"Only through time time is conquered"

Right, so time-lapse photography is possibly one of the coolest things I've ever seen or ever will, in my opinion. And how neat is it that T.S. Eliot had a time-lapse portrait given his fixation with the theme of time, the still point, the Bradleian view of history....

Honestly, I don't think I've ever seen something that quite so niftily illustrates Eliot's conception of history as a "pattern of timeless moments" (see Little Gidding, V). Each moment is an independent reality, yet (paradoxically) dependent on all of history, in the sense that the newness of the moment in some sense consists in its reevaluation and recreation of all that has gone before. It might sound like incredibly sketchy philosophy if you're not familiar with it, but it's really quite sensible; I'm just not expressing it very well. But the basic idea is that all that has gone before forms a new reality when united with the new moment, which must necessarily alter our understanding of what has gone before.

It's a sort of relativism that asserts the relativity of human knowledge while never once doubting the power of faith and God to provide us with the truth. On their own, humans will never be able to discern the "pattern" of the world because the progression of time ensures that the pattern is new in every moment; as he expresses it in East Coker II:

There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

Yet the fact that for the Creator of time "all time is eternally present" (Burnt Norton, I) means that for Him, the pattern is eternal, and eternally revolving about the "still point". This very still point is then the reason that humans are (again, paradoxically) able to have knowledge of Reality; because this "still point" is no less than the Incarnate Word, whose entry into the world gives us a sure "point of view" that does not falsify by virtue of its limitation, unlike all fallible human viewpoints. The Church which preserves the Truth of Christ's revelation is then the only path to sure knowledge for a human.

That's the basic philosophical idea behind all of Eliot's poetry, though it's most perfectly developed in the Quartets when he begins to emphasize not merely the necessity of purgation and courage to achieve faith, but more importantly the way of love. Things just become ridiculously beautiful towards the end there.

But here I am with six papers to write and I can't start getting into all of that now. I just really liked this picture when I saw it for a variety of reasons and thought I'd post it. Maybe I'll try to do a more thorough explication of the Bradleian position one of these days, or better still, of the Bergsonian position, which I understand somewhat better because I've actually read a significant amount of Bergson.


Familiar compound ghost?
(Little Gidding II)

T.S. Eliot: The Scholarly Conversation

The infamous and to some extent deliberately cultivated difficulty of T.S. Eliot's highly allusive poetry has produced an onslaught of critical attempts to elucidate it in light of one “crucial” insight or another. These attempts have been more or less successful according to the degree in which they actually address the main thrust of his poetic legacy instead of wandering off, as Heaney complains is too often the case, in pursuit of one or another esoteric reference to literary tradition.

The poems are in many respects pastiches of literary reference, and though critics agree on the ubiquity of such references, they disagree about whether a comprehensive understanding of these is necessary to understand the poetry. Gardner and Heaney present compelling cases for initially encountering the poetry on its own ground, an attractively unpretentious approach when one considers the plethora of attempts to read Eliot's entire corpus in terms of some arcane paraphrasing of one dead author or another. Arguments such as Chinitz's regarding the influence of popular song or Lowe's comparison of Raskolnikov and Prufrock—though valuable in some respects—will often give too much weight to a single influence, implicitly suggesting that Eliot's work is intrinsically esoteric, accessible only to the scholars who can chase down such references and solve them as one might work out a puzzle. A reasonable balance is found in the work of scholars such as Moody, Manganiello, and Rogers, who admit the power of the allusions to enrich an understanding of the poetry and believe the major ones to be worth pursuing in consequence, but who stop short of reducing the poetry to the sum of its references.

Having studied with some of the leading thinkers of the early twentieth century at Harvard and abroad, Eliot had a clear set of philosophical convictions, and study of these philosophical influences forms a significant subcategory of Eliot criticism. There is less disagreement on this subject than there is about the importance of allusion in his work. Though Heaney still holds the philosophical underpinnings of the poetry to be potentially distracting, critics from Gardner in the 1950s to contemporary writers such as Moody, Perl and Childs have agreed on the relevance of Eliot's philosophy to a comprehension of the intellectual arc of his poetry. Brooker and Childs, authors well-versed in Bergsonism and Bradleanism, substantially treat Eliot's relation to these thinkers, while Perl hones in on the often overlooked influence of Eastern philosophy, all making welcome contributions to the understanding of Eliot's early poetry. Schneider, Clark, and Thomas Howard (not cited here) treat Eliot's later career, when his thought is more completely his own, verifying his new preoccupation with Anglo-Catholic theological concepts such as the Incarnation as well as his continued interest in the concepts of time, history and change. This area of criticism manifests, perhaps because of the general coherency and clarity of Eliot's philosophical theory, a much greater degree of consensus than is often seen among his critics, and is a fertile area of scrutiny.

