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A review by ericjaysonnenscheinwriter2392
Collected Poems, 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot
4.0
TS ELIOT AND WALLACE STEVENS: A CONTRAST BETWEEN TWO OBLIVIOUS POETS
There are basically two kinds of poets, those who want you to understand and those who don't care. The difference between the poetry they make is simple. The accessible poet writes foremost to communicate, to put himself out there for you the reader to learn from, to like or to dislike. He has a story to tell and uses verse to tell it. Even when he employs obscure terms, they are like rare ornaments or odd accessories to a central character and location that are easy to identify. With the accessible poet you know how he feels about his subject and how he wants you to feel about it; when you read his verse, you usually know where you are. Allen Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, Carl Sandberg, EA Houseman, and Robert Frost were accessible poets. WB Yeats was accessible most of the time, until he sailed to Byzantium and slouched toward Bethlehem, and spoke to us about a perne in a gyre. But even in his most mystical, astrologically driven moments, Yeats is fairly easy to locate. He likes to tell a story.
The oblivious poet also writes about a subject, but the reader quickly realizes that what he is reading is not what the poem is about, the words are figures, signifiers that are as far from the signified as the earth is from Alpha Centauri. And then the reader makes another uneasy discovery that may make him queasy: he doesn't know how he wil ever understand this poem. That is because the words and statements of these poets are like the short-cuts on a computer desk-top. They link you to real files, but only if those files actually exist in your hard drive. The problem is they usually don't. Those points of reference, those short-cuts, exist only in the poet's memory. And unless you, the reader, can somehow access the poet's mind and experience, you will not be able to recover that point of reference. Therefore, you will have no way of understanding or emotionally connecting with that poet. TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens are such poets as these.
Of course, it would be unfair to simply say that Eliot and Stevens are arcane and enigmatic and not worth the trouble of reading. In fact, both poets demonstrate just how little we need to understand a poem in order to be seduced by it. Maybe we like poetry because it points out flamboyantly a property of even the most mundane communication: we talk, we listen, but we are never quite sure of what our interlocutor has said and how much we understood. Yet, we continue to talk and listen--why? For the pleasure of communication, of the words pouring on our ears and into my minds and hearts. And also for the time and effort we spend remembering the bits and pieces of what was said and the fun of putting it back together into something coherent and comforting. When Stevens asks Ramon Hernandez why the singing ended and why the lights in the boats marked off the dark water of the harbor as if creating a Cartesian grid, we also want to know. We want to know what things mean, we also want to believe that the cosmos has a pattern.
In imploring Ramon for some key to what he senses, Stevens comes as close as any poet can without crashing on the rocks of prose to explaining the life-long objective of his career in verse: to find God, a universal soul or spirit, or intelligence behind the apparently random beauty and horror in the cosmos. Stevens can lose us with his blackbirds and his uncle's monocle and when he tells me that "life is a bitter aspic" I want to tell him to send it back to the kitchen with a footnote.
But for every obscurantist poem of Stevens there is a beautifully clear and evocative one, like Martial Cadenza" or "The Dwarf." Stevens is always trying to solve a problem and even if he is sometimes like the mumbling math genius professor who scrawls inscrutable symbols on a blackboard in impossibly dense equations only to erase parts of them while we look on, he does so with such an unerring placement of words and sounds and such sincerity that we cannot help but try to go along with him on his adventure.
We as readers and consumers of stories and explorers of science also wish to understand the world around us. We look to the poet to tell us something about it. TS Eliot was that unique poet who did not really care about telling us anything about our world. He did not seem to share our need to understand the world he lived in and his poetry reflects this purposeful dismissal of our expectations. He understood the world all too well and it disgusted him. It was a world in which he did not fit in. It was a world in which nobody seemed to be fitting in. It was a world in which humanity seemed to be blossoming like one large teeming larval army. It was a world of Coney Island, canned food, and Model Ts, of factories and immigrants for whom his erudition and eloquence might as well have been on the other side of a black hole.
TS Eliot was not nearly as comfortable as Wallace Stevens in his skin or in his home or on his street. He did not feel like a master of his environment. He could not tell us about Key West or Naples or Paris or his stately house. He was not someone trying to make sense of a world of intriguing phenomena--he'd given up on that. The best he could do was to try to deal with his debased environment with satire, sarcasm and an elegiac eloquence that often comes off as faintly romantic, except that the romance is about something without name or reference. That eloquence, as hypnotic at times as an oyster's saliva, can turn Eliot's anguish and irritation about the low quality of life around him into a pearl of linguistic beauty. For him, poetry is a victory over billboards, bad music and degraded values. It is how he turns it all into something resembling art.
At times, Eliot uses his wit and erudition like a hammer. He bludgeons "the young man carbuncular" and others with his grand diction. Eliot was deprived of finer things. He would have been an angry young man, but his education and Anglo-Saxon sense of class superiority and entitlement made him unfit for soapboxes and the vulgarity of politics. In any case he did not have much good to say and wanted to steer clear of stating his case or explaining himself for fear that his "message" might not be more than a well-articulated shout of disgust and despair.
He gives us J Alfred Prufrock,the Wasteland, Sweeney and The Nightingales, The Hollow Men and Gerontian because he wants to speak without making a statement, to attack without committing to conquest. He wants to smother his grievance in lacquer and does not want us to be pinned down to particulars. Eliot may have started in a very similar place to Stevens, but rather than enjoying the world in an Epicurian way, he sank into its depths. While Stevens could permit himself to meditate on the dark conundrum of beauty and ugliness, life and death, Eliot could only make snide comments about it. His only way out was religion and he found it. Then his poetry calms down, becomes simply sad and dignified.
