The Power of Poetry in the Modern World

Rejoice! The new issue of the South Atlantic Review (vol. 77 nos. 1 & 2, for those of you compiling bibliographies) will soon find its way into print (and onto your local JSTOR server), and it's a special issue on the power of poetry in the modern world—essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how poetry interacts with the larger world.  In addition to poems and reviews, it features the following articles:

Marjorie Perloff, "John Cage as Conceptualist Poet"
Lisa K. Perdigow, "Coming Undone: Entering Jorie Graham's Poststructural Poetics"
Emily R. Rutter, "the story of being: Revising the Posthumous Legacy of Huddie Ledbetter in Tyehimba Bess' leadbelley"
Jason M. Coates, "H.D. and the Hermetic Impulse"
Ronald Schuchard, "Yeats and Olivia Revisited: A Pathway to The Winding Stair and Other Poems"
Tara D. Causey, "Stories of Survivance: The Poetry of Karenne Wood"

There's also my own essay—"The Fall and Rise of Poetry: T.S. Eliot and the Place of Poetry in the Modern World."  Here's how it starts:

T. S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis. Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world. Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic poetry associated with that class. Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth and similarly strong connections to the poetic traditions of that class, traditions whose supporting institutions eroded rapidly in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Eliot’s reaction to the decline of public poetry was, at first, to retreat from such poetry into the aestheticism of his 1905 graduation ode and later to satirize his declining class and its culture, including its literary culture. Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline. Eliot sees a public role for this new poetry—but not as a replacement for popular culture. Rather, he sees it as being important in the formation of a new caste of cultural leaders who will, he hopes, have a broad influence in society. When a new class of educated professionals takes up Eliot’s poetry (and humanistic culture more generally) in the postwar era, this class partially fulfills Eliot’s ambition. Unlike Yeats or Pound, Eliot sees his dream for a revivified poetry, with a kind of power in the modern world, come to some measure of fruition.

I'm especially happy to have my essay on Eliot—really a kind of social class analysis of aesthetics in poetry—appear in an issue guest edited by Nancy D. Hargrove, a distinguished Eliot scholar.  The South Atlantic Review is under new and dynamic editorship, and promised great things in the years ahead.  Excelsior!  Now, if only they could do something about cover art...

T.S. Eliot and the Vanishing Brahmin

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.

Tradition and the Individual's Urges: Notes on T.S. Eliot

The new semester is upon me, and I find myself feverishly tapping out various course documents for my students.  I'm getting a bit ambitious in terms of what I'm assigning for the seminar on modernism I'm co-teaching, so I'm writing up some general notes for students to read ahead of time.  Here's what I've come up with for a session on Eliot that will feature The Waste Land, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," some excerpts from Eliot's writings about myth, and three early satirical poems ("The Boston Evening Transcript," "Cousin Nancy," and "Aunt Helen").  Some bits of it have been adapted from the Eliot chapter of a book called Making Nothing Happen: Poetry, Autonomy, Society that I've been working on.

1. Overview

T.S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis.  Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional, and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world.  Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic culture associated with that class.  Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth.  Eliot’s reaction to the decline was to satirize his declining class and its culture.  Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline in a new kind of poetry.  Eliot theorizes about the value and meaning of high culture in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and works to fuse the energies of popular culture and the civilizing influence of high culture in his great, difficult, long poem The Waste Land.

2. Eliot’s Social Situation

The mark of the old, cultivated, civic-minded Bostonian elite was indelibly inscribed in the psyche of T.S. Eliot, but his was not an uncomplicated relation to his heritage.  There was, of course, the matter of geography.  The St. Louis-bred Eliot came from the margins of a social and cultural world whose metropolitan center was located somewhere between Harvard Square and Boston Common, and he knew it.  But even more important than his marginality to his class in space was his generational marginality with respect to that class.  When Eliot was still in his childhood it became clear that the old Bostonian elite and its national offshoots were being displaced, and in many instances dispossessed. The neighborhood surrounding the Eliot family’s house at 2635 Locust Street, once eminently respectable, was already coming down in the world when the poet was born in 1888.  It had, Eliot wrote in a memoir, “become shabby to a degree approaching slumminess,” and was an apt image for the decline of the high-minded St. Louis elite of which the Eliots had been cornerstones.  “The best citizens,” wrote Lincoln Steffens of St. Louis, “used to rule the town, and they ruled it well…. But a change occurred.  Public spirit became private spirit.” Steffens dates the change as beginning around 1890, and by the turn of the century the city had fallen into the hands of a self-interested and materialistic elite.           

            The story Lincoln Steffens tells about St. Louis was true of other places as well: indeed, his 1904 book The Shame of the Cities relates the same sad tale about Minneapolis, Pittsburg, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.  The older elites of many of these cities, including New York, had been influenced by the ideals of the Boston elite, but increasingly, in the decades after the Civil War, the old elites faced the same kind of displacement the Eliots and their circle faced in St. Louis.  As historian Richard Hofstadter puts it,

The rapid development of the big cities, the building of a great industrial plant, the construction of the railroads, the emergence of the corporation as the dominant form of enterprise, transformed the old society and revolutionized the distribution of power and prestige…. By the late 1880s this process had gone far enough to become the subject of frequent, anxious comment in the press…. The newly rich, the grandiosely or corruptly rich were bypassing…the old gentry…

In 1917 Eliot would write that a writer’s art is formed by “the accumulated sensations of his first twenty-one years”—a period that in his case covered the years 1888-1903.  These were the years in which the class to which he was born had to confront the hard fact that it had been diminished, that the new America of industry, growing immigrant diversity, and imperial ambition had covered the old America of the Brahmins like a flow of fresh lava.

