T S ELIOT

T S ELIOT

1. THE WASTE LAND (1922)

   • http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176735 
   • "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain"
   • "There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson! / “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! / “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?"
   • Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.
   • “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; / “They called me the hyacinth girl.” / —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence. / Oed’ und leer das Meer.

2. THE HOLLOW MEN (1925)

   • "Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion"
   • "In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms / In this last of meeting places / We grope together / And avoid speech"

3. ULYSSES, ORDER, AND MYTH

   • myth "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."
   • "Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires."

4. TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT

   • tradition involves "the historical sense". 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 timelessness and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity."
   • "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it."
   • the poet "must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same"
   • "the mind of Europe - the mind of his own country"
   • "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past...he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."
   • "the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written"
   • "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."
   • "it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts."
   • "the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways."
   • "There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of *significant* emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet."