Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock tells the story of the downfall of the Boyle family (Jack the father, Juno the mother, Mary the Daughter, and Johnny the son) from relative poverty into destitute conditions. They live in a tenement in Dublin and are working class through and through. Near the beginning of the play, it seems as if good fortune will finally smile upon the Boyle family, as they receive news that a rich uncle has passed away and intends to leave them a sizable sum.
It turns out bad for the family as they are swindled by Bentham, a young lawyer from London, who has, in the words of Captain Jack Boyle done to us the same as he's done to Mary. He had "screwed" the family financially and Mary literally, as he has absconded leaving Mary pregnant and unmarried.
Some interesting parallels to a Doll's House, which Mary is reading at one point in the play: a woman leaving her husband is the finale of both dramas, and the idea that this is pretty radical given the time and the social conditions is evident. Perhaps, as Juno claims "two mothers'll be better than one"... tough from very different social classes, both stories present powerful argument for suffrage.
Mary's character is interested in improving herself, but she has been born into unfortunate circumstances. Page 5 stage direction states that there are "two forces working in her... one, through circumstances of her life... the other, through books..."
Captain Boyle is antagonistic toward her reading and sees it as putting on airs. At one point he even indirectly blames Mary's reading and new ideas as leading to her pregnancy. "What did the likes of her born in a tenement house, want with readin?"
There is an interesting attitude toward religion in the play, as the clergy certainly has power, but religion and god seems to be rendered impotent "agen the stupidity of men". Bentham presents himself as a theosophist and then proceeds to swindle the family. It could be a symbolic indictment of the church in Ireland. Another interesting line comes from the mother of Tancred during her son's funeral procession: "O blessed Virgin where were you when me darlin' son was riddled with bullets?"
The lines spoken by Joxer near the end of the play seem so important thematically: "The whole worlds in a terrible state of chaos." This seems a very modern idea, reminiscent of Eliot's "unreal city" and Yeats' widening gyre of history coming apart. This modern idea of history coming apart, is not a totally hopeless state in the hands of a writer with a truly modernist bent. That, I think, explains the feeling of hopefulness one may feel at the end of Juno or a Doll's house. The modernists see the end as the beginning. Things have to be wiped out before they can begin again, anew. Similar to Giambista Vico's theory of history, which Joyce drew on to write Fennigan's Wake, Juno constructs a world that needs to be torn down-- a world that by being torn down opens the door for new possibilities.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Monday, November 15, 2010
A Day with Leopold
A Day with Leopold
a play list loosely tied to James Joyce’s Ulysses
“This song is first associated (in the Wandering Rocks episode of Ulysses) with Blazes Boylan, who steps to the catchy refrain as he marches down the street. We hear the song later played on the pianola in Bella Cohen's brothel during the Circe episode, where it is linked with Privates Carr and Compton, two British soldiers who eventually get into an altercation with an inebriated Stephen Dedalus.
The song features two young men discussing their girls; in the course of the conversation they find out that the respective girls share similar characteristics. Inevitably it turns out they are both talking of the same girl; and to make matters worse, the lads — who have decided to pay her a visit — are greeted at the door by her husband, who chases them off with his own rendition of the chorus of the song.
Obviously the song furthers the Odyssean theme of a universal temptress, suitors, and a husband who reclaims his right to her. In this way it is a direct parallel to the main dilemma of Ulysses.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
2) I know I’m losing you—This is a recording by Rod Stewart from the 1971 album Every Picture Tells a Story. Stewart was born and raised in North London. The song was a 1966 #1 hit single by The Temptations, on Motown records. Thematically, I connected this song to Leopold’s likely feeling that his wife having slowly slipped away from him.
3) Leopold’s Morning—this is a homemade piece, with sound recording from pages 59-60 of Ulysses, and my addition of music using Apple Garageband software. I like this passage as it sets up so much of Leopold’s and Molly’s and Millie’s and Boylan’s relationship, and all in a stream of Leopold’s thoughts as he goes through his morning routine.
4) The Letter—The song was a number one hit for the Memphis group, the Boxtops in 1967. This is a live recording by Joe Cocker of Sheffield, England with his band Mad Dogs and Englishmen. The song appeared in the film and on the live Album Mad Dongs and Englishmen (1969-1971). Letters figure prominently into Leopold’s Morning (one from Millie and one from Boylan). Also, the theme of this song is desperately trying to get home to someone you love, which connects both to Leopold and to Homer’s Odysseus.
“This is a song Bloom buys for his daughter Milly when she is taking piano lessons. Known in English as "The Flower Song," it is tied to Bloom's pen name, Henry Flower, which he uses in his clandestine correspondence with Martha Clifford. It is one of a number of flower references throughout Ulysses.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
6) The Rocky Road to Dublin—this is a recording of the traditional Irish ‘slip-jig’ performed by The Chieftains and The Rolling Stones. “The song is partially recited several times by Mr. Deasy in James Joyce's Ulysses. The words were written by D.K. Gavan, "The Galway Poet", for the English music hall performer Harry Clifton (1824-1872), who popularized the song.”
Wikipedia
“This cheerful ditty is perhaps the most frequently mentioned song in Ulysses. Milly's morning letter to Bloom erroneously refers to the song as having been written by Blazes Boylan, and Bloom associates the song with Boylan throughout much of the rest of the book. It becomes the motif of the universal temptress figures leading all men to their eventual destruction. Most of the subsequent references to the song in Ulysses are made by Bloom, who of course is never far from female temptation.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
8) Tales of Brave Ulysses—This is a song recorded by the group Cream. The explanation from Wikepedia makes clear the song’s thematic connection to Ulysses. “The lyrics are inspired by Homer's Odyssey, an account of the adventures undertaken by Ulysses. This can be seen in the song's reference to "naked ears ... tortured by the sirens sweetly singing," an event from Homer's epic. When interviewed on the episode of the VH1 show, Classic Albums, which featured Disraeli Gears, lyricist Martin Sharp explained that he had recently returned from Ibiza, which was the source of many of the images in the song (e.g. "tiny purple fishes run laughing through her fingers") and the general feeling of having left an idyll to return to "the hard lands of the winter"; Clapton stated in the same show that he had been independently writing a tune based on the Loving Spoonful's "Summer in the City", and when Sharp gave him the words (on the back of a bar napkin) they fit the tune.” [1](Wikipedia)
9) Finnegan’s Wake—No allusions to Ulysses here, but to Joyce’s last work. Probably no need to explain this choice!
10) Stranger in a Strange Land—The title of this song and its mood connects to how Leopold might be feeling as he wanders Dublin all day, possibly feeling, if not homeless, at least dispossessed of his home for the time being. Incidentally, Leon Russell, who recorded this song as part of his 1971 Album Shelter the People, was a part of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dog’s and Englishmen album and tour, so we have some intertextuality within this compilation!. Also, a bit of trivia is that this song contains one of the first uses by a popular musician of the Moog Synthesizer, which later became very common in pop and rock music.
“One of the major musical themes running through Ulysses, this song gathers many large issues — Ireland's tortured political history, Roman Catholicism, divided loyalty, betrayal, and Christ-like self-sacrifice — into one bundle, ripe for Joyce's elaboration. The song dates to the rebellion of 1798; like their hoped-for French allies, the most ardent Irish revolutionaries wore their hair short (i.e., cropped ) in emulation of the virtuous republican Romans. Stephen Dedalus shares a similarity with the song's protagonist by failing to pray for his mother, even on her deathbed: this thought will come back to haunt him, literally, at the climax of the Circe chapter.”
[from CD liner notes, contributed by Kevin McDermott]
12) Satisfaction—This is from the Band Devo, and it just seemed to fit thematically with how Leopold might be feeling by the end of his day. The name of the Band, interestingly, is based on the concept of “Devolution”—the idea that humans are actually devolving rather than evolving.
13) Dublin—I think this is just a beautiful, moody song that happens to be set in Dublin home of the band featured here—Thin Lizzy.
14) Struggling Man—Jimmy Cliff is not normally associated with Ireland, but with Jamaica—another Island nation with a somewhat turbulent history. I certainly see Leopold Bloom, much like all moderns perhaps, as a Struggling Man.
“This is one of the most frequently referred to and significant musical allusions throughout Ulysses. Molly Bloom will be singing this song on her concert tour with Blazes Boylan and, indeed, the afternoon liaison between her and Blazes is ostensibly for the purpose of rehearsing the music for that concert, including this song. Bloom learns that the song will be included in the concert tour early in the morning, and it serves throughout his day and the novel Ulysses both as a leitmotif of Molly's adultery and as the theme song of her potential reconciliation with Bloom.
” [from CD liner notes, contributed by Prof. Zack Bowen]
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Mrs. Dalloway
I read Mrs. Dalloway some time ago, and didn't take particularly good notes. I need to try here to summarize some very basic ideas I have about the book:
This is a modern novel, one that breaks with tradition in rendering its vision of the life of a small group of people. Like many great modern works, it is stylistically, and perhaps thematically linked to classic of western literature. Again, as with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, the famous dictum "make it new" does not mean a complete destruction of the past, but rather a reworking of classical elements in order that the tradition may continue. The dramatic structure of one 'day in the life' is much in line with Aristotle's pronouncement in his Poetics that drama take place within a 'reasonable time frame'. This is reminiscent of Joyce's one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses. Other things, such as the stream of consciousness style, identify this work as a modernist piece of fiction, as well as the non-linear narrative (with flash-forwards and flash-backs). Thematically many part of the story also seem distinctly modernist: the focus on time's passing, the obsessions of the characters with the past and confusion about their places in the world, or if not confusion, at least thoughtfulness.
