In talking about Pound and
The Cantos last week,
I was talking about translation
a lot.
In the case of Eliot I'll be
talking about quotation,
a related but different
practice, and one that we'll see
again in Marianne Moore.
 
In Pound's case there is a wish
in poetry for immediacy,
for some kind of seemingly
natural language.
Pound doesn't want,
and doesn't use,
quotation marks,
just as he doesn't use
footnotes.
If you look at Pound in any of
the editions of his work,
from The Cantos
backward,
you will find that the poems
are presented without notes,
without any kind of apparatus,
without any kind of help.
 
That's because,
I think, Pound wants to,
in some sense,
give you a--he doesn't want to
get in your way in any sense.
 
He wants you to have a kind of
immediate experience of the
writing that he's presenting,
even when it comes in the form
of quotation.
But as I suggested,
for Pound, a sort of central
practice is translation,
which he also describes as
transmitting the impulse.
And I spoke last time as if the
impulse meant the motive or the
emotion in a piece of writing.
 
I think that Pound also had a
kind of scientific or technical
sense of that process of
transmitting the impulse,
and that what he wants to do is
carry;
he wants writing to carry
energy.
He wants it to carry a kind of
pulse, and he wants to give you
a kind of direct access to this.
 
The contrast with Eliot is
striking, I think.
Instead of translation,
you find in Eliot more often
quotation;
quotation which implies a
certain relation to the literary
past, just as Pound's practices
of translation imply a relation
to tradition.
Think about the difference
between these forms,
translation and quotation.
 
It's a way to understand the
differences between Eliot and
Pound, and through them to think
about at least two of modern
poetry's possible relations to
the literature of the past.
Remember, too,
that modern poetry – and
that's a word or a phrase that
Eliot and Pound both used –
that modern poetry is a
specifically historical
category.
It's a historical way of naming
what it is.
You could contrast this with
Romantic poetry,
say, or Imagism,
which are names or labels that
identify something more like an
aesthetic project or a tendency.
 
Here, to call modern poetry
"modern" is to choose as its
defining quality its position in
history, its place in literary
history.
And it does place modern poetry
in history ambiguously.
 
Is modern poetry--is its
modernness an index of the way
it extends the past,
or is it rather "modern"
because it breaks with the past?
 
Does "modern" mean some kind of
renewal and continuity,
or does it mean rupture?
 
Translation and quotation
suggest, as I say,
different relations to the
past.
Pound aims to "make it new"
itself, I suggested,
a translated phrase from the
ancient Chinese.
Pound, in doing this,
aims to carry culture forward,
to hand it over to us as a kind
of living and immediate thing.
The past is renewable in
translation, it is communicable.
That's part of the premise of
translation.
For Pound, the past is
something that can be
re-embodied continually and
needs to be re-embodied
continually, over and over again
in new forms.
In this sense,
translation envisions a past
that is metamorphic and mobile
and durable.
It's something that is always
essentially itself.
It's something that is capable
of being carried forward.
And you think about Pound's
voyagers, his seafarers –
Odysseus or the "Seafarer" poet
– as being agents or
representatives of acts of
translation.
They embody the action of
carrying something across,
journeying.
In quotation,
however, the past is something
to be preserved,
which is different;
preserved or maybe mocked,
in the sense of--mocked in the
sense of copied or parodied.
Quotation seems to imply two
possible relations to the past,
when you think about it:
deference to the past,
deference to what has been
said;
or some kind of violation of it.
 
When you quote someone,
especially maybe your parents
or a teacher,
what are you doing?
Probably you mean either to
honor them or to mock them,
right?
To, in a sense,
defer to their authority or to
take it away,
to empty it out.
Both of these are possible:
empty it out by parroting it,
treating it as if it were
merely iterable and formulaic
and therefore without substance.
Eliot's quotations teeter
ambiguously between these two
options and sometimes you may
feel he's doing the one thing
and sometimes you may feel he's
doing the other;
that he's somehow deferring to
the past and honoring it,
or he's doing something quite
subversive, something parodic.
And in Pound I don't think
there's any of that ambiguity,
ever.
It's a very striking contrast.
If you listen to Pound online,
you hear a voice that is fierce
and melodramatic and in earnest.
 
You listen to Eliot,
you hear another voice
entirely;
one dry, diffident,
hard to place tonally.
 
This is all worked into the
poetry and our encounters with
it on the page.
Again, you might contrast the
heroic figures that you meet in
Pound, whether they're Odysseus
or a troubadour poet or one of
the political leaders that Pound
fastens on.
These are men of will and
willpower and action.
 
These are the people that
attract Pound's admiration and
imagination.
Whom do you meet in Eliot?
J.
Alfred Prufrock,
this figure of extraordinary
indecisiveness and indeterminate
will, someone who's diffident.
 
Well, Prufrock is surely a
version of Eliot and we
encounter in Eliot generally
some of the problems that
Prufrock raises for us through
his meandering mode of speech
and difficult-to-place tone.
 
Let's look at some pictures of
Eliot, maybe my favorite one,
especially since we're going to
be thinking about and talking
about Eliot's age and how he
projects himself.
This is Tom at eight.
 
He was born in St.
 
Louis, the only major British
poet born in St.
Louis, in 1888.
He went to Harvard.
This was not a surprise and,
in a sense, it was a family
mission.
He spent his summers,
importantly,
in Massachusetts and on the
coast of Massachusetts,
the North Shore of Boston.
And these places return and
recur in his poetry.
As a graduate student at
Harvard in 1910 he expatriated
to Europe.
 
 
 
This is Eliot in 1910,1911.
 
He had studied philosophy at
Harvard and he went on to study
philosophy at Cambridge with
Bertrand Russell.
He wrote his Master's thesis on
F.H.
Bradley.
That's an association I'll say
more about when we get to The
Waste Land.
In 1915 he met and married
Vivienne Haigh-Wood,
a charismatic and volatile
Englishwoman.
This romance produced for Eliot
a kind of dramatic conflict with
his family over his wish to
marry her, his wish to take up
residence in England;
and behind all this,
and with all this,
his sense of vocation,
his desire to become,
to establish himself as a poet
and man of letters rather than
the
more-easily-to-be-approved-of
career of a professor and
scholar that he had seemed to
have been made for.
Pound was Eliot's older friend
and mentor, very quickly upon
their meeting in Europe;
and Pound, always putting his
fingers in everything,
wrote quite an extraordinary
letter to Eliot's father.
 
And I've got that on your
handout, on the top page,
a little quotation from it.
 
It says a lot about Pound;
it says something about Eliot,
too.
This is a letter in which Pound
felt the need to,
probably with some
encouragement but probably also
some embarrassment,
from Eliot, felt the need to
defend Eliot's expatriation to
the family patriarch.
 
And Pound says:
As to his [Eliot's]
coming to London,
well anything else is a waste
of time and energy.
 
No one in London cares a hang
what is written in America.
After getting an American
audience a man has to begin all
over again if he plans for an
international hearing.
[And who wouldn't plan for an
international hearing?]
He even begins at a
disadvantage.
London likes discovering her
own gods.
Again, in a literary career,
mediocrity is worse than
useless.
Either a man goes in to go the
whole hog or he had better take
to selling soap and gents
furnishings.
[Is this the right way to write
Mr.
Eliot?
I don't know.
He must have felt so.]
The situation has been very
well summed up in the sentence,
"Henry James stayed in Paris
and read Turgenev and Flaubert.
Mr.
Howles returned to America and
read Henry James."
 
[And then he says in another
important sentence:]
A literary man's income depends
very much on how rigidly he
insists on doing exactly what he
himself wants to do.
Interesting.
The idea is that by
establishing some kind of
independence from tastes in a
literary market,
Eliot will in fact come to
establish his position in that
literary market,
and his ability,
in fact, to create taste.
And so in fact he did.
 
At this early point in Eliot's
career there is a kind of
important conflict between
conformity and revolt:
conformity to his parents'
wishes,
social expectations;
or revolt from them,
which is also,
I think, another way to
describe the tension between two
different senses or aspects of
quotation.
Pound wants Eliot's father to
see that his son's revolt is
okay, because,
in fact, he's also going to
conform.
He's going to conform to a
certain ideal of tradition,
to professional standards.
 
