T.S. Eliot
 

As a Margate resident I've always claimed that Eliot wrote 99% of The Waste Land in the shelter just down the way from where I live and not the 2% the experts believe. Now they want to pull the shelter down!

http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/margate/...l/article.html

On Margate Sands,
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.

Holly, you say they want to pull the shelter down, but the newspaper article you link to merely says they want to have it listed, and it was, anyway, restored in 2000. Do you have other information about some threat of it being pulled down?

Eliot
 

There is no way to avoid his seminal presence in my life. I can't get away from him, and I don't want to. I had to make pilgrimage to St Michael's in East Coker. These literary sites are sacred places. And must be preserved, as long as we have imagination, all the while knowing that -

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

The shelters and churches will fall, but we must help them stand as long as we can.



http://i655.photobucket.com/albums/u...r/DSCN4068.jpg


I was deeply moved by the ancient female goddess figure that stands beside Eliot in his corner of the church. I can't explain how that abiding feminine presence alongside him pierced my soul.

http://i655.photobucket.com/albums/u...r/DSCN4071.jpg

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.


Holly, it has made my day to know that you live close to the shelter. I never wanted to leave East Coker, one of the most beautiful villages I saw in England. I am so glad Eliot lies there. The spirit of the place evokes him powerfully for me. He is there.

Thanks for the brilliant pics, Cally!
Jerome, unfortunately Thanet Council are resolutely anti-culture and not to be trusted. They have allowed many fine historical local buildings to go to the wrecking ball and their interest and support of anything to do with T.S. Eliot has, up to now, been nil.

Re Culture, The Council of Thanet
Prefer its exponents would can it,
And re Eliot T.S.’s
Whole oeuvre, my guess is
They’d pan it and burn it and ban it.

Holly, there's more on the shelter and Eliot in today's Observer:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009...margate-shrine

Incidentally, there's a plaque commemorating his baptism in Holy Trinity Finstock, Oxfordshire, along with one for Barbara Pym the novelist.

Thanks for this, Jerome. The Albermarle Hotel where Eliot stayed - just round the corner from me - was demolished without ceremony about ten years ago. It's actually in Cliftonville and is at least a mile from the Nayland Rock shelter. He must surely have visited other shelters on his walks so I'm not sure why the Margate shelter has been singled out.

T. S. Eliot
 

Loved the pictures, Cally. I wish I could have a plaque like that when my own time comes (some hopes!)
But – (hush! Speak the heresy in whispers!) - the truth is, I could never really warm up to Eliot. The only poem of his I ever took to my heart was “The Hippopotamus”, and for the benefit of those who may have overlooked it, I give it here.

THE HIPPOPOTAMUS

(I omit a Latin quotation from St. Ignatius about the orders of the clergy).

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans.

The broad-backed hippopotamus
Rests on his belly in the mud;
Although he seems to firm to us
He is merely flesh and blood.

Flesh and blood is weak and frail,
Susceptible to nervous shock;
While the True Church can never fail
For it is based upon a rock.

The hippo's feeble steps may err
In compassing material ends,
While the True Church need never stir
To gather in its dividends.

The 'potamus can never reach
The mango on the mango-tree;
But fruits of pomegranate and peach
Refresh the Church from over sea.

At mating time the hippo's voice
Betrays inflexions hoarse and odd,
But every week we hear rejoice
The Church, at being one with God.

The hippopotamus's day
Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts;
God works in a mysterious way--
The Church can sleep and feed at once.

I saw the 'potamus take wing
Ascending from the damp savannas,
And quiring angels round him sing
The praise of God, in loud hosannas.

Blood of the Lamb shall wash him clean
And him shall heavenly arms enfold,
Among the saints he shall be seen
Performing on a harp of gold.

He shall be washed as white as snow,
By all the martyr'd virgins kist,
While the True Church remains below
Wrapped in the old miasmal mist.

Thanks for this, Gail. In fact, as a posting it would equally well on the neighbouring thread, "The poem you wouldn't expect..."

A 30 minute programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday discusses Eliot's current reputation. Apart from the awful background music from 'Cats', it featured some interesting stuff about the 'Quartets'.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode..._21st_Century/

I think you just volunteered to instigate the petition, Holly.

