Hot news -- the new issue of the Battersea Review is out, and available online!
It's got poetry by John Tranter, Alfred Corn, Peter Robinson, Katia Kapovich, and many others, as well as new translations of Georg Trakl, Sophocles, Pushkin, and Mandelshtam.
You'll also find essays on Harvard & Yale poetry culture, Wallace Stevens, Federico Garcia Lorca, Romanticism, and more -- including my essay "T.S. Eliot and the Vanishing Brahmin." Check it out!
Many thanks to U.S. Dhuga and Ben Mazer for putting it all together, and for running the most intelligent and eclectic literary journal of the decade.
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Here's the first paragraph of my essay:
"Noblesse oblige," wrote E.J. Dionne in the Washington Post, "sounds bad until you don't have it any more." Dionne's point was that the American elite no longer seems much interested in legitimating its position by undertaking the kind of social and cultural leadership to which earlier elites had devoted themselves. Dionne's sentiment is apt for our times, but it would have been equally germane to the America in which T.S. Eliot came of age, an America in which an old elite headquartered in Boston found itself shunted aside by a rougher sort altogether: the Carnegies and Fricks and Morgans and Rockefellers, and the equally ruthless men whose stories Lincoln Steffens told in The Shame of the Cities, men who made an art of turning public resources into private profit in the burgeoning metropolises of the nation. Eliot's class, the old Boston Brahmins, with their patrician scruples about fair dealing and community leadership and responsibility, didn't stand a chance, and their decline mattered immensely to Eliot. Indeed, the decay of Eliot's class of origin would prove crucial to his Anglophilia, his poetics, and even to his love of etymology.
I love your essay, Robert. It is an insightful analysis on the transformation of American culture through the singular artistic experience of the great poet of the 20th century.
ReplyDeleteBeing a descendant of Anne Bradstreet, I find the analysis relative to my personal mental development, though my ancestors were in Idaho by 1900, and I grew up far outside that old Boston world view.
Thanks! Many Brahmin families moved west, hoping to set up what were essentially colonies of Boston society. Eliot's grandfather was exactly that sort of pioneer, becoming a kind of patriarch for St. Louis, and his uncle followed the same course further west, leaving St. Louis for the Pacific northwest. Much of the movement in the mid 19th century had an abolitionist component -- the Bostonians wanted to make sure that newer states would oppose slavery. Fascinating stuff!
ReplyDeleteI meant to write "I find the analysis relevant to my personal mental development."
ReplyDeleteYou presented lots of fascinating insight into cultural history that will keep thinking for a long time, and which helps me better understand myself since my ancestors were part of that westward expansion.
Do you have connection to the Boston Brahmin cultural world?
Me? No. My ancestors got to this continent before most of theirs, though a little further to the north. I take a little pride, then, in thinking of them as southerners and arrivistes!
DeleteDoes that westward movement have any relationship to the odd emergence of a "soda"-saying fragment population in the midwest, far from New England?
ReplyDeletehttp://boingboing.net/2013/08/23/american-dialects-mapped.html
I await research funds to look into this vital issue.
DeleteI'm still reeling from the Dickinson book I'm currently reading casually mentioning that after her death, Eliot would be writing only three decades later.
ReplyDelete