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.