Thanks for this whole thread. The pictures were helpful, as was the information.
Living in New York City, and having a great deal of trouble accepting the sale of air-rights left and right, the theme-park of Manhattan, where I live (in a cheap apartment-hotel), and what we really do with all our waste, T.S Eliot is about right for the times.
peace

Good news! T.S. Eliot's shelter in Margate has now been officially listed and is safe from the developers (but not unfortunately the vandals who like to carve their nasty names there). A piece in my local paper confounds those critics who said Eliot hardly wrote anything of 'The Waste Land' while he was resting up at Margate after his breakdown. They print part of a letter he penned to the novelist Sydney Schiff:

I have done a rough draft of part III but do not know whether it will do and must wait for Vivien's opinion as to whether it is printable. I have done this while sitting in a shelter on the front - as I am out all day except when taking rest.

How splendid. Eliot is surely the ONLY literary person who has put Margate on the map. Are we going to get a plaque?

I can see yobs ripping off Tom's plaque and using it as a frisbee. John Betjeman spent time in Margate and wrote several poems about the place, here's one:


MARGATE (1940)

From out The Queen's Highcliffe for weeks at a stretch
I watched how the mower evaded the vetch,
So that over the putting-course rashes were seen
Of pink and of yellow among the burnt green.

How restful to putt, when the strains of a band
Announced a thé dansant was on at The Grand,
While over the privet, comminglingly clear,
I heard lesser Co-Optimists down by the pier.

How lightly municipal, meltingly tarr'd,
Were the walks through the lawns by the Queen's Promenade
As soft over Cliftonville languished the light
Down Harold Road, Norfolk Road, into the night.

Oh! then what a pleasure to see the ground floor
With tables for two laid as tables for four,
And bottles of sauce and Kia-Ora and squash
Awaiting their owners who'd gone up to wash -

Who had gone up to wash the ozone from their skins
The sand from their legs and the rock from their chins,
To prepare for an evening of dancing and cards
And forget the sea-breeze on the dry promenades.

From third floor and fourth floor the children looked down
Upon ribbons of light in the salt-scented town;
And drowning the trams roared the sound of the sea
As it washed in the shingle the scraps of their tea.

Beside The Queen's Highcliffe now rank grows the vetch,
Now dark is the terrace, a storm-battered stretch;
And I think, as the fairy-lit sights I recall,
It is those we are fighting for, foremost of all.

The new edition of Eliot's 1920s letters makes for uncomfortable reading for devoted fans. On the plus side his devotion to Vivienne at this time is perfectly clear. Unfortunately the anti-Semitism hinted at in The Waste Land though common enough in British middle-class society at the time is all too apparent in his correspondence.
Having an insatiable appetite for 20th century murder trials, I was particularly interested in his letter to The Daily Mail virulently insisting Edith Thompson should be hanged for her part in the Bywaters murder. For those unfamiliar with this case, here's a link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_T...erick_Bywaters

Well, she was, and so she should have been. Well not hanged. In general I'm against that, though for Tony Blair... But she put him up to it, and he fell for it, the dumb klutz. Yes the anti-semitism is not nice, but so utterly all pervading among the upper and upper middle class. Dorothy Sayers is excellent on this. Some of the comments of her characters (not Lord Peter and Harriet of course) in Whose Body particularly.. I wouldn't dare quote them here.

Holly,
I have never enjoyed reading the letters of people whose work I admire. I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the part of them that I admired was in their work and the rest was the detritus which we all carry about with us. The astringent quality of Eliot's poetry hints at what you observe in your post. Often, the information we discover about admired figures gets in the way of our interaction with the distilled experiences which attracted us in the first place.

The anti-Semitism is worst--because more than just tepid modishness--in After Strange Gods, the lecture series he later tried to keep out of print. The most recent thorough consideration I know of is TS Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form by Anthony Julius.

RHE

Here's the book: After Strange Gods. This reference on page 19 is certainly anti-semitic: “The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.” I've probably missed something on my quick flash-through read, but so far it's all I've found.

I spent a few minutes going through it and didn't even come across that particular anti-semitic quote, but for me the issue goes far beyond anti-semitism. What a disgusting twit he was! Truly hateful to the core, it seems to me. Almost everything he has to say is repulsive and smug and harshly judgmental and dismissive of a large swath of humankind. I would think anti-semitism would be but an incidental subset of a more far-reaching hatred.

Doubtless so, Roger: though he was probably within the parameters of Normal for his era. But on the charge specifically of anti-semitism, I can't see (so far) anything more than that one reference, vile though it is; the document is hardly seething with explicit anti-semitism.

Well, the one line you did find is perhaps sufficient to prove the case. Once he said what he said, I'm not sure any corroboration is needed. I don't think anti-semitism is excused merely for not seething.