Less helpful in general is the movement, born of what often seems a voyeuristic interest in Eliot's (largely exaggerated) psychological neuroses, to interpret his work in terms of these biographical details. Däumer, Chinitz, and Cuda speculate on the effect of Eliot’s “inhibitions” regarding domineering women, romantic assignations, and medical operations to support their interpretations of his work, and the result is generally unsatisfying as a macroscopic explanation, though occasionally interesting in details.

While literary, philosophical, and biographical influences are common focuses, the body of criticism suffers from a relative dearth of comprehensive treatments of Eliot’s prosody. Gardner and Hartman excepted, many critics seem bewildered by the peculiar metricality of Eliot’s “free verse.” When critics such as Rogers, Sanders, and Unger make incidental forays into prosodic issues, the analysis of one will often differ wildly from that of another, and it is often true that allegations that, for instance, a certain passage “is” an abortive sonnet are not backed up and seem presupposed for the sake of the main argument.

T.S. and Valerie Eliot

Charles Hartman on "The Discovery of Meter"

Hartman's examination of the manifestations of meter in free verse focuses on Eliot's poetry in this chapter, in which he defines his verse as vers liberé and attempts to discover precisely what qualities characterize vers liberé. Eliot's prosody seeks to draw out the rhythmic elements of common speech, and Hartman identifies syntactic parallelism and counterpoint as important features of this attempt. Particularly important is Eliot's practice of approximating stricter metrical forms before departing from them: it is a truly “loosened up” verse in the sense that he allows himself to move in and out of this formal metrical structure. The only major aspect of Hartman's argument at which I cavil is his categorical denunciation of Helen Gardner's evaluation of certain of Eliot's passages as accentual. Hartman asserts that Gardner has fallen prey to the “fallacy of calling 'accentual' all verse which has accents” (115), but never backs this statement up, presenting an “alternative” understanding of Eliot's prosody which is actually quite compatible with the idea that Eliot occasionally takes advantage of the incantatory effect of heavily accentual verse, such as in the “Lady of Silences” passage in “Ash Wednesday.” On the whole, however, he is laudably faithful to direct textual evidence in his discussion of the basic rhythmicality and musicality of Eliot's syntactic form.


Commenting on the chapter from Free Verse: An Essay in Prosody; overall a quite recommendable book.

Paul Douglass on “Eliot's Cats: Serious Play behind the Playful Seriousness"

Douglass turns his attention to one of Eliot's works that has been almost wholly ignored in the critical world. The Book of Practical Cats is not mere fluff to be dispensed with entirely, Douglass argues, but is, despite being intended for children, a work which reflects many aspects of Eliot's corpus and which, by its very simplicity, sheds light on some of these. The rhythm of the poems in this collection not only displays Eliot's metric virtuosity, but unveils many of the techniques he uses elsewhere, such as his affinity for four-stress rhythm and his tendency to have anapestic and dactylic rhythms slip in and out of one another to heighten the lilting feeling of a passage. In terms of content, the Book of Practical Cats, with its character sketches of uncannily human felines, aims to explore the “battle between the ego and social self” (115), which Eliot reads as a preoccupation of the Quartets as well. The book “accepts its own fascination with human imperfection” (115) and through its rollicking tone, its rhythm, and its clever but benevolent satire, choreographs a jubilant dance that shows the reader the possibility of rejoicing in the foible-ridden but wonderfully variegated ranks of humanity.

You know you're from Maine if...

(These are, for the most part, excellent.)