He's not just going to have a
wild time, he's going to work
hard and do what a literary man
should do.
Eliot, you'll see,
takes up these themes in
different terms but related ways
in "Tradition and the Individual
Talent," which I'll talk about
later.
Like Pound, Eliot,
we'll see, wants to ally
himself with tradition,
wants to ally himself with
tradition over against vers
libre,
Amy Lowell and "Amygism," and
at the same time his relation to
tradition, even from very early
on,
was potentially subversive,
and his poetry was very new and
disturbing.
Now, there are all sorts of
interesting things in the
Beinecke, including – here he
is again, the author of
"Prufrock" – including T.S.
Eliot's waistcoat;
H.D.'s death mask I showed you
last time;
here's Eliot's waistcoat.
I like this as an object,
as part of the literary archive
we have.
Also, it's interesting isn't it?
It's a piece of Eliot's costume.
 
Costume was very important for
T.S.
Eliot.
I think it's also potentially a
kind of emblem of quotation in
his work.
Is Eliot taking on the past and
the aura of propriety in order
to parody it or empower himself?
 
These are questions we might
ask even about the waistcoat.
Is it some kind of disguise,
is it a costume through which
he conforms to social forms and
expectations,
or is it again something he
puts on?
All of these questions are at,
for me, the center of Eliot's
interest and power,
and also, I think,
some of the lasting power that
he exerts in schools and for
students.
I will confess that my high
school yearbook carries a
quotation from T.S.
Eliot, in fact,
from "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock," which I won't
identify for you.
And as I think about that,
why I cared about Eliot when I
was seventeen or so – not that
I don't now,
too – when I think about
that, it seems to me that his
special combination of ambition
and aggression expressed,
as it is very often by young
people through parody or satire
or diffidence,
was powerful for me,
too, as a young person.
 
All of this is on display in
Eliot's great poem,
"The Love Song of J.
 
Alfred Prufrock," which is what
I'll concentrate on today.
"Prufrock" is a poem composed
initially at Harvard and
something Eliot carried along
with him in the years after;
a poem created out of pages and
pages of drafts,
which Eliot kept adding to and
going back over and re-combining
and re-composing,
somewhat like his repetitive
and wayward speaker.
 
You can find early versions of
the poem in a book of Eliot's
early and otherwise uncollected
work that Christopher Ricks
edited a few years ago called
Inventions of the March
Hare.
It's a very interesting book,
and you can see Eliot exploring
different ways to write this
poem, which hung around for a
long time.
It was eventually published in
1915 in Poetry magazine.
And in this way,
just like "Mowing," just like
Yeats's "The Fisherman," which
also appeared there then;
also, a poem we'll get to in a
couple of weeks,
Marianne Moore's "A Grave";
and some of the Imagist poems
we discussed last week – all
these appeared,
thanks to Pound,
in Poetry magazine.
The poem became the title of
Eliot's first volume.
Interestingly – this is the
cover of the book – it leaves
off the full title which was
Prufrock and Other
Observations,
which is an interesting title.
First of all,
is "Prufrock" an observation?
Eliot was treating this
character as if he were an
observation.
You can think about what that
might imply.
And then think about that word
"observations."
It suggests something seen,
of course, as well as some kind
of speculation.
It's also a way of defining and
presenting Eliot's poems.
He doesn't say Prufrock and
Other Poems,
he says Prufrock and Other
Observations.
And Observations is,
in fact, a word that Marianne
Moore would use to title her
first book of poems a few years
later.
On that cover we see Eliot's
name and Prufrock's,
in some kind of alteration –
alternation, rather--"Prufrock"
being a little bit bigger than
"T.S.
Eliot," but raising for us
graphically the simple question:
what is the relationship
between these two?
 
Yes, the one man created the
other thing, "Prufrock."
Are they the same thing?
 
How different are they?
 
Here's the interior of the book.
 
You can see--although,
well, you can't see,
but if you get a better look at
this online you will see that
this book,
which is in the Beinecke,
has a signature on it,
"W.
Stevens, NY,
October 17,1917."
So, this was Stevens's copy,
which he, as a young man
wandering around the streets of
New York, picked up and kept.
It was, like Frost's early
work, published in London in
1917, now in Bloomsbury,
by the Egoist Press.
And there's the table of
contents, the first and long
poem included in the volume
being "The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock."
 
Well, what do we expect from a
poem that calls itself that,
"The Love Song of J.
 
Alfred Prufrock"?
 