3. Eliot’s Satiric Verse

In Eliot’s view, the old world of genteel culture was too disconnected from the vital energies of the new, urban, industrial America to be revived.  Indeed, genteel culture appears as a spent force in the satiric verse he wrote in the early 1910s. If the genteel, decaying elite represented is satirized for the stifling nature of its commitment to old codes of behavior, the younger generation is satirized for the primitive nature of its urges, and for the vulgarity of the new mass culture that expresses and speaks to those urges.  We see this kind of satire in poems like “The Boston Evening Transcript,” “Cousin Nancy,” and “Aunt Helen.”  

4.  Eliot on the Imagination and Tradition

Eliot came to see the mass culture of his day—jazz music, comic strips, boxing matches, and other popular entertainments—as things that engaged people at a visceral level, speaking to their inner urges, but not linking those urges to anything more spiritual or refined.  At the same time, he saw the high culture of his own social class as civilized but anemic and disconnected from the baser urges.  Eliot attempts to bridge the gap between our inner urges and a civilizing high culture through a theory of tradition and imagination that fuses the primitive urges with a mental world conditioned by long exposure to a literary and religious cultural tradition. 

            Eliot does not limit the creative process to the primitive, unprocessed urges, but he bases it there. 

            He describes the basis of the creative process as something unpremeditated, based in the unconscious, and not fully within the artist’s control.  In discussing Virgil’s Eclogues, for example, Eliot uses the idea of prophecy to describe the method of composition:

If a prophet were by definition a man who understood the full meaning of what he was saying, this would be the end of the matter.  But if the word ‘inspiration’ is to have any meaning, it must mean just this, that the speaker or writer is uttering something which he does not wholly understand—or which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him.  This is certainly true of poetic inspiration…

Elsewhere, Eliot chastises the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold for failing, at times, to make his verse rise to the condition of true poetry.  The failure has, at root, what Eliot calls an insensitivity to the “auditory imagination”—though what is at stake in the auditory imagination is not mere sound, but a sounding of the depths of the unconscious:

What I call the ‘auditory imagination’ is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back…. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses… the most ancient, and the most civilized mentality. 

Eliot finds the greatest force in poems that, unlike Arnold’s weaker productions, use words that have “a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires” and the spring from “a kind of power” that “comes from below the intellect.” In a short critical note appended to The Collected Poems of Harold Monro Eliot is quite explicit about the basis of the creative process, saying that for the poet the poem “is dictated, not by the idea—for there is no idea—but by the dark embryo within him.”

            There is another element to Eliot’s theory of poetic creation, though, one just as important.  Indeed, if we turn to the most famous of Eliot’s critical essays, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” we find Eliot advocating a rigorous preparation of the poet’s mind, so that the urges of the imagination will be received in particular ways.  The preparation involves the acquisition of the “historical sense,” which comes from much deliberate study, and results in a conditioning of the imagination such that the poet writes “not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling for the whole literature of Europe.” This literary tradition is “the mind of Europe,” and the poet must understand that what it offers is “more important than his own mind.”  Indeed, it is in absorbing this tradition into his bones that the poet has his “self-sacrifice” and his “extinction of personality.” As Frank Lentricchia notes, the extinction of personality Eliot describes is not an extinction into “no-self” but into “self-in-historical-community.” That is: the poet’s imagination becomes not just a theater of individual urges, fears, and desires: it becomes a place in which those urges and desires take on meanings derived from a tradition larger and wiser than the individual.  The imagination’s reception of the dictates of the dark embryo within is tempered by the tradition’s teachings about the meaning and value of those dictates, teachings that have been wholly absorbed by the poet.

            For Eliot, the artist who does not fully absorb tradition, or who fails to connect the dark embryo of urges, fears, and desires to the teachings of that tradition fails, in some significant sense, as an artist.

5. The Waste Land

In reading The Waste Land, it is easy to become paralyzed by the fear that one needs to look up every obscure phrase and locate every reference.  Much can be gained from giving the poem that kind of attention, but there is also something to be said for reading through without too much hesitation, allowing the language and images to wash over you as if you were watching a film montage.   One thing one might keep in mind during this second, less anxious kind of reading is Eliot’s emphasis on both primal urges (often associated with popular culture) and high culture (often seen as anemic or remote from everyday life as lived in the twentieth century).

The Waste Land offers both abundant examples of language reduced to the bare expression of emotion, and instances of the transformation of emotion into spiritual wisdom based on the absorption of tradition.  As the critic William Harmon has pointed out, The Waste Land is full of “animal utterances” that are “below articulate language.”  These utterances are often connected with sexual desire, as in the “Weialala leia/Wallala leilala” of the Thames maidens; or with the consequences of violent sexual encounters, as in the lament of Philomela, a figure from Greek mythology who is turned into a nightingale after being brutally raped, and who is invoked in Eliot’s poem in these lines:

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

Lust, sorrow, and other simple emotions, expressed in preverbal sounds: this is the traditionless condition, where “farmyard noises” (to use a phrase Eliot used in an interview) are the only vehicle for expression, and where what is expressed are merely crude emotions without much intellectual content.