This is a modern novel, one that breaks with tradition in rendering its vision of the life of a small group of people. Like many great modern works, it is stylistically, and perhaps thematically linked to classic of western literature. Again, as with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, the famous dictum "make it new" does not mean a complete destruction of the past, but rather a reworking of classical elements in order that the tradition may continue. The dramatic structure of one 'day in the life' is much in line with Aristotle's pronouncement in his Poetics that drama take place within a 'reasonable time frame'. This is reminiscent of Joyce's one day in the life of Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses. Other things, such as the stream of consciousness style, identify this work as a modernist piece of fiction, as well as the non-linear narrative (with flash-forwards and flash-backs). Thematically many part of the story also seem distinctly modernist: the focus on time's passing, the obsessions of the characters with the past and confusion about their places in the world, or if not confusion, at least thoughtfulness.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
A few Rounds with Wallace Stevens
And in this corner, the heavyweight champion of the world (in poetry, in the 20th century, in English)... okay some qualifiers, but honestly Wallace Stevens (in Hemmingwayesque parlance) is not a poet you'd want to go a few poetic rounds with... actually, interestingly I heard a story of Hemmingway and Stevens actually getting into a fist fight in Key West (supposedly Stevens broke his hand on Papa's jaw).
Some notes from The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens
:(P. 1-- para 1) "... they see Stevens as a major poet because he addresses major themes: the relationship between the world and the mind, the beauty of planet earth as an end in itself, poetry (or art in general) as an affirmation of life, the problem of belief in a secular age, the need for creating a sense of nobility in a crass and violent world."
(P. 3-- para 2) "If there is a common thread throughout his work, it is that reality and our responses to it are in constant flux. We must learn to live with multiple perspectives... be at home with multiple truths... and accept uncertainty, contradiction, even chaos, as central to existence..."
(P. 4-- para 2) "More than other poets, Stevens pointedly declares that everything we believe is a fiction, that reality is an invention of the mind..."
(P. 6-- para 1) "... he creates new linguistic structures that attain integrity... valorizes perception over conception, moments of genuineness and authenticity that, in a world of constant change, lie beyond, or, one might say, above, reason."
(P. 11-- para 2) "He had come, like his father, to leave behind orthodox belief and observance. But, like William James, he realized the value of preserving some variety of religious experience in expressing what he came to consider the "divine"".
(P. 24-- para 4-5) "... "the poetry of the subject" the specific and precise details of which a poem consists, and the "true subject", which is what the poem expresses... Stevens' "true subject" is the relation of reality and the imagination..."
(P. 27-- para 1) "... the explicit purpose of many (all?) of his poems is to re-create and embody the presence of another person, "an interior paramour."
(P. 29-- para 2) (Regarding Sunday Morning) "Present pleasure set against ancient sacrifice is one of the several antitheses upon which the poem is built: life versus death, change versus stasis, the actual world versus an imaginary one." (and para 3) "She wants a religion of the earth, not of the supernatural..."
(P. 31-- para 1) "Considering different perspectives is fundamental to Stevens' way of thinking about the world."
(P. 32-- para 1) "Sunday Morning is a poem set in the present about the relations of the poet with himself and concerned with discarding the past in order to enter more fully into the present. Eliot, Pound, an Crane need both a mythic and a historical past. Stevens wants the present."
(P. 34-- para 2) (Regarding Tea at the Palaz of Hoon) "Stevens believes that there is a real world, but that we perceive it imperfectly" (Para 3)... If the relation between the individual and the world is uncertain, then any definition of the self is problematic."
Chapter 3 (pgs. 37-47)... about Stevens' long hiatus after Harmonium was published and his perceived conservative politics during 1930s (Man With Blue Guitar) figures prominently into this essay...
(P. 49-- para 2) "A high toned old Christian woman dramatizes the central insight in George Santayana's Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900)... poetry and religion are both human fabrications, designed to express and at least partly satisfy our longing for the ideal... poetry must step forward to provide us with a new mythology..."
Chapter 4 (pgs 48-61) explores the "supreme fiction"-- Stevens' ideas about poetry in some ways taking the place of God/ coming from the same source/ and fulfilling a vital human need...
Chapter 8 (pgs. 103-117) discusses Stevens' less obvious relationship to philosophy-- he was not an historical name dropper as were other great modern poets-- Pound, Eliot...
(P. 109-- para 3) "Much of Stevens' work is epistemological in inspiration... how can we know the external world around us..."
Chapter 9 (pgs. 118-132) Reflects on Stevens' and the importance of the seasons... makes the case for Stevens as a great pastoral modernist poet...
(P. 120-- para 2) "The poems of autumn are always of departure, dislocation, and a enveloping destitution."
(P. 122-- para 2) "The poems of winter are like those of autumn, except pushed further, and in some cases, to an extreme. "... what would it be like to be one with the earth in an absolute sense, to erase altogether the Cartesian rupture?"
(P/ 124-- para 3) "Spring-- the ensuing season offers a different delight. It signals the beginning of subjectivity reemerging... it is possible to discover a meaning in nothingness..."
(P. 127-- para 3) "Summer- the imagination's happiest and most requiting pairings with the world... find celebration in the fullness of summer..."
(P. 132-- para 1) "His 'grand poem', in which he found both frustration and placation, was also his personal refuge and self-appointed cure."
(P. 193-- para 1) "The major poetic idea in the world is and always has been the idea of God."
(P. 193-- para 2) "I am not an atheist although I do not believe today in the same god in whom I believed as a boy."
Yeats (The Collected Poems/ Cullingford on Yeat's Love Poetry)
I will try to blog here in a way that separates Yeats' work into three rough periods (early, middle, and late). I will attempt to describe each period, provide examples of poems from each period, and explain some of the thematic and stylistic variation from period to period.
NOTES FROM COLLECTED POEMS
Yeats' early work...
* Song of the Happy Shepherd
Seems like an example of a london influenced somewhat self-consciously romantic poem. This is from Yeats early period.
* The Stolen Child (the theme of escape)
Interesting repetition of italicized verse. This is also an early work, and makes use of Irish Mythological content (the Faeries)
* The Lake Isle of Innisfree
Also, romantic, but a romanticism of solitutde and nature-- where poet may find peace. Yeats shows his love for County Sligo. A refreshing image that may be carried back into the grey of urban Dublin.
* When you are old
Beautiful poem written to a beautiful woman (Maude Gonne) who the speaker loved, more for who she was then simply for her physical beauty...
* Who Goes With Fergus
Joyce used this at quite a few points in Ulysses... "Who will follow King Fergus to know the wisdom of nature and have the cares of the world (possibly exhorting his generation to leave off with Ireland's political struggles and look to a deeper mythical past... There is a deeper mystical meaning, a unity, within the natural world...
* The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland
Inspired image from his time in Sligo/ Yeats as in (Fergus) encouraged young Irish to return to nature... druids felt all natural things control the divine...
* The Lamentation of the Old Pensioner
Nice poem of old age/ how women don' look at him anymore, but he has the women from his past stored in memory... he 'spits in the face of time'... Perhaps having these memories is worse, or perhaps not... maybe it really does comfort him...
* To Ireland in the Coming Times
Yeats defends his poems as patriotic, in the sense that they benefit Ireland... he implores us to remember to reflect on eternal things.
* Aedh Thinks of Those Who Have Spoken Ill and Aedh Wished for the Clothes of Heaven
Aedh is one of Yeats' three archetypal/ mythological characters. Aedh is the most romantic of the three.
* No Second Troy
A poem comparing Maude Gonne to Helen of Troy... she in her nature has spurned the speaker... may lead men and be responsible for revolution...
* September 1913
Yeats criticizes employers who locked out workers in general strike... also criticizes rampant mercenary materialism. Also celebrates Irish heroes such as John O'Leary...
* AN Irish Airman Forsees His Death
Seems the story of a poor Irish soldier dying for the British Empire... probably based on Yeats' friend's death (Major Robert Gregory)-- the only child of Yeat's patron Lady Augusta Gregory (co-founder of Abbey Theatre)...
* Easer 1916
About Yeats confused feelings about Easter 1916 uprising, in which many IRA members were executed for treason..."A terrible beauty is born"/ beauty of martyrdom?
* The Second Coming
Yeat's uses Christian imagery of the apocalypse to describe conditions in post World War I Europe... I often have an image of Hitler/ Mussolini/ and fascism emerging out of world war I... something slouching toward Bethlehem...
* A Prayer for My Daughter
During a storm the speaker imagines his infant daughter's life/ and wishes for peace and happiness for her...
* Mohini Chatterjee
Seems to be a poem in which the Brahmin tries to calm someone and worries about life with talk of reincarnation and the endless circle of samsara...
Opening quote from Virginia Woolf sets tone of book:
"All human relations have shifter-- those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of those changes abut the year 1910." (from Mr. and Mrs. Bennett)
Chapter one: (pgs. 11-24) discusses ho Yeat's deviates from stereotypical/ canonical male love poet.
Chapter two: (pgs. 25-42)
Chapter three (pgs. 43-54) deals with the concept of 'liebstod' which conflates sex with death...
Chapter four (pgs. 55-72) primarily offers Yeat's view of Ireland as represented in the image of the beloved/ woman and country are symbolically linked.
Chapter five (pgs. 73-101) discusses suffrage movement during Yeats' time and his association with Maude Gonne and the love poems about her...
Chapter six (pgs. 102-120) provides much discussion of Yeats's sex life-- particularly his wife George's disappointment with Yeats...
