Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Quote of the Day (T. S. Eliot, on How Poets Deal With Their Influences)


“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make into something better, or at least something different.”—American-born British poet-critic-dramatist T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), “Philip Massinger,” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920)

T.S.Eliot was born 130 years ago today in St. Louis. It is hard to think of Missouri giving to the world of literature two figures so different as Mark Twain—folksy, rollicking, and irreverent—and Eliot—deeply reserved and, after his conversion to the Anglican Church, equally religious. 

They may have been mostly sharply differentiated by their influences. Twain’s were orally based—folk and tall tales of the American heartland and West by the likes of Josh Billings, Artemus Ward and Petroleum V. Nasby. (Even a British poet that Twain deeply admired, Robert Browning, was notable for first-person narrative poems, often filled with pitch-black ironic humor.) 

Eliot’s influences were, perhaps, the entire Western canon—starting with Virgil and Dante, but hardly stopping there.

Perhaps Eliot’s most important poem, “The Waste Land” was indisputably his most allusive. It’s the final poem I ever came across with footnotes by the author himself (reportedly at the insistence of his publisher, who feared it would be otherwise incomprehensible to readers). Collectively, these references form a kind of intellectual Baedeker map to the thoughts of this modernist poet—and, eventual Nobel Literature laureate.

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