Chapter 17 T. S. Eliot
The publication in 1922 of The Waste Land in the British little magazine Criterion and the American Dial was a cultural and literary event. The poem’s title and the view it incorporated of modern civilization seemed, to many, to catch precisely the state of culture and society after World War Ⅰ. The war, supposedly fought to save European civilization, had been the most brutal and destructive in Western history: what kind of civilization, after all, could have allowed it to take place? The long, fragmented structure of The Waste Land, too, contained so many technical innovations that ideas of what poetry was and how it worked seemed fundamentally changed. A generation of poets either imitated or resisted it. The author of this poem was an American living in London, T. S. Eliot, he had a comfortable upbringing in St. Louis: his mother was involved in cultural and charitable activities and wrote poetry, his father was a successful businessman.
Critical Perspectives
1.New Historicism
Steven Matthews, in “Literary and Political Hinterland of T.S. Eliot’s Coriolan”, argues that there has been an increased amount of scholarly interest lately in T. S. Eliot’s unfinished sequence, Coriolan(1932)—interest drawn from its Shakespearian allusiveness, and from analysis of this writings particularly rebarbative, jarring poetic. Although, however, the two parts of the sequence published by Eliot are acknowledged as being his nearest approach to poetic commentary upon contemporary political ideas, little criticism exists establishing the hinterland of the political thought, with which Eliot was most familiar, as editor of the Criterion. Coriolan emerges at a time when the lure of fascism pulled hardest at Eliot’s sensibility. This article reviews the full political context provided by Eliot’s journal, as well as considering the connections between that political engagement and the readings of Shakespeare he was also promulgating through this forum, in order to provide a more complex sense than hitherto of the diverse pressures underlying the unsettled nature of the existing Coriolan poems.[1]
Michael Simpson, in “Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and The Elder Statesman”, discusses The Elder Statesman, a play by T. S. Eliot that put in an isolated appearance in 2008 as a rehearsed reading at the King’s Head, Islington, where it was performed by the theater group Primavera as part of its “Forgotten Classics” series. It notes that John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger had opened in London, England, leading to a revolution in British theater that probably obscured the success of Eliot’s drama. It proposes a conjunction between The Elder Statesman and Look Back in Anger.[2]
2.Canonization Study
Andrey Astvatsaturov,in “On the Way towards Canon-formation: The Case of T. S. Eliot”, presents an attempt to highlight the historical and cultural background of formation of Eliot’s canon, as well as to analyze certain aesthetic paradigms that formed its basis (the theory of tradition, the conception of impersonal poetry, and the concept of “dissociation of sensibility”). In the article, the key figures belonging to the canon are mentioned, and the reasons for their canonization are identified. Particular attention is paid to Eliot’s take on the problem of dialogue of cultures, and of acquisition of a foreign poetical tradition, as well as to the principles that, according to Eliot, should govern literary translation.[3]
3.Philosophical Study
Edward Upton, in “Language in the Middle Way: T. S. Eliot’s Engagement with Madhyamaka Buddhism in Four Quartets”, traces the influence that Buddhist texts had on the poetic design and philosophical orientation of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. References to the “middle way” in the poems point us to texts from the very earliest moments of the Buddhist tradition, texts to which Eliot had access. More specifically, Edward develops the suggestion offered by Jeffrey Perl and Andrew Tuck that the work of Nagarjuna, the second-century founder of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism (the so-called “Middle Way” school), could have played an important role in T. S. Eliot’s philosophical and poetic development. Edward employs Perl and Tuck’s assertion as a hermeneutical lens through which to analyze Eliot’s work and suggests that Eliot’s allusions to the “middle way” in Four Quartets can usefully be understood through Nagarjuna’s causal analysis and linguistic theories, themselves codifications in part of the earlier Buddhist priorities.[4]
Muhammad Saleem, Akhtar Ali and Shazia Kousar, in “The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: A Site for Inertia in Motion”, analyzes T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land with reference to the theme of stasis in the apparently mobile life of the twentieth century Europe. The poetic sensibility of Eliot aestheticises the barrenness of the modern life in the backdrop of spiritual bankruptcy. The horizontal motion is measured with the yardstick of paradigmatic axis. Boredom, monotony and meaninglessness are the various manifestations of stillness in the spiritually barren modern world. The poet makes use of different artistic devices to foreground his concerns on this modern dilemma. Self-critical text, suggestive alternative point of view, use of grand-narrative in the modern context, inter-textual references, contrastive modes of description and metaphoric images are some of them. This study is pursued in the light of these poetic strategies to draw upon the stopped up life of the current Europe. The variety of mechanical activities of the age makes face at the theoretical framework of the modern existence.[5]
