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In 1957, at the age of 68, the American poet T.S. Eliot (a naturalised Englishman) married Valerie Fletcher, who was 30. She had been his secretary at Faber and Faber for several years. In Leeds not
long after this, Alan Bennett ’s mother described meeting their old customer Mrs. Fletcher in the company of “ a tall,
elderly, very refined-looking feller.” Recognising his identity , Bennett tried to explain the significance of this poet , finishing with his Nobel Prize. “ Well, I’m not surprised,” his mother replied,
“ It was a beautiful overcoat.” So, a refined gent of the old school or an old goat ? The youthful Eliot had been one of the pioneers of
Modernism, a movement in Western literature that followed trends in the visual arts by rejecting past styles and conventions, emphasising instead the need for innovative techniques in order to reflect
modern experience. His "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" was written in 1910-11 and published in 1915 :
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis ?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
brought in on a platter,
I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter ;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
No mention of the carnage on the Western Front here. The Modernists themselves claimed to be reacting to that ‘immense panorama of futility and violence’ by promoting greater self-awareness.
These people were largely intellectuals. Weren’t they aware of those eastern spiritual disciplines designed to eliminate the ‘self’ ? William Burroughs calls it “that querulous , frightened , defensive , petty , boring entity”. What Eliot presents us with are the hesitations of a balding, middle-aged highbrow
and a “stream of consciousness” that complains of ladies in drawing rooms and laments his physical and intellectual inertia. Among his contemporaries were some who took the view that difficulty in
literature was the deliberate tool of a socially privileged elite (“they lived in squares and slept in triangles”) who turned up their noses at the natural pleasures of a ‘good read’ (or a ‘nice picture’)
in favour of the dubious pleasure of feeling superior to ‘the common herd’.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
As the century wore on, futility and violence never went that far away and obscurity continued to be the strategy to protect art from co-optation by an all-absorbing system of mass consumption.
Like adolescents fearful of getting taken in by all that was phony , some chaps at their typewriters set out to ‘challenge’ or ‘subvert’ the reader’s expectations, either with impenetrable
word-play or that old stand-by , obscenity. Neither of these was the path Mr. Eliot took. The ex-iconoclast adopted hard-line conservative religious and political views, embracing the Anglican
church and kow-towing to traditional authority in literature as in society. As a poet , dramatist , critic , publisher and cultural commentator , it could be said that he towered over English letters.
It might equally be observed that he was a bag of self-important wind. Feeling disquiet with the world as it is can lead us down revolutionary or reactionary paths. A delight in the New often gives way
to melancholy at the disappearance of the Old.
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Archive
Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15th February 2016
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