Chapter seven (pgs. 121-139) This chapter brings together images of love and patriotism-- especially in Easter 1916...
Chapter eight (pgs. 140-164) Much focus in this chapter on Leda and the Swan, and sexuality in Ireland being repressed by previously agrarian culture and the clergy...
Chapter nine (pgs. 165-184) A very interesting portrayal of the Crazy Jane poems as "attempt to construct the erotic as a site of popular resistance", which culminated in "Crazy Jane's defiance of the Irish Episcopate..."
Chapter fourteen (pgs. 261-287) Yeats become randy in his final years...
Eliot (More from BC Southam & The Cambridge Companion)
I am purely a product of a postmodern age, and so at times when I try to think of either classical rhetoric (Aristotle, Plato, Quintillian, Cicero), or even the more recent Modernist writers (in this case Eliot), my mind dredges up unlikely, useless (or so it seem to me) references. Every time I pick up my Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, I keep hearing that little wrinkly ant-like creature, saying "Eliot...Eliot...". No good can come, I fear, from connecting an 80s movie to a 20s poet. Except for the fact that these connections simply help me remember.
So where were we? Ah yes, T.S. Eliot. He was famous, in fact for his own borrowings; his own stealings; his own quotations drawn from so many varied sources, throughout literary history. A quick look at Eliot's Annotated Wasteland reveals the following references in the first 60 of 430 lines: Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance, The Golden Bough, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Tristan and Isolde, The Fisher King, and Baudelaire. So my own mind ranging over its catalog of mediocre films, bad television, strip malls, bible school, and comic books comes up with a reference to E.T. This is what, at base, I had bestowed upon me in my youth. The important thing to remember from my own little mnemonic story is that Eliot, as modernists often do, borrows from the sacred western tradition-- not to slight or destroy it. His borrowing and allusions are not of the iconoclastic variety, but are, in the words of Ezra Pound, attempting to "make it new." I don't see Eliot as hoping to do anything but bring a renewed vigor to, in his estimation, a worn and outdated literary tradition.
FROM A CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO T.S. ELIOT
An interesting part of the Cambridge Companion to Eliot is the connection drawn between Eliot and Yeats:
(P. 5-- para 2) "So very present was yeats to Eliot...we find echoes...of such late Yeats poems as "A Prayer for Old Age," "An Acre of Grass," and "What Then..."
(P.8-- para 1) "The shift from the plural "emotions" of life to the singular "emotion in the writing" is altogether relevant, implying the transformation of multiple disordered emotions into the ordered and significant emotion of the poem."
(P. 10-- para 2) "Shakespeare too was occupied with the struggle which alone constitutes life for a poet-- to transmute personal and private agonies into something rich, and strange, something universal and impersonal."
(P. 11-- para 1) "What Eliot implies with the commencement of the Waste Land is that as Chaucer was the first great individual talent in the English tradition, so, as of 1922, the poet of this poem is the last, the most recent individual talent in the same line."
(P. 19-- para 3) ""Eliot's earliest poems quietly register the American tendency to associate culture with what is foreign..."
(P. 20-- para 2) "... nearly every poet and writer of his generation left for Europe, in search of living art..."
(P. 20-21) "... St. Louis Heritage connected Eliot's work to the then current popular phenomenon-- ragtime music..."
((P. 26-- para 2) "Rev. Eliot's last book [was an abolitionist book] The Story of Archer Alexander From Slavery to Freedom..." (this author was Eliot's grandfather).
(P. 27-- para 20 "His poems borrowed a measure of the humor, rhythm, and musical expression of Afro-American culture, while also acknowledging its peculiar burden of morality and history-- distinct from, yet related to, Eliot's own."
(P. 31-- para 2) "Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career..."
(Pgs. 37-39) Eliot was deeply influenced by his friendship with Bertrand Russell-- particularly Eliot's ideas of literary criticism as objective/ impersonal logical analysis... without emotion or relationship to the author...
(Pgs. 41-43) Eliot mirrors in his criticism much of Wittgenstein (i.e. language's dependence on social use... valid interpretations of texts may thus change over time...
(P. 44-- para 2) "Eliot's later philosophy thus abandoned the objectivist scientism of his early critical theory for a hermeneutic historicism which emphasized the contextual limits and pragmatic functions of world human knowledge (as distinguished from the absolutes of faith).
(P. 44-- para 3) "The kind of pragmatism Eliot most wanted to revive for modern life was not the philosophy of Peirce, James, and Dewey but the classical idea of practical wisdom... elaborated by Aristotle-- phronesis..."
(P. 46-- para 1) "It is practical wisdom which involves the development of character and the education and discipline of the emotions. Eliot thought...such emotional discipline..."only attainable through dogmatic religion"... which offers a time-tested version of the good life, and a solid, reinforcing community and social practice for its pursuit..."
(Pgs. 48-59) Eliot's critical program created an unrivaled influence in his generation (other than Pound).
(P. 58-- para 2) "When T.S. Eliot was an experimental poet, rebelling against literary convention, his respect for tradition generated a creative dialectic in his work."
(Pgs. 60-75) The social critic in Eliot created some troublesome or "problematic" social criticism.
(P. 61-- para 2) "In Eliot as in Yeats and Pound, we see the cultural alienation definitive of modernism, which drove all three poets to emigre obsession with the cultural defectiveness of their homelands."
(P. 63-- para 3) "Analytical psychology... can do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the great society with an aggregation of human being who are not units but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs."
(P 81-- para 2) "The highest goal of the civilized being... to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith..."
(P. 96-- para 2) "What I want to suggest is this: that Eliot's development as a writer from the Wasteland on is governed by his changing relationship to England..."
(P. 122-- para 3) "This contradiction, along with the poem's lack of thematic clarity and its careful refusal of connections between images, scenes, and voices, makes the Wasteland particularly open to different interpretations."
(P.123-- para 2) "While the poem provides an emotional and often visceral critique of the state of human life, it equally provides a critique of the desire to transcend and escape that life, and it offers no alternatives beyond that life of the persistence of that desire."
(P. 131-- para 2) "The Passionate and paradoxical desire to end desire leads only to the continuation of life in all its variousness, confusions, tragedies, and improper desires."
(P. 229-231) An interesting parallel is drawn between modern and postmodern architecture and writing.
(P. 230-- para 3) "What such 'difficulty' writing as that of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound potentially offered was justification for claiming the status of a discipline for English..."
BC SOUTHAM/ ON THE WASTELAND
(P. 126-- para 2) "THe wasteland is not, however, that of war's devastation... but the emotional and spiritual sterility of western man, the 'waste' of our civilization (para 3) The theme of the poem is the salvation of the wasteland... of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality to be regained."
(P. 128-- para 3) "The common source of all these myths lay in the fundamental rhythm of nature... and their varying symbolism was an effort to explain the origin of life-- their symbolism was basically sexual."
(P. 135-- para 4) "A personal wasteland closes book II of the confessions of St. Agustine... I became to myself a wasteland."
(P. 137 para: 1) "Pound's cutting was largely responsible for the cinematic effects of the poem in its sudden disjunctions and shifts of scene."
(P. 138-139) discussion of opening of poem "April is the cruelest month" may refer to Egypt waiting for flooding of the Nile for land to be fertile, of to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales..."
(P 141-- para 1) "Image... from Whitman's when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed/ Elligaic poem to Lincoln... in some ways both post war mournful poems..."
(P. 144-- para 6) "A handful of dust... found in many places such as John Donne's meditation IV/ in Tennyson's Moud.../ In Conrad's Youth.../ also biblical-- dust is the symbolic reminder to man of his bodily mortality..."
(P. 145-146) Hyacinths... a symbol for the resurrected god of fertility rites...
(P. 147) Madame Sostoris borrowed from "Chrome Yellow" a novel by Aldous Huxley... a posing fortune teller...
(P. 151 para 5) "Such a long stream of people: refers to Dante's inferno and the reaction upon seeing so many unhappy spirits-- those who in life knew neither good nor evil, who never learned to care for anyone but themselves..."
(P. 163 para 3) ""Hayward makes it clear that Eliot thinking of the post war ragtime world, the jazz world of the 1920s, restless, aimless, hectic, fearful, futile, enurotic."
(P. 165 para 1) "THe fire sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy, and other passions that consume men."
(P. 172 Para 2/ 3) about Tiresias character from Ovid's Metamorphoses a character who has been both man and woman...
(P. 181 para 3) "In the Buddhist tradition the image of fire carries both the pain of worldly experience and the processes of purification."
(P. 190 para 2) "Bertrand Russell recalls that he told Eliot of a nightmare in which he had a vision of London as an unreal city-- its inhabitants like hallucinations..."
(P. 188 para 6) "Sanskrit word so repeated signifying peace which passeth understanding"
So where were we? Ah yes, T.S. Eliot. He was famous, in fact for his own borrowings; his own stealings; his own quotations drawn from so many varied sources, throughout literary history. A quick look at Eliot's Annotated Wasteland reveals the following references in the first 60 of 430 lines: Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance, The Golden Bough, Ezekiel, Ecclesiastes, Tristan and Isolde, The Fisher King, and Baudelaire. So my own mind ranging over its catalog of mediocre films, bad television, strip malls, bible school, and comic books comes up with a reference to E.T. This is what, at base, I had bestowed upon me in my youth. The important thing to remember from my own little mnemonic story is that Eliot, as modernists often do, borrows from the sacred western tradition-- not to slight or destroy it. His borrowing and allusions are not of the iconoclastic variety, but are, in the words of Ezra Pound, attempting to "make it new." I don't see Eliot as hoping to do anything but bring a renewed vigor to, in his estimation, a worn and outdated literary tradition.