Francesca Bugliani Knox, in “Between Fire and Fire: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”, presents on the intellectual interest in religious mysticism of poet T. S. Eliot and his poem The Waste Land. Topics discussed include mystical Christian tradition popularized by author Evelyn Underhill which is the thread that connect themes and details of poems, Eliot’s acknowledgment of the philosophy of philosopher Rudolph Eucken regarding religious expression, and author Jessie Weston who suggested Eliot the plan of the poem The Waste Land.[6]
Jūrate Levina, in “Speaking the Unnameable: A Phenomenology of Sense in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets”, argues that through its ostensibly philosophical rhetoric and multiple allusions, Four Quartets manifests a continuity between T.S. Eliot’s poetic thought and his early engagement with philosophy. The thematic core of this continuity is Eliot’s concern with the meaningful experience of reality, described as equally dependent on direct perception and on linguistic structure. language shapes perception into a meaningful world-vision, while experience itself is an ongoing process of interpreting (or signifying) that which is perceived. This link empowers poetic language, entangling the reading consciousness in a process to which Edmund Husserl’s descriptions of consciousness refer as “sense-giving”. Four Quartets epitomizes both the phenomenological description and the poetic enactment of meaningful experience. Its opening movement both mimics the structure of experienced reality and keeps the reading eye in the process of making sense in its full complexity, involving all faculties of apprehending reality, from the metaphysical logo-centric systems underlying conceptual understanding of the world to the direct sensuous perception of immediate environment.[7]
4.Cultural Study
Alastair Morrison, in “Beyond Bad Faith: Cultural Criticism and Instrumentality”, argues for the role of instrumental thinking in cultural and literary criticism, practices sometimes thought of as naturally anti-instrumental. Focusing on the work of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot, it shows a shared instrumental defense of Christianity but also how, for situational reasons, this defense has made instrumentalism harder to locate within the Anglophone critical tradition. Arnold promoted adherence to the national church on openly civic and functional grounds, though to do so he had to derogate the idea, widely held by British Christians, that the metaphysical truth of Christianity outweighed practical considerations. Eliot, in a career of apologetics that consciously emended Arnold’s, offered a similarly effectual sense of Christianity’s value but enfolded this valuation into a model of cultural holism that forbade individual acts of if/then calculation, avoiding the appearance of bad faith. Eliot’s holism becomes part of Raymond Williams’s conception of the agency of the cultural despite Williams’s lack of interest in the specifically religious project. In brief, the rhetorical difficulty of instrumentalizing Christianity drives instrumental calculation underground, making it illegible against the larger backdrop of romantic anti-utilitarianism in cultural politics. This essay suggests that, when the object is not belief, instrumental approaches to culture present fewer contradictions than is often assumed and that it may be an opportune moment to reconsider them.[8]
Hazel Atkins, in “Raising The Rock: The Importance of T. S. Eliot’s Pageant-Play”, examines the development of British poet T. S. Eliot’s concept of community, tradition, and ritualism in art in his play The Rock. It offers a background of Eliot’s reason for writing the play which centers on the building of a church. Hazel infers that critics of The Rock have overlooked the fact that despite its flaws, the pageant-play typifies Eliot’s transformation into a Christian writer and his special interest in rituals and church symbolisms.[9]
Anthony Domestico, in “The Twice-Broken World: Karl Barth, T. S. Eliot, and the Poetics of Christian Revelation”, presents on the relation between poet T. S. Eliot and theologian Karl Barth. It compares Barth’s Epistle to the Romans to Eliot’s early poetry, exploring the reaction to historical crises that resulted in a crisis of representation. Also, it compares Eliot’s dialectical poetics to the analogical poetics of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. It examines the sharp contrast between what Eliot’s poetry asserts and what it enacts.[10]
Alan Blackstock, in “Chesterton, Eliot, and Modernist Heresy”, discusses the orthodoxy and heresy by writers G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot. Topics include Chesterton’s 1908 book Orthodoxy, lectures delivered by Eliot at the University of Virginia in 1933, and the relationship of Eliot to modernism. Particular focus is also given to Chesterton’s 1905 book Heretics.[11]
Martin Warner, in “Reading the Bible ‘as the Report of the Word of God’: The Case of T. S. Eliot”, focuses on the case of Thomas Stearns Eliot, wherein he reads the Bible “as the Report of the Word of God”. It says that Eliot’s preferred traditional mode of reading, not as fundamentalist, but as authoritative witness to religious truth. It mentions that the biblical resonance of Eliot mature poetry is often more imagistic than verbal, directing to “God-fearing” poetic approach to the literary dimension of the Bible.[12]
