Bright Young Things discussion

Given that the January Group Read is...

Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot by T.S. Eliot

...it seems fitting to start a thread where we can discuss the poet himself, his influences and any other of his works that people would like to discuss.

Ally

Eliot is sometimes described as a modernist poet but modernism is a tricky thing to describe.

What do the Bright Young Things understand by the term 'Modernism'???

Ally

Thanks for the Eliot reminder. I've been sort of busy lately and forgot. I love his poetry.

You know, I'm an English major and never really got into movement labels like modernism or romanticism, etc. They tended to confuse me and I just dove into the works and if I enjoyed them, so be it. Sorry, I can't help you there. :-)

I would normally agree that arbitrary labels are not usually helpful. It's just that the many influences that are collectively referred to as 'modernism' are very interesting in terms of analysing the (sometimes obscure) literature of the time period.

I'm thinking specifically of things like...

* The Bloomsbury Set, who felt themselves to be part of the vanguard - a new wave of authors - Eliot, Woolf, Joyce etc - they were consciously 'modern'
* The influence of turbulent political times - Communism, Fascism, the Spanish Civil war, the first and second world wars - the uncertainty that this context brought ended up being worked into writing of this time.
* The Freudian influences - sexual revolution (of sorts) & playing with boundaries. Feminist ideas and the vote for women etc.
* concepts of time - Henri Bergson & others influence.
* the youth's disenchantment with the establishment & tradition

etc etc etc

Ally

Ally wrote: "Eliot is sometimes described as a modernist poet but modernism is a tricky thing to describe.

What do the Bright Young Things understand by the term 'Modernism'???

I've always taken the Modernist program to be the intent to disburden art from everything not fundamental to it. So in painting, for example, we begin with the consequences of accepting that a painting is a flat two-dimensional surface. There's more to it than that, and the process was incremental -- we didn't all wake up one morning Modernists. One recent book I have found useful is "Thinking Through Craft" I believe by Glenn Adamson. He talks about for example Brancusi's effort to make sculpture which wasn't about anything, and the parallel effort to turn craft jewelry into sculpture, that is, not which was meaningful only as a body ornament, something couture has never done. The factors you cite I take as a (partial) explanation of why we might have wanted to be Modernists, but not of what Modernism is or (better) what practitioners wanted it to be. Likewise, I would say there are no Modernists now, and haven't been for fifty years. We want different things now. So: isn't all this prefatory to the question -- Why is Elliot Modern?

Ally wrote: "I would normally agree that arbitrary labels are not usually helpful. It's just that the many influences that are collectively referred to as 'modernism' are very interesting in terms of analysing ..."

May I suggest for clarity that we agree to the convention that Modern capitalized refers to a philosophy, practice, set of ideas, and that modern/modernism refers in a general way to a historical period or condition (e.g. "modern times") This might save some talking at cross-purposes.

Is there something about Eliot that may be putting people off commenting in this month's group read thread? - how do our members perceive this poet?

I finally dug out my old Anthology this evening and was looking over some of the Eliot poems in there and trying to decipher what my notes from 30+ years ago meant.

One thing about this anthology (Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry) that is nice is all the annotations. Editor of this particular version is Richard Ellmann. Actually, the annotations in the book regarding The Waste Land are Eliot's own annotations, I see now that I am re-reading the write-up before the poem.

Most especially I was reading The Waste Land. I probably haven't read it since I took the class. I almost felt as if part of the poem was missing. It seemed so long then. I guess it is still long. But it seemed much longer and more confusing then.

When he wrote that poem he had recently seen an early copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. Maybe I feel less confused by The Waste Land now is because I am more confused by Ulysses. Ezra Pound apparently made him remove 72 stanzas that were kind of ripping on Joyce's book. Other lines were suggested by his wife.

And I now discover that there is a character (Tiresias) and a section ("And no rock") that ties the whole poem together - at least per the notes in my book. But I don't think I realized that years ago.

[perhaps this should have gone in "The Waste Land" section - but I went off on a tangent]

Jan C wrote: "I finally dug out my old Anthology this evening and was looking over some of the Eliot poems in there and trying to decipher what my notes from 30+ years ago meant.

One thing about this antholo..."

My take on this is that a lot of 20th century poetry (and fiction) is really not very accessible. It takes practice to decipher. How many people have read the great Modernists since school? The same is true of fiction. Why exactly does Quentin Compson kill himself at the end of The Sound and the Fury? What is going on with Jake in Heminway's "The Big Two-Hearted River" besides fishing? These are hard questions. Never mind why an author would choose to frustrate readers. Some readers consider the challenge to be a provocation, which in some ways it is, and refuse to rise to it, and so get no practice reading it. Hardly surprising. But I think we underrate ourselves for the interpretive skills we have picked up just by being immersed in this stuff. A glance at my shelves picks out Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills and ask what sense could you have made of this about the time Joyce was writing Finnegan's Wake?

I don't know how to upload a picture so here's the cover to the Sherman book.

For Ash Wednesday, let's not forget to celebrate the great Eliot poem of the same name!