FROM A CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO T.S. ELIOT
An interesting part of the Cambridge Companion to Eliot is the connection drawn between Eliot and Yeats:
(P. 5-- para 2) "So very present was yeats to Eliot...we find echoes...of such late Yeats poems as "A Prayer for Old Age," "An Acre of Grass," and "What Then..."
(P.8-- para 1) "The shift from the plural "emotions" of life to the singular "emotion in the writing" is altogether relevant, implying the transformation of multiple disordered emotions into the ordered and significant emotion of the poem."
(P. 10-- para 2) "Shakespeare too was occupied with the struggle which alone constitutes life for a poet-- to transmute personal and private agonies into something rich, and strange, something universal and impersonal."
(P. 11-- para 1) "What Eliot implies with the commencement of the Waste Land is that as Chaucer was the first great individual talent in the English tradition, so, as of 1922, the poet of this poem is the last, the most recent individual talent in the same line."
(P. 19-- para 3) ""Eliot's earliest poems quietly register the American tendency to associate culture with what is foreign..."
(P. 20-- para 2) "... nearly every poet and writer of his generation left for Europe, in search of living art..."
(P. 20-21) "... St. Louis Heritage connected Eliot's work to the then current popular phenomenon-- ragtime music..."
((P. 26-- para 2) "Rev. Eliot's last book [was an abolitionist book] The Story of Archer Alexander From Slavery to Freedom..." (this author was Eliot's grandfather).
(P. 27-- para 20 "His poems borrowed a measure of the humor, rhythm, and musical expression of Afro-American culture, while also acknowledging its peculiar burden of morality and history-- distinct from, yet related to, Eliot's own."
(P. 31-- para 2) "Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career..."
(Pgs. 37-39) Eliot was deeply influenced by his friendship with Bertrand Russell-- particularly Eliot's ideas of literary criticism as objective/ impersonal logical analysis... without emotion or relationship to the author...
(Pgs. 41-43) Eliot mirrors in his criticism much of Wittgenstein (i.e. language's dependence on social use... valid interpretations of texts may thus change over time...
(P. 44-- para 2) "Eliot's later philosophy thus abandoned the objectivist scientism of his early critical theory for a hermeneutic historicism which emphasized the contextual limits and pragmatic functions of world human knowledge (as distinguished from the absolutes of faith).
(P. 44-- para 3) "The kind of pragmatism Eliot most wanted to revive for modern life was not the philosophy of Peirce, James, and Dewey but the classical idea of practical wisdom... elaborated by Aristotle-- phronesis..."
(P. 46-- para 1) "It is practical wisdom which involves the development of character and the education and discipline of the emotions. Eliot thought...such emotional discipline..."only attainable through dogmatic religion"... which offers a time-tested version of the good life, and a solid, reinforcing community and social practice for its pursuit..."
(Pgs. 48-59) Eliot's critical program created an unrivaled influence in his generation (other than Pound).
(P. 58-- para 2) "When T.S. Eliot was an experimental poet, rebelling against literary convention, his respect for tradition generated a creative dialectic in his work."
(Pgs. 60-75) The social critic in Eliot created some troublesome or "problematic" social criticism.
(P. 61-- para 2) "In Eliot as in Yeats and Pound, we see the cultural alienation definitive of modernism, which drove all three poets to emigre obsession with the cultural defectiveness of their homelands."
(P. 63-- para 3) "Analytical psychology... can do little except produce monsters; for it is attempting to produce unified individuals in a world without unity; the social, political, and economic sciences can do little, for they are attempting to produce the great society with an aggregation of human being who are not units but merely bundles of incoherent impulses and beliefs."
(P 81-- para 2) "The highest goal of the civilized being... to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith..."
(P. 96-- para 2) "What I want to suggest is this: that Eliot's development as a writer from the Wasteland on is governed by his changing relationship to England..."
(P. 122-- para 3) "This contradiction, along with the poem's lack of thematic clarity and its careful refusal of connections between images, scenes, and voices, makes the Wasteland particularly open to different interpretations."
(P.123-- para 2) "While the poem provides an emotional and often visceral critique of the state of human life, it equally provides a critique of the desire to transcend and escape that life, and it offers no alternatives beyond that life of the persistence of that desire."
(P. 131-- para 2) "The Passionate and paradoxical desire to end desire leads only to the continuation of life in all its variousness, confusions, tragedies, and improper desires."
(P. 229-231) An interesting parallel is drawn between modern and postmodern architecture and writing.
(P. 230-- para 3) "What such 'difficulty' writing as that of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound potentially offered was justification for claiming the status of a discipline for English..."
BC SOUTHAM/ ON THE WASTELAND
(P. 126-- para 2) "THe wasteland is not, however, that of war's devastation... but the emotional and spiritual sterility of western man, the 'waste' of our civilization (para 3) The theme of the poem is the salvation of the wasteland... of emotional, spiritual, and intellectual vitality to be regained."
(P. 128-- para 3) "The common source of all these myths lay in the fundamental rhythm of nature... and their varying symbolism was an effort to explain the origin of life-- their symbolism was basically sexual."
(P. 135-- para 4) "A personal wasteland closes book II of the confessions of St. Agustine... I became to myself a wasteland."
(P. 137 para: 1) "Pound's cutting was largely responsible for the cinematic effects of the poem in its sudden disjunctions and shifts of scene."
(P. 138-139) discussion of opening of poem "April is the cruelest month" may refer to Egypt waiting for flooding of the Nile for land to be fertile, of to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales..."
(P 141-- para 1) "Image... from Whitman's when lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed/ Elligaic poem to Lincoln... in some ways both post war mournful poems..."
(P. 144-- para 6) "A handful of dust... found in many places such as John Donne's meditation IV/ in Tennyson's Moud.../ In Conrad's Youth.../ also biblical-- dust is the symbolic reminder to man of his bodily mortality..."
(P. 145-146) Hyacinths... a symbol for the resurrected god of fertility rites...
(P. 147) Madame Sostoris borrowed from "Chrome Yellow" a novel by Aldous Huxley... a posing fortune teller...
(P. 151 para 5) "Such a long stream of people: refers to Dante's inferno and the reaction upon seeing so many unhappy spirits-- those who in life knew neither good nor evil, who never learned to care for anyone but themselves..."
(P. 163 para 3) ""Hayward makes it clear that Eliot thinking of the post war ragtime world, the jazz world of the 1920s, restless, aimless, hectic, fearful, futile, enurotic."
(P. 165 para 1) "THe fire sermon was preached by the Buddha against the fires of lust, anger, envy, and other passions that consume men."
(P. 172 Para 2/ 3) about Tiresias character from Ovid's Metamorphoses a character who has been both man and woman...
(P. 181 para 3) "In the Buddhist tradition the image of fire carries both the pain of worldly experience and the processes of purification."
(P. 190 para 2) "Bertrand Russell recalls that he told Eliot of a nightmare in which he had a vision of London as an unreal city-- its inhabitants like hallucinations..."
(P. 188 para 6) "Sanskrit word so repeated signifying peace which passeth understanding"
Monday, October 25, 2010
Family Ties (Raisin, Foxes, Journey, Juno)
I set this blog up for summer, but now, well into fall, I find that blogging about my reading helps me think out loud (which I need in order to process information). So, I'll continue to try to tie things together here from reading. Comps are now less than four months away.
I read Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun
. After Dr. Power suggested parallels between this work and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock
. Reading it through that lens, I have to say there did seem to be some very obvious comparisons. First, surface similarities such as an unwanted pregnancy (Mary and ...). Then, of course social class similarities, and the money motive inspiring and driving everything. On a deeper level, there is the family dynamic in both plays, which seems to be breaking apart. The major difference is that in the American play (Raisin) the family seems to come together finally, in opposition-- dare we say solidarity-- to oppose the exclusionary practices of the all white neighborhood association. In the Irish play (Juno) the family breaks in to splinters, with the death of one, and the mother and daughter leaving at the end to live to raise the coming child with two mothers and no father.
I also read the Little Foxes
by Lilian Hellman last week, and that particular play immediately made me think of Eugen O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night
. Both plays are realistic depictions of American families, and these families are dysfunctional. In fact you could describe both plays as a painful protracted glance at dysfunction-- dysfunction on display. An interesting contrast to the Irish plays, which do not allow this intimate glance into family life (at least in O'Casey's case), and though you are in the home of the family, you are not in the head of the characters so deeply. Both O'Neil and Hellman seem to write from within the family secret they have been party to.
One of the most helpful, and fun, things I've been doing in conjunction with my reading and meeting with Dr. Power has been finding films version of the plays and novels I've been reading. There is an old version of Juno directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a film version of Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, a film of Long Day's Journey with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards, and a Bette Davis version of Raisin in the Sun. All of these are worth watching and the O'Neil, the Hansberry, and the Hellman stay very close to their original sources.