Jewel Spears Brooker, in “ ‘Our First World’: T. S. Eliot and The Edenic Imagination”, offers the insights regarding the work of T.S. Eliot that was never been read as a whole because some of his work has been withdrew in archives. He says that Eliot’s complete prose, the first volume including over twenty unpublished philosophical essays which is important for clarifying intellectual and spiritual roots of his imagination. He adds that Eliot had an edenic imagination, a religious version of dialectical imagination that transcends and contains contradictions.[13]
Craig Woelfel, in “T. S. Eliot and Our Beliefs about Belief”, presents on the beliefs regarding religion and literature scholarship and the works of T.S. Eliot. It says that the loss of beliefs defines secularization and modernization. It states that literary-biographer A.D. Moody summarizes the turn away of Eliot from philosophy study in 1914 in terms of Anglo-Catholicism. It adds that the early works of Eliot reflect his background in studies of religious experiences including psychology, mysticism, and sociology.[14]
Susan E. Colón, in “This Twittering World: T. S. Eliot and Acedia”, presents the views regarding the prevalence of acedia in T. S. Eliot’s literary works. It highlights Eliot’s books where the said mortal sin is present including The Waste Land, Murder in the Cathedral and Four Quartets. It denotes the relational concepts between acedia and laziness. It also denotes the criticism on Eliot’s views about the sin.[15]
5.Aesthetic Study
Ben J. Richardson, in “ ‘A Conversation with Spectres’: Russian Ballet and the Politics of Voice in T. S. Eliot”, argues that when Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes first emerged on the pre-war London stage, it was greeted as the herald of an artistic revolution. T. S. Eliot—one of the most outspoken, of often ambivalent, commentators on modern dance—paradoxically sought to approach such radical new aesthetic forms through the notion of “tradition”. Ballet in particular performs a dual function within his poetic oeuvre: it is emblematic of both the collapse of human community within modernist spaces, yet also simultaneously represents the possibility of reintegration through transnational modes of experience. It exemplifies, for Eliot, the interpenetration of all expression, suggesting “not only the pastness of the past, but...its presence”.[16]
6.Gender Study
Brian Clifton, in “Textual Frustration: The Sonnet and Gender Performance in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, discusses of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and focuses on alienation and anxiety or the poem’s formal elements. However, there seems to be a gap in explaining how these two aspects relate to each other. Throughout the monologue, Prufrock’s attempts to assert his (idea of) masculinity seem to be related to how the poem uses and frustrates the sonnet form. If the sonnet is understood as an inherently masculine form and if its appearance (fully or partially) within the poem points toward an attempt to fulfill the social constraints of masculinity, then the poem will allow gender and structure to enter in dialogue, which suggests that Prufrock’s inability to perform as masculine is related to his inability to both create and manipulate the sonnet structure.[17]
7.Ethical Study(https://www.daowen.com)
James Matthew Wilson,in “The Formal and Moral Challenges of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral”, discusses the plot of the play, the play’s challenge for the contemporary readers to reconsider the assumption regarding the nature of morality, and the formal and historical background of the play.[18]
8.New Criticism
James Matthew Wilson, in “Ancient Beauty, Modern Verse: Romanticism and Classicism from Plato to T. S. Eliot and the New Formalism”, focuses on the argument of contemporary artists and poets about their position on Classicism and Romanticism literature carried on by T. S. Eliot and other modernists early in the twentieth century. Topics discussed include the description of Classicism and Romanticism in the book The Mirror and the Lamp, by M. H. Abrams, the genealogy of Romanticism and Classicism, and the controversy between Eliot and John Middleton Murry regarding the theory of modernist art.[19]
Matthew Scully, in “Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form”, argues that for Catherine Malabou, plasticity names what gives or receives form, as well as what potentially annihilates form. Malabou does not propose a liberation from the closure of form but a liberation within form itself. In The Waste Land, the metamorphic force of Tiresias, who figures a bodily excess at the approximate center of the poem, announces a disordering impulse from within the poem. Critical approaches to The Waste Land have often reproduced Eliot’s desire for order by repeatedly privileging ordering logics in readings of the poem’s form, especially in readings focused on the role of Tiresias. In contrast, by thinking of Tiresias as a plastic figure and as a figure for the plasticity of The Waste Land, we can reconceive the form of The Waste Land as that which bears witness to the disordering and excessive force excluded and absented from traditional conceptions of the poem’s formal organization.[20]
【注释】
[1]Matthews S. “Literary and Political Hinterland of T. S. Eliot’s Coriolan”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2013, 36(2):44-60.