I notice he also wrote "a right tradition for us must be also a Christian tradition," which, in the context of an essay that elsewhere directly attacks Jews, might be read as especially offensive to Jews even though Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists and Shintos, among others, are embraced by the remark.

Another of my old gods crumble to dust. Ain't got many left now.

We are in accord on that Roger. The context I made my original remark from was Richard's statement that "The anti-Semitism is worst--because more than just tepid modishness--in After Strange Gods, the lecture series he later tried to keep out of print", and this from VQR:

The wording and tenor of these two observations led me to expect that the document contained a great number of anti-semitic remarks when in fact it contains (as far as I've found so far) just one -- which one certainly does as you say demonstrate anti-semitism. Very obviously I'm NOT saying that "anti-semitism is excused merely for not seething".

"Another of my old gods crumble to dust."

The godhead is in the poetry. Poets don't make very good idols. (Neither do plumbers, archbishops, phys ed teachers, or professional bowlers.)

By the way, this is an interesting clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot1VZD6b14U

RHE

Thank you, Richard. for posting the link to this video.

My remark about "fallen gods" was spontaneous and had a wider range. I've just been reading a history of the Vietnam era containing documentation on President Kennedy. I wasn't living in the U.S. during that time.

Just before I read this thread, I had been reflecting on the kids on our country road who died in that war who would have lived if JFK had pulled out at a point when he had an excellent oppotunity to do so (I'm skipping specifics) but he wanted to wait until he was reelected. Then he was killed and we know the rest.

The other eight teammates of my baseball team either died there or were changed for life.

But yes, when I was young I was a huge admirer of Eliot's poetry and that impression has remained with me strongly all these years.

Oh for Christ's sake, T. S. Eliot is perhaps the best poet this benighted country ever produced, and to dismiss him, as some on this thread seem to do, is beyond repugnant. Yes, I've read After Strange Gods--I'm not only aware of it, but I've actually read that paean to damn near everything I detest, including his praise of the South at the expense of the North. BUT... perhaps part of the reason Eliot suppressed a book that is every biut as vile as its reputation makes it out to be is that, perhaps he... regretted it, maybe? Coupled with that, his break with the French Right at the time of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia was essentially on an anti-imperialist basis. In addition to which, even at the time that Eliot was writing After Strange Gods, he was actively promoting the work of one Stephen Spender, who in his book on Eliot, states that he never noticed a hint of bigotry from Eliot, despite Spender being a part-Jewish bisexual Communist. I say this not to justify Eliot's flaws, but merely to say that the story with him is far, far more complex.

As it doubtless is with most poets, which is why I think it's very dangerous to taint the Muse with politics. Keep 'em separate. Most poets are barking mad in one way or t'other anyway, present company excepted of course.

On the other hand, I also think it's dangerous to have idols. -- After Strange Gods indeed: but I reckon Robert Graves firmly nailed the Yeats-Eliot-Pound-Auden-Thomas idolatry cults in These be Your Gods, O Israel.

Paul--

Having just defended Eliot from simplistic dismissal on a political basis, I also find the notion of an absolute separation of poetry from what it states about the world equally suspect. Poems are made out of words, which have meanings and implications, and in an art form like poetry, frequently have meshes of meanings. While I would never insist that a poem that expresses ideas similar to mine is good (I've come across plenty of crap ones that do that) or one that expresses ideas different from mine is bad (too many of those are good), I do a poem a disservice if I don't take it seriously. While I find Eliot's anti-Semitism in After Strange Gods repugnant, I nevertheless, as a reader whose work is shot through with influences from the guy, have to deal with it. What role do Eliot's religious and political views play in his work? What is it about it that resonates with me? It sure as %#^& ain't extended tirades against the "free-thinking jew." But the core of his questions are not based in dodgy racial theories, but rather in a desire for some sort of meaning in life, an order and a sublimity. Yes, his answers led him to many positions that I do not share (monarchism, Anglo-Catholicism as well), but I cannot help but feel a great deal of sympathy for him in a way that I cannot, say, for a poet primarily motivated by irrational hatred of other races and an inflated self-perception, or a critic or editor who, say, sets up Potemkin Village webzines, lambastes books he clearly hasn't read or pseudonymously attacks those toward whom he bears grudges on a personalist and dishonest basis, and promotes poets based on what they say, with a few better writers thrown in for window dressing. Those sorts of things do sully the art.

Quincy

During a similar discussion in the past, Maz wrote and posted this poem:

La La Land

Come and live in La La Land
where the atmosphere is bland,
where everyone is very sweet
and all the poems are a treat.