First of all,
what do we expect from this
genre, the love song,
a love song?
What is a love song?
 
What is a love song like?
 
Presumably, it would be a
romantic poem,
even a poem about romance.
 
What we get is perhaps
something more like a parody of
a romantic poem and something
much stranger.
This is going to be familiar to
very many of you:
Let us go then, you and I
When the evening is spread out
against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a
table;
Let us go, through certain
half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night
cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with
oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a
tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming
question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
 
In the room the women come and
go
Talking of Michelangelo.
 
 
 
Meter?
It's a topic we've raised
before.
It isn't iambic pentameter.
It's notably,
importantly,
not iambic pentameter.
 
Instead, you are introduced to
another kind of rhythm of
speech, which you can work at to
scan,
but without even going into any
detail about it,
I think, we can describe that
rhythm as languid,
as open to variation,
as including hesitancy and
sometimes abruptness.
 
It is a way of speaking that is
interrupted, often;
is alternately voluble and
nervous.
The poem's initial
discontinuities of rhythm and
pattern and image introduce us
to really a new kind of
structure in poetry that would
include a kind of,
almost a principle that any
time you establish a pattern you
must quickly break it.
 
"Let us go then,
you and I, / when the evening
is spread out against the sky";
it sounds like this character's
going to speak in couplets.
 
"Like a patient etherised upon
a table";
where did that come from?
 
We could supply another third
line that would be very
different, I think.
 
Immediately,
we are invited to
surrealistically conjure a prone
patient, someone sick and being
attended to and "etherised,"
unconscious,
and objectified upon a table.
 
If we felt as though we were
going to be in a romantic,
crepuscular atmosphere,
we are suddenly confronted with
an image quite disturbing and
ugly.
And note that it doesn't rhyme.
 
I suppose you could connect
"table" to "hotels" and
"shelves" below,
but it's not a strong
connection and there has been no
preparation for it before.
So, immediately,
we are given an image and a
rhyme decision,
if you like,
that complicates any kind of
sense of pattern that we might
have predicted from the first
two lines.
That rhythm,
well, the contrast to an iambic
poem is strong and should be
emphasized.
And I want to draw your
attention to an example that
would have been in the ears of
Eliot's listeners,
and that is – Eliot's
listeners;
Eliot's readers – that is the
end of Tennyson's "Ulysses," a
poem well known in the
nineteenth century:
The long day wanes;
the slow moon climbs;
the deep
Moans round with many voices.
[I quote it,
too, because Eliot loved this
passage and it returns in his
late poetry in interesting
echoes.]
Come my
friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a
newer world.
…
It may be that the gulfs will
wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the
Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles,
whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides;
and tho'
We are not now that strength
which in old days
Moved earth and heaven,
[we're older]
that which we are,
we are,--
One equal temper of heroic
hearts,
Made weak by time and fate,
but strong in will
To strive, to seek,
to find, and not to
yield.
Echoing, I think,
Milton's Satan,
the blank verse suddenly
becomes a kind of heroic medium
of the will.
Well, the contrast is important
with the poetry that Eliot is
presenting to us because here
the question of the speaker's
will is so much at issue and his
manner of speech is so different
from the example that Tennyson
gives us.
Tennyson specifically,
in this dramatic monologue,
as in others of his
oeurve or other important
nineteenth-century examples,
introduces us to a dramatic
speaker who has a kind of
coherent character and whose
unity of character,
if you like,
is allied to the unity of the
verse form itself.
Eliot gives us something very
different.
He creates, in "Prufrock," I
would say, not a character.
Rather, he creates something
more like a consciousness.
He creates a fragmentary
consciousness that rises and
falls, takes shape and disperses
before us.
John Stuart Mill said in a
memorable passage that poetry
– lyric poetry is what he was
thinking of – is overheard
speech.
Overheard speech.
And you can think,
if you have some sense of the
Romantic poetry of Wordsworth or
Coleridge as examples before
you,
of what Mill had in mind,
the way in which in those poems
we listen in on a soliquizing
poet's thoughts.
Listening to "Prufrock" is much
less like listening to someone
speak on the street or on the
stage than it is like closing
your eyes and remembering,
or inventing voices in your
mind.
Eliot is creating a kind of
overheard inner speech.
He's letting us listen in on a
mind that we don't see whole,
we don't feel whole.
 