[2]Simpson M. “Oedipus, Suez, and Hungary: T. S. Eliot’s Tradition and The Elder Statesman”. Comparative Drama, 2010-2011, 44/45(4/1):509-528.
[3]Astvatsaturov A. “On the Way towards Canon-formation: The Case of T. S. Eliot”. World Literature Studies, 2019, 11(1):42-50.
[4]Upton E. “Language in the Middle Way: T. S. Eliot’s Engagement with Madhyamaka Buddhism in Four Quartets”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2018, 86(3):821-850.
[5]Saleem M, Ali A, Kousar S. “The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: A Site for Inertia in Motion”. Gomal University Journal of Research, 2015, 31(2):182-193.
[6]Knox F B. “Between Fire and Fire: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land”.The Heythrop Journal, 2015, 56(2):235-248.
[7]Levina J. “Speaking the Unnameable: A Phenomenology of Sense in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2013, 36(3):194-211.
[8]Morrison A. “Beyond Bad Faith: Cultural Criticism and Instrumentality”. Criticism, 2019, 61(2):167-189.
[9]Atkins H. “Raising The Rock: The Importance of T. S. Eliot’s Pageant-Play”. Christianity ＆ Literature, 2013, 62(2):261-282.
[10]Domestico A. “The Twice-Broken World: Karl Barth, T. S. Eliot, and the Poetics of Christian Revelation”. Religion ＆ Literature, 2012, 44(3):1-26.
[11]Blackstock A. “Chesterton, Eliot, and Modernist Heresy”. Renascence, 2018, 70(3):199-216.
[12]Warner M. “Reading the Bible ‘as the Report of the Word of God’: The Case of T. S. Eliot”. Christianity ＆ Literature, 2012, 61(4):543-564.
[13]Brooker J S. “‘Our First World’:T. S. Eliot and the Edenic Imagination”. Religion ＆ Literature, 2012, 44(1):151-159.
[14]Woelfel C. “T. S. Eliot and Our Beliefs about Belief”. Religion ＆ Literature, 2012, 44(1):128-136.
[15]Colón S E. “This Twittering World: T. S. Eliot and Acedia”. Religion ＆ Literature, 2011, 43(2):69-90.
[16]Richardson B J. “ ‘A Conversation with Spectres’: Russian Ballet and the Politics of Voice in T. S. Eliot”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2013, 37(1):158-177.
[17]Clifton B. “Textual Frustration: The Sonnet and Gender Performance in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2018, 42(1):65-76.
[18]Wilson J M. “The Formal and Moral Challenges of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral”. Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought ＆ Culture, 2016, 19(1):167-203.
[19]Wilson J M. “Ancient Beauty, Modern Verse: Romanticism and Classicism from Plato to T. S. Eliot and the New Formalism”. Renascence, 2015, 67(1):3-40.
[20]Scully M. “Plasticity at the Violet Hour: Tiresias, The Waste Land, and Poetic Form”. Journal of Modern Literature, 2018, 41(3):166-182.