            The repeated syllable we encounter at the very end of the poem, “DA,” seems, initially, to be yet another instance of preverbal noise, expression without meaning.   But we see, near the end of The Waste Land, the transformation of sound into language, and, in fact, into language redolent of the deep historical roots of spiritual tradition. “DA/Datta” speaks to us of the need to give, as articulated in the Sanskrit of the Upanishads; while “DA/Dayadhvam” and “DA/Damyata” speak to us of the spiritual need to sympathize and to control oneself as articulated in the same text.  Giving, controlling, and sympathizing are all matters of the disciplining of one’s more basic urges.  Eliot is dramatizing the transformation of primitive urges, of speech as a series of yelps, howls, and shouts, into the beginnings of a spiritual tradition.  The poem enacts a kind of re-creation of a spiritual and intellectual tradition that can connect with human urges. 

T.S.Eliot, Social Class, and Anti-Semitism

I've been working on a chapter about T.S. Eliot for a book whose current working title is Poetry, Autonomy, Society, and I've been trying to think of a way of addressing Eliot's very real, entirely inescapable anti-Semitism.  On the one hand, I don't want it to become the main focus of the chapter, since the book is about the idea of aesthetic autonomy.  On the other hand, I don't want to act like Eliot's anti-Semitism didn't exist, or didn't matter, or didn't play an important role in his poetry and his social writings.

One line of argument I'm making in the chapter is that Eliot's early interest in aesthetic autonomy comes from his break with his own social class' moralism.  That is: he comes from a long line of people who formed a social elite in Boston, and in various communities where Bostonians settled, as in his native St. Louis.  The Bostonian elite believed in a very paternalistic kind of civic-mindedness.   They were not firm believers in popular, bottom-up democracy—but they thought elites should be good stewards of the community, and they often lavished funds on hospitals, churches, schools, and charities of all sorts, and were wary of excessive avarice and of financial speculation.  

Beginning in the years after the Civil War, they began to be displaced by a newer and more overtly materialistic elite, often politically corrupt (this new elite was overwhelmingly made up of gentiles, both Protestant and Catholic).  The decline of their class accelerated right around the time Eliot was born in 1888.  And when their power fades and their old ideal of stewardship is no longer relevant to their new circumstances, Eliot turns his back on the moralistic aesthetic associated with his class—think of the poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier, or of James Russell Lowell, both with family connections to the Eliots—and writes less overtly moralistic poetry, as well as poetry that satirizes the old elite's rectitude and reserve. Think "Portrait of a Lady" or "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — though there's more to both poems than a rejection of overt moralism and the ethos of the Boston elite.

So, since I'm already discussing Eliot's class circumstances as a way of explaining some of his aesthetic choices, I want to take this as an opportunity to discuss his anti-Semitism, especially since Eliot's prejudice isn't just a personal quirk: it's part and parcel of the outlook of his class.  Which is not to say that they were the only American anti-Semites, but their anti-Semitism took a particular form.  That is: the decline of the old elite happened to coincide with the arrival of numbers of Jewish immigrants, many of whom prospered in American conditions.  Always an easy target for those with axes to grind about their position in society, these immigrants bore much of the brunt of Eliot's class' resentment about their own loss of status.

Many among the old elite believed that scruple, gentlemanly habit, and class-based reservations hampering them in their attempts to retain privileged positions.  There is certainly some truth with regard to their loss of political power in cities like New York and St. Louis, where political bosses like William Magear "Boss" Tweed and Edward "Colonel Ed" Butler used tactics anathema to the well-bred gentleman to secure power, and it may have had some truth in the economic sphere, where fortunes like those of the Carnegies and Rockefellers (new money men, not members of the old elite) were built with a ruthlessness the old elite had never known.

But along with disdain for the new political and economic elite—both overwhelmingly Christian—came an anti-Semitism, drawing on longstanding bigotry and the coincidence of the arrival of Jewish immigrants with the decline of the old elite.  That is, a measure of the anti-Semitism endemic to Eliot and his class may be traced to their notion that their genteel ideals put them at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the Jewish immigrants who were arriving in America and often thriving in an environment that did not restrict their actions to the degree that many European countries had.  No less a Brahmin than Henry Adams, thinking of the man of the old class, wrote:

Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the Ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish to the officers of the customs—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy, and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him… 

The old elite’s sense of displacement, coinciding with the arrival and success of Jewish immigrants, in no way excuses the anti-Semitism of “Gerontion” or After Strange Gods, although it might be said to provide an explanatory context: Eliot’s bigotries were those of his class in a particular phase of its decline.

T.S. Eliot Graduates from Aestheticism

I’ve been doing some research on T.S. Eliot’s brief journey through aestheticism on his way to becoming a religious poet and a moralist with a reactionary critique of modernity—and I can’t think of any clearer demonstration of the change in his poetry than the contrast between one of his most famous Christian poems, “Journey of the Magi,” and a very early untitled poem, known in Eliot circles as “At Graduation 1905.”

