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 I don't see Eliot as hoping to do anything but bring a renewed vigor to, in his estimation, a worn and outdated literary tradition.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"
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