AFTER WW I: The impersonal, fractured poetic voice

T. S. ELIOT (1888-1965)
INTRODUCTION
--Eliot, the American Briton
--Connections to
The W.W.I Poets
James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence
Victorian Poets--Dramatic Monologue

I: 2289/2364 "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1910-11/1915)
--What we expect from a love song?
--A poem abt self-doubt/a fragmented self

Mvmt I: upstairs, drawing room, "How should I begin?"
Mvmt II: 5 lines; beginning fails
Mvmt III: return to I: "Would it have been worth it?"
Mvmt IV: I'm no Hamlet=I'm a nobody
[notice the beauty of the imagery: fog, mermaids; intensity of alienation]

--Conclusion:
*a poem abt loving loneliness
*manliness = stalling; impotence; inaction
*art = defence against life

II: 2395 "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919)
--Where does a poet stand in relation to his predecessors?
OUT (ie. earlier concepts now under revision by Eliot's aesthetics):
--Originality & original genius
--Emotion recollected in tranquillity
IN:
--Tradition = history = dialectic of past and present
--Impersonality: the poet as creative mind detached from suffering self
--Poet as catalyst of emotions/feelings producing new (detached) compound
[Notice here how the individual effaces himself in the creative process so that his art is less self-expression than it is the catalyzing of the emotions and feelings aroused in the mind by response to the art of others. So paradoxically, the poet is likely to produce the most interesting, original writing when he is responding to the work of his predecessors.]
--Modernism: is it hermetic, ahistorical?

III:2383 "The Hollow Men"(1925)
[The empty shell of Victorian manliness; in this post-World-War-I milieu, life seems disordered, fragmented, with no clear narrative.]
Here I'm gave you a little more than usual because we didn't get very far with this poem before we ran out of time.
Removed: November 2007.