The Little Foxes
I read Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun
. After Dr. Power suggested parallels between this work and Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock. Reading it through that lens, I have to say there did seem to be some very obvious comparisons. First, surface similarities such as an unwanted pregnancy (Mary and ...). Then, of course social class similarities, and the money motive inspiring and driving everything. On a deeper level, there is the family dynamic in both plays, which seems to be breaking apart. The major difference is that in the American play (Raisin) the family seems to come together finally, in opposition-- dare we say solidarity-- to oppose the exclusionary practices of the all white neighborhood association. In the Irish play (Juno) the family breaks in to splinters, with the death of one, and the mother and daughter leaving at the end to live to raise the coming child with two mothers and no father.I also read the Little Foxes
by Lilian Hellman last week, and that particular play immediately made me think of Eugen O'Neil's Long Day's Journey into Night. Both plays are realistic depictions of American families, and these families are dysfunctional. In fact you could describe both plays as a painful protracted glance at dysfunction-- dysfunction on display. An interesting contrast to the Irish plays, which do not allow this intimate glance into family life (at least in O'Casey's case), and though you are in the home of the family, you are not in the head of the characters so deeply. Both O'Neil and Hellman seem to write from within the family secret they have been party to.One of the most helpful, and fun, things I've been doing in conjunction with my reading and meeting with Dr. Power has been finding films version of the plays and novels I've been reading. There is an old version of Juno directed by Alfred Hitchcock, a film version of Raisin in the Sun with Sidney Poitier, a film of Long Day's Journey with Katherine Hepburn and Jason Robards, and a Bette Davis version of Raisin in the Sun. All of these are worth watching and the O'Neil, the Hansberry, and the Hellman stay very close to their original sources.
The Little Foxes
Thursday, August 19, 2010
He Didn't Quit His Day Job
My father worked in the Insurance industry for thirty years, first as a salesman, and later as a sales manager. There was a moment just after finishing my BA in 1990, when I thought, maybe I should go to work for Dad. At that time, I thought I'll teach High School, and finish my PhD in the evenings, on weekends, and over summers. Also, I'll find time to write. Fast-forward twenty years. I've been teaching since 1991, and now doing admin work, and am still trying to finish my education.
Perhaps if I'd have read Wallace Stevens seriously (more than the Emperor of Ice Cream in an anthology), I would have gone to work selling insurance because I would have seen it as a viable 'day job' for an aspiring academic. To me though, teaching was the job of choice for those who wanted to pursue higher education, and business was for those who wanted only to pursue money. Two modernist luminaries, though, worked in the hurly burly of the business world, and produced some of the greatest writing of the twentieth century.
I had know something about TS Eliot and his work in banking, but I never equated his job with banality for the simple reason that he lived in London. 'Expatriate' banker somehow still seems revolutionary, non-conformist, and appropriate to a writer. But Wallace Stevens is unaccountable within my universe. He breaks stereotypes, and I enjoy the experience of having prejudices or biases questioned. It is not only that he is a poet and an Insurance Company Executive, but that he is an Insurance Company Executive, and writes amazing poetry.
I was not deeply interested in Stevens and thought I would just read a few of his poems from an anthology, but after my experience with Sunday Morning, I wanted to read everything he's written. So I bought a collection of his poems I found at Page One called The Palm at the End of the Mind
So far, several poems have made very strong impressions:
1) Sunday Morning. Apparently, when asked about this Poem Stevens replied it was a Pagan work, and I love that idea reading this. I can imagine a woman on a Sunday morning coping with the sudden rush of beauty from a moment, and then the let down of, "oh yes, but this is all temporary", and the diminished quality of comparing the earthly, physical world to the otherworldly, spiritual, divine. A dichotomy is set up dividing the material from the spiritual. Maybe there is a possible thematic connection to Frost's the Oven Bird. In fact, the idea of 'what to make of a diminished thing' may be a rhetorical question in Frost's work, but it is as if, in some way, Stevens answers the rhetorical question. And perhaps he answers it by saying, "this thing is only diminished if you are operating within a certain epistemological frame". How do we know that a beautiful. Sunday Morning isn't really the most important thing, and that a bird diving down in the present moment isn't just as real as an eternal form, beauty.
There is some suggestion that Matisse and Stevens are kindred spirits. I can really see the greens and the oranges in this painting by Matisse in much the same way that the poem's oranges an cockatoo are imaginable, though I think the kindred nature is more in the vision, the world view. Though, I don't know enough about Matisse to pretend to understand that.
2) Peter Quince at the Clavier is another very interesting poem, which draws on the biblical story of Susana, who was condemned to death, after she refused to succumb to some elders who had seen her bathing and pursued her. She is defended by Daniel who uses a series of puns to secure her safety and condemn the elders to death. The picture by Gentileschi is one of many paintings based on the Susana story.
I am struggling to comprehend the full weight of the possible inversion of Platonism which has been pointed to in this poem by critics. The idea that there is not ideal form of beauty, but only the transitory beauty existing in the mind. The challenge to Plato is in many ways a challenge to the foundations of modern Christianity in the same way that Sunday Morning challenges a world view dependent on the unseen, and somewhat suspicious of the seen, actual, material world, as corrupt, or at best devoid of truth.
3) The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem I am still coming to understand, and will look at it more closely during the fall term's independent study.
Again, I've just been struck by how much I love Steven's work, and again at the surprise at his position in the world seeming to be so out of step with my stereotype of 'the artist'. I like that about Stevens, and maybe my reading his work and my deep appreciation of it is that wonderful accident of finding a certain work or collection or artist at exactly the right time in life.
Perhaps if I'd have read Wallace Stevens seriously (more than the Emperor of Ice Cream in an anthology), I would have gone to work selling insurance because I would have seen it as a viable 'day job' for an aspiring academic. To me though, teaching was the job of choice for those who wanted to pursue higher education, and business was for those who wanted only to pursue money. Two modernist luminaries, though, worked in the hurly burly of the business world, and produced some of the greatest writing of the twentieth century.
I had know something about TS Eliot and his work in banking, but I never equated his job with banality for the simple reason that he lived in London. 'Expatriate' banker somehow still seems revolutionary, non-conformist, and appropriate to a writer. But Wallace Stevens is unaccountable within my universe. He breaks stereotypes, and I enjoy the experience of having prejudices or biases questioned. It is not only that he is a poet and an Insurance Company Executive, but that he is an Insurance Company Executive, and writes amazing poetry.
I was not deeply interested in Stevens and thought I would just read a few of his poems from an anthology, but after my experience with Sunday Morning, I wanted to read everything he's written. So I bought a collection of his poems I found at Page One called The Palm at the End of the Mind
So far, several poems have made very strong impressions:
1) Sunday Morning. Apparently, when asked about this Poem Stevens replied it was a Pagan work, and I love that idea reading this. I can imagine a woman on a Sunday morning coping with the sudden rush of beauty from a moment, and then the let down of, "oh yes, but this is all temporary", and the diminished quality of comparing the earthly, physical world to the otherworldly, spiritual, divine. A dichotomy is set up dividing the material from the spiritual. Maybe there is a possible thematic connection to Frost's the Oven Bird. In fact, the idea of 'what to make of a diminished thing' may be a rhetorical question in Frost's work, but it is as if, in some way, Stevens answers the rhetorical question. And perhaps he answers it by saying, "this thing is only diminished if you are operating within a certain epistemological frame". How do we know that a beautiful. Sunday Morning isn't really the most important thing, and that a bird diving down in the present moment isn't just as real as an eternal form, beauty.
There is some suggestion that Matisse and Stevens are kindred spirits. I can really see the greens and the oranges in this painting by Matisse in much the same way that the poem's oranges an cockatoo are imaginable, though I think the kindred nature is more in the vision, the world view. Though, I don't know enough about Matisse to pretend to understand that.
2) Peter Quince at the Clavier is another very interesting poem, which draws on the biblical story of Susana, who was condemned to death, after she refused to succumb to some elders who had seen her bathing and pursued her. She is defended by Daniel who uses a series of puns to secure her safety and condemn the elders to death. The picture by Gentileschi is one of many paintings based on the Susana story.
,_Artemisia_Gentileschi.jpg){kind=link}
I am struggling to comprehend the full weight of the possible inversion of Platonism which has been pointed to in this poem by critics. The idea that there is not ideal form of beauty, but only the transitory beauty existing in the mind. The challenge to Plato is in many ways a challenge to the foundations of modern Christianity in the same way that Sunday Morning challenges a world view dependent on the unseen, and somewhat suspicious of the seen, actual, material world, as corrupt, or at best devoid of truth.
3) The Idea of Order at Key West is a poem I am still coming to understand, and will look at it more closely during the fall term's independent study.
Again, I've just been struck by how much I love Steven's work, and again at the surprise at his position in the world seeming to be so out of step with my stereotype of 'the artist'. I like that about Stevens, and maybe my reading his work and my deep appreciation of it is that wonderful accident of finding a certain work or collection or artist at exactly the right time in life.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Backyard like Mississippi
Finished reading Absalom, Absalom
this afternoon (actually listened to the last part of it on tape; actually on CD; actually on my I-pod) while cooking meals for the week (pork chops with mango and cilantro, and tuna salad for sandwiches)... after a nap and while typing up notes on Long Day's Journey into Night, and Juno and the Paycock, I heard a clatter out on the lawn... springing from my computer. No, springing is not exactly it-- it was vexatious, no not really vexatious, but a desire nonetheless, a desire, that's how it might be said in a Faulkner novel, or perhaps it would be an ardor, or a hunger or a thirst, or some other such thing as might be said of a will brought about by a thought, or maybe it is the other way around, and I can only say that I heard some imperviously vexing, lugubrious resonance and moved from my place at the computer, and there, high in the old apple tree, with its eyes on me like I was a demon straight out of Sutpen's hundred-- there, up in the billowing, bending, pliancy of those branches was a Raccoon-- a salacious, determined, nocturnal, little creature, and it was ingratiating itself of my apples and it's kin-- another black-faced, ring tailed mammalian, acrobat-- was just scuttling about up the tree, over the wall and onto the shed. That was my attempt at a Faulknerian sentence, and the pictures are here as well.