1.. you've had arguments over the comparative quality of Fried Dough.
2.. you get four inches of snow and you call it "a dusting."
3.. you don't understand why there aren't fried clamshacks elsewhere in the country.
4.. you know what an Irving is and the location of 15 of them.
5.. you knew all the flavors at Perry's Nut House.
6.. your car is covered in yellow-green dust in May.
7.. you can drive the Augusta rotaries without slowing down.
8.. you've hung out at a gravel pit.
9.. you think a mosquito could be a species of bird.
10.. you once skipped school and went to Bar Harbor, Old Orchard Beach or Reid State Park.
11.. you've almost fallen asleep driving between Houlton and Presque Isle.
12.. you know how to pronounce Calais and Machias.
13.. you've gone to a Grange bean supper.
14.. at least once in your life, a seagull pooped on your head.
15.. at least once in your life you've said, "It smells like the mill in here." Yep
16.. there's a fruit and vegetable stand within 10 minutes of your house.
17.. your idea of a traffic jam is being the second car at the stoplight.
18.. you wonder out loud if the state can just close its borders to people from away.
19.. your house converts to a B&B every July & August for people from away that you happen to know.
20.. all year long you're tracking sand in the house; from the beach in the summer and the roads and sidewalks in the winter.
21.. you have a front door but no steps to get to it.
22.. you use "wicked" as a multi-purpose part of speech.
23.. you have to have the sand cleaned out of your brake system every spring.
24.. you do the majority of your shopping out of Uncle Henry's.
25.. you've ditched the car on the side of the road somewhere because you thought you saw some good fiddleheads!
26.. you've had a vacation from school just to help the family pick potatoes.
27.. you know a lobster pot is a trap, not a kettle. Of course!
28.. you know not to plant tender crops until the last full moon in May.
29.. when you go to the dump and bring back more than you brought.
30.. when people from "away" ask for directions and you intentionally led them in the opposite direction they wanted to go.
31.. you watch "Murder She Wrote" and snicker at the stupid fake accents.
32.. you know how to find the rope swing at the quarry.
33.. you take the New Hampshire toll personally.
34.. you feel really really good when you cross the Piscatiqua River bridge into Kittery.
35.. you always wave when you see a Maine license plate in another state.
36.. a roll of duct tape and a can of flat black spray paint will get your car to pass inspection.
37.. you have to replace your mailbox yearly because ofthe town plow.
38.. you know how to get from Cumberland to Fryeburg via the "Egypt Road".
39.. you can remember when the "Egypt Road" was a dirt track through the woods.
40.. when you're supposed to dress up, you wear plaid flannel with a tie.
41.. you know that Moody's Diner does NOT take credit cards!
42.. you actually miss the fifteen below zero mornings in winter (that have been eliminated by the greenhouse effect) because you enjoyed running or walking to workin the silent crystal stillness, punctuated by an idling car engine as the owner waited indoors for the car to warm up before his mad dash from warmth to warmth, and your lungs did not freeze; thank you verymuch for your concern.
43.. the word "stove" refers to what you did to the right front fender of your truck after you've had a wicked bring-up on a rock.
44.. there's too much "stuff" in your 2 "cah" garage to get either of your cars into it.
45.. you know the smell of Woodsmens fly dope.
46.. you eat supper at night and dinner at noon.
47.. your idea of a traffic jam is ten cars waiting to pass a tractor on the highway.
48.. "vacation" means going to the Allagash for the weekend.
49.. you measure distance in hours. Still do!
50.. you know several people who have hit moose more than once.
51.. you often switch from "heat" to "A/C" in the same day.
52.. you use a down comforter in the summer.
53.. your grandparents drive at 65 mph through 13 feet of snow during a raging blizzard, without flinching.
54.. you see people wearing hunting clothes at social events.
55.. you install security lights on your house and garage and leave them both unlocked.
56.. you carry jumper cables in your car and know how to use them.
57.. there are 4 empty cars running in the parking lot at the convenience store at any given time.
58.. you design your kid's Halloween costume to fit over a snowsuit.
59.. driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow.
60.. you know all 4 seasons: almost wintah, wintah, still wintah and construction.
61.. you know what it means when someone says they are going upstreet.
62.. you can actually see the milky way. Yes
63.. you can use your brights on the highway. Yes
64.. L.L. Bean's not just a store, it's a way of life. Absolutely
65.. you encounter any sign reading: "Next Exit: 246 miles".
66.. the nearest mall is 2 hours away.
67.. you have to yield for snowmobiles.
68.. the state closes down at five o'clock.
69.. "The City" means exclusively Portland. Yes
70.. "salt damage" is a viable insurance claim.
71.. all of the traffic lights blink yellow at 10 o'clock at night.
72.. it's not a storm, it's a nor'eastah.
73.. you say room and people think you are saying rum.
74.. you can buy a minivan with four wheel drive and chained tires.
75.. all addresses start with RR#
76.. a rest stop means a pit toilet and a picnic table.
77.. you know Moxie isn't a woman's magazine.
78.. you go "off-roading" before and after school.
79.. you eat ice cream with flavors like 'MooseTracks" and "Maine Black Bear".
80.. you know that a chocolate doughnut is not a white doughnut with chocolate frosting.
81.. you call any long sandwich an "Italian".
82.. you eat potato chips with flavors such as "clamdip", "ketchup" and "dill pickle".
83.. the smell of clam flats at low tide, while disgusting, brings back fond memories of childhood trips to the beach.
84.. you call the basement "downcellah."
85.. your grandmother called shorts "shots".
86.. you live in a mobile home and have a brand new car and a satellite dish.
87.. you see a beat up Ford Pickup with a bumper sticker that reads: "I'd rather be bowhunting."
88.. you can hum the tune of "You should have bought it when you saw it at Mardens?"
89..You know what the Old Port is.

