T.S.Eliot – The Waste Land and beyond.
...a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.
John Keats
Does the outsider have a more acute vision of the English sensibility than those raised within its compass? The work of Joseph Conrad, Henry James, the painter John S. Sargent, and above all T.S. Eliot, suggests that the notion is plausible.
Eliot left America just before the First World War intent on living in Paris, but impending hostilities prevented him from doing so. He subsequently settled in London and published, eight years later, The Waste Land - generally regarded as the greatest poem of the twentieth century. It is a panoply of images, references and startlingly original ideas. At Harvard, Eliot had studied Sanskrit, Indian philosophy and Buddhism, thus he was not shy of including three languages, other than English, in his opus.
As much as one can plot the gestation of any poem, The Waste Land came to Eliot after a serious personal trauma. He did not exclusively rationalise the nervous debilitation he was also experiencing, but attempted to empathise with his emotions in order to understand them. As Nietzsche once wrote, ‘A man must have chaos within him to give birth to a dancing star.’
To many in 1922 who read The Waste Land, such a singularly different approach to poetry was more than disturbing. At the time, Eliot’s method was considered to be extremely radical, even shocking. Those who had previously been used to a more formal rendition were presented with meaning compressed into highly evocative passages of verse, vibrating with a concentrated energy.
I well remember the effect Eliot had upon me when I came to his work as a student in the 1960s. I was both thrilled and mystified yet I knew that above all, here was something great. The eclecticism of The Waste Land perfectly suited the decade I was living through, an era when the established and the experimental met - surprisingly perhaps – more often than not with mutual affection. Confrontation too was certainly not absent, but the blending and merging of classical and modern brought many an artistic triumph, much as The Waste Land had brought to Eliot’s time.
Like Bob Dylan, Eliot had no wish to be ‘the voice of a generation’. Much later he reflected upon the contemporary echoes that many had apparently seen in The Waste Land. He remarked, suitably enigmatically, that the poem was ‘my own illusion of being disillusioned’. The artist may provide questions aplenty but does not see why he must provide answers as well. With Eliot such a view is not entirely disingenuous, he perceived that he was as ‘various and complex’ as the times he lived in.
We might also refer to Dylan’s penchant - like Eliot - for juxtaposing phrases almost for their own sake. New meaning is created where before only a literal interpretation held sway. Eliot is enthused by the opportunity to imply associations on many different levels. He delights in introducing as many ramifications as possible in just a few lines. Various themes, some ostensibly discordant, are assembled in the belief that we may discover that they are linked, albeit not always rationally.
These multifarious allusions - many in the form of direct quotation - are the warp and weft of The Waste Land. Vulgar slang, comic songs, dialect - all is grist to the poetic mill. Contrasting styles - magnificence and squalor - are deliberately juxtaposed. Some may find this jarring, but the admirer of Eliot applauds the poet as magpie - welding and melding his borrowings into new and unique expressions and emotions.
F.H.Bradley, a philosopher who greatly influenced Eliot, proposed that the inclusion of disparate elements aids understanding. A less able poet following this dictum would simply flounder in a maelstrom of ideas. Eliot successfully combined various genres, modes of perception and states of mind in his work. To fully embrace the experience of The Waste Land, the reader must alter completely his approach to words and how they are comprehended.
Time, as Einstein succinctly observed, is an illusion. Even though it may be aligned with space, this too is yet another hall of mirrors. The greatest of poets are never intimidated by any formal mode. Eliot neatly sidesteps conventions as soon as he sees them approaching. He is always ahead of the game; he plays it too well to be anything but the victor in any duel between form and content. To cite Eliot’s contemporary Joyce, the theme dictates the form in Ulysses. It is interesting that Joyce chooses to write a long novel describing one single day in Dublin, while Eliot paints a picture of a whole society in The Waste Land.
Eliot, although a respected critic is - almost perversely - the enemy of much academic discourse. His approach is intrinsically subversive, constantly upending any measured approach to the English Professors’ favoured icons - imagery and symbolism. Eliot’s restless and enquiring mind will not, above all, tolerate the predictable in literature. He is an intellectual, his mind incisive as a scalpel as he pares sum and substance into ever thinner slices of metaphor.
Eliot’s insistence on structure, although not immediately apparent in The Waste Land, is demonstrated by his not permitting an unconsidered sentiment to remain on the page. He is laconic and precise at the same time, and always is the dramatic imagination to the fore. Eliot even questions his religious faith, admitting that personal spirituality is only yet another illusion. By courageously doing this he leads us further into a world where impressions - including doubts - are regarded as significant as any other experience.
His sincerity is never in doubt - his motive always a search for truth. If he seems a little stiff and unwilling to reveal himself that may be attributed, not only to shyness, but also to a deliberately self-effacing approach. Eliot considered, as did Henry James, that it was the business of the artist to surrender his own personality for the sake of bettering his art. James criticised those writers who ‘have a habit of giving themselves away...a betrayal of a sacred office’.
Eliot’s admiration for the metaphysical poets, might suggest that he is a metaphysical poet himself. He is this, but only in the philosophical sense - part of a school that embraces the esoteric. A significant magical adage is that the practioner must acknowledge the presence of both darkness and light within himself and not desire to exorcise those elements which fundamentalist doctrine would regard as ‘evil’. The artist too is constantly involved with paradox and not only in the union of apparently disparate elements. He faces the more basic dilemna of being unable to sensibly account for successes that rely upon apparently contradictory methods.
Yet, Eliot is necessarily a naturalistic writer not a mystical one. Above all he demands clarity, seeing no distinction between thinking and feeling. He questions the notion that poetry must be always intense, and only express white hot emotions. Eliot emphasises that, ‘The business of the poet is not to find new emotions’, and he has a great suspicion of any style that is merely ‘reverberating language’. All must be considered, from the humblest to the most lofty. To remove any element - even the most trivial - is to harm the effect of whole. Eliot is a craftsman – no part of the scene that he describes is ever spurious, it s always an exercise in light and shade.
Eliot’s poetry can be deceptive, almost deceitful. He plays the clown and entertains us, at the same time forcing us to reflect. His kingdom is filled with the exotic and the baroque, and what is to be found there may be terrifying in its bleak or raw quality. Nothing can be ignored or overlooked, for there is purpose in every line that Eliot puts together. In his world a personal epiphany is always possible but to gain such Eliot expects us never to shirk from our personal Quest. We must discover The Grail residing within ourselves.
29. 5. 2011