It did seem very Mississippi to have the "coons outch younder thayre". Weird! Raccoons in Nob Hill-- well I declare Miss Colfield, it's strange aint it....
Monday, July 26, 2010
Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden
I read The Cambridge Companion to W.H. Auden earlier this month. Below are some key quotes from this text.
(P.3/ para 3) "The 'Auden effect' lay in that ability to catch the changing moods of the time in luminous images, magical phrases and breathtaking apercus, expressing sentiments that people were unaware they shared until they read him."
(P.7/ para 2) "For the younger Larkin Auden was of course the first "modern poet", not just in his ability to employ modern properties unselfconsciously but primarily in the 'dominant and ubiquitous unease' at the heart of his poetry. Auden's outlook was completely dislocated..."
(P.9/ para 3) "...his sleeping around with poetic forms and his plagiarism of other poet's voices, constitute a deliberate assault on the idea of autonomous authentic self, speaking with its own unique accents." "All art is ventriloquism."
(P.11/ para 3) "He denounced Stephen Dedalus' remark...as an impossible ambition, since it is precisely this attempt to escape being a historical creature that makes man's history a nightmare..."
(P.13/ para 3) "Art is born of humiliation." "(Auden was) The first poet at home in the 20th century."
(P.17/ para 4) "...his language and anxieties in the early 1930s entranced the young intelligentsia...they heard...political injustice and human pain clarified and amplified in his words."
(P.19/ para 3) "Many of his young admirers felt betrayed by the departure...the belief that he had deserted Britain during a dangerous crisis..." (seems an interesting pop-parallel when Bob Dylan went electric in the mid-1960s, and many in the folk community criticized him for selling out. Martin Scorcher's documentary No Direction Home outlines this process of following one's art, and the resultant alienation of some followers).
(P.3/ para 3) "The 'Auden effect' lay in that ability to catch the changing moods of the time in luminous images, magical phrases and breathtaking apercus, expressing sentiments that people were unaware they shared until they read him."
(P.7/ para 2) "For the younger Larkin Auden was of course the first "modern poet", not just in his ability to employ modern properties unselfconsciously but primarily in the 'dominant and ubiquitous unease' at the heart of his poetry. Auden's outlook was completely dislocated..."
(P.9/ para 3) "...his sleeping around with poetic forms and his plagiarism of other poet's voices, constitute a deliberate assault on the idea of autonomous authentic self, speaking with its own unique accents." "All art is ventriloquism."
(P.11/ para 3) "He denounced Stephen Dedalus' remark...as an impossible ambition, since it is precisely this attempt to escape being a historical creature that makes man's history a nightmare..."
(P.13/ para 3) "Art is born of humiliation." "(Auden was) The first poet at home in the 20th century."
(P.17/ para 4) "...his language and anxieties in the early 1930s entranced the young intelligentsia...they heard...political injustice and human pain clarified and amplified in his words."
(P.19/ para 3) "Many of his young admirers felt betrayed by the departure...the belief that he had deserted Britain during a dangerous crisis..." (seems an interesting pop-parallel when Bob Dylan went electric in the mid-1960s, and many in the folk community criticized him for selling out. Martin Scorcher's documentary No Direction Home outlines this process of following one's art, and the resultant alienation of some followers).
Too brief, Edward Estlin, too brief
I have not consulted any critical sources for E.E. Cummings, so if this ends up as a part of my exams I will need to do more work with this poet. This is a brief note or two from the five poems I looked at.
1) All in green went my love riding-- Early poem/ may be allusion to the Knight's Tale by Chaucer or refers to or retells story of Diana or Artemis/ Actaeon observes Diana bathing, and because of this Diana turns him into a stag and he is eaten by his own dogs... the myth really takes a fearful attitude to the corrupting power of female beauty.
2) O Sweet spontaneous--describes the rape of the earth, but allows that spring returns anyway.
3) The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls-- this is a form of the sonnet, not as experimental in form as other works by Cummings. Seems to suggest a dead sort of religion/ an interpretation that limits one's direct experience or the real, actual physical reality/ an anit-Tao...
4) I was Sitting in McSoreley's-- poem uses strange, experimental syntax and punctuation. Shows Cumming's "manunkind" concept, lack of harmony between the organic world and human society. Maybe written to simulate 'sloppy' way the brain processes language when intoxicated.
5) A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves-- There is an obvious comparison to the story of the Good Samaritan. May be a comparison to "manunkind" who ignores-- contrasted with speaker in the poem who picks up the 'puke covered wretch'....
1) All in green went my love riding-- Early poem/ may be allusion to the Knight's Tale by Chaucer or refers to or retells story of Diana or Artemis/ Actaeon observes Diana bathing, and because of this Diana turns him into a stag and he is eaten by his own dogs... the myth really takes a fearful attitude to the corrupting power of female beauty.
2) O Sweet spontaneous--describes the rape of the earth, but allows that spring returns anyway.
3) The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls-- this is a form of the sonnet, not as experimental in form as other works by Cummings. Seems to suggest a dead sort of religion/ an interpretation that limits one's direct experience or the real, actual physical reality/ an anit-Tao...
4) I was Sitting in McSoreley's-- poem uses strange, experimental syntax and punctuation. Shows Cumming's "manunkind" concept, lack of harmony between the organic world and human society. Maybe written to simulate 'sloppy' way the brain processes language when intoxicated.
5) A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves-- There is an obvious comparison to the story of the Good Samaritan. May be a comparison to "manunkind" who ignores-- contrasted with speaker in the poem who picks up the 'puke covered wretch'....
Catching up with Frost
I have been so busy with reading that I've had little time to post, but I want to keep up with my posting, so I have another layer of reflection on my readings. I read several of Robert Frost's poems during the last week of June, and now in the last week of July, I'll try to remember some of my observations, with the help of some very sketchy notes.
1) Mending Wall-- two neighbors walk a wall in spring putting the stones back in place. Speaker perhaps sees the neighbor as from some outmoded era...written in blank verse, but few lines match iambic pentameter. Most lines have five stressed syllables, but feet vary extensively to sustain the feel of natural speech. There are no patterns of rhyme, but much assonance (i.e. wall/ hill, bulls/ walls...)...why do we put up walls? Segregate, alienate ourselves? It's really impossible and yet we persist in attempts to cloister. Some have suggested this poem comments on the act of writing creatively, or any kind of creation, is a kind of duality of construction vs. destruction...also, the idea that destructive acts can result in creations, and constructions can sometimes disrupt.
2) After Apple Picking-- after a hard day of picking apples, speaker wonders about sleep coming on (is it just sleep, or something deeper?) This is a rhyming poem, but it has no regular rhyme scheme. The changing rhythms keep the reader "awake" as the speaker drifts off to "sleep". Is this the big sleep that comes at the end of human endeavor? Apples have obvious symbolic meaning in the western tradition (Adam and Eve/ Eden/ the Fall/ Genesis). Apples may represent knowledge and a punishable claim to godliness/ creation.
3) The Wood Pile-- on a walk in a frozen swamp, a speaker considers going back, follows a bird, finds a woodpile, and wonders why someone left it there to rot. This poem has typical Frostian 5 stress lines/ no discernible rhyme pattern/ looks like poetry, but sounds like speech. Something urges the speaker to get thoroughly lost. There seems to be despair in the poem's final line "the slow, smokeless burning of decay". Somehow bring Shelly's Ozymandias's last line to mind, " Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away..."...makes me wonder is there is some sense of futility here???
4) The Road not Taken-- speaker stands at a fork in the road and chooses which road to take. He may take the other road later, but that's unlikely. He will tell this story to someone later, but will say he took the less traveled road. This is strict masculine rhyme scheme (ABAAB). For me, I think I've misunderstood this poem ever since memorizing it in 8th grade. This is not a simple Hallmark card which proclaims "I've made the hard choice; I'm an American rugged individualist; because of my trueness to myself, I've benefited in the long run." The idea that we can not know what we are choosing when we choose, makes perfect sense to me, now at 41, and feeling somewhat disappointed. I mean, we may know what we are going to get, but we can not predict how getting it is going to feel. We can't really know "what" we are choosing when we choose. The speaker in this poems, proclaims that he "will be telling this with a sigh"....is that sigh because he knows he is lying to himself and to someone else when he tells some young person, "stick to your guns and choose the road less traveled..."? In fact, we aren't really sure the speaker has actually chosen a less traveled road; the poem does say "the passing...had worn them really about the same..." So this poem is really--whether less common or more common-- about the road we did not take. There is something fascinating about that path we didn't go down, and we will try to tell ourselves we made the right choice to bring some peace of mind, but this is really just rationalizing. Is there really a right and a wrong path? We can never know. Wrong decisions? Right decisions? Who Knows? Reminds, me as I mentioned in an earlier post on Frost or the old Buddhist story of the farmer who finds the horse (Sae-ung-ji-ma) in Korean.
5) An Old Man's Winter Night-- An old man alone in the wintry climate of New England. This poem has been described as having a complicated, even Miltonian, structure-- long sentences (lines 8-13), with much enjambment (breaking of lines in mid-sentence). This is a dark, lonely story of going to one's maker alone, but is there really any other way to do it?
