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| ESSAY: T.S. ELIOT | |
 April 18, 2001 
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| T.S. ELIOT: April is
the greatest month reading lilacs out of the dead land.
ROGER ROSENBLATT: I don't know if the folks who make these sorts of decisions designated April as poetry month because of T.S. Eliot's line that, of the months, "April is the cruelest." But the occasion allows one to dwell on Eliot again, and still, and to try to figure out why he remains the world's best-known and most talked about poet in English, right behind Shakespeare. There are the famous, this-is- modern-poetry works one studied in school, of course; the pieces every high school would use to say, "this is new." The "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Ash Wednesday," the "Hollow Men," and the "Wasteland." By the time one got to college, one was ready for Eliot's "four quartets"-- the poet always serving as a test for sophisticated advancement. And there was that voice of his on records, the voice of dry eggshells, that everyone came to think of as the only voice a true poet should have. T.S. ELIOT: We shall not see exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. ROGER ROSENBLATT: Above all that, is something else in the nature of his poetry itself that says, and continues to say after nearly 100 years, that this is what poetry is, what it means, and that poetry means us. What Eliot's poems tell us, to put it a bit too easily, is that language is a deception, perhaps an agreed-upon deception-- that we do not mean what we say or say what we mean. This suggests that all meaning is hidden, which Freud suggested too. Eliot laid it out in art. The syntax is abnormal, the logic is illogical. Take the opening of "Prufrock": T.S. ELIOT: Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table. ROGER ROSENBLATT: Look at an evening, say in April. The only way one can understand Eliot's lines is to see the evening as something that one feels, and then if one feels etherized like a patient, the time of day corresponds. In other words, you cannot interpret the image except by entering a dreamlike statue of non-interpretation. Underlying that thought is that language is always inadequate to the truth of experience - inadequate to who we are. So Beckett wanted to reduce his plays to a single word. So Wallace Stevens wrote about the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. But it also goes back into poetry. Shakespeare, no less, wrote about making nothing of nothing. "I get it, but I can't say it. I say it, but I can never say it all." That is poetry, both ancient and modern. That is why poems are constructed in columns, or column-like arrangements in the centers of pages, rather than the whole page itself. Every poet says in effect, "I cannot put the truth into words in a row. I cannot make linear sense. So I'll put my words into stacks, like the rungs of a ladder, and beg the reader to see that the spaces between the rungs are where the meaning lies." Keats, Donne, Byron, Tennyson, Marvell, Pope, Dickenson, Wordsworth, Arnold, up to and past Eliot, to Yeats, Pound, Ransom, Aiken, Millay, Cummings, Tate, Hughes, Warren, Moore and on and on. All column makers, columnists, holding up structures, without explicitly expressing structure. Reading between the lines is how one makes sense of poetry. And, at the same time, always implicit is the idea that sense is never to be made, at least not with words. What sense would you make of these lines from Eliot's "Choruses from the Rock": "Light light the visible reminder of invisible light." To see the light you must feel the light. Eliot carries a lot of taint with him into the 21st century that still appreciates his work. His dead-world politics and ideology are equally compelling and intolerable. His apparent anti-Semitism drags his personal reputation down. And yet he remains the poet's poet -- not for the voice or the bearing, not even for the individual poems, but for the fact that he, perhaps more than any other, knew that poetry is ambiguity, impression and mystery; just like us readers. I'm Roger Rosenblatt. |
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