The Official 'T.S Eliot Collected Poems' thread for 2014

[DJA]

The Official T.S Eliot Collected Poems thread
Please post thoughts, insights and ideas on this fairly enigmatic guy who weaves vast tapestries of surreal word pictures which leave me dumbfounded and lost
If you have studied Eliot before, if you can please post:
-Any guides to Eliot which might be useful
-Ideas on HOW to tackle and analyse the lexicon of his poetry
-Examples of essays/poetry analysis

Us Lit 3/4 people who are doing Eliot in 2014 can use this thread to discuss and share ideas.
Out of all my texts, I've been finding Eliot the hardest to analyse!

[achre]

-Any guides to Eliot which might be useful

There's a lot of good guides to Eliot out there (to name a few, there's that 15 dollar Waste Land app on iTunes, bookrags is amazing (definitely get a class subscription to this, if you all want to chip in ~80 cents), poetry.rapgenius.com was surprisingly useful for disentangling his transliterary fetish, there's a lot of informative youtube videos on the context and function of his poetry, and as if you needed to be told, sparknotes is always there) but I never really found any of these especially useful in SAC tasks. Your own impression of Eliot will constitue the bulk of your writings on him, if not the whole, so just read and re-read. Your understanding of his poems, of course, will feed your demonstrable knowledge, but please, please do not become dependant on studyguides.

-Ideas on HOW to tackle and analyse the lexicon of his poetry

Not too sure what you mean by lexicon, but in analysing a poem - any poem - the big thing you have to do is  correctly link technique to function. A lot of people (or at least, most low-scoring essays and students that I see) mistakenly suppose that the non-prosaic nature of poetry can be exploited to draw out any kind of interpretation from any technique they happen to identify - linking said technique to a function it may not necessarily serve. For instance, saying that Eliot's use of enjambment in the opening lines of The Waste Land emphasises the sense of loss in post World War I Europe may sound right, when in fact it's pure bullshit, as enjambment just draws attention to whatever words or moments are enjambed, and so you can't draw the previous reading out of those lines alone.
Anyway, the only thing you need to worry about when analysing Eliot is making sure you have some level of original analytical exposure to all of his prescribed poems, and ensuring that you don't fuck up when describing the role of poetic technique in his creation of meaning.

-Examples of essays/poetry analysis

Most example essays worth reading cost money, but the second I can be stuffed transcribing my SACs onto word, I'll post a couple of Eliot essays in the sample compilation thread.
Oh, and good luck! Don't listen to the naysayers who get frustrated with him, Eliot is amazing and beautiful and don't do him for your creative response!

[DJA]

Preludes (pg.13 Collected Poems)
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173478
A bit of an update of ideas for the poem Preludes in the Collection that I have gathered in my readings:

• Concern about the impact of industrialisation on the soul
• Irony in the loneliness of the individual in a city which is intense and where everyone is close together
• Industrialisation as powerful, malevolent and foreboding
• Existential crisis
• Isolation
• Dirt + Pollution pervasive: metaphor for a stained/corrupted soul and inner life
• Paranoia over industry and machinery (Brutal destruction of WW1, loss of human imput in direct work, factory work)
• Enlightenment, Modernism
• Decline of religion in worldview
• Peoples’ perception of the world challenged

General information:
There are 4 preludes. The first prelude at dusk, then the morning, then at night and dawn and the fourth is in the late afternoon.
It is highly focused on emotive imagery depicting human despair and abject suffering.

Prelude (definition): Derived from music meaning a short introductory piece

[brenden]

Why would you read a guide? If anyone thinks they know wtf that guy is on about, well... They're missing a line of the poem (the one TS deleted for fun).

Just feel the poems for a while before you try to analyse them. And try not to think too much

[achre]

Because you can't just say that you don't understand his poetry and then talk about how the poems make you feel, you need to have some kind of point of reference to substantiate your essay. Guides can be helpful, especially when gathering all the obscure transliterary references.
Personally, I think a lot of Eliot's poetry is very digestable and coherent as insular works (difficult != incomprehensible), but when you start doing passage analyses, trying to form links between his different periods and philosophies and styles tends to make the whole thing fall to pieces. It's a struggle, but (I'm told) also not impossible. The stuff you've got on the Preludes above is really general. I think having that kind of generality will be really helpful in avoidng losing your train of thought in the middle of an Eliot essay, as its applicable to almost all of his poetry, so keep at that.

