By Ratan Bhattacharjee
TS Eliot once told that ‘Human kind cannot bear too much reality’ and literary modernism, or modernist literature begins with the introduction of this reality removing Georgian romanticism from English literature. This modernism has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterised by a self-conscious break from traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction.
Modernists experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra Pound’s maxim to “make it new”.During the flowering of Modernist poetry between 1917 and 1929, the second phase of the movement, all these initial manifestations of modernism combined to find a full nature expression in the poetry of TS Eliot, and another Edith Sitwell while WB Yeats came later.
Eliot was not just the most famous poet but is still regarded as the finest poet of the 20th century. Internationally lauded, he had been awarded the Nobel prize, the Dante Gold Medal, the Goethe prize, the US Medal of Freedom and the British Order of Merit. The world knew him as the poet not just of “Prufrock” but also of The Waste Land and Four Quartets; theatre audiences had flocked to his plays such as Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party at the Edinburgh festival, in London and on Broadway; at home and in school, children relished Macavity, one of the poems from his Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, just as eagerly as later audiences have delighted in Cats.
Fifty years later, “difficult” remains the word most people attach to his verse. Yet we quote him: “Not with a bang but a whimper”, the last line of Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men is among the best-known lines of modern poetry.
“April is the cruellest month,” begins The Waste Land with unsettling memorability.
The beginning of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock is startling — the queer and rather shocking image of “patient etherised upon a table” at the start of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.
The emergence of TS Eliot in the literary scene occurred in 1915, when Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine, recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine’s founder, that she publish The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The poem follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. The poem’s structure was heavily influenced by Eliot’s extensive reading of Dante and refers to a number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists.
Eliot’s The Waste Land, according to Jonathon McAloon, “remains one of the finest reflections on mental illness ever written”. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation and a poetic counterpart to James Joyce’s Ulysses. But in reality it was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. At that time he was advised by his psychiatrist to go to Margate Seafront Shelter where he was enjoying some calm of mind. He used to go to Seafront at Nayland Rock by tram from Albemarle Hotel at Cliftonville.
In Part III of The Waste Land the poet wrote, “On Margate sands, I can connect /Nothing with nothing/ The broken fingernails of dirty hands”. He again and again delved deep into his own despair: “My nerves are bad tonight, yes bad. Stay with me/Speak to me, Why do you never speak. Speak.”
In October 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot’s dedication to il miglior fabbro (“the better craftsman”) refers to Ezra Pound’s significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication. Among its best-known phrases are “April is the cruellest month”, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” and “Shantih shantih shantih”. The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem. The marriage of “Tom and Viv” proved a disaster, but it gave the world The Waste Land.
The Hollow Men appeared in 1925. He reached the nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in The Waste Land. The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot’s most famous lines, notably its conclusion:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Ash-Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot’s “conversion poem”, it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation.
Before the publication of The Waste Land as a book in December 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On November 15, 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, “As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style.” His style became less ironic, and the poems were no longer populated by multiple characters in dialogue. His subject matter also became more focused on Eliot’s spiritual concerns and his Christian faith.
Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements, respectively: air, earth, water, and fire. The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and history. The lines from East Coker contain the essence of all his mystical search: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope.”
Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th century – a world poet, who changed the way we think. Yet, fifty years after his death, we are still making new discoveries about him.
(The author is International Visiting Professor, Fairleigh
Dickinson University, New Jersey.
He may be reached at [email protected])