Reviews for Eliot's early years

The average rating for Eliot's early years based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-26 00:00:00 Timothy Kleveno Some random notes: Eliot's father viewed sex as "nastiness." What effect could this have had on him? When Eliot went to Paris, he planned to gradually give up English and write in French. Eliot "sees Londoners hibernating behind their bricks, shut in by sudden rains, and tied to their routines--tea and marmalade at six. Whatever the city--Boston, Paris, London--he saw the same: people who were too apathetic and inarticulate and undisciplined to hope to escape their dreary fates." "Eliot said several years later that a poet should state a vision which includes a coherent formulation of life outside the poem. Eliot did not wish to create a rag-bag of moods, insights, and sensations; he wanted his poetry to terminate in a formulated philosophy and extend, even further, into a way of life. He decided a poet should realize emotionally and dramatically 'that which constitutes the truth of his time, whatever that may be'." In the summer of 1911 Eliot made a decision to study philosophy. I like him better already. In his copy of Hegel's Philosophy of History, Eliot underlined "Thought ought to govern spiritual reality." Eliot studied the different saints and mystics, such as Saint Theresa, Dame Julian of Norwich, Mme Guyon, Walter Hilton, St John of the Cross, Jacob Bohme, St Bernard. He studied visions, such as Dame Julian's steady gazing on a crucifix, Jacob Bohme's gazing on a dazzling light reflected from a tin vessel, St. Theresa's assertion she never saw visions with the eye of the body. One book he read was Mysticism by Evelyn Underhill. Here is a quote: "Visionary experience . . . is a picture which the mind constructs . . . from raw materials already at its disposal." He focused on the maladies of the religious life, its discipline and curses. Some other books: St. Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul Eliot said The Wasteland was not a "criticism of the contemporary world" but a personal "grouse against life." Eliot had a sudden precipitous marriage following the death of his young French friend in WWI and a 1921 nervous breakdown. He suffered from what he described to Richard Aldington as "an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction." That word may be from the French aboulia (or abulia) which is a "condition marked by loss of will power, an abnormal inability to act." Doesn't that sound so much like Prufrock wondering if he should "disturb the universe?" Eliot told a New Yorker interviewer: "In The Wasteland, I wasn't even bothering whether I understood what I was saying." I love that quote and have no problem with it. Eliot thought Pound's poems were "old fashioned." But he likes the way "he says it." Without Eliot's knowledge, Pound borrowed money to publish Eliot's Prufrock poems. Eliot's "preoccupations with questions of Christianity, theology, and evil remained undercover because he remained in doubt." I see a lot of time wasted and poems not written. "Marriage was Eliot's one memorable act of daring self-surrender . . . . A little more than a year after his marriage Eliot wrote of the attractions of passion after a practical, sensible, and emotionally undernourished upbringing." Three types of male characters with their female counterparts in Eliot according to Gordon: 1. Suffering from "a sense of inadequacy like Prufrock." Here "the woman is unapproachable." 2. Suffering from "emotional barrenness as in the case of the house agent's clerk." Here the woman is "hysterical." 3. Suffering from "automatic lust like Sweeney." Here the woman "remains indifferent." He does not place Eliot in any of the three categories for they are "caricatures." But I would place him in the first. Eliot's wife Vivienne remained in ill health for most of her life with him. She had frequent "nervous collapses." There's no telling what kind of medicine she received. That was probably part of the problem along with drinking. She would eventually enter a mental home where she would die in 1947. Eliot would marry again late in life in 1957 for eight years until his death. He appears to have "at last known happiness." Virginia Woolf in the early 20s got a little tired of Eliot. "His self pity became a bit tiresome," says Gordon, "and she did not look forward to his visits and she used to sigh over him in her diary: Oh, dear, Eliot on the phone again." The Woolfs and the Bells "treated him as a family joke." Virginia joked, "Eliot will be there in a four-piece suit." That quote should be on T. S. Eliot's gravestone. When Eliot visited Michelangelo's Pieta in Rome 1926, he fell on his knees to the surprise of the relatives with him. The next year he entered the Church of England. His confessor called him "a thoroughly converted man." It was not some superficial ploy. "Every poem is an epitaph."--Eliot in Four Quartets. The Wyndham Lewis portrait of T. S. Eliot: Photos of Eliot from the T. S. Eliot Society: Here are 326 images:

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-17 00:00:00 Alison Hanover I'm not so sure I completely buy into Lyndall Gordon's reading of "The Waste Land," but given how suspicious Eliot studies is of biographical readings, I found it a refreshing and enlightening interpretation. The real value here is getting to know the poet. I wish there was more on his love for Emily Hale, but alas the Hale letters won't be published until next year. I'm interested in thinking more about the tension between Puritan and Catholic in Eliot's mind. This book places him on more firmly American ground than I've come to know him.