Eliot wrote the latter poem, an ode, when he was 16 years old, and read it at his graduation from Smith Academy.  His greatest literary influence at the time was Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of an 11^th century Persian work, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.  Fitzgerald’s rather free translation had attracted a cult following in certain English literary circles ever since it appeared in 1859, and had gone through several expansions and editions over the course of the late nineteenth century.  It was particularly popular in Pre-Raphaelite circles, and later among the aesthetes of the Rhymer’s Club in the 1890s.  One can see why: it was a kind of antidote to the moralistic poetry of such Victorian heavyweights as Tennyson and Matthew Arnold.  Here’s a fairly typical stanza, in which we are urged to see the world as temporary, as without any great moral meaning:

The Worldy Hope men set their Hearts upon 

Turn Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, 

Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, 

Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” it ain’t.  Instead of duty to Queen, country, and God, we find a world almost existentially absurd, a world in which the momentary fleeting impression of beauty is what matters.  Bohemians like Dante Gabriel Rossetti loved Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát, and it anticipates both Pater’s aestheticism and the whole emphasis on a poetry of fleeting impressions, loaded with imagery of transience, that we get with Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, and other 1890s types.

Fitzgerald certainly came as a relief to the young T.S. Eliot, who had grown up in an oppressively strict and moralistic family milieu.  When I read his recollections of encountering the Rubáiyát, I thought immediately of John Stuart Mill’s recollections of first encountering Wordsworth and the “culture of the feelings” after his narrow, Utilitarian upbringing.  Here’s Eliot:

I can recall clearly enough the moment when, at the age of fourteen or so, I happened to pick up a copy of Fitzgerald’s Omar which was lying about, and the almost overwhelming introduction to a new world of feeling which this poem was the occasion of giving me.  It was like a sudden conversion; the world appeared anew, painted with bright, delicious, and painful colors.  Thereupon I took the usual adolescent course with Byron, Shelley, Keats, Rossetti, Swinburne. 

There’s reason to wonder just how Eliot found a copy “lying about,” since he grew up in a household where even Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were banned, and the Rubáiyát is both agnostic and (on occasion) just a bit racy.  But I digress.

Here’s a representative stanza of Eliot’s graduation ode.  The influence of Fitzgerald’s agnostic, aesthetic ethos is clear enough:

We go; like flitting faces in a dream;

Out of thy care and tutelage we pass

Into the unknown world—class after class,

O queen of schools—a momentary gleam,

A bubble on the surface of the stream

A drop of dew upon the morning grass.

“Graduation addresses,” says Eliot biographer James E. Miller Jr., “are generally supposed to be inspirational, saying, in effect: now go forth and live a life of great achievement and fulfillment.  Eliot, therefore, must has startled his listeners.”  Indeed!  This is a poem without moral exhortation, without homiletic reassurances.  This is a poem in which fleeting moments of beauty are the best for which we can hope—an aesthete’s poem.

Two stanzas from the poem offer an early version of one of Eliot’s recurring motifs: the return to a place long left behind, and the difference felt by those returning (the most famous instance is in “Little Gidding,” where Eliot writes “We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time”).  Notice the alienation felt by those who return to Smith Academy after graduation:

Standing upon the shore of all we know

We linger for a moment doubtfully

Then with a song upon our lips, sail we

Across the harbor bar—no chart to show,

No light to warn of rocks which lie below,

But let us put forth courageously

As colonists embarking on the strand

To seek their fortunes on some foreign shore

Well know they lose what time shall not restore

And when they leave they fully understand

That though again they see their fatherland

They there shall be as citizens no more.

We don’t get much by way of an explanation for this alienation—and this itself is significant.  Eliot, at 16, gives us a sense of separateness without any specific moral attached to it.  Those who return are no longer at home in the place they’ve left, but we’re not given any moral to attach to this story.  It’s not that the world has corrupted them, and they must touch base with the virtues embodied in the old school.  Nor is it that they’ve become Real Men, who must put aside childish things and get back out into the jungle where they compete with one another to push back the frontiers of darkness and spread the light of empire.  What we have is a mood, without a moral: the very stuff of impressionism and aestheticism.

Flash forward to 1927, and we find Eliot touching on his ‘return’ motif, but quite differently.  Eliot was now 39 years old, had settled in England, and had just been baptized and confirmed in the Anglican Church.  It was a move that rattled his deeply Unitarian family back in the U.S., and that puzzled his English friends, who tended to be secular intellectuals.  When Eliot went to visit I.A. Richards at Cambridge, for example, Richards and his friends were surprised to find Eliot carrying a “large, new, and to us awe-inspiring Prayer Book,” and were a bit flummoxed by the demands of Eliot’s faith, being “suddenly made much aware of our total inability to advise him on (or even discuss) the character of the various Services available on Sunday mornings.”

This was a new Eliot, and one of the poems that he published in 1927, “Journey of the Magi,” captures both his sincere Christian commitment and his sense of alienation.  After recounting the travails of the magi on their way to the nativity, and loading the poem up with imagery foreshadowing the crucifixion, the poem concludes with the return of one of the magi to the kingdom he’d left behind:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.

This is the first point in the poem where we’re made aware of the speaker’s silent interlocutor, a scribe figure to whom he dictates his accounts.  And of course, since the accounts we have of the journey of the magi are scriptural and without any mention of the magi's return, there’s a suggestion that the speaker’s words, which he twice insists be recorded, have not been recorded— that they've been suppressed by someone who did not want such discouraging comments to be put in front of the faithful.  And the comments are discouraging, telling us of the pain of conversion, of how one’s rebirth as a Christian is also a death of one’s former self.  The nature of the pain is significant: it comes in the form of alienation from one’s people.  One returns, as one does in Eliot’s graduation ode, to find that one no longer belongs.  Unlike in the graduation ode, though, there’s a specific moral to the story: though conversion is difficult, and though it leads to a rift with those one loves (we may think here of Eliot’s shocked family, or of his puzzled friends at Cambridge), conversion is not to be reversed.  The speaker suffers from his sense of difference, but it’s important that he never raises the possibility of re-conversion: he’d rather have “another death”—a literal one— than that. 

