T. S. Eliot

Published in the Daily Yiddish Forward, May 4th, 2018. Based on Chaim Grade's public lectures in the years 1958 - 1981. The paper claims that after Mendele Moycher Sforim, Y. L. Peretz and Sholem Aleichem - Chaim Grade is the candidate to be considered as the fourth classic Yiddish author.

La escritura biográfica sobre Eliot se encuentra en un estado más confuso y controvertido que en cualquier otro gran escritor del siglo XX. No ha salido al mercado ninguna biografía importante desde la publicación de sus primeros poemas, Inventions of the March Hare, en 1996, que alteró radicalmente la percepción del público respecto a la personalidad legendaria de Eliot.

Con esta biografía se liberan algunas distorsiones de la imagen pública del escritor, más bien basadas en cotilleos, así como de su talante frío y nada emotivo. Eliot escribió una vez que cada poema es un epitafio. John Worthen nos muestra un Eliot vulnerable, por lo que su poesía no es más que un reflejo de las turbulencias emocionales que sufrió en vida.

2017 marks the centenary of an artwork judged to be the single most influential of the twentieth century: Marcel Duchamp’s famous “readymade” entitled Fountain. The final verdict on Fountain has been widely accepted, despite the fact that the circumstances surrounding “Mr. Richard Mutt” have never resembled an open-and-shut case. On the contrary, since Fountain’s appearance in 1917, when it was rejected as “a plain piece of plumbing” only to be subsequently celebrated as a work of conceptual art, numerous questions remain unanswered, several facts remain unexplained.
Now, one hundred years later, Robert Kilroy attempts to answer these questions by examining the evidence with fresh eyes. Central to the investigation is the primary witness – Duchamp himself – whose statements are forensically analyzed. The facts themselves are interrogated using the methodology of a detective: precisely speaking, an art historical approach with a critical edge sharpened by a new interpretation of psychoanalytic theory.
In weaving an alternative narrative, Kilroy shows us that, not only has Fountain been fundamentally misunderstood, this very misunderstanding is central to the work’s significance. The final verdict, he argues, was strategically stage-managed by Duchamp in order to expose the apparatus underpinning Fountain’s reception, what he terms “The Creative Act.” By suggesting that a specific aesthetic “crime” has gone unnoticed, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: One Hundred Years Later asks the reader to radically reassess his/her precise contribution to “the creation of art.” This urgent, if somewhat troubling question, could have far-reaching implications for the field of scholarship, the course of contemporary art and the discipline of Art history.

"Eliot and France, France and Eliot", preface, in Jayme Stayer, ed., T. S. Eliot, France, and the Mind of Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), p. X-XIV.

T. S. Eliot and France: quel sujet! The French influence on Eliot’s poetry and thought could not be underestimated in any way; it might even be one of the most intense and long-lasting love stories an English-speaking writer ever had with Baudelaire’s country.
As far as Eliot and France go then, ça suffit. But what about France and Eliot? What I mean is: what about the way Eliot has been read in the country that influenced him so much? What level of understanding has the poet actually attained in his second literary homeland? Foreign literatures are specific systems more isolated from their neighbors than one might think, and Eliot’s case can reveal the unformulated laws that govern these systems.

Ein weiterer Zug seiner Originalität liegt in der Art, wie er deutsche und französische Kultur verarbeitet und zusammenführt. Ich wüßte keinen Kritiker in Europa, der mit derselben Sympathie und demselben Verständnis über Madame de Noailles und Simmel, über Marcel Proust und Max Scheler zu schreiben vermöchte.

Paul Valéry afirmaba que la mayor aspiración de la poesía simbolista era recuperar, para el lenguaje, el bien que la música le había arrebatado. El presente ensayo explora el contenido de esa afirmación, extendiendo su sentido a la idea de poesía en general de Valéry. Para ello, el autor parte de que la poesía y la música son artes diferentes, aunque entre ellas hay relaciones analógicas que pueden explorarse sistemáticamente. Sin embargo, esta exploración no puede desplegarse en una dirección única. Por eso, el ensayo contrapone las ideas de Valéry a las de T. S. Eliot: ambos suponen que la música es la máxima aspiración de la poesía, pero cada uno de ellos concibe el sentido de esa aspiración de un modo diferente. Para entender mejor esto, el ensayo toma como punto de partida la exploración de las relaciones entre la poesía y la danza para los dos autores, y se centra en la imagen que cada uno de ellos usa para describir el arte de la danza: Valéry piensa en una bailarina cuyos movimientos son un juego de transformaciones que se desenvuelven en sí mismas, mientras que Eliot tiene en mente la imagen del ballet clásico con su tradición de convenciones impersonales. La metodología del ensayo sigue un principio básico de Valéry: que el despliegue de las implicaciones de una relación analógica entre dos fenómenos diversos puede ayudar al conocimiento de los objetos. ¿Qué es la poesía para estos dos autores? ¿A qué aspira? Es posible aproximarse a estas cuestiones al explorar la naturaleza de la danza y la música