Manganiello on Dante and Eliot

Citing Pound's acknowledgment of Eliot as "the true Dantescan voice" of the modern world, Manganiello explores Dante's influence on Eliot, outlining Eliot's literary, thematic, and theological/philosophical indebtedness to the Florentine poet (Qtd. Manganiello, 1). Manganiello draws a connection between Eliot's preoccupation with "Death By Water" and Dante's Ulysses, recognizing in both the same core recognition of the dangers of seeking without faith, but finding Eliot's development of this theme in "Marina" to mirror more closely the pilgrim Dante's own journey. The motif of exodus which Dante uses throughout his Purgatorio similarly informs "The Waste Land" and "The Hollow Men," developing into garden imagery reminiscent of Dante's Earthly Paradise with the utterance of the Word in the desert. Underlying these thematic similarities is, however, a deeper correspondence between the two poets, manifested in their parallel political views, that consists in their common understanding of experience in time as having meaning only in relation to the timelessness of the "love which moves the sun and the other stars." Manganiello's argument focuses on Eliot's major poems, but takes into account his essays and minor poems to assemble a complete model of his thought; he also balances close readings of passages that show a peculiar degree of linguistic similarity to Dante's work with a fine attention to the philosophical arc of the poetry.

Marie de France

One of the poets whom we're studying in Medieval Lit. I highly recommend her lais, which are both amusing and insightful. To anyone interested in fairy tales, they're especially interesting, because many of the elements of the classic European fairy tales can be found here.

Not so shabby...

Eliot in general

Erudite and imbued throughout with a highly sophisticated wit, T.S. Eliot’s body of poetry undergoes a dramatic conversion in tone from a sense of pessimism regarding the disjointed state of the modern world in his early work to a humble realization that the ideal for which he longs is unattainable in this life. The poetic career that began with the bleak picture of J. Alfred Prufrock’s utter inarticulateness in the face of the “overwhelming question” of modern urban life ends with a sense of joyful anticipation of the “Still point,” the true fulfillment of the Bradleian “Absolute” that so enthralled him as a student of philosophy (“Prufrock” 10; “Burnt Norton” 2.16).

The sense of conflict in Eliot’s poetry derives from his acute desire for the unification of society in a coherent and meaningful whole and his equally acute awareness that modern life, as quintessentially demonstrated in the fragmentation of the modern city (one of Eliot’s primary images), fails to live up to this ideal. The dramatic quality of his poetry arises from this very tension and is perhaps most apparent in “The Waste Land,” where an essentially dramatic structure—the quest motif—underlies the lyric passages so that their meaning is only comprehensible in light of a certain action or (initially) lack thereof. Contributing to the sense of conflict is Eliot’s ability to ventriloquize a multiplicity of voices, a talent which adds to the dramatic quality of the poetry and which reaches its acme in “The Waste Land.” Not only does he make use of a variety of characters’ voices, such as that of Tiresias, the typist, or Madame Sosostris to drive home the sensibility of conflict; he also ventriloquizes other artists through his ubiquitous allusions to deepen the ambiguity of his images and even of his metric forms. These forms and images are revealed to be peculiarly multifaceted as we recognize allusions which layer the simple picture of the girl in the hyacinth garden with overtones of Tristan and Iseult’s tragic love, or which put the prose poem “Hysteria” in the context of Baudelaire’s similar experimentation with form that led to the exploration of the labyrinthine modern city in the prose poems of “Spleen de Paris.” Through this cubist method of fragmenting his images and forcing us to make unintuitive connections between, say, Sweeney and Agamemnon (“Sweeney Among the Nightingales”) or between Queen Elizabeth I and the mundane typist (“The Waste Land”), Eliot is pushing the reader to an acute perception of the modern world’s lack of cultural unity. His bathetic juxtaposition of images of grand cosmic significance with startlingly mundane, even sordid scenes of modern life reinforces the tone of pessimism with which he treats the emptiness of a world preoccupied with “the profit and the loss” and disconnected from tradition (WL.IV, 3).