6) The Oven Bird-- The oven bird sings during the height of summer, perhaps near the vernal equinox. He sings that the spring's bloom was more beautiful than the bloom of mid-summer ("as one to ten"), and hints of the coming fall. This poem is a non-traditional sonnet (fourteen lines with rhyme). It seems to be a meditation on mid-life, and, once again, I completely relate and understand this feeling. I immediately related this poem to Ulysses, in terms of the setting. Ulysses takes place in Bloom's middle years, and it also takes place in the summer (June 17, the longest day of the year). By this point, the year is half over, life is half over, and maybe this is the peak. If it isn't what you'd hoped, well, that's sad. If it is all you'd hoped, well, you realize this is the beginning of the end. The "highway dust" that the oven bird acknowledges is "over all" reminds me of Eliots "handful of dust" from the Wasteland.
7) Birches-- Ice storms have weighed down and bent birch trees, and the speaker fantasizes a young boy has climbed to the top and pulled them down. There is a tension evident between the real world and the world of imagination.
8) Putting in the seed-- A sonnet. A meditation on creation/ the creator/ the earth/ mother earth/ springtime's fruit as "love child of nature"...the physical act of planting and of sex results in new life...
1) Mending Wall-- two neighbors walk a wall in spring putting the stones back in place. Speaker perhaps sees the neighbor as from some outmoded era...written in blank verse, but few lines match iambic pentameter. Most lines have five stressed syllables, but feet vary extensively to sustain the feel of natural speech. There are no patterns of rhyme, but much assonance (i.e. wall/ hill, bulls/ walls...)...why do we put up walls? Segregate, alienate ourselves? It's really impossible and yet we persist in attempts to cloister. Some have suggested this poem comments on the act of writing creatively, or any kind of creation, is a kind of duality of construction vs. destruction...also, the idea that destructive acts can result in creations, and constructions can sometimes disrupt.
2) After Apple Picking-- after a hard day of picking apples, speaker wonders about sleep coming on (is it just sleep, or something deeper?) This is a rhyming poem, but it has no regular rhyme scheme. The changing rhythms keep the reader "awake" as the speaker drifts off to "sleep". Is this the big sleep that comes at the end of human endeavor? Apples have obvious symbolic meaning in the western tradition (Adam and Eve/ Eden/ the Fall/ Genesis). Apples may represent knowledge and a punishable claim to godliness/ creation.
3) The Wood Pile-- on a walk in a frozen swamp, a speaker considers going back, follows a bird, finds a woodpile, and wonders why someone left it there to rot. This poem has typical Frostian 5 stress lines/ no discernible rhyme pattern/ looks like poetry, but sounds like speech. Something urges the speaker to get thoroughly lost. There seems to be despair in the poem's final line "the slow, smokeless burning of decay". Somehow bring Shelly's Ozymandias's last line to mind, " Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away..."...makes me wonder is there is some sense of futility here???
4) The Road not Taken-- speaker stands at a fork in the road and chooses which road to take. He may take the other road later, but that's unlikely. He will tell this story to someone later, but will say he took the less traveled road. This is strict masculine rhyme scheme (ABAAB). For me, I think I've misunderstood this poem ever since memorizing it in 8th grade. This is not a simple Hallmark card which proclaims "I've made the hard choice; I'm an American rugged individualist; because of my trueness to myself, I've benefited in the long run." The idea that we can not know what we are choosing when we choose, makes perfect sense to me, now at 41, and feeling somewhat disappointed. I mean, we may know what we are going to get, but we can not predict how getting it is going to feel. We can't really know "what" we are choosing when we choose. The speaker in this poems, proclaims that he "will be telling this with a sigh"....is that sigh because he knows he is lying to himself and to someone else when he tells some young person, "stick to your guns and choose the road less traveled..."? In fact, we aren't really sure the speaker has actually chosen a less traveled road; the poem does say "the passing...had worn them really about the same..." So this poem is really--whether less common or more common-- about the road we did not take. There is something fascinating about that path we didn't go down, and we will try to tell ourselves we made the right choice to bring some peace of mind, but this is really just rationalizing. Is there really a right and a wrong path? We can never know. Wrong decisions? Right decisions? Who Knows? Reminds, me as I mentioned in an earlier post on Frost or the old Buddhist story of the farmer who finds the horse (Sae-ung-ji-ma) in Korean.
5) An Old Man's Winter Night-- An old man alone in the wintry climate of New England. This poem has been described as having a complicated, even Miltonian, structure-- long sentences (lines 8-13), with much enjambment (breaking of lines in mid-sentence). This is a dark, lonely story of going to one's maker alone, but is there really any other way to do it?
6) The Oven Bird-- The oven bird sings during the height of summer, perhaps near the vernal equinox. He sings that the spring's bloom was more beautiful than the bloom of mid-summer ("as one to ten"), and hints of the coming fall. This poem is a non-traditional sonnet (fourteen lines with rhyme). It seems to be a meditation on mid-life, and, once again, I completely relate and understand this feeling. I immediately related this poem to Ulysses, in terms of the setting. Ulysses takes place in Bloom's middle years, and it also takes place in the summer (June 17, the longest day of the year). By this point, the year is half over, life is half over, and maybe this is the peak. If it isn't what you'd hoped, well, that's sad. If it is all you'd hoped, well, you realize this is the beginning of the end. The "highway dust" that the oven bird acknowledges is "over all" reminds me of Eliots "handful of dust" from the Wasteland.
7) Birches-- Ice storms have weighed down and bent birch trees, and the speaker fantasizes a young boy has climbed to the top and pulled them down. There is a tension evident between the real world and the world of imagination.
8) Putting in the seed-- A sonnet. A meditation on creation/ the creator/ the earth/ mother earth/ springtime's fruit as "love child of nature"...the physical act of planting and of sex results in new life...
Monday, July 19, 2010
The Ambassadors
The Ambassadors
I began listening to an audio book version of Henry James's The Ambassadors on my trip back to Oklahoma over the fourth of July weekend. This book, according to the introduction of the edition I have, is a sort of connection between the Victorian and the Modern Novel. In many passages, listening to this very civilized work, I felt a sameness to two summers ago listening to Ulysses. The samenes is not in terms of the story structure or lack thereof, or in terms of the images or the types of characters, but there is a sameness, in certain passages, in terms of language. There is-- and the introduciton to the book pointed to this-- a similarity with any of the Moderns (Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf) who use a stream of consciouness technique. James's novel has that feel in parts, but at the same time it is simply not as hard to follow as Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury or Mrs. Dalloway. James, perhaps, has not completely gone over to the experimental techniques so common among modernist authors, but is breaking groung all the same, and so really bridges victorian 19th centruy fiction with modern 20th century writing.
It is interesting the way James always details the psychological aspects of his characters. I've heard the argument that his brother William was a gifted psychologist who could write like a novelist, and so made his ideas more accesible, and that Henry was a novelist who could think like a psychologist, and so created amazing psychological depth among his characters. This fixation on the internal working of characters' minds, even the acknowledgment of a subconscious world, again prefigures much that is great in modernist novels.
I am very interested in some of the thematic contents of this novel: the 'innocent' American (Strether) coming into contact with the more cultured, refined Europeans; the idea of 'living one's life' to some fullness, conflict between personal pleasure and duty. That idea of enjoying one's life occured to James after a conversation with a friend, novelist William Dean Howells. Howell's had traveled to Paris to visit his son, and had been positively ovewhelmed by the european capital, and had come to doubt whether or not he had really lived-- if he had not wasted his life.
I began listening to an audio book version of Henry James's The Ambassadors on my trip back to Oklahoma over the fourth of July weekend. This book, according to the introduction of the edition I have, is a sort of connection between the Victorian and the Modern Novel. In many passages, listening to this very civilized work, I felt a sameness to two summers ago listening to Ulysses. The samenes is not in terms of the story structure or lack thereof, or in terms of the images or the types of characters, but there is a sameness, in certain passages, in terms of language. There is-- and the introduciton to the book pointed to this-- a similarity with any of the Moderns (Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf) who use a stream of consciouness technique. James's novel has that feel in parts, but at the same time it is simply not as hard to follow as Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury or Mrs. Dalloway. James, perhaps, has not completely gone over to the experimental techniques so common among modernist authors, but is breaking groung all the same, and so really bridges victorian 19th centruy fiction with modern 20th century writing.
It is interesting the way James always details the psychological aspects of his characters. I've heard the argument that his brother William was a gifted psychologist who could write like a novelist, and so made his ideas more accesible, and that Henry was a novelist who could think like a psychologist, and so created amazing psychological depth among his characters. This fixation on the internal working of characters' minds, even the acknowledgment of a subconscious world, again prefigures much that is great in modernist novels.
I am very interested in some of the thematic contents of this novel: the 'innocent' American (Strether) coming into contact with the more cultured, refined Europeans; the idea of 'living one's life' to some fullness, conflict between personal pleasure and duty. That idea of enjoying one's life occured to James after a conversation with a friend, novelist William Dean Howells. Howell's had traveled to Paris to visit his son, and had been positively ovewhelmed by the european capital, and had come to doubt whether or not he had really lived-- if he had not wasted his life.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
Reading Frost this afternoon...much focus on mortality in poems like an old man's winters night...midlife in the oven bird...death or afterlife in after apple picking...the nature of decisions and rationalizing them in the road not taken...good stuff, very relevant to me at this point....love the line about highway dust over everything from the Oven Bird...sounds contemporary like Bob Dylan...(I was thinking of the line Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues...you can tell by the way she smiles...from Visions of Johanna)
...then going to Starbucks in Nob Hill to meet a friend for coffee...we talked some about the parallels between literary and architectural periods...I have tried several times to explain Postmodernism to someone not interested in literary theory, and I suppose the fact that I don't really understand it doesn't help, but I was able to talk with some coherence about modernism, and some of the parallels between literature and architecture really struck me:
-- a certain adherence (awareness at least) of the classic structure and design, not a neo-classicism, but a sort of nod to tradition, form, and structure...
