T S Eliot – Possibly The Greatest Poet Of The 20th Century
By any measure, my favourite poet of the 20th century is T S Eliot. There’s Auden and Lewis, Thomas and Larkin, even Betjamen; all to my taste and all produced more than Eliot, but more is sometimes less. Never mind your Heaney, your Hughes and your Plath, much less all those dreary women like Angelou and Duffy who were lauded as the century grew old. They were well enough in their way, but their best efforts were as rap to poetry, doggerel to the sublime. Small voices suited only to small and quotidian visions. The legion of European and Caribbean poetasters droning on in self-important, self-congratulatory verse deserve no mention at all, and the popularity of Neruda and Lorca seems to me inexplicable and a sign of terminal decline in the art.
Every line of Eliot’s is filled with allusions and references, as evocative as a haiku to those who have culture. A whole world fractally contained in a few simple lines, changing the way we see the world forever by calling forth an infinite series of images, like a binomial expansion.
Tonight, in memory of my grandmother, who always said that April is a treacherous month[1], I have been treating myself to some Eliot as a relief from my labours, and the following connexions amused me.
The Hollow Men is based on four main allusions[2]: Dante’s Divine Comedy (circa 1310-1314), William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599), Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), and an event in English history, the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now‘, which was based on Heart Of Darkness, Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) recites from ‘The Hollow Men‘, bringing a pleasing circularity of allusions. The poem begins;
The Hollow Men
‘Mistah Kurtz-he dead A penny for the Old Guy
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom Remember us-if at all-not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.’
And ends with the well-known lines, (and how fitting that so many know these words without the faintest notion of from whence they came.)
‘ This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.‘
Which somehow echoes and reminds us of Kurtz’s last words, ‘The horror! the horror!’
And I am reminded of these lines from The Four Quartets, that ring with the bell-tones of truth;
‘So I find words I never thought to speak In streets I never thought I should revisit When I left my body on a distant shore. Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us To purify the dialect of the tribe And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight, Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age To set a crown upon your lifetime’s effort. First, the cold friction of expiring sense Without enchantment, offering no promise But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit As body and soul begin to fall asunder. Second, the conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration Of laughter at what ceases to amuse. And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the shame Of things ill done and done to others’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.’
Perhaps though, I still retain some acceptance to reconcile me to the Wheel of Dhamma,
‘We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.‘
Little Gidding – The Four Quartets.
PS. While Eliot produced vast amounts of reviews and critical works, his poetic output was small, and some might say none the worse for that, quality trumps quantity, after all. However, he might be surprised to discover that by far his most popular work, and that by which he is best known to the general public, was a slim book of humorous verse which vastly outsold his rather gloomy, but profoundly admirable works.
‘The Addressing Of Cats Is A Difficult Matter’. Illustration By Nicholas Bentley For Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats
I refer, of course, to ‘Old Possum’s Book Of Practical Cats‘, which was brought to the attention of the non-reading public by the composer of popular ditties, Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber. I cannot help but feel that there is a delicious irony in that, and one which Eliot himself, with his deep understanding of Buddhism, would have enjoyed with a wry smile on the vanity of human pretensions.
Here are a few more well-known and evocative quotes.
‘April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.’
Opening lines – The Waste Land, T S Eliot. (perhaps Eliot’s greatest work)
And,
“On Margate Sands. I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.”