There are basically two kinds of poets, those who want you to understand and those who don't care. The difference between the poetry they make is simple. The accessible poet writes foremost to communicate, to put himself out there for you the reader to learn from, to like or to dislike. He has a story to tell and uses verse to tell it. Even when he employs obscure terms, they are like rare ornaments or odd accessories to a central character and location that are easy to identify. With the accessible poet you know how he feels about his subject and how he wants you to feel about it; when you read his verse, you usually know where you are. Allen Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, Carl Sandberg, EA Houseman, and Robert Frost were accessible poets. WB Yeats was accessible most of the time, until he sailed to Byzantium and slouched toward Bethlehem, and spoke to us about a perne in a gyre. But even in his most mystical, astrologically driven moments, Yeats is fairly easy to locate. He likes to tell a story.
The oblivious poet also writes about a subject, but the reader quickly realizes that what he is reading is not what the poem is about, the words are figures, signifiers that are as far from the signified as the earth is from Alpha Centauri. And then the reader makes another uneasy discovery that may make him queasy: he doesn't know how he wil ever understand this poem. That is because the words and statements of these poets are like the short-cuts on a computer desk-top. They link you to real files, but only if those files actually exist in your hard drive. The problem is they usually don't. Those points of reference, those short-cuts, exist only in the poet's memory. And unless you, the reader, can somehow access the poet's mind and experience, you will not be able to recover that point of reference. Therefore, you will have no way of understanding or emotionally connecting with that poet. TS Eliot and Wallace Stevens are such poets as these.
Of course, it would be unfair to simply say that Eliot and Stevens are arcane and enigmatic and not worth the trouble of reading. In fact, both poets demonstrate just how little we need to understand a poem in order to be seduced by it. Maybe we like poetry because it points out flamboyantly a property of even the most mundane communication: we talk, we listen, but we are never quite sure of what our interlocutor has said and how much we understood. Yet, we continue to talk and listen--why? For the pleasure of communication, of the words pouring on our ears and into my minds and hearts. And also for the time and effort we spend remembering the bits and pieces of what was said and the fun of putting it back together into something coherent and comforting. When Stevens asks Ramon Hernandez why the singing ended and why the lights in the boats marked off the dark water of the harbor as if creating a Cartesian grid, we also want to know. We want to know what things mean, we also want to believe that the cosmos has a pattern.
In imploring Ramon for some key to what he senses, Stevens comes as close as any poet can without crashing on the rocks of prose to explaining the life-long objective of his career in verse: to find God, a universal soul or spirit, or intelligence behind the apparently random beauty and horror in the cosmos. Stevens can lose us with his blackbirds and his uncle's monocle and when he tells me that "life is a bitter aspic" I want to tell him to send it back to the kitchen with a footnote.
But for every obscurantist poem of Stevens there is a beautifully clear and evocative one, like Martial Cadenza" or "The Dwarf." Stevens is always trying to solve a problem and even if he is sometimes like the mumbling math genius professor who scrawls inscrutable symbols on a blackboard in impossibly dense equations only to erase parts of them while we look on, he does so with such an unerring placement of words and sounds and such sincerity that we cannot help but try to go along with him on his adventure.
We as readers and consumers of stories and explorers of science also wish to understand the world around us. We look to the poet to tell us something about it. TS Eliot was that unique poet who did not really care about telling us anything about our world. He did not seem to share our need to understand the world he lived in and his poetry reflects this purposeful dismissal of our expectations. He understood the world all too well and it disgusted him. It was a world in which he did not fit in. It was a world in which nobody seemed to be fitting in. It was a world in which humanity seemed to be blossoming like one large teeming larval army. It was a world of Coney Island, canned food, and Model Ts, of factories and immigrants for whom his erudition and eloquence might as well have been on the other side of a black hole.
TS Eliot was not nearly as comfortable as Wallace Stevens in his skin or in his home or on his street. He did not feel like a master of his environment. He could not tell us about Key West or Naples or Paris or his stately house. He was not someone trying to make sense of a world of intriguing phenomena--he'd given up on that. The best he could do was to try to deal with his debased environment with satire, sarcasm and an elegiac eloquence that often comes off as faintly romantic, except that the romance is about something without name or reference. That eloquence, as hypnotic at times as an oyster's saliva, can turn Eliot's anguish and irritation about the low quality of life around him into a pearl of linguistic beauty. For him, poetry is a victory over billboards, bad music and degraded values. It is how he turns it all into something resembling art.
At times, Eliot uses his wit and erudition like a hammer. He bludgeons "the young man carbuncular" and others with his grand diction. Eliot was deprived of finer things. He would have been an angry young man, but his education and Anglo-Saxon sense of class superiority and entitlement made him unfit for soapboxes and the vulgarity of politics. In any case he did not have much good to say and wanted to steer clear of stating his case or explaining himself for fear that his "message" might not be more than a well-articulated shout of disgust and despair.
He gives us J Alfred Prufrock,the Wasteland, Sweeney and The Nightingales, The Hollow Men and Gerontian because he wants to speak without making a statement, to attack without committing to conquest. He wants to smother his grievance in lacquer and does not want us to be pinned down to particulars. Eliot may have started in a very similar place to Stevens, but rather than enjoying the world in an Epicurian way, he sank into its depths. While Stevens could permit himself to meditate on the dark conundrum of beauty and ugliness, life and death, Eliot could only make snide comments about it. His only way out was religion and he found it. Then his poetry calms down, becomes simply sad and dignified.