[brenden]

Because you can't just say that you don't understand his poetry and then talk about how the poems make you feel, you need to have some kind of point of reference to substantiate your essay.

Indeed, thank you for the information. I'll keep that in mind the next time I tell one of my students to write a journal of their feelings instead of a text response.


Honestly, the way I would approach TS, or any poetry, is to try and feel it first and use that as a basis for your analysis. Particularly with TS... I mean, "April is the cruellest month". Isn't that crazy? How can a month be cruel? I'd never heard that line before I read it for the first time, and it just hit me in the face. If you approach TS 'trying to figure it out' the first time around, it can just get frustrating and confusing. But if you listen to how you feel like you're in the middle of a storm, then you've got a basis. Why do I feel like that? What's going on with the language? That's some interesting language. Let's look at that. Oh, that line might refer to his wife? Hmm...
Or, feel like you're getting barraged/overwhelmed. "Hmm.. Those sentences are really short. They're punchy. Short enough that the next one starts before I've finished the last one - I can't catch my breath".
Call me old-fashioned, but poetry should be felt. It'd be like trying to analyse a song without ever hearing the beat, trying to analyse a poem without feeling its beat. Why sit down and try to analyse exactly what a poet is saying about a city the first time when you could sit down and feel how the poet tries to convey the rushrushrush of the citythe soundsthesounds they're everywhere THE SOUNDS!
Read about the guy's life. Read some other people's interpretations, and keep them as a platform from which you can disagree from . You have the capacity to do it by yourself with other resources that are telling you what they think, rather than telling you what they think you should think.

So that's my idea of how to tackle poetry.

[DJA]

Honestly, the way I would approach TS, or any poetry, is to try and feel it first and use that as a basis for your analysis. Particularly with TS... I mean, "April is the cruellest month". Isn't that crazy? How can a month be cruel? I'd never heard that line before I read it for the first time, and it just hit me in the face.

Indeed.
I'm totally with you here Brenden.
In fact I do in fact never actually start annoting thinking too deeply until I have read the poem through a good many times to get a feel for the emotions which are so prevalent in Eliot especially. I actually found Preludes very sad when I first read it.

Call me old-fashioned, but poetry should be felt. It'd be like trying to analyse a song without ever hearing the beat, trying to analyse a poem without feeling its beat. Why sit down and try to analyse exactly what a poet is saying about a city the first time when you could sit down and feel how the poet tries to convey the rushrushrush of the citythe soundsthesounds they're everywhere THE SOUNDS!

Yep. In fact along those lines, a lot of my thoughts do center around the voice of the poet and the emotions I feel when I read the poem. A lot of  that eventually comes through in my analysis.

Basically after the first few initial reads to get a feel for the poem, I start jotting down my thoughts on paper especially in the shifts of emotion and feel throughout. Then I start annotating little devices the poet is using.
I also read a bit about the poet-biography on Eliot just to get an idea of where he is coming from. Hence my views and values thoughts.
Then I start forming links in my mind.
Sound cool with my thought process?

I actually haven't yet read other peoples' interpretations of Eliot yet so don't get me wrong. All I have read is author bio + a sheet outlining some poetic devices in the poem.
I'm pm'ing you my analysis of preludes Brencookie. Would greatly appreciate if you could have a read and let me know your thoughts?

Anyway thanks for the input guys!

[kandinsky]

Something that always strikes me when reading Eliot is the prominence of time in his verse. One gets the sense that Eliot views time as something fluid and not necessarily linear. It is also possible to see this metaphor as a sense of destiny (or alternately as lack of one):

"Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present ..."

This idea seems to recur throughout Eliot's canon. I know that part of Literature is to look at the context of poetry. One possibility for Eliot is his generation's disillusionment with a future out of a past of war and turmoil:

There will be time, there will be time   
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;   
There will be time to murder and create,   
And time for all the works and days of hands   
That lift and drop a question on your plate;          
Time for you and time for me.

Time appears here as the great leveller of all, both destroyer and creator. It is ultimately a power beyond our reach, and Eliot leaves the question to the reader as to whether we are in control of time or time in control of us. Personally, I see it as an ineluctable sense of time - that certain things are fated.

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,   
And for a hundred visions and revisions,   
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Notice in the above extract the contrast between almost profound thing and mundane (prosaic even) quotidian life. I think this stresses how, despite all the time we have in our lives to dream of or do extraordinary things, we are always reduced to human limitations.

Hope that helps