He has been a mentor and guide, Virgil to my self-styled Dante. He has been both bête noire and cause célèbre, a source of controversy and a rallying cry. He started something which has yet to fully run its course but at times I fear has caused me to leave him behind.
A few facts and biases I should lay out at the start so this ramble makes some semblance of coherence.
• I wouldn't be writing this blog, I wouldn't have anything more than a passing academic interest in poetry if it weren't for "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." It was the first real poem I ever read, the first thing I couldn't get out of my mind, twisting and turning it around like a cherished puzzle I've never managed to solve.
• Because his poem began my seemingly lifelong passion for other poems, it wasn't just duty but a sort of filial devotion and discipleship that compelled me to devour all his poems, then move to annotations and commentaries on the work, sleuthing out every allusion and quotation like a first-semester seminary student on a NoDoze bender.
• After ingesting that much of the man's influence, his philosophy, even some of his bogus literary criticism, I couldn't help but feel marked by him, like the Apostle Paul wandering in the desert being taught at the feet of the disembodied Lord.
• If this sounds melodramatic and over-pious, that's because it was. I felt baptized in the man's intellect, his poetic voice, his deep scholarship and deeper cynicism.
• In receiving a very evangelical education, I was taught to see a very simple narrative in the progression of his work. To wit: from the dark adolescent sarcasm of his early Harvard work there came the violent eruption, the one-two Little Boy/Fat Man punch of "The Hollow Men" and "The Waste-Land." Following this catharsis, a spent young man approaching middle age searched for stability and meaning, finding it in the Church of England. The religious struggles of "Ash-Wednesday" finally gave way to the acceptance and beauty of "Journey of the Magi" and "Song for Simeon," then culminating in the difficult but orthodox "Four Quartets."
• This interpretation leaves a lot to be desired, glossing over so many facets of the man from biographical (wife's mental illness and their separation, his subsequent remarriage) to professional (his latter-day turn towards verse dramatist, critical theorist and literary elder statesman) to critical (accusations of misogyny and anti-Semitism in his works). So it's one way to look at the man, but only one, and pretty lame at that.
• Given all this backstory, I find it hard to separate my critical evaluation from the towering influence. It's hard to read lines like "I am tired of my own life/And the lives of those after me" and separate their familiarity and ringing grandeur from what I actually think of them. It's like listening to bells ringing from the church you grew up attending and trying to critique their tone.
• So I'm left with this: Eliot is a father figure to me, someone who served as a poetical model and in some ways a biographical one. He was an expatriate with a world-class education and never-ending artistic ambition; I fancied myself the same. He's a troublesome poet: sometimes dense and allusive, other times ambiguous, purposefully obtuse and deeply troubling. He seems to never have a kind word for women or Jews, though as Henry Higgins puts it, "The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you've ever heard me treat anyone else better." He was certainly a colossus of 20th-century poetry, only Frost or William Carlos Williams could be contenders.
• He was a difficult man creating difficult work that anyone working in the field has to contend with one way or another. He's not out of my system, may never be. I'm grateful and annoyed and confused and in awe of the man. And whatever bad ideas, bad actions, bad points of view he possessed, he still did me a lot of good.
Preludes
T.S. Eliot
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
II
The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.
With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.
III
You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.
IV
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
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