs of bitter grief. When hi brother suddenly reappears, they greet each other with a curt "hello" and resume their pose of hostility. "Three Miraculous Soldiers" shows the reactions of an ignorant Southern girl, who is terrified when a Union detachment camps on her mother's farm. She helps three Confederate prisoners to escape, but breaks into hysterical tears over a sentry they have wounded. "A Mystery of Heroism" is concerned with the reckless feat of a private who crosses a field during a violent battle to fetch a pail of drinking water. Whan he returns, apparently by miracle, the water is accidentally spilled because any of it can be used. "The Veteran" tells of the heroism of an aged ex-coldier who sacrifices his life to save the animals in a burning barn.






The Open Boat, and Other Tales of Adventure, eight short stories by Stephen Crane, published in 1898, mainly "after the Fact" of his own experiences as a reporter and war correspondent.

"The Open Boat" is a realistic account of the thoughts and emotions of four men who escape in a small dinghy from the wrecked steamer Commodore off the Florida coast. The captain, the cook, an oiler, and a newspaper correspondent, unable to land because of the dangerous surf, see the beach tantalizingly near, but are forced to spend the night on the sea. Next morning they employ their last strength to swim ashore, and all but the oiler survive. "Death and the Child," reminiscent of The Red Badge of Courage, has for its scene a battle of the Greco-Turkish War and is concerned with the psychological reactions of a Greek newspapersman in his first experience of warfare. At first he desires to fight with his countrymen, but as he views the battle more intimately he is overcome by fear and panic, and flees to a nearby mountain, where his self-centered emotion is contrasted with the indifference of an abandoned peasant child. "Flanagan, and His Short Filibustering Adventure" narrates a melodramatic incident of arms smuggling in Cuba before the Spanish-American War. The remaining stories are sardonically realistic adventure tales in Mexico and the Far West. One is "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky," about a newly married couple, the marshal of Yellow Sky, Tex., and his bride from San Antonio, who arrive on the train in his town at the moment that the local bad man goes on a drunken shooting spree. After a tense moment, the marshal is spared, not because the bad man was a "student of chivalry; it was merely that in the presence of this foreign condition he was a simple child of the earlier plains." 





Whilomville Stories, 13 tales by Stephen Crane, published in 1900. Except for "The Knife," concerned with the humorous tribulations of two black men in the town of Whilomville, when both try to steal the same watermelon, the stories deal with typical childhood incidents among boys and girls of this small New York town.

"The Angel Child" tells of an ingenious birthday entertainment invented by little Cora Trescott, who treats her friends to haircuts at the shop of an unperceptive barber, to the alarm and sorrow of their parents. "Lynx-hunting" details the adventures of three small boys with a rifle who seek a lynx, aim at a chipmuk, and hit a farmer's cow. "The Lover and the Telltale" is concerned with the tragedy of Jimmie Trescott, who attacks his school-fellows because they have derided him for writing a love letter to his cousin Cora, and it is kept after school by his teacher. "The Trial, Execution, and Burial of Homer Phelps" tells of the imaginative play of a group of boys, and the misfortunes of their unwilling victim. "A Little Pilgrimage" deals with the disastrous error of Jimmie Trescott, who leaves his Sunday school because it has been announced there will be no Christmas tree this year, only to join another that follows the same policy. "'Showin' Off'" is a humorous account of the rivalry between two youngsters for the favors of a vain little girl in a red hood.

Reading Racism: The Assumption of Authorial Intentions in Stephen Crane's The Monster
 

In Search of Shakespeare

Una extraordinaria serie documental de la BBC sobre la vida de Shakespeare, presentada por Michael Wood. Aquí empieza el capítulo 1, "A Time of Revolution."






Part 2: The Lost Years

Part 3: The Duty of Poets

Part 4: For All Time

Part 5: Special feature - Extra footage

1599: Un año en la vida de William Shakespeare