Set side by side with the graduation ode, “Journey of the Magi” looks very much like a moralist’s poem.  Its ethos is one of religion, and poetry at the service of religion, rather than aestheticism, and the appreciation of the passing moment as the highest of goods.  If Eliot’s graduation ode was a poem of moments, “Journey of the Magi” aspires to be a poem of the intersection of the timeless with time.

Modernism, or Talking to Dead People

Wars, the persecution of heretics, the whole centuries-long history of Spain as the Islamic realm of Al-Andalus, the Chanson de Roland: this is the stuff of John Matthias’ long, late-modernist poem “A Compostella Dipytch.  The poem came about after Matthias walked the ancient pilgrimage route from southern France to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostella, near the westernmost point of Spain.  Not long ago I was talking to an old friend of Matthias about how I love the poem, mostly because of how it opens up whole layers of history and turns them into a kind of music.  Matthias’ friend also admitted to admiring the historical nature of the poem, and then commented on how different Matthias’ experience of walking across Spain was from that of a younger poet he knew.  Where Matthias saw the past everywhere, the younger poet saw the present: the living world of German backpackers and American trust-fund kids, the world of hostels and internet cafes and casual romance and talk of high-tech hiking boots.  This, said Matthias’ friend, was how you could tell Matthias is truly a modernist: whereas the younger poet talks to the others on the trail, Matthias spends a lot of his time talking to dead people, thinking about what he’s read and what he sees left behind in old churches and in ancient pilgrim way-stations.

There’s something to the idea that modernist poetry converses with the dead as much, or more, than with the living.  It is, after all, at the core of that most significant of modernist essays, T.S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where Eliot tells us

…if 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.... Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want if you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense [which] 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….

There it is: the past as something alive around us, as much present on any pilgrim route as the backpacker up ahead yakking on his iPhone and wolfing down Protein bars.  When I explain this to students, I usually begin by telling them that every time they open their mouths to speak, it's the year 1066 again.  This is actually a pretty bad pedagogical strategy, since my students are overwhelmingly American, and have generally been taught almost nothing about English history. I usually have to remind them that 1066 was the year of the Norman conquest, when a French-speaking elite displaced the Anglo-Saxon regime in England, initiating a long, slow process whereby French and Anglo-Saxon fused to create the hybrid creature we call the English language.  So when you say "the submarine went underwater" you're doing something that couldn't happen had the Normans lost the Battle of Hastings: you're using a French-derived word ("submarine," coming from the French "sous-marin") and something closer to Anglo-Saxon ("under water," linked to the Germanic "unter wasser").  The results of a battle in 1066 matter now, and in a sense that battle lives on in virtually every English sentence.  And there are implications of this presence of the past poetry.  Eliot goes on:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead... what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.… Whoever has approved this idea of order… will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past…

Of course a lot of people, my students among them, do find it preposterous that the present can modify the past (and it is preposterous, in the root meaning of that word: "preposterous" originally meant a confusing of time periods, a placing of the pre- and the post- in the wrong positions).  But there's some sense to Eliot here.  Consider Satan.  Or, at any rate, consider Satan from Milton's Paradise Lost.  Milton means for him to be a villain, but William Blake famously observed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it," meaning that Milton was more of a rebel than he thought he was, that a poem intended as a defense of obedience to God was really more in love with individualism than anything else.  And after Romanticism — after Blake's Milton and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and a thousand other poems and plays and novels that echo and reinterpret Milton — it's difficult to see Paradise Lost as one could see it before Romanticism.  Milton's initially villainous Satan now seems to have had many of the positive qualities the Romantics found in him.


By the time we get to modernism, this kind of revisiting and revising of the literature of the past has become one of the major poetic moves: Eliot scrapes together the fragments that make up his Waste Land, Pound reworks Homer in The Cantos, David Jones mines Welsh literature and legend, H.D. reworks the classics in Helen in Egypt, and so on.  (It's important to make a distinction here between modernism and the avant-garde, which often wanted to shrug off the past).

So many modernists wanted to converse with the dead poets.  But why?

A big part of the answer comes when we look at modernist poetry in relation to the larger literary culture around it.  Indeed, if we don't, we'll never fully understand why modernists wrote as they did.  And the larger literary culture around them was mass culture in its early dawn.  Andreas Huyssen has argued, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, that the two phenomena come into being in tandem, that "the twin establishment of a sphere of high autonomous art and a sphere of mass culture" only make sense in relation to one another.  Indeed, he says, since they're beginnings "modernism and mass culture have been engaged in a compulsive pas de deux."