A spectacular shift in tone characterizes Eliot’s post-conversion poetry. He continues to recognize the lack of cultural unity and accompanying societal malaise, but the quest of “What the Thunder Said” has been transformed into a more personal journey towards the emptiness which will allow God to fulfill him. Corresponding to this shift in tone is a move towards a more resolute, calm diction and imagery. Eliot retains his allusiveness, but the diction of the highly prophet of tradition almost arrogant in his education largely disappears in favor of one who, like his Magi describing their journey with a simplicity that lends conviction to their account, speaks in a more down-to-earth syntax about a truth which would make a mockery of mere eloquence. The form of his poetry consequently moves towards a more conversational accentually-based meter, imitating other metrical patterns rarely and, when doing so, drawing on a highly significant association in a manner that enhances the musicality of the sequence, as we see in “Dry Salvages” II. Moreover the allusions no longer shock the reader with a kaleidoscopic picture of the fragmented world. The words of Lancelot Andrewes (Journey of the Magi) or echoes of the Bhagavad Gita (“Dry Salvages”) do not aim at the violent juxtapositions of the Sweeney poems or “The Waste Land,” but are rather presented as objects of the poet’s meditation; they are not examples of the modern world’s dissolution, but rather form part of a conversation in which Eliot climbs to higher apprehension of his faith through the work of these “dead master[s]” (“Little Gidding). Eliot’s poetry reflects his realization that through the modern world suffers from this fragmentation, the Incarnation of Christ provides a real solution and puts mankind into contact with the ideal that is the whole of reality.

Donald Childs on T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"

Prefacing his article with an argument for “Rhapsody on a Windy Night”'s temporal antecedence to Eliot's rejection of Bergsonism, Childs performs a cogent close reading of “Rhapsody” in terms of Bergson's thought. The moon and the street lamp—the two light sources of the poem—both prompt the speaker to meditation, affecting his memory, but the influence of the former is importantly opposed to that of the latter. The lamp illuminates certain objects with a clear but circumscribed light, and its effect is to stir up what Bergson calls the practical memory (479)— memory limited and defined by the intellect's association of the past with a specific object of present experience. The moon, however, dissolves the street lamp's string of associations and as the lamp dies down the night's images are understood in terms of a medley of disparate experiences: this is the influence of Bergson's "pure memory" (479), memory understood in terms of its entire indeterminate content. The end of the poem Childs reads as a painful return of the practical intellect after a near-mystical approach to apprehension of the whole, an apprehension which, he notes, will be the consistent object of Eliot's quest for the ideal.

Eliot by Wyndham Lewis

Anthony Cuda on Eliot: "T.S. Eliot's Etherized Patient"

From its first appearance in "Prufrock" to its reemergence in "East Coker" IV, the trope of the "patient etherized upon a table" is central to Eliot's poetry, Cuda argues; its development occurs in the undercurrent of conflict between passivity as a danger to the individual's spiritual progress and its necessity as a precursor to surrender to the divine. Passivity in "Prufrock" is to be feared: the image of the patient intensifies the sense of the vulnerability of the person left open to the action of random influence. Later theological development augments Eliot's awareness of the dangers associated with passivity- when allowed free reign in the conscience, pernicious influences have a disastrous effect. Yet Eliot's simultaneously growing recognition of the necessity of humble self-surrender to God, as particularly shown in "East Coker," creates a drastic conflict within his understanding of what it means to be passive. Eliot's eventual conclusion is that the terror of surrender can be accompanied by great spiritual joy if the passivity is a freely chosen acceptance of purgation; passivity is thus "transfigured in the light of the divine" (413). Cuda's argument hangs together, but is not improved by several significant departures into the realm of psychological/ biographical speculation which do no more than give a less-than-compelling recapitulation of the points which Cuda accurately proves from the poetry itself. Such digressions serve to make excessively long an otherwise creditable essay.

Eliot at the blackboard

Elisabeth Däumer on T.S. Eliot

One of the articles I recently read for the 25-source annotated bibliography I'm writing for Junior Poet is “Charlotte Stearns Eliot and "Ash-Wednesday"'s Lady of Silences” by Elisabeth Däumer. It's not the best article on Eliot I've read thus far, being rather too focused on biographical detail and psychological speculation to be entirely convincing (reading too much biographical detail into an artist's work, especially one as consciously impersonal as Eliot always raises a red flag).

Basically Däumer aims to explain Eliot's depiction of women in “Ash Wednesday” as the poetic resolution of his highly ambiguous response to his mother's significant influence on the young Eliot's personal and artistic development. Compared to the semi-misogynistic portrayal of women in his earlier poetry, “Ash Wednesday”'s picture of the “Lady of Silences” and the “Holy Mother” is much more positive, describing womanhood in terms of the Beatrician/Marian ideal which directs the poet towards heaven. Yet he retains the ambiguity of his relationship with his at times overly influential mother by emphasizing that the women of “Ash Wednesday” are destructive forces as much as they are creative. They must reduce the speaker to a heap of dry bones before their reception of the Word can restore him to life.