If there’s something not quite right,
please don’t yell and start a fight.
because the status quo is grand,
and that’s the rule in La La Land

where nothing’s wrong and nothing’s sick
and nothing cuts men to the quick.
If some dark inkling irks a poet
we must advise him not to show it.

Please stay in step and stay in line
and everything will soon be fine;
for we’re all good and we’re all free.
Let’s write and publish, merrily.

And what we write is all (although
it may be judged on whom we know
and how much influence they wield).
So, sorry scribblers, shut up! Yield!

And if you wish to sidestep strife
you mustn’t sully art with life.


M.A.Griffiths

PS: I completely agree with Quincy that we have to deal with it.

There are lots of straw men about today (:)). Quincy, I never suggested for a second that we separate poetry from what it, ie the poetry, states about the world. I'm flummoxed if that's what you misread me to be saying. What I'm saying that it is precisely the poem that we should look at, not at what the poet does with his non-poetry time, which is likely, humans being what they are, to be highly problematic and quite irrelevant. Should the reader really obsess, at the expense of the poetry, over the fact that Larkin was a homophobic antisemitic nazi-sympathising paeodophile-porn-loving racially abusive horror at times? Is that where our main focus should be? Is that what we should wallow in concerning Larkin? Lots of poets are real shockers -- it seems to go with the territory. Sure a poet's disgusting bits should be addressed, but it should not dominate the entire response to that poet's work. Check it out, and move on. But with some it seems to be an obsession. Every time the wind veers east the rotting corpse of old Bete-Noir is trotted out again and given the rounds of the village, as if nothing else mattered.

I hear what you say, Janet, but on a personal level, these days I find it hard to listen to Wagner without thinking of the little squirt's noisome pontificating, as I can't listen to Bach without being aware of his inner goodness. You are right, we should be able to divorce the man from the work, but I'm not sure I can do it.

My approach to Wagner is similar to Holly's. I detest Wagner. I hear his philosphy throughout his music, loud and clear. My quirk. Sometimes I take Gesualdo off the shelf and put him back, also my personal quirk.

Quincy, I didn't say I had burned all my Eliot books in the snow last night. I can still enjoy his work, though I enjoy it less when I think about Ezra standing over him with a red pencil.

I can enjoy Donne also, but think that "Batter my heart, three-personed God; " is a bit of silliness. But lovely writing.

Eliot has certainly influenced how I think about the writing of poetry, but I hope my content is my own thoughts. I don't think he thought of himself as a homeboy from St. Louis; he gave himself a complete make-over, becoming a British citizen, and converting to Anglicanism.

Actually Quincy, I think my thoughts on Eliot have quite as much validity as your thoughts on my thoughts. What's to get indignant about? Except the joy of being indignant.

You do have a point though that he might have regretted it. I'll keep that in mind.

Larkin 'paedophile-porn-loving', Paul. Have you seen the porn he liked or are you talking about the schoolgirl novels? If you are, then ppl seemss a bit over the top. Paedophiles are adults who desire sexual relations with children - which appears to be anything from three months to, oh about ten or eleven I'd say. Children before puberty. I think old blokes and young girls is a bit... well, you know. But Sarkozy and the Italian PM whose name escapes me are not paedophiles. Just a bit... well, you know. But perhaps you have info I don't. Anyway, at least Philip didn't pursue the young Martin Amis around the dining room table. That was Labour MP and later Labour Lord, Tom Driberg. He didn't catch him though.

Those of us brought up on the New Critics may find it a tad easier to separate the biography from the poems, having had it beaten into us ("More? You want more biography?") that it was a more than venial sin to read the poet's personal life into his art. I can hear my mentors now: "That's nice, Richard. You shouldn't have Eliot to tea, if you feel that way. Now back to that line you find so offensive. Do you think he's alluding to Coleridge's yew?"

RHE

Well, let's say pornography inclined towards paedophilia, John. I know about the schoolgirl fantasy novels, but Andrew Motion's biography talks about (p. 266) how Larkin and Robert Conquest used to swap picture and prose pornography in which Headmasters did unspeakable things to schoolgirls (though PL and RC DID use to explicitly speak about what those things might be). There's more on this in Anthony Thwaite's Selected Letters.

I think Richard has a very good point about New-Critics-nurtured readers of poetry. As I see it a true poem has a life detached from that of the poet-vehicle who brought it into being. One way of seeing the poet-to-poem relationship is as that of artisan-to-artifact. The jeweller might think a thousand lurid fantasies, beat her spouse, say mean and hurtful things to neighbours, cheat on her tax return, write poison pen letters and advocate that leftists all be gaoled. Does that really mean she can't craft a beautiful piece of jewellery? Perhaps an even more beautiful piece than that made by the pious PC prude working at the next bench in the jewellery workshop?