We only get parts of it.
 
Fluctuation:
this is the medium and the
rhythm that we enter when we
enter the poem.
There is, as I was already
suggesting, no overarching
pattern for the poem's verse
form.
I think this is probably true
for other dimensions of
organization as well.
 
There are rather,
in this poem,
what I would call a kind of set
of unfolding local systems of
organization.
There are couplets.
We see couplets in that first
paragraph, but then they're not
systematically pursued.
 
Instead, what you get in the
poem are a lot of loose ends,
pauses;
bits and pieces of language,
language that is almost always
full of quotations.
Your editor will give you the
source for some of them.
What we have then in the poem
as you move through it is a lot
of shifting, improvised orders.
 
This formal instability in the
poem is related to,
and it constructs,
a special sort of speaker,
one who is performing for us
his thoughts,
his thoughts experienced as a
set of routines or riffs or
acts,
and they come and go without
very definite aim or conclusion.
 
 
 
Looking at the cover of
Prufrock,
I asked you to think about the
relationship between Prufrock
and T.S.
Eliot.
You can think about "Prufrock,"
the name itself:
"J.
Alfred Prufrock," almost a kind
of parody of T.S.
 
Eliot.
The name suggests a kind of
upper-class English or
Anglophile person.
Those formal initials are
pretentious in a way.
I think it's proper to think of
Prufrock as in some sense a kind
of comic figure,
almost like a cartoon or a
caricature or device.
 
On one level he is a kind of
parody of a Romantic singer.
He is bourgeois;
he is intellectualizing;
he's incapable of grasping and
expressing what we expect from a
love song, that is,
strong emotion.
The poem can be seen,
too, as a kind of critique of
Romantic egotism and of the
Wordsworthian ideal of
expression.
This is something that Eliot
theorizes polemically in his
essay, "Tradition and the
Individual Talent."
 
And in fact,
why don't we look there for a
few minutes to get more sense of
Eliot's ideas.
On page 946,
the back of your book there,
he says, quoting Wordsworth in
the "Preface" to Lyrical
Ballads:
…We must believe that
"emotion recollected in
tranquility" is an inexact
formula,
for it is neither emotion,
nor recollection,
nor without distortion of
meaning, tranquility.
 
[That you get in an Eliot poem,
at least.]
It is a concentration,
and a new thing resulting from
the concentration,
of a very great number of
experiences which to the
practical and active person
would not seem to be experiences
at all;
it is a concentration which
does not happen consciously or
of deliberation.
These experiences are not
"recollected," and they finally
unite in an atmosphere which is
"tranquil" only in that it is a
passive attending upon the
event.
Eliot is trying to describe
poetry here as having a kind
of--generating a kind of
experience in and of itself that
is distinct from any kind of
recollected experience,
and it is curiously impersonal
as he imagines it.
 
And he continues:
There is a great deal,
in the writing of poetry,
which must be conscious and
deliberate.
In fact, the bad poet is
usually unconscious where he
ought to be conscious,
and conscious where he ought to
be unconscious.
[We know what he means.]
Both errors tend to make him
"personal."
[And now T.S.
Eliot will say:]
Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from
emotion;
it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from
personality.
But, of course,
only those who have personality
and emotions know what it means
to want to escape from these
things.
Which is an extraordinary kind
of coda to this polemical
passage, and revealing,
of course, the way in which
Eliot, even as he's polemicizing
against a romantic poetry that
would be too personal,
is deeply invested in the
personal and personality,
and conflicted about it.
I've been talking about
ambiguity in Eliot.
Well, we can speak of
"ambivalence."
This essay retains,
even while it is critiquing,
a certain romantic story of
creation.
And we could say something
similar about Eliot's love song.
"Prufrock" is a kind of
pre-text or a device through
which Eliot can speak of
himself.
"Prufrock" becomes a way of
writing about the self when to
Eliot it no longer seems
plausible to write as one's
self, as Wordsworth had felt it
to be.
You can think of "Prufrock" as
a kind of mask behind which you
hear a young poet asking
questions about himself and his
art.
List the poem's questions.
Prufrock asks questions
throughout.
Do you recall them?
 
They are: "Do I dare?"
 
"Do I dare disturb the
universe?"
"So how should I presume?"
 