There are a lot of reasons for the rise of mass culture, with its cheap novels, its enormous output of crime writing, its how-to and self-improvement books, but for the moment it's just important to note the incredible rise of this sort of literature from the 1880s on into the period between the two world wars (things start to change then — D.L. LeMahieu's study A Culture for Democracy explains how).  Publishers in the 1850s and 1860s could actually expect to make a reasonable, even substantial, profit from poetry, but the growth of the mass market for works appealing to a relatively low level of literacy meant that profit margins were so much higher in other genres that, by the turn of the century, poetry became a marginal commodity.  Poets were very much aware of this, and modernist poets often sought to find a justification for their work in terms other than popularity, on the grounds of which they lost decisively to more commercial works.  Ezra Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" captured the situation perfectly:

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries

Of the inward gaze;

Better mendacities 

Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster, 

Made with no loss of time, 

A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster

Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

Here we see modernism against the mass culture of its time—in fact, we see it being defined at its core as in opposition to the mass culture of its time.  Huyssen puts it this way: "modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture."

One way to oppose the mass culture of the present was to turn to the already-esteemed culture of the past: to acquire tradition by the sweat of one's brow, to start talking to dead people. It's tempting to see the whole phenomenon as a defensive turn.  You can't beat murder novels in sales?  So what!  Those tawdry writers may be reaching a lot of readers, but you're not insignificant, Mr. Modernist! You're changing the whole meaning and direction of the tradition!  You don't have a place in the market, but you've got a place in history!

Well, that makes the modernist ideal sound like a huge ego trip, and I suppose it can be.  But there are more sympathetic ways this plays out: I remember talking to the poet Joseph Donahue not long ago about the lack of audience for complex mystical poetry like his, and he told me that he derives satisfaction less from the connection with an audience now than from participation in a centuries-long tradition of mystics and poets, from continuing the conversation they began.  That's talking to dead people in the grand old modernist tradition, and it isn't a matter of seeking to slake the ego with a sense of personal historical significance.

Of course there's more substance to the modernist rejection of mass culture than simply a defensiveness about being displaced in the marketplace.  Yeats, for example, argued in his great essay "What is Popular Poetry" that for poems to be truly significant and beautiful, they must appeal to and resonate with tradition, they must look to old legends and myths and  "borrow their beauty from those that used them before," because then the emotions of the poem will be seen "moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting."  A poetry that talks to dead people, Yeats argues, will have an enormous resonance beyond what is possible for writing that doesn't allude to what has come before.  

There's a great deal of truth to this: I think, again, of the poetry of John Matthias, which often gives us arcane bits of old text, or antiquated pieces of our language.  The critic Vincent Sherry once said of the poetry of John Matthias, that, “on the one hand, the pedagogue offers from his word-hoard and reference trove the splendid alterity of unfamiliar speech; on the other, this is our familial tongue, our own language in its deeper memory and reference.”  We get to see our own language, and our own ways of experiencing the world, connected to their roots, to the words and ideas and ways of living from which we come.  This makes us more at home in the world, and more knowledgeable about ourselves: we see something of where we came from, and thus become more empowered in understanding why we are as we are.  We even become more capable of change, since we see that the things we think of as permanent have a history, and can thus be changed.  There is, at least potentially, a very liberationist politics at work in any kind of writing that leads us to understand our history.

There's also a preservationist politics to modernism of this kind, of course.  In the modern era of Schumpeter's capitalist "creative destruction," when (as Marx wrote) "all that is solid melts into air," the insistence on retaining a tradition is a kind of statement of dissent, though it's often a reactionary dissent.  That's certainly what it is in Pound, in Eliot, and in Yeats, where the present often appears as a horrible distortion and despoiling of a better, finer past, to which the poets wish we could return.

There's another issue involved, too, which we might think of as political.  When a poet talks to dead people, you're not going to understand the conversation if you, too, haven't tuned in to the past and done the (pleasurable, luxurious) work of acquiring a sense of the appropriate traditions.  Many people find this off-putting right at the start.  Many, too, find it elitist: it sets up a certain barrier to instant understanding for the reader, and, if you take it as a principle not just of reading but of writing, it sets up a very high cost of entry for anyone seeking to set up as a poet. 

When I hear the charge that modernist poetry is elitist and therefore excludes readers, I generally think of three things by way of response.  Firstly, I think of the poet Michael Anania, who pointed out that all of his allusions and historical references are simply things that one can look up, a difficulty far from insurmountable in the age of Google and Wikipedia.  Secondly, I think of the effort many people expend trying to get to the final level of a video game: they don't call those games elitist, even though they require a great deal more effort to get through than, say, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and the glosses on its allusions (and anyway, one could argue that the effort in both cases is, in fact, the main source of pleasure).  Finally, I think of something the dear, late poet Reginald Shepherd said:

It’s often said that “difficult” poems exclude potential readers. This can certainly be true, but I feel excluded by poems that give me nothing to do as a reader, that offer me no new experience and nothing I didn’t already know. It’s wearying to read such poems, and it makes me want to watch music videos instead, where at least one sometimes gets glimpses of shirtless guys with six-pack abs. Any good poem gives the reader something, what Allen Grossman calls the interest of the world: feelings, sensations, experiences. 

Reginald may have looked for different things in music videos than I do, but we have turned to poems for the same reasons.

