This is part 2 of a three-part series
Another reason I found myself reading The Wasteland can be chalked up to a bit of ethnicity-reclamation. I am now living in a foreign country (and yes, Quebec is, culturally if not politically, a nation unto itself) where English is not the first language and English-language books are not even that easily gotten; I've now gotten sufficently wet in the sea of anti-American and anti-anglophone sentiment here to see this more clearly. Though I understand it, and am willing to roll with it for the sake of what I'm learning as a resident of such a remarkable and international city, the vehemence of French defensiveness (at best) and racism (at worst) has made me - a reader for many years of "world literature" - more interested in going back to some works written originally in English. I feel the need to hold onto my own self, while lashing myself to the mast of this ship sailing through foreign and often seductive waters.
It's not really Eliot I'm headed toward, but bear with me for a minute while I tell you about the peregrinations of yesterday afternoon. First of all, Eliot has always made me feel inadequate (I'd never even noticed that The Wasteland is dedicated to Pound!) As much as I responded to the music of Eliot's poetry and his skill with our language, I used to dismiss this style of work - full of references to other works out of the past - as egotistical exercises in erudition: let the academics spend their careers parsing them out, I thought, and droning on about them to new generations of students. Post-modernism has struck many more blows to that whole concept of historical cultural lineage, especially the hubris of imposing this particular one on students for whom it is either meaningless, misplaced, or inadequately representative of their own identity and experience. As a woman I found precious few role models in that type of literary canon. But I never rejected it entirely for a feminist alternative, because it still spoke to me: this is my ethnicity. I can trace myself back from modernism to Eliot to Shakespeare to Mallory to the Bible to Vergil and Homer. In fact, that's what I spent earlier parts of my life doing, and then, later, moving horizontally, trying to broaden my experience of the world through its literature, and finding echoes of myself there as well.
And I found it was a lot more pleasurable, frankly, to read contemporary Latin American or Chinese or Indian or Egyptian works than to struggle with James Joyce or T.S. Eliot. Whch is not to say that these works, too, had plenty of cultural references. Some I missed and some - like the Qu'ran, for instance - were a new area to delve into.
But Teju Cole's recent post, Disciple, got me thinking about the whole question of influences and traditions, especially as it affected one of the writers he most admires - and I do too - Seamus Heaney. So yesterday, I began with Eliot, and went on a journey that led me to Heaney, and then back to Eliot.
After re-reading The Wasteland, I looked at some of the links to try to find something in Eliot's own words about his method. In an essay called Tradition and the Individual Talent he said, "Someone wrote, 'The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.' Precisely, and they are that which we know." !!
He went on to talk about how an historical sense gives writers an acute consciousness of their own place in time, as well as what is time-less. "The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities," he wrote.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement.
That's probably a pretty clear statement of how literature was presented to young people at Oxford when Eliot was writing. Annoying, lofty, limiting - easy for us to dismiss today, perhaps, when writing about the individual's experience, often in what appears to be a post-modern, alienated sensibility, is much more the norm.
But then, on to Heaney.
I remember the first time I stumbled upon a contemporary poem, and the confusion that soon set in. All of the guideposts and frameworks had been removed, and it was like wanering in a deceptively simple wilderness. One of the things that interests me is how historically framed verse or prose, while filled with allusions, often does not do the complex dimensional work of the most seemingly straightforward contemporary verse (I think of William Carlos Williams, usually, or Frost, or even, God forbid, Philip Larkin, although I know there are better examples) A few years ago I tried to learn Hebrew, and was startled to find how much meaning is compacted into a simple morpheme -- Arabic may be similar in that way. That's how I think about poetry these days, what once were allusions are often now mystical dimensions, not signs that say "this is how educated I am" but rather, "this is how vast." I just ordered my first Heaney volume--the new one, so I'll read along with you.
Posted by: s. | April 16, 2007 at 05:06 PM
Thanks a lot for this comment. I am a huge fan of contemporary poetry, and part of that must be because I feel it affirms me, and my own experience, as absolutely valid as well as being a reflection of some universal Truth. Yes, Arabic words are packed with layers of meaning, according to my father-in-law. This discussion is making me realize that even when we don't know the etymology behind an English word, its nuance has a history that is affecting why we choose it. So no matter in what dimension you look at poetry, the vastness is there, and open to us for further engagement - thanks for pointing this out so well in your comment. Tomorrow I'll have some quotes from Heaney that go into this more. Which volume did you order? I'm reading from "Opened Ground" at the moment.
Posted by: beth | April 16, 2007 at 06:02 PM
I think she got "District and Circle."
I'm enjoying this investigation. One thing reading original English language poetry has done for me is make me very sad about how much I must be missing when I read poets in translation. A Heaney poem translated into Polish probably sounds good, but I can't imagine it being half as strong as the original.
Gotta run for now. More later.
Posted by: Teju | April 16, 2007 at 06:16 PM
I ordered Spirit Level. It's on the way. Have you read The Names of Things by Susan Brind-Morrow? Not exactly poetry, but about the way language unfolds into layers and layers of meaning. It's a lovely memoir (I quoted it in Redemption Shoes, "Palamedes invented the alphabet after watching the patterns that flocks of migrating cranes made in flight against the sky…" about her travels in Egypt as a translator of ancient texts.
Posted by: s. | April 16, 2007 at 07:27 PM
Oops. Sorry, I thought you'd gotten the most recent.
Well, many poems from the "The Spirit Level" are also included in the "Opened Ground" collection. It's a good book. Maybe we three can do some reading together?
Posted by: Teju | April 16, 2007 at 07:45 PM
Thanks, Teju. I'd definitely be up for some reading-together. And S., no, I haven't read Susan Brind-Morrow but it sounds like I should...
Posted by: beth | April 16, 2007 at 08:05 PM
I think it would speak to you. Your writing style is also similar to hers.
Posted by: s. | April 16, 2007 at 09:16 PM
This is a great discussion! It has prompted me to recall an old documentary that I watched on PBS....maybe 15 or 20 years ago....about Elliot. The only concrete thing that I recall is that Elliot believed that after he wrote the Four Quartets he no longer needed to write poetry. I cannot remember why.
Posted by: Fred Garber | April 18, 2007 at 11:48 AM