The Wasteland / Eliot thread

Thoughts on this. What is the connection to "Ritual to Romance"? Is this worth reading to gain a broader understanding of the poem? I know he mentions to read it in his own notes but I don't want to track it down if its a pile of shite.

Eliot seems to be a writer who is constantly referenced but in a very shallow way. I love the sound and feel of poems like the above and especially above / The Hollow Men but at times they can feel like a string of semi-religious abstractions. I feel quite far from understanding what he means by a lot of his quotes and so on. Maybe its appropriate that now you get weird single lines of his taken out of context and re-quoted (eg Apocalypse Now, all the "not with a bang but a wimper")?

/pollit/, what do you make of Eliot's anti Jewish views and links to fashyism? Was he just being a naughty modernist like Wyndham Lewis? It was never as overt as say Ezra Pound but you do get this strong sense of his views sometimes. There's something about his heterodox doubty Catholicism which is a common background to have for the far right. Is this important to understanding his work? As important as his religious views? Indistinguishable from his religious views? Is it a response to death or what?

I like The Wasteland. Some of my old profs started a podcast named after it, Virtue in the Wasteland.

While I find myself very sympathetic to Eliot's political and cultural views (Particularly his anti-Usury positions), I don't think that that should play a large role in the appreciation or understanding of any poet's work.
There are many far left-wing poets and authors that are objectively brilliant.

The man's a talentless meme
>Missouri hick moves to England as an adult
>English have no great writers left and are trying their best to deny the genius of Joyce
>maybe this guy can pretend to be English
>a member of the canon is born

The thing that separates Eliot from the pack is his undeniable poetic voice. The Four Quartets is the best example of it to me. WCW, H.D., and Yeats all had similarly complex aesthetic systems/more consistently great output, but the sheer beauty of the phrases he's managed makes him the one I go back to constantly just to read aloud.

Favorite lines from the poem?

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I feel like these lines right here epitomizes the whole damn thing and his early career.

>anti Jewish views and links to fashyism
Literally where do you even get this from

>his undeniable poetic voice
He has no voice of is own. Even minor poets like Swinburne have more of a voice.

>I don't know the most basic facts about TS Eliot
>let me barge into a thread anyway

>Literally where do you even get this from
Literally everything he wrote that wasn't poetry alongside a solid chunk of his poetry. Read any book about him.

how do you reckon? I haven't found a single thing that sounds like the Four Quartets without being horrible.

>I haven't found a single thing that sounds like the Four Quartets without being horrible.
I agree, and I include the four quartets.

maybe i'm retarded, but i'm having trouble parsing this post

I'm just saying the four quartets are shit so everything in imitation of them is shitty

that's what i thought, i dislike Little Gidding for its silly need to put everything under a little bow, but the other three are great imo

I can't stand any of them. All of the ideas are cliches and nothing really stays with you except a few choice phrases.
Not with a bang but a whimper,etc
Not from four quartets but you get the point.

I think most of the good stuff in his poems isn't really his. The work was already done for him. And then he just turned them into lines, most of which function more like prose than poetry, even though they're in verse.

I feel the same way about Pound and some of the other poets of that generation. What do you like about Eliot?

I really couldn't care less about the 'ideas' in his writing. H.D.'s trilogy did exactly what he wanted to do perfectly, but The Dry Salvages, Prufock, blah-blah are all my favorite things to read aloud. He's more fun to recite than anyone else I've read.

I thought he got significantly worse after he converted desu. I love Ash Wednesday tho.

Pound is great, the man made sense of free verse (free from what?) and he answered (from this and this) but still made it metrical (etc etc)
The removal of Jewish influence in his poetry makes it even more worthwhile. Usura canto -- the prerequisite reading for any artist, really. Don't trust the Jew! He will swindle you.
And what do you love, you love the poem, the idea of the poem, the negative ontology of the poem -- the poem only exists in metaphors and allegories that get lost over time and can never say what you mean; having your mouth shut means you haven't said the wrong thing in the poem -- he tried, he failed (ie Paradiso canto) and so on.

Great man!

Pound just isn't that good, man.

Whoa! What's that, merchant? The only poet which spake against the Jews isn't "all that good"?
Tell me, merchant, how come this "just not that good" man managed to discover the talent of Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot, H.D, hmm?
Are you sweating, merchant? This highly acclaimed poet is "all that good?"

Good god! Is it not time to swindle the goyim, Merchant?

He's a great agent, just like Stein was. A lesser poet, though.

>Just like Stein
Oh wow! Comparing Pound to a mutt Jew? How quaint, merchant.

See, to me, someone like Eliot just doesn't write great verse. He should have concentrated on prose imo, his mind was more logical than anything. He was a good essayist and could have been an exceptional novelist.

Someone like Swinburne, minor as he is, I would consider to be a recital poet.

Dude stop larping. /pol/ doesn't sound like that. The people you don't like aren't just childish caricatures.

you're a quirky little nazi

I am not larping, merely showing the Jewish swine that his lies have no effect on me.

what lie? that Pound is lesser? he is lesser

He isn't lesser. He's erudite, he isn't a trickster, his archetype is the Sage.

His archetype is the bumbling would-be poet carried through the canon by his associations and eccentricities

I see you've never read Pound.

I have The Cantos and his selected poems, I've also read the ones around him (they're why he's lesser)

No, not really.

>Virtue in the Wasteland
Thanks, will look into this

What do you think of Murder in the Cathedral?

Read Jesse Weston's book in a T. S. Eliot sources class. It's thin, but has the virtue of being short. Perhaps it's just dated. I felt it passed right through me.

True. Equally I sometimes think some of the old heroes of the left (Bernard-Shaw for one) would if they were alive today be placed on the right. Now that the only litmus test for being left wing seems to be views on internationalism and multiculturalism its not really clear where someone like Orwell, who was clearly a romantic nationalist who loved Anglo-Saxon culture, would fit.

The left has eaten itself a bit, in that a lot of its greatest thinkers and advocates are now "too white" for it to take at face value.