Modernist Literature. The sixth part of the second volume offers a selection of the Modernist Literature from Joyce to Eliot. English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 2 - From the Romanticism to the Twentieth Century. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011, pp. 536.

We often think of Mrs Dalloway or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as difficult books, originally published in small print runs for a handful of readers. But from the mid-1920s, these texts and others were available in cheap format across Europe. Uniform series of reprints such as the Travellers’ Library, the Phoenix Library, Tauchnitz and Albatross sold modernism to a wide audience – thus transforming a little-read “highbrow” movement into a popular phenomenon. The expansion of the readership for modernism was not only vertical (from “high” to “low”) but also spatial – since publishers' series were distributed within and outside metropolitan centres in Britain, continental Europe and elsewhere. Many non-English native speakers discovered texts by Joyce, Woolf and others in the original language – a fact that has rarely been mentioned in histories of modernism. Drawing on extensive archival work supported by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, the Harry Ransom Center and the Humboldt foundation, Cheap Modernism sheds new light on the complex relationship between modernism and the marketplace. It will be of particular interest to students of modernism and book history – and to all those who want to learn how the new literature became a global commercial hit.

As a modernist poet writing in London during World War I and in the postwar period, Eliot takes the City of London as the background of his poems and presents a bleak image of the city through his lines. In "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and in "The waste land" the reader follows the poet personae through the streets of London by experiencing each element that defines London as Eliot gives life to the city by personifying its elements such as the London fog. The image of the city in Modernist literature is always a pessimistic one and this is not only the result of the Great War and its aftermath but also an image that is borrowed from late nineteenth-century concerns in literature such as industrialization, migration to the big city, crowded and suffocating city life, and so on. However, modernist literature also depicts a conflicting relationship between the metropolis and the modern individual in which one closely identifies with the city but feels alienated in it at the same time. This paper aims to discuss that the city has its own life and character created by the language used to describe the city by Eliot, and endeavours to scrutinize the conflicting nature of the individual's relation to the big city, which s/he both antagonizes and identifies with in Eliot's poetry.

Squeezing the Bodleian collection of Vivien Eliot's papers for anything of value they may contain, in the hope of seeing off any idea of publication, which would be almost impossible (they are scrapbooks, often of printed material), sad and demeaning, and pointless.

The dramatic monologue would not immediately appear to be a form which is compatible with the interests of ecocriticism. Its focus on human actions, often occurring within created settings, seems at odds with a theory which promotes nature and the environment.  However, in this paper I hope to present an ecocritical reading of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ which emphasises the importance of the speaker’s environment to the construction of his character. In reading the poem from a green perspective I intend to show how Eliot adapted the form to show the psychological and spiritual consequences of modern man’s disconnection from nature and the non-human world.
Modernism is often thought to mark the demise of the dramatic monologue, but rather than diluting the form I will argue that Eliot modernises it and increases its relevance to readers by placing his speaker within a recognisable urban environment. Prufrock’s failures to fulfil the expectation of dramatic action expected by the form then become the integral to the revelation of his character and inability to act.
In adapting the dramatic monologue to address the increasing distance between modern man and the natural world, Eliot places his speaker within the stifling restraints of upper middle class society. The result is a speaker who is the archetypal urban man: nervous, sensitive, painfully self aware, and longing to connect with something beyond the human world. His failure to do so forces the re-examination of ideas of progress and raises questions about the psychological impact of modernity.

