[Richard Epstein]

I'll bet it was said by some stinking bishop.

RHE

[Allen Tice]

Thank you, Michael, et al., now we're getting a bit of somewhere.

I will show a poem with as little artifice (or quality) as I can muster.
Roses are often red,
Violets sort of blue,
This poem's not much good,
But that's Ok too.

Back to the main action. Eliot appears to deny all connection between his emotion and his hypothetical personality, and his poetry. He speaks as if he created Potemkin poetry about sadness, emptiness, and that Fisher King that earned him some fame and endeared him to his devotees. So how did he get so famous? What differentiates him (for Americans) from Rod McKuen? (I don't know the British equivalent of Rod McKuen.)

I'd like a Nobel Prize for my Potemkin Village. Actually.

[John Whitworth]

Couldn't say. I've never heard of Rod McKuen.

[Allen Tice]

You'd just luv him. Ha!

Actually he looms just below the very lowest level of almost non-kitsch, looking up at you with big wet eyes, blinking damply.

[Michael F]

Yes, Allen.

Eliot’s pronouncement, taken as a corrective to the excesses of e.g. the confessional poets, is fine; but taken as an absolute edict for what poetry is or must be, NO. Taken literally, I believe it makes poetry (or any art) impossible.

[Jayne Osborn]

I'll bet it was said by some stinking bishop.

RHE

Lovely cheese, Richard!

[Allen Tice]

Ii's nice that Michael Ferris agrees with my view of McKuen, if he does. McKuen has to be read in book form to be properly assessed, though McKuen sang too. A near talent, almost, maybe.

And so I agree with most of Ferris' judgment of Eliot's statement. Yet before he actually reached his own old age, Eliot got ferociously famous early on writing about his pseudo-old age (or someone's). (He never got very bald, for example.) And so his early fabrications were in some sense entire falsifications, but ones that fit the quoted remark very well. I get the sense that he was nailing together clapboard to hide behind all the way.

As we know, he suffered serious double inguinal hernias as a child whose surgical treatment must have severely impacted his sense of sexual capability, and his early stuff (cited here), shows a big fear of pre-antibiotic syphilis. All of this fits with the screen and "escapes" mentioned at the top.

[Michael F]

Allen,

It is so very agreeable to be agreed with! Your complaisance tempts me to two further comments:

1. Isn’t a mark of greatness the capaciousness of poet? Emotional as well as intellectual capaciousness -- which is, I think, much the same thing as Keats’s negative capability. They think and feel what we do, or have done. Thus, their writing on a wide range of subjects feels authentic, not factitious. Shakespeare and Dickinson are prime examples, IMO. Auden (whom I apparently recall more than I’m aware of!) deemed the worst sin of his poetry to be ‘insincerity’ or ‘dishonesty’ or some such: professing to feel what he did not, in fact, feel. If I were less lazy I would search for the exact quote.

2. While Eliot may not have gone bald, he was an old man. Veritably. I sometimes wonder, reading him, if he was ever young. Do you think he ever wrote convincingly of romantic love?

[Allen Tice]

I know that I am very largely unconvinced by the ancient poet Horace's descriptions of love, but that's another matter. I think Eliot wrote fairly convincingly of enormously frustrated romantic love in "La Figlia che Piange", for example, where I believe he shows a paralyzing fear of being unable to perform virilely and effortlessly as he thought he would be expected to --- in other words, he was mortally embarrassed about his body's defects.

It's harder to say about his late poem to his second wife, Valerie. What went on with his first wife is subject to much discussion, but one view is that she herself was a very unlucky refugee from the pages of Krafft-Ebing.

[Michael F]

I enjoy your reading of "La Figlia che Piange". I enjoy your thoughts on Eliot in general.

Thanks.