And, "How should I begin?"
 
"Shall I say?"
He says that pretty often:
"Shall I say this?
 
Shall I say that?"
 
Daring, presuming,
beginning, "what shall I
say?"--these are,
are they not,
an ambitious young poet's
questions about how to write
poetry.
The question is,
why should beginning be
something that you really have
to dare?
What does that imply?
Why should it be frightening?
 
Why should it give you pause?
 
Why, if these are a young man's
questions, as I'm suggesting,
does Prufrock seem as old,
as old and weary,
as he does?
In fact, how old do you think
he is?
 
 
 
I don't know.
Ask yourselves that question;
ask yourselves what evidence
you would have for one answer or
another.
It's hard to pinpoint his age.
Prufrock is,
isn't he, a kind of old-young
man, or a young-old man?
 
He is cautious and aggressive
at the same time:
old and young.
These paradoxes,
I think, point to Eliot's sense
of his place,
his own place,
in literary history,
and some sense of what it meant
to be "modern" for Eliot.
Prufrock is burdened by the
question of how to begin.
Indeed, he begins exactly by
deferring beginning;
by failing to come to the point;
by putting it off;
by delaying because by
implication, beginning is indeed
something threatening,
something that must be dared.
But this only makes sense if
Prufrock really does want to
disturb the universe,
or at least the system of
culture as he found it.
 
It only makes sense if
beginning really does require
disturbing things.
 
The implication is that the
universe is already complete
without Prufrock,
without T.S.
Eliot and anything that he
might do or say.
You can extend this to Eliot's
idea of culture and,
in particular,
to his sense of the literary
past.
You see the idea in "Tradition
and the Individual Talent."
 
On pages 942 to 943,
he speaks of – towards the
bottom of the page on 942 –
tradition as a kind of ideal
order of monuments.
 
Tradition is in some sense,
well, it's monumental and it's
already complete,
as he imagines it.
To add to it,
to enter it would be to change
it, to disturb it.
 
In fact, Eliot evolves here a
quite ingenious and complicated
argument for how the new could
indeed be introduced to a
tradition conceived in the terms
I just described.
Eliot says, on the bottom of
the page, about any new poet:
The necessity that he
shall conform [and there's that
word, "conform";
think of the waistcoat],
that he shall cohere [and
remain put together],
is not one-sided [this was
quite an extraordinary argument;
he's saying it's not only
necessary for a new poet to
conform to tradition];
what happens when a new work of
art is created is something that
happens simultaneously to all
the works of art which preceded
it.
[Something which happens
simultaneously to all the works
of art which preceded it.
 
This is quite a claim.]
The existing monuments form an
ideal order among themselves,
which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the
really new) work of art among
them.
The existing order is complete
before the new work arrives;
for order to persist after the
supervention of novelty [novelty
comes as something that
supervenes;
it has force,
it's a leopard in the temple],
the whole existing order
must be, if ever so slightly,
altered;
and so the relations,
proportions,
values of each work of art
toward the whole are readjusted,
and this is conformity between
the old and the new.
Here, Eliot is struggling with
an idea of tradition as
something that is static and
fully present in and of itself,
a sense of the new as something
that is revolutionary and that
threatens tradition,
or is threatened by it.
How can he bring them into
alignment?
Well, through this very
complicated process that he
describes which gives the
modern,
gives the new,
an extraordinary power to make
us see and, in fact,
to realign the relations among
all the works of the past.
 
This is, as I say,
quite an extraordinary power.
The implication is the new poet
must in some sense wrest
authority from all those who
have come before through a kind
of imaginative and rhetorical
violence,
a kind of insurrection in the
temple of culture.
Prufrock's sense of age
expresses for him a feeling of
belatedness, an anxiety that
he's already run out of time.
His very youth,
the fact that he's only just
now starting,
makes him old.
To presume would be to reverse
this order, to dare to come
before and to claim priority for
his own work.
As I say these sentences,
I sound a whole lot like Harold
Bloom as he describes the
mission of any poet in his work,
The Anxiety of
Influence,
and that is because Bloom's
work is deeply indebted
precisely to Eliot and to
"Tradition and the Individual
Talent."
These are questions I'll say a
little bit more about next time,
as we finish discussing Eliot's
"Love Song" and begin to talk
about The Waste Land.
