Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on ‘Half the Harm That is Done in This World’)

“Half the harm that is done in this world
Is due to people who want to feel important.
They don’t mean to do harm — but the harm does not interest them.
Or they do not see it, or they justify it
Because they are absorbed in the endless struggle
To think well of themselves.” —American-born British poet-critic-playwright—and Nobel Literature laureate—T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), The Cocktail Party (1950)

Flashback, December 1922: T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ Reflects Disillusionment of an Age—and Its Creator’s

Six years ago, as the hours of the old year ticked away, I rushed to finish writing about a significant literary milestone: the 500^th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia. That book was so influential—such a revolution in the history of Western thought—that it would have been shameful nor for me to take note of it.

I feel the same way about The Waste Land. While More dared to imagine an ideal society of the future, T.S. Eliot anatomized his contemporary world—a post-WWI environment with its illusions of peace, safety, and even belief in a higher spiritual power rudely dashed.

In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot propounded his belief that poetry should be “impersonal”—i.e., for a separation of a poet as a man and a poet as an artist. But the personal drama in his own life inevitably colored the atmosphere of his most famous poem 

At the time of the composition and publication of The Waste Land, Eliot was involved in a train wreck of a marriage to Vivienne Haigh-Wood. In 1921, following stress occasioned by tensions between his wife and his visiting mother, Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown.

It was during the period of recuperation under psychiatric care that Eliot was able to complete his poem. In the process, he grafted his own disgust, sense of sexual disruption, and emotional and spiritual depletion onto an entire culture.

Google “The Waste Land’ and “humor” and numerous hits will come up in the search. But whatever comedy exists in the poem is of a very black kind indeed.

That may mark its major difference with another modernist masterpiece published in 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses, a novel that encompasses parodies, puns, and sometimes laugh-out-loud snatches of dialogue as Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus trek in 24 hours across an all-too-earthy Dublin. 

In contrast, “The Waste Land,” with its nightmarish evocation of the “Unreal City” of London, is about as funny as a heart attack.

The great turning point in Eliot’s occurred five years later, with his conversion to the Anglican Church. But he had to hit rock bottom before he could make this decision that, he felt, saved his life.

The Waste Land anticipated this turn through its cycle of life, death and rebirth, especially in repeated references to water. (In the section “A Game of Chess,” a husband believes that “The hot water at ten” is just the thing to calm down his wife.)

Writers as various as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott, and Bob Dylan have incorporated Eliot’s themes and concerns into their own work.

Not all this poem’s influence has been benign: Eliot’s textual pyrotechnics—literary allusions, symbolism, untranslated foreign phrases, fragmented conversational slang—have inspired countless dissertations. And Ezra Pound’s major surgery on the manuscript—half left by the wayside after his aggressive editing—probably only succeeded in making a demanding work even more opaque.

At the same time, writing-workshop imitators have seen some of its more arcane passages as a license to conflate obscurity and profundity. The accessibility that poets in the public eye once enjoyed has, not surprisingly, been significantly undermined as a result.

In the end, little of this diminishes the achievement of this ambitious poem. In his 1948 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Eliot said that “while language constitutes a barrier, poetry itself gives us a reason for trying to overcome the barrier…. Partly through his influence on other poets, partly through translation,…partly through readers of his language who are not themselves poets, the poet can contribute toward understanding between peoples.”

Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on Tradition and Poetry)

“[I]f the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.”—American-born English Nobel Literature laureate T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), “Tradition and the Individual Talent: An Essay,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode (1975)

Disruption, we have been told endlessly by self-promoting tech titans, is the spirit of the age. Look around you, in business and politics, to understand the wreckage involved in that philosophy.

In the 20^th century, there may have been no greater disruption than World War I. I don’t think that it’s coincidental that its aftermath saw the publication of what Robert Crawford, in his 2015 biography Young Eliot, termed his subject’s “greatest manifesto, his ‘programme for the métier of poetry.’”

This passing year marks the centennial of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” a groundbreaking piece of literary criticism that appeared in the September and December 1919 issues of The Egoist. In it, T.S. Eliot argued that “the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” His second point was more problematic: that a poet should be “impersonal,” acting, in effect, as a “receptacle” of past images, phrases and feelings so as to create “a new art emotion.”

The extent to which Eliot himself could be “impersonal” in his work is debatable, as Crawford outlines in some detail. But he certainly would use his feelings about tradition in a time of displacement as he shortly began to work on The Waste Land, perhaps the keystone of modernist poetry.

Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, on ‘Gus: The Theatre Cat’)

“His coat's very shabby, he's thin as a rake,

And he suffers from palsy that makes his paw shake.

Yet he was, in his youth, quite the smartest of Cats--

But no longer a terror to mice and to rats.

For he isn't the Cat that he was in his prime;

Though his name was quite famous, he says, in its time.

And whenever he joins his friends at their club

(Which takes place at the back of the neighbouring pub)

He loves to regale them, if someone else pays,

With anecdotes drawn from his palmiest days.

For he once was a Star of the highest degree--

He has acted with Irving, he's acted with Tree.

And he likes to relate his success on the Halls,

Where the Gallery once gave him seven cat-calls.”—American-born British poet, essayist, and playwright T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), “Gus: The Theatre Cat,” in Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)

For nearly the past four decades, theatergoers have also recognized these verses in a quite different context: as the lyrics to a song from the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Cats. But I discovered it first in a far different source: the very fine Philip Larkin-edited anthology, The Oxford Book of 20^th-Century English Verse.

The Eliot poems that I know best are about as funny as heart attacks: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” “Ash Wednesday,” and “Four Quartets,” not to mention the verse drama Murder in the Cathedral. So I couldn’t be more excited to discover this distinct change of pace for him.

Well, somewhat different, anyway. It's not massively somber like so many other Eliot poems, but this certainly has an element of melancholy to it. And take a look at the face in the photo. Hasn't it seen better days? He's not even feared anymore!

Quote of the Day (P. G. Wodehouse, Parodying T.S. Eliot)

“I am a bat that wheels through the air of Fate;

I am a worm that wriggles in a swamp of Disillusionment;

I am a despairing toad;

I have got dyspepsia.”— English humorist P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), “Darkling: A Threnody,” in Meet Mr. Mulliner (1928)

The image of Wodehouse that accompanies this post was taken around 1904.

Quote of the Day (T.S. Eliot, in a Who-Knew?-Moment)

“I have a frightful attack of rheumatism.  I’m afraid I sang too much.”— Poet (The Waste Land) T.S. Eliot, nobody’s idea of a cut-up, writing on the day after a dinner party at his publication the Criterion, in The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 3: 1926-1927, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden (2012)

(Photograph of Eliot, taken one Sunday afternoon in 1923, by Lady Ottoline Morrell, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London)