Poetry is Dead????

 Inspired by articles speaking of the centenary of TS Eliot's epic The Waste Land below a few links with commentary.  It’s good to see what some people consider an autopsy, others consider yet another change! 

For 2023, let’s hope we won’t want to repeat lines like this:

“What are the roots that clutch

what branches grow out of this rubbish”

 

Poetry, perhaps as defined as rhyming and rhythmic sounds of sense that surprise, console and delight, might twist out of the fashionable clothes it once wore, but as “compressed meaning that’s meaningful”, I don’t agree with Eliot’s negative answer to its importance .  O Pen seems to prove it!

I highly recommend this  article about TSE and the centenary of his poem The Waste Land by James Parker in the Jan/Feb. 2023 issue of The Atlantic:  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/ts-eliot-the-waste-land-poem-anniversary/672231/

It paints a formidable portrait of the 33 Eliot working at Lloyds Bank and taking off 3 months to write the "sprawling chaotic" poem and on return to London, gave it to Ezra Pound.  (The article gives a lively paragraph portraying him as well.)

Myth #1. It is difficult.  Riposte: If you you come at it with no expectations, no search for meaning, it won't be.

Myth #2. It is depressing.  Riposte.  Au contraire-- exhilarating...  Do read the article.

The article below is the one saying Eliot ushered in the end of poetry...

NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/opinion/eliot-waste-land-poetry.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

See New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2022 article as well:  "On the Rocks": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/03/the-shock-and-aftershocks-of-the-waste-land

Humorous introduction to The Waste Land  which appeared in the October 1922 issue of the Criterion.  and so did an article on "Ulysses" by James Joyce and an article by an aged British critic titled, "Dullness".

Indeed, parts of the 433 lines of the Waste Land didn't look, sound or feel like poetry at all.

The passage quoted and comparison of a "bookish" reader from 1922 and an "ordinary" reader in 2022 seem to concur

it's best to move on and trust that indeed, "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood".  

 

 

I concur with Virginia Woolf who wrote in June, 1922 about Eliot’s poem The Waste Land:  “What connects it together I’m not so sure”.

OK, a cryptogram perhaps, but to continue with Virginia:  “with force of phrase, some symmetry and tensity” and for some, gives a feeling of being left with some emotion.

 

The New Yorker article ends with the inscription of the 1922 copy of The Waste Land, which he presented in 1958 to his second wife, Valerie who breathed new life into him.  (She was born 4 years after he wrote it... 40 years younger, and married him in Jan. 1957, 2 years after Eliot’s first wife Vivienne died in a mental sanatorium.)

“She had made his land blossom and birds to sing there.”

It’s quite the story: https://time.com/4447078/valerie-eliot-90th-birthday/

 

However, the Atlantic article does mention that Vivienne, this first wife was also a valuable editor of the poem.  In the second section "A Game of Chess" drew upon and dramatized certain awful scenes from their marriage.  "Given that Vivienne, vivid, quivering Vivienne was outwardly at least, even more unstable that Eliot... and an anxious woman speaks in this section, frenziedly interrogating her husband:  'What are you thinking of?  What thinking?  What?' ... Nevertheless.  On the manuscript next to the line "my nerves are bad tonight.  Yes, bad", Vivienne ... wrote WONDERFUL.

 

The Waste Land appeared in the October 1922 issue of the Criterion.  and so did an article on "Ulysses" by James Joyce and an article by an aged British critic titled, "Dullness".

**

Here's a view of the reviewer in the NYT  by Abby Murray.

This time the interchangeable author is saying that poetry is dead because it's the 100th anniversary of the publication of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and after such a work of genius, people are "incapable" of writing good poetry. Poetry itself is incapable of evolving beyond that book, or of being revived, according to this dude who edits a Catholic literary journal.

It's such a sad, limited little view of poetry, and of people. Normally these articles just annoy me, but today, for some reason, I found some joy in writing a response as a pantoum. I used a reference to a short poem by Eliot, in which the speaker is looking down from a window upon the working world, which has the audacity to smile and (ugh!) exist.

For fun, and not enough time to polish this into something more she continued:

Saying Poetry Is Dead Is Dead

 

 

Tell me you’re a straight white guy

who doesn’t feel seen anymore

without saying you’re a straight white guy

who doesn’t feel seen anymore.

 

Who doesn’t feel seen anymore?

Eliot’s morning window writes back, saying 

he who doesn’t feel seen anymore

ought to take more long, quiet walks.

 

Eliot’s morning window also says 

saying poetry is dead is dead. 

So why not take a long, quiet walk,

listen to someone else who’s speaking?

 

Saying poetry is dead is dead.

Without saying you’re a straight white guy,

listen to someone else who’s speaking.

We know, we know: you’re a straight white guy.

**

And because Abby and I are friends, and I usually respond to her weekly Friday poems, I replied:

As I read your poem, I read, “mourning widow” instead of “morning window”.   So little a change to add a u, mourning the death some “interchangeable” author declares should be attached to poetry, as if it

had a finite life.  Curious, the u. Someone else besides that "understood you", not you talking to yourself.  And how delightful to add N to transform the widow, as a set of possibilities.

Before I sat down to write, I did review  Eliot’s poem, “Morning at the Window”.  He does sound like a white, privileged guy who has the right to overlord a scene.  If anyone wants to see it, ask me to send you  my rhyming response: To Mr. Eliot at your Window

But back to the question at hand about poetry being dead, my response to Abby's poem:

Reply of the Mourning Widow for Dead Poetry

 

God bless a morning window saying

he who doesn't feel seen anymore

ought to take more long quiet walks

and listen to whoever passes by.

 

April and its cruelty and waste

of time shedding tears 

for what passes

on

            is not the question...

                                                for what passes

but time?  Shedding tears

and cruelty is no more a waste

than passing up poetry

as dead, hands down.

                        The question is perhaps 

who passes what buck? Even better,

let's discuss how time moves on, 

constantly changing;

What has wasted                                   

away or been

wasted?

What do we pass up and what do we keep

to pass on?