"This book explores poetry of T. S. Eliot and three plays, Sweeney Agonistes, The Family Reunion, and The Cocktail Party, in the light of his responses to his cultural tradition." "The concept of memory, as an acknowledgment both of a cultural heritage and of its availability for original works of mind and imagination, unifies this study by Grover Smith. Eliot was tradition-oriented, drawing upon various cultures - primitive, Indic, European, and American - for poetic inspiration and models. By education, he was multicultural in a thoroughly legitimate sense." "In separate chapters, Smith, though commenting on a few verbal sources of types familiar from Eliot's practice of stylistic borrowing, focuses on thematic concerns. Included are the psychological labyrinth of death-in-life of Poe's tales and poems; transfigurations of Hamlet from Shakespeare to Goethe, Coleridge, and Freud; popular stage entertainment in nineteenth-century America; poetic stimuli from James Barrie, Arnold Bennett, and Aldous Huxley; twentieth-century speculations on time and serialism; the world of occult phenomena in W. B. Yeats and, later, the novelist Charles Williams; and Eliot's obsessive critiques of primitive myth and ritual." "In various ways, all of these interests intersected. Smith shows in Eliot's dedication to diverse traditions a practical imperative, and to a great extent a moral one, for a poetic art grounded in traditional American reverence for inherited values."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf were almost exact contemporaries, readers and critics of each others' work, and friends for over twenty years. Their writings, though, are rarely paired. Modernism, Memory, and Desire proposes that some striking correspondences exist in Eliot and Woolf's poetic, fictional, critical, and autobiographical texts, particularly in their recurring turn to the language of desire, sensuality, and the body to render memory's processes. The book includes extensive archival research on some mostly unknown bawdy poetry by T. S. Eliot while offering readings of major work by both writers, including The Waste Land, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', Orlando and To the Lighthouse. McIntire juxtaposes Eliot and Woolf with several major modernist thinkers of memory, including Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin, to offer compelling reconsiderations of the relation between textuality, remembrance and the body in modernist literature.
The first comprehensive treatment of how "an American poet so profoundly shaped or affected the modern British novel," this--in the words of James E. Miller, Jr.--details "an extraordinary and even exciting literary fact, worthy of full documentation and exploration. "The book begins with an introduction describing how The Waste Land blew into England in 1922, as William Empson said, "not unlike an east wind." Although the critics disagree over what the poem means, all writers since 1922 have felt its influence in some degree, even if only in rejecting it. The author then traces echoes of The Waste Land in 17 major British novelists, confining himself to cases where the evidence is too strong to be explained as coincidence. The authors are divided into three groups. Part I assesses the poem's early impact, as seen in the work of writers already established at the time of its publication. Novelists discussed in this section include E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley. There is also a chapter on Richard Aldinton that contains a fascinating revaluation, based on extensive research, of Aldington's personal quarrel with Eliot. Part II examines the different sort of influence The Waste Land exerted on novelists who came to prominence in the decade before World War II. For these writers--among them Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, Christopher Isherwood, C. S. Lewis, and Graham Greene--the poem was a basic part of their literary education, and was therefore woven more deeply, and frequently, into the fabric of their work. Part III focuses on two writers of the postwar era, Iris Murdoch and Anthony Burgess. With the rest of their generation they had been forced to recognize a horror more oppressive than the banality and blight of Eliot's "Unreal City," yet they found in the The Waste Land images and meanings so compelling that the poem retains an undeniable presence in their work. In his conclusion, Dr. Crawford attributes The Waste Land's uniquely powerful impact to four qualities: its timing in providing "prototypes for almost every modern problem"; its challenging elusiveness; its ambiguity, which "allows every reader to draw his own conclusion regarding the poem's meaning"; and its haunting symbols and descriptions. The "rhetoric of fiction" is especially sensitive to such qualities. The result is the British novelists "have helped to 'define' The Waste Land by their varied use of it."
The last major verse written by Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, considered by Eliot himself to be his finest work Four Quartets is a rich composition that expands the spiritual vision introduced in “The Waste Land.” Here, in four linked poems (“Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding”), spiritual, philosophical, and personal themes emerge through symbolic allusions and literary and religious references from both Eastern and Western thought. It is the culminating achievement by a man considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century and one of the seminal figures in the evolution of modernism.
From a world-renowned painter, an exploration of creativity’s quintessential—and often overlooked—role in the spiritual life “Makoto Fujimura’s art and writings have been a true inspiration to me. In this luminous book, he addresses the question of art and faith and their reconciliation with a quiet and moving eloquence.”—Martin Scorsese “[An] elegant treatise . . . Fujimura’s sensitive, evocative theology will appeal to believers interested in the role religion can play in the creation of art.”—Publishers Weekly Conceived over thirty years of painting and creating in his studio, this book is Makoto Fujimura’s broad and deep exploration of creativity and the spiritual aspects of “making.” What he does in the studio is theological work as much as it is aesthetic work. In between pouring precious, pulverized minerals onto handmade paper to create the prismatic, refractive surfaces of his art, he comes into the quiet space in the studio, in a discipline of awareness, waiting, prayer, and praise. Ranging from the Bible to T. S. Eliot, and from Mark Rothko to Japanese Kintsugi technique, he shows how unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives. This poignant and beautiful book offers the perspective of, in Christian Wiman’s words, “an accidental theologian,” one who comes to spiritual questions always through the prism of art.
Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Siegen, course: Noble Prize Winners. Instantly canonized?, language: English, abstract: In his book about “Tradition” Edward Shils claims, “there are two pasts.” One is the phenomenal past; the past of realism, the past of occurred incidents which builds a sequence of human action until the present is reached. The other past is the perceived past. As “a much more plastic thing” this form of past is recorded in myths, memory and in literature, which are built up on the encounters and experiences with the occurred incidents. Sethe, the fictional figure and protagonist in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, offers a view towards the timelessness and power of memory: “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” Does that mean that memories live amongst us? Of course many things we remember today have been there long before our generation was born – for example experiences of our ancestors during World War II, or even myth, traditional orals. Nevertheless, its appearances before do change in the mind of the living generation which is referring to it. Concerning a pedagogical purpose, in his book, Shils claims for a need of tradition as T.S Eliot does in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. With a sensitive regard to the past as function and feeder for a modern artist, it becomes obvious that even novelty presupposes what T.S. Eliot calls “historical sense”. In his essay from 1919 Eliot debates about the problem of time and its relation towards the past. In Eliot’s understanding “[...] the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; [...] This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.”
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot describes how the poetic mind -- and his own mind -- works in a fragmentary manner in the process of literary creation. In this essay he states that The poet's mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together. (SP 41) Not only do these words contain a measure for understanding the creative process, but they also contain fragments of Eliot's beginning, his early interest in the philosophy of French philosopher, Henri Bergson. Author of such influential books such as Creative Evolution, Mind and Memory, and Time and Free Will, Bergson's ideas were pervasive and conspicuous in the writing of the early twentieth century. Paul Douglass asserts that "Bergson played an important, perhaps decisive role in the development of an expressly 'modern' philosophy and literature" (1). Bergson's philosophy, while popular during the modernist period, is little known or explored by most graduate students today. Yet, without knowledge of Bergson's philosophy, a scholar lacks full understanding of this period's writing. Bergson viewed time's spatial representation by science and mathematics --that of an unalterable, irreversible time line -- as unsuitable and illusory for the actual human experience and event of time and memory. Instead, Bergson's idea of time and memory posits that a moment in the present leads us to a surviving memory which leads to another memory in a free flowing association and movement from present to past, past to present. In Bergson's complex philosophy of time and consciousness, he noted two types of memory -- Practical and Pure. For us to achieve Bergson's almost mystical Pure Memory, we must separate ourselves from the demands of our practical bodies and our practical worlds. Only in this separation can we become conscious of Pure Memory. If a memory has survived, it has survived for a purpose. When we are in the midst of a consciousness that allows for Pure Memory, time past and time present become one in a type of synchronicity, wherein time bends and folds back on itself freely and seems to lengthen. We then become one with time and memory on a universal level. There is, however, the potentiality for memory and time to cause effects of inaction and inarticulateness that can have debilitating effects -- as when a person turns away from the present and looks so far towards the past that he or she become filled with sorrow. The poetry of T. S. Eliot is filled with such temporal concerns because of his early interest in Bergson. Indeed, the influence of Henri Bergson's philosophy on T.S. Eliot's early poetry has been explored and documented by scholars Donald Childs, Philip LeBrun, Lyndall Gordon, and Piers Gray. Evidence of Bergson's enduring and perhaps unconscious influence on Eliot's poetry remains explored to a significantly lesser degree -- particularly in reference to his post-conversion poetry. Childs' final assertion is that "Bergsonsim, to quote Eliot's mother, becomes in his thought a 'diminishing quality,' [yet] it nonetheless endures in its pseudo-mystical dimension as an important quality of Eliot's poetic and religious sensibility" (488). My thesis looks at Bergson's influence in Eliot's poetry in his early and late work, in other words, his beginning and his end. In particular, I evaluate evidence of Bergson's philosophical influence in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," and Four Quartets. Even in these last poems, the echo of Bergson's intuition and duration, pure memory and practical memory, reverberates as "Time present and time past" intertwine, leading to the illumination that "In my beginning is my end." I will not only explore evidence of Bergson"s philosophy in Four Quartets, but also examine Bergson's influence throughout a representative scope of Eliot's work because, after extensive research and careful analysis, I find it plausible that Bergson became part of Eliot's poetic voice. As scholar Phillip Le Brun states in his essay on "T.S. Eliot and Henri Bergson," "had he not known Bergson's philosophical writings, Eliot's major formulations about poetry -- about tradition, the associated sensibility of the artist, and the work of art as objective correlative -- would have been quite different from what they are" (10). And so would his poetry have been vastly different had he not been forever altered by Bergson. Focusing on time, memory and the Bergsonian, memory-related consequence of inaction and inarticulateness in Eliot's poetic voices, my thesis analyzes the artistic evolution of Eliot in an effort to show how his poetic mind arrived at a "new compound."