--a reaction against excess and flourish of Victorian styles
--challenged by post-modernists on the grounds of a certain sterility and-- probably because of its attention to some elements of classical form-- elitism.
This is interesting, and I can really see much of this in modernist literature, though I don't know enough about architecture to recognize whether or not these parallels are real. I do know that, in literature people like Joyce, Eliot, Pound all seemed acutely aware of the western tradition in literature and not at all throwing everything away, or even deconstructing, but refashioning things, not to destroy literature, but to reevaluate literature and to make it (as Pound said) new, in order to make it relevant once again.
What I can see in modernist buildings is new materials (concrete, glass, steel), but lots of right angles and recognizable shapes. I am thinking of the Seagram Building in NYC and IBM Plaza in Chicago. Isn't there a parallel to many modernist writers' works: Joyce certainly covers some very 'new material' in Ulysses--defecation, menstruation, fornication; DH Lawrence (need I say more). So the material is new, but in many ways the form is the same (or at least recognizably based on a traditional form). Ulysses is an Odyssey, albeit a modern rendering. DH Lawrence's novels (Son and Lovers, Lady Chatterley's Lover) don't seem overly experimental in terms of form, but the material (theme, subject) is new.
And finally, in this post, we come full circle...back to Frost. I memorized Frost poems in the eight grade with Mr. Ehler's and I think I always kept the poet in my mind as a nice, respectable, patriotic, Pastoral. But, I have to say, I see something else now. The form, the language, the rhythm all seem familiar, easy, even lovable. There is something more though-- something, if not sinister, highly sceptical about Frost. You see it in a poem like the road not taken, for example. I think it is funny how that poem has been held up as a 'hallmark card' of poems-- celebrating the visionary American, the Yankee Pioneer, who's not afraid to take the less traveled path and stick to her guns. In reality, whichever path we take, the other paths in life all become 'Roads not taken'. Is this poem mainly a poem about how humans rationalize their own decisions, even though they know the other path might have been "just as fair"? And then they tell it "with a sigh" because they are aware of their own rationalizing dishonesty.
The other thing which comes to mind with much Robert Frost poetry is the possibility for a sort of Taoist/ Buddhist interpretation. I am reminded of the old Buddhist parable that is called Se-ung-ji-ma in Korean. I know it through Korean and through a children's book called Zen Shorts
. The story can be summarized as follows: A man finds a horse. His neighbors say good. He says maybe. His son falls from the horse and breaks a leg. Neighbors say bad. Man says maybe. This goes on and on, illlustrating that good and bad are all about perceptions. I think this is easily relatable to The Road Not Taken (if we take the poem as ironic).
...then going to Starbucks in Nob Hill to meet a friend for coffee...we talked some about the parallels between literary and architectural periods...I have tried several times to explain Postmodernism to someone not interested in literary theory, and I suppose the fact that I don't really understand it doesn't help, but I was able to talk with some coherence about modernism, and some of the parallels between literature and architecture really struck me:
-- a certain adherence (awareness at least) of the classic structure and design, not a neo-classicism, but a sort of nod to tradition, form, and structure...
--a reaction against excess and flourish of Victorian styles
--challenged by post-modernists on the grounds of a certain sterility and-- probably because of its attention to some elements of classical form-- elitism.
This is interesting, and I can really see much of this in modernist literature, though I don't know enough about architecture to recognize whether or not these parallels are real. I do know that, in literature people like Joyce, Eliot, Pound all seemed acutely aware of the western tradition in literature and not at all throwing everything away, or even deconstructing, but refashioning things, not to destroy literature, but to reevaluate literature and to make it (as Pound said) new, in order to make it relevant once again.
What I can see in modernist buildings is new materials (concrete, glass, steel), but lots of right angles and recognizable shapes. I am thinking of the Seagram Building in NYC and IBM Plaza in Chicago. Isn't there a parallel to many modernist writers' works: Joyce certainly covers some very 'new material' in Ulysses--defecation, menstruation, fornication; DH Lawrence (need I say more). So the material is new, but in many ways the form is the same (or at least recognizably based on a traditional form). Ulysses is an Odyssey, albeit a modern rendering. DH Lawrence's novels (Son and Lovers, Lady Chatterley's Lover) don't seem overly experimental in terms of form, but the material (theme, subject) is new.
And finally, in this post, we come full circle...back to Frost. I memorized Frost poems in the eight grade with Mr. Ehler's and I think I always kept the poet in my mind as a nice, respectable, patriotic, Pastoral. But, I have to say, I see something else now. The form, the language, the rhythm all seem familiar, easy, even lovable. There is something more though-- something, if not sinister, highly sceptical about Frost. You see it in a poem like the road not taken, for example. I think it is funny how that poem has been held up as a 'hallmark card' of poems-- celebrating the visionary American, the Yankee Pioneer, who's not afraid to take the less traveled path and stick to her guns. In reality, whichever path we take, the other paths in life all become 'Roads not taken'. Is this poem mainly a poem about how humans rationalize their own decisions, even though they know the other path might have been "just as fair"? And then they tell it "with a sigh" because they are aware of their own rationalizing dishonesty.
The other thing which comes to mind with much Robert Frost poetry is the possibility for a sort of Taoist/ Buddhist interpretation. I am reminded of the old Buddhist parable that is called Se-ung-ji-ma in Korean. I know it through Korean and through a children's book called Zen Shorts
. The story can be summarized as follows: A man finds a horse. His neighbors say good. He says maybe. His son falls from the horse and breaks a leg. Neighbors say bad. Man says maybe. This goes on and on, illlustrating that good and bad are all about perceptions. I think this is easily relatable to The Road Not Taken (if we take the poem as ironic).
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
BC Southam on Eliot
I picked up BC Southam’s Selected Poems of TS Eliot at the CNM Library last week, along with a collection of essay on Eliot, edited by Harold Bloom. Some basic observations from Southam’s book so far:
• TS Eliot’s poetry is difficult and this book’s purpose is largely focused on helping readers deal with the difficulty caused by the many and varied allusions and quotations in his works.
• Eliot defends his own complexity as a reaction to the complexity of the modern world.
• Eliot attempted to “assemble the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole”… I like this idea, and I was thinking about Ezra Pound’s dictum “make it new”… some discussion of making it new in order, not to destroy art, but to make it more relevant, and essential to a new generation was included.
• There is much discussion of Eliot’s debt to the French Symbolist poets who he discovered while a student at Harvard. He learned technique and also an appreciation that his life did indeed provide poetic material out of unpoetic circumstances. He was particularly fond of and influenced by Laforgue.
Some of Southam’s ideas about Prufrock:
• Mentions parallels to Dante (Ironic, pathetic, comic), and parallels clearly some of the language in the poem to Laforgue’s language.
• Also outlines influence of Bergson
• And the echoes of Ecclesiastes (the notion of return and a time for everything)…this was a very popular theme of Americans in Paris in the 20s it seems, as Hemingway used it as the epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises.
Some of Southam’s ideas about Geronition:
• Wyndham Lewis observed Geronition is a close relative of Prufrock.
• Connection to war poets who “took up theme of youth dying at the front—while old men (Geronition like) remained securely…at home”.
• The image of “Christ the Tiger” is interesting
• Concept of history is reminiscent of Joyce’s Stephen Deadalus saying “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Some of Southam’s ideas about Sweeney Among the Nightingales
• Title may be a reference to Ode to a Nightingale
• “nightingale is also a slang term for prostitutes…Eliot once remarked that the action of the poem takes place in a dive…”
• Eliot has been quoted as saying, “all I wanted to achieve with this poem is a sense of foreboding…” It does seem to have a very strong sense of something impending.
• TS Eliot’s poetry is difficult and this book’s purpose is largely focused on helping readers deal with the difficulty caused by the many and varied allusions and quotations in his works.
• Eliot defends his own complexity as a reaction to the complexity of the modern world.
• Eliot attempted to “assemble the most disparate and unlikely material to make a new whole”… I like this idea, and I was thinking about Ezra Pound’s dictum “make it new”… some discussion of making it new in order, not to destroy art, but to make it more relevant, and essential to a new generation was included.
• There is much discussion of Eliot’s debt to the French Symbolist poets who he discovered while a student at Harvard. He learned technique and also an appreciation that his life did indeed provide poetic material out of unpoetic circumstances. He was particularly fond of and influenced by Laforgue.
Some of Southam’s ideas about Prufrock:
• Mentions parallels to Dante (Ironic, pathetic, comic), and parallels clearly some of the language in the poem to Laforgue’s language.
• Also outlines influence of Bergson
• And the echoes of Ecclesiastes (the notion of return and a time for everything)…this was a very popular theme of Americans in Paris in the 20s it seems, as Hemingway used it as the epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises.
Some of Southam’s ideas about Geronition:
• Wyndham Lewis observed Geronition is a close relative of Prufrock.
• Connection to war poets who “took up theme of youth dying at the front—while old men (Geronition like) remained securely…at home”.
• The image of “Christ the Tiger” is interesting
• Concept of history is reminiscent of Joyce’s Stephen Deadalus saying “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Some of Southam’s ideas about Sweeney Among the Nightingales
• Title may be a reference to Ode to a Nightingale
• “nightingale is also a slang term for prostitutes…Eliot once remarked that the action of the poem takes place in a dive…”
• Eliot has been quoted as saying, “all I wanted to achieve with this poem is a sense of foreboding…” It does seem to have a very strong sense of something impending.
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