With regard to the charge that the approach to becoming a poet that Eliot outlined in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is elitist and restrictive — one can only respond that it's true.  If you want to be the kind of poet who talks to dead people (and that's not the only kind of poet), you're going to have to spend a lot of time in conversation with old books.  There's certainly an elitism to this, in that it requires a great deal of time and effort, and there's a material and financial reality behind the opportunity to take that time and make that effort. Of course the old modernist path to becoming a poet does not propose as great a material and financial burden as the new, 21st century way of becoming a poet we have in America: the completion of an MFA program.  It's what our age demands, and in a way, the existence of these programs has shown the inexorable progress of the very forces of modernity — standardization, credentialing, commercialization, and commodification — that led so many modernists to turn against modernity itself and immerse themselves in the splendid alterity of the past.

The Conservative Director of the Spectator Fouls the Breeze: T.S. Eliot and Mass Media

I'm at least two weeks behind in my email, I've got three stacks of essays to grade, three exams to write, two writing deadlines to meet and a Gordian knot of editorial hoo-hah to untangle.  So the only rational thing to do is to hole up in a coffee shop with good internet access, paw through the Selected Writings of Jules LaForgue, and blog about the things I've been reading on the commuter train.  And those things have been the poems of T.S. Eliot.


Last time I blogged about reading Eliot on the train, I let the juxtaposition of Eliot's urban street scenes and the glimpses of greater Chicago I'd had out the window of the train dictate the direction of my thoughts.  This time I'm letting the fact that I read Eliot surrounded by commuters immersed in various newspapers, magazines, Kindles, and iPads point me in the direction of Eliot and the mass media of his day.  There are a surprising number of references to the mass media in his poetry, and I think I see what it means to him.  It's a part of his critique of the modern world, with its social atomization and its failure to communion with the timeless, the life-forces of fertile nature, or true community.  In fact, we can find in Eliot's representations of the mass media in his early poetry a kind of dress-rehersal of the main themes of that miraculous poem, The Waste Land.


Consider the deeply underrated little poem called "The Boston Evening Transcript," from the 1917 volume Prufrock and Other Observations.  It opens with a depiction of the mass-media audience:


The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.


Right away we get one of the most common criticisms of the mass media, then as now: the notion of the passivity of the audience or readership, blown helplessly hither and yon, without the wherewithal to resist the power of the public word.  It's an idea as old as Plato's "Ion," or book ten of his Republic, and it will probably be with us as long as we have intellectuals ready to feel contempt for the real or perceived intellectual passivity of others. 


But this isn't just any mass media outlet being criticized.  Eliot has singled out the Boston Evening Transcript.  Why?  In part, I suspect it's because of the way the name of the paper scans: BOS-ton EEEEEV-en-ing TRANS-cript: there's a certain wonderful drawl to it, a falling rhythm with a good long vowel stretch in the middle, depriving the phrase of energy and allying it with a kind of lifelessness that echoes the passivity of the newspaper readers as Eliot depicts them (scansion, of course, is a performance, so your reading of those syllables may vary).


There's more, though, to the selection than a love of the scansion and a desire to represent for Boston.  The Boston Evening Transcript had a very particular place in the media culture of Boston in the early years of the twentieth century.  First of all, it was venerable, even then, having been founded in 1830.  Secondly, it was an icon of middlebrow, respectable literary taste: it had for many years in the nineteenth century been edited by the poet Epes Sargent, founder of the literary magazine of the Boston Latin School, contributor to the Harvard Advocate, and writer of such well known poems as, uh... well, writer of some poems.  Around the time Eliot was writing Prufrock and Other Observations the paper was publishing poems by Hazel Hall, who was to become a favorite poet of needlepoint enthusiasts looking for Uplifting Phrases to frame and put on a wall over a pianola or potted dieffenbachia.  Thirdly, it was stuffy to the point of snobbery, becoming well-known for its column on bridge and, especially, its weekly feature on genealogy, a field of immense importance in brahaminical Boston.  The stuffiness was truly legendary: in fact, some have argued that the etymology of the term "fuddy-duddy" can be traced to allegedly humorous little dialogues in The Boston Evening Transcript between two characters, one named Fuddy and the other Duddy.  This one appeared in November 1895:


Fuddy: So Miss Dandervecken is going to marry an Englishman.  A lord, I suppose?
Duddy: Well, no, not exactly: but I understand that he's often as drunk as a lord.


This dire attempt at humor — clearly the product of a mind fed only on Unitarian tracts and watery chowder — is not something I  made up.  The paper was actually pitched at that level of squareness.  One can almost see the heavy lace curtains hanging sadly by the china cabinets, hear the slow, somber ticking of the grandfather clock, and smell the faint, lilac odor of inner desolation floating over the tea cups and saucers.


It's the association of this particular newspaper with stifling respectability that gives additional resonance to that cornfield image, especially when we read it in conjunction with the next three lines:


When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,


The juxtaposition between those with life-appetites and those who subscribe to the Transcript gives a certain ironic tinge to the earlier image of the paper's readers as blowing in the wind like a field of ripe corn.  One can certainly see in the ripeness of the corn a kind of ready-to-be-reaped, end-of-life quality.  But ripeness is a funny thing: simultaneously an end and an apex, it can read as death-ready or as filled with the juice of life, as a kind of primal fertility.  So along with the windblown passivity of the readers, we get two more ideas attached to them: death-readiness and life-fullness.  But the lines that follow the initial couplet cue us to view the life-full sense as ironic, as something distant from the actual lives of the readers.  The life-full sense of ripeness is called to mind in order for us to see how far from its pagan, fertile vitality these Transcript readers have fallen. Eliot will go on to use imagery this way throughout The Waste Land, where a fertile and glamorized elsewhere is juxtaposed to a lifeless and debased here-and-now.


The critique of mass media takes a different form in the next few lines, where Eliot juxtaposes the world of the newspaper with another kind writing ecosystem altogether:


I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the other end of the street,


Who's this Rochefoucauld?  He's Francois, the sixth Duc de Rochefoucauld and the Prince de Marcillac to you, bro.  He's famous as a writer of pithy little maxims, and as a habitue of some of the finest literary salons in seventeenth century France.  If the newspaper is devoted to the moment, maxims were thought of as being little nuggets of wisdom that endured forever, touchstones to which generations might gratefully return.  And if the readers of the Transcript live in stifling bourgeois Boston, Rochefoucauld makes their lives seem petty and repressed indeed: he cut a swaggering swath through a world of glittering intellects and dallying ladies.  So there's a great doubled feeling to that street image: on the one hand, the speaker treats Rochfoucauld the way a tired, respectable Bostonian on the way home from the bank or law firm might treat a neighbor, with a curt, none-too-warm nod.  On the other hand, we get a sense of the distance — all the way down the street of time — of the present repressed world of isolated, respectable newspaper readers and the more lively and glamorous world of the salons.  Salons, after all, are places of face-to-face interaction and sparkling wit.  Newspapers are just things you hide behind in the parlor so your maiden aunt wont bore you with tales of her dying ficus.


The real kicker comes in the final line, though, where Eliot's speaker himself becomes the vehicle through which the lifeless, graceless, passive world of the newspaper enters the home:


And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."


There's that great complicity thing we see so often in Eliot — it's there in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — Prufrock knows all about his condition, his failure to enter a world of active, fertile, human association, but he can't make himself do anything about it, so he remains in the lifeless passivity and stodgy formality of a world much like that of the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript.  I think it's something Eliot gets from Jules LaForgue.


Another relatively unsung poem early poem of Eliot's, "Le Directeur" from Poems (1920), presents a similarly dark take on the mass media, this time in the form of a depiction of the editors of a magazine. Although the poem is set in London, and the magazine is The Spectator (not Addison and Steele's worthy journal, but the nasty right-wing publication founded by the Barclays in 1828), Eliot wrote the poem in French, and the rhymes in that language are wonderful to quote along with an English version of the poem.  It starts by presenting The Spectator as a kind of curse hovering over the Thames estuary:

Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise

Qui coule si preès du Spectateur.

Le directeur

Conservateur

Du Spectateur

Empeste la brise.

Evil to the unhappy Thames

Which flows so close to The Spectator.

The conservative

Director

Of The Spectator

Fouls the breeze.

But what, other than the afflatus of the editor, constitutes the accursed nature of the publication?  We'd do well to remember the nature of the publication before we proceed.  Under the editorship of John St. Loe Strachey, who published and edited the magazine in the early years of the twentieth century, The Spectator was already taking on the self-consciously provocative right-wingery it retains to this day.  In the 1930s it would become associated with the journal Everyman, a Fascist publication, and in our own time it continues to run the anti-black, anti-poor, openly anti-semite screeds of one Taki Theodoracopulos, who has said that he wishes he could have been a Wehrmacht officer in the 1940s — I am not making this up.  (Theodoracopulos, it is worth noting, is one of the founders of The American Conservative, a journal associated with many current members of the Republican Party and several right-wing think tanks, including The Heritage Foundation).  So let's bear that in mind when we read the next lines:

Les actionnaires

Réactionnaires

Du Spectateur

Conservateur

Bras dessus bras dessous

Font des tours

A pas de loup.

The reactionary

Shareholders of the

Conservative

Spectator

With folded arms

And stealthy step

Encircle.

There's a strange, menacing kind of ritualism here, as if the stakeholders of the right-wing media were a kind of cult, or a coven of warlocks preparing a spell.  They present a strongly unified little group, secretive (those folded arms) closed to the world, and working stealthily to project their schemes upon it.  But what of the world outside the circle of monied shareholders and their editorial mouthpieces?  Well, here it is:

Dans un égout

Une petite fille

En guenilles

Camarde

Regarde

Le directeur

Du Spectateur

Conservateur

Et crève d’amour.

In a gutter
A little girl
In rags,
With flattened nose
Looks at the
Conservative
Director
Of The Spectator
And starves for love.

Well, "starves" isn't quite right.  "Bursts with love" might be more like it.  Anyway: how to interpret this?  Clearly the editors and shareholders don't care for the well-being of this girl.  She's an outcast, a product of the atomized urban society Eliot so despised, and the editors feel no sense of community with her, no desire to nurture her as part of a communion of fellow humans.  But she, from her position of isolation and poverty, looks with love and longing on the spectacle of the mass media, as represented by these men.  I'm tempted to say the relationship is much like that between the cynical people running Fox News and the economically and socially threatened people in the Tea Party movement: those people turn their yearning eyes toward a media empire that, in actuality, supports a monied class that doesn't give a damn for their wellbeing.  Eliot was no leftist, but his particular form of conservatism was all about community and communion, about people feeling for, and caring for, their fellow humans across space and time (there were limits to this: step outside Christianity and you leave Eliot's circle of sympathy).  The kind of right-wing media represented by The Spectator could only seem as malevolent to him as the worst excesses of the media seem to many of us today.