This one needed a do-over. If I want to record my experience reading Thomas Stearns (T.S. to you) Eliot’s poems, and I do, the version set down by me 13 years ago just won’t do. Twenty-three year-old Charles sounded disappointed and slightly annoyed. It sounded like an arduous and not very satisfying task. Sort of like eating an expensive, over the top tasting menu made up of tiny, deconstructed dishes that leave you hungry and befuddled. “Intensely intellectual and modern…read each twice…his works about religion unsurprisingly insufferable…would much better understand and therefore enjoy them if read with someone else...cryptic” is what I wrote. Clearly I preferred the oysters and wine of Hemingway and Waugh.
I couldn’t let this read escape my memory, and decided a second visit from a more focused and mature me was needed. Confident, I began reading his poems again this spring. I quickly realized a decade plus hadn’t made it any easier to read Eliot’s work–realized whatever I relayed to you was at great risk of coming up short on a pretty high-powered guy (an American until 1927, when he became a British subject). I’m damning the torpedoes and going through with it.
At risk sounding thick, poetry is inherently cryptic. At its basic level it’s suggestive, forcing physicality on sounds, words, and lines, playing on the reader’s full array of senses and memory. It is also far older than contemporary prose and novel writing, and maybe therefore flightier to capture in a short and snappy review format. Poems are also momentary. They aren’t chapters and story that build subconsciously, but a natural warping of conveyance, where sparseness tells more. Those few other poets I have read and enjoyed are a bit more purposeful with connection (Charles Bukowski, Mary Jane Oliver, Billy Collins). It feels like Eliot speaks more into the celestial fog than to you directly, and used poetry as an alloy for post-war pain with what feels like every last scrape of literary history sewn in. Here’s something that’s slightly more straight-forward:
Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.
I was neither at the hot gates
Nor fought in the warm rain
Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,
Bitten by flies, fought.
My house is a decayed house,
And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,
Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.
The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.
The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea,
Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.
I an old man,
A dull dead among windy spaces.
Just this first stanza from “Gerontion” (Poems, 1920) boggles. It teems with land, direction, and time. It’s heavy with squalor and damp; bodies exercising the warmth of life in an apathetic routine, amongst wet-sounding rocks, moss, fields, and gutters. Excuse my French but that’s fucking awesome–but where it goes and how it adds up is a mystery.
One of my favorites, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker, puts me at ease in “The Shock and Aftershocks of ‘The Waste Land” (2022). “[Of two] first-time readers, the erudite and the uninformed, Eliot would lean toward the second. ‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood,’ he wrote in an essay on Dante. ‘It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.”
Let’s check “uninformed” and keep going. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) is towering, with references to Shakespeare, “Canterbury Tales,” Baudelaire, Thomas Kyd, the Bible, Greek mythology, Hindu scripture, E.M. Forster, and Aldous Huxley (the guy clearly needed to lay off the books and get out more). The fount of “Waste Land’s” analysis is ample, so please don’t stop with me (check out Lane above). What “Waste Land” means is still a bit open ended. A coherent scene bubbles up in the third section “The Fire Sermon.”
At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.
Out of the window perilously spread
Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,
On the divan are piled (at night her bed)
Stockings, slippers, camisoles, and stays.
I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs
Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—
I too awaited the expected guest.
He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.
The time is now propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which still are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided, he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence;
His vanity requires no response,
And makes a welcome of indifference.
(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
Bestows one final patronising kiss,
And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit . . .
Even this sad, mundane moment takes work to parse out–the woman’s “drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays,” her clothes, “one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire,” maybe describing the house agent’s clerk’s unworthiness and lechery, “the human engine waits, like a taxi throbbing waiting,” the familiar echo of life humming on. But Tiresias? The ancient Greek prophet guy who occasionally transformed into a woman? He hangs around creepily out of sight as the sun sets amongst the detritus of the 20th century.
The reader is watched and watching, pulled through centuries and across gossip columns in the local paper. The combination plays on your head and your middle, like a cup of coffee–sharp, complex, hot, there and gone, you feel awake. But to get there it takes a physical effort–a saddling up to the print on the page and a squaring of the shoulders to the table to grasp the line by line.
“The Waste Land” was followed by “Hollow Men” (1925), a 98 line piece in the similar vein with nods again to Shakespeare, “Dante’s Inferno,” Guy Fawkes, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, and others. It is also more specifically a reflection of collective grief and despair after the First World War. “Ash Wednesday” (1930), “Four Quartets” (1943), and a more whimsical collection called “Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats” (1939) is also out there.
I’ll end with a section of my favorite of his, “The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock” (1915). Although still melancholy, “Prufrock” feels like it steps outside the dark study into the fresh air. It’s more playful with language, and doesn’t make my head hurt as much to read. Check out the full version (it’s quick) at Poetry Foundation. Hope you like it too.
I very much appreciate the substantial inclusion of primary text in this one, especially since I may not end up reading any TS Elliot, if I'm honest. (I shudder from Anthony Lane's assessment of me, residing in a third category for people who lack the scholarship and haven't [yet?] found the joy – maybe if 23yo Charles can grow into a more focused and mature someone for whom Elliot is playful and non-headachey, then so can 36yo Nick.) But this gave me a much more grounded taste of it, and poems as "a natural warping of conveyance, where sparseness tells more" is lovely.