I don't get it. It's "beyond repugnant" to mention bad things about a poet, but not to mention good things? That's sort of the way Sarah Palin ran her campaign. Take bows and accept cheers when people want to praise her heroic soldier son (must be that she raised him so well!) but cry foul and leave-the-chldren-out-of-it when the subject turns to her pregnant teenage daughter.

Personally, I think it's beyond repugnant to excuse a poet's personal views just because you happen to like his poetry, particularly when those views are expressed in the course of what is being put forward as literary criticism expounding on what he regards as right and proper in poetry. That he did not misbehave with Stephen Spender hardly makes up for his detestable views in print, which it is healthy to speak out against.

If he tried to suppress the work in question, I have no indication that he ever stepped forward and publicly stated that he was wrong. It sounds to me that he was more embarrassed by the likely reaction than by views he no longer sincerely held in such a natural and ingrained way that it didn't occur to him until after publication that some might not react too kindly.

This is not an argument against his poems, which never moved me in any event even if he had been a man I could deeply admire. The same goes for his good friend Pound, who, purely by coincidence of course, had, shall we say, something of an anti-semitic streak.

I didn't see anyone here claiming that our assessment of Eliot's poems should depend on our assessment of the man. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be simply curious about the man behind the poems, the way we are generally eager to read biographies about famous people from all walks of life and it is generally considered entirely proper to have such interests. To bowlderize and excuse the life story of someone you would like to admire with less ambivalence is beyond repugnant.

Roger,
So much depends .... upon the way we met the work.

I met Eliot's poetry when my big brother was laughing at it and I was young and hungry for things like poetry which were not in my daily world. I stole my brother's book and absorbed the poetry, saw that my brother was wrong and am indelibly imprinted with that undeniably important experience.

I value that moment of discovery. I make no other claims for Eliot. He showed me new ways of being. That's all I need from him.

A classic statement of the issue is in Cleanth Brooks's "Criticism and Literary History: Marvell's Horation Ode," available on line at

http://www.hu.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/brooks1.htm

His argument is summed up in this paragraph, I think:

But I propose to deal here with a more modest example than Milton’s epic. I propose to illustrate from Marvell’s “Horatian Ode.” If we follow the orthodox procedure, the obvious way to understand the “Ode” is to ascertain by historical evidence—by letters and documents of all kinds—what Marvell really thought of Cromwell, or, since Marvell apparently thought different things of Cromwell at different times, to ascertain the date of the “Ode,” and then neatly fit it into the particular stage of Marvell’s developing opinion of Cromwell. But this yields at best only an approximation of the poem; and there lurks in it some positive perils. For to ascertain what Marvell the man thought of Cromwell, and even to ascertain what Marvell as poet consciously intended to say in his poem, will not prove that the poem actually says this, or all this, or merely this. This last remark, in my opinion, does not imply too metaphysical a notion of the structure of a poem. There is surely a sense in which anyone must agree that a poem has a life of its own, and a sense in which it provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged. It is a commonplace that the poet sometimes writes better than he knows, and alas, on occasion, writes worse than he knows. The history of English literature will furnish plenty of examples of both cases.

A poem "provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged." It can be elucidated by external materials. If a poet refers to "the swan of Mantua," it seems fair to go outside the poem to find out he's alluding to Virgil. As Brooks says, "To put the matter into its simplest terms: the critic obviously must know what the words of the poem mean, something which immediately puts him in debt to the linguist; and since many of the words in this poem are proper norms, in debt to the historian as well." But these are tools to find out what the poem says, not who the poet was. When Brooks concludes, "Was this, then, the attitude of Andrew Marvell, born 1621, sometime student of Cambridge, returned traveller and prospective tutor, toward Oliver Cromwell in the summer of 1650? The honest answer must be: I do not know. I have tried to read the poem, the 'Horatian Ode,' not Andrew Marvell’s mind. That seems sensible to me in view of the fact that we have the poem, whereas the attitude held by Marvell at any particular time must be a matter of inference, even though I grant that the poem may be put in as part of the evidence from which we draw inferences[,]" I can only agree, even though I must sometimes remind myself that knowing what I know about Pound's crackpot fascism and Eliot's semi-genteel anti-Semitism makes no specific poem either better or worse.

RHE-