Attraverso i secoli, il racconto evangelico della resurrezione di Gesù e degli eventi successivi è stato oggetto di una iconografia non di rado spinta al limite delle possibilità di rappresentazione, almeno nell'ambito di un'arte tradizionalmente figurativa. Nei migliori esempi, questa iconografia al limite lo è pure del limite, nel senso che è riuscita a suggerire quanto non si può rappresentare ma solo accennare o implicare. Nel presente saggio si è cercato di individuare tali esempi, ma anche la produzione letteraria che si è sforzata di evocare e quella filosofica che si è applicata ad analizzare la tematica in questione, a volte proprio ispirandosi a quelle opere d'arte.

The dissertation explores T.S.Eliot’s portrayals of human unhappiness and urban dreariness within his early poetry – specifically his published and unpublished work written during the period 1909-1915.

The essay notes that Eliot’s early portrayals of ‘unhappiness’ were mostly founded upon dysfunctional relationships and that, moreover, any resulting sadness was brought about by the frailties of the partners (most often the man), irrespective of whether the association was in the process of being imagined, sought, developed or abandoned. Using Prufrock and March Hare poems that exemplify his observational methods for depicting such ‘affairs’, the dissertation examines a number of factors within this approach; it thus determines how Eliot creates the feelings of, at worst ‘despair’ and at best ‘embarrassment’, so that reader recognition of such discomposure is accomplished. The dissertation also notes and illustrates other writers that significantly influenced the young Eliot during this formative stage of his career.

Complementary to his depictions of personal misery, are Eliot’s images of city dreariness and degradation that, as a young man, he found distasteful but fascinating. The dissertation explores the different methods used to connote city seediness or debauchery – attributes which, in some poems represent the dominant purpose of the work but, in others, act as a supportive environment for the individual ‘relationship’ cheerlessness depicted.

Throughout, the dissertation explores and illustrates Eliot’s methodology, in particular his use of: language; personification; synecdoche and his own ‘objective correlative’ theories of imagery. However, the predominant objective of the dissertation is to determine how the two major themes of individual unhappiness and urban shabbiness are suggested, portrayed and then cemented into the reader’s mind. It takes the position that the Eliot approach of showing (in contrast to telling), how a character feels, by letting the reader ‘intrude’ upon the narrative mental observations contained within a dramatic monologue, is fundamental.

This article analyses “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the light of the American psychiatrist A. T. Beck’s diagnostic criteria and cognitive theories for interpreting and evaluating symptoms and levels of depression. This study aims to show that many symptoms listed in Beck’s Inventory for Measuring Depression (sixteen out of twenty-one) are recognizable – at different levels of signifier and signified – in both the poetical structure and the imagery of the poem, whereas specific aspects included in Cognitive Therapy of Depression (for instance, the cognitive process defined by Beck as “Faulty Information Processing” and two crucial points of this process, “Selective abstraction” and “Arbitrary inference”) are identifiable in some of the most relevant figurative isotopies of the poem.
Questo articolo analizza “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“ alla luce di alcuni studi dello psichiatra americano A. T. Beck, in particolare le teorie cognitive e i criteri diagnostici da lui elaborati per interpretare e analizzare sintomi e livelli della depressione. Dallo studio è emerso che molti dei sintomi presenti nell’Inventory for Measuring Depression (sedici su ventuno) sono rinvenibili – a diversi livelli di significato e significante – sia nella struttura poetica che nel tessuto figurativo dell’opera, mentre aspetti specifici della Cognitive Therapy of Depression (in particolare ciò che Beck definisce “Faulty Information Processing” e due dei punti cruciali di questo processo cognitivo, vale a dire la “Selective abstraction” e la “Arbitrary inference”) sono individuabili in alcune delle più importanti isotopie figurative del poema.

The current paper provides an analytical study of Eliot's poem, "The Hollow Men." The methods that have been employed in this research are textual and reader-response analyses. The poem has been explored from both approaches in order to know the first impression of the researcher of the poem and backed by critics' notions of the poem. The study thus intends to shed light on two main themes including religion, spirituality, meaninglessness and nothingness. It also tends to demonstrate how Eliot portrays his own view on the modern men and the modern life through this poem. Eliot believes that modern men are hollow from their insides, and they are empty yet filled with straw just like a scarecrow. The paper tackles the critics' views on Eliot, Eliot's view on modernity, and the role of tradition and intertextuality in Eliot's poetry. The paper finally depicts major themes in the poem. Eliot, in his quest for finding a satisfying religion, penned "The Hollow Men" as a mirror to the conditions of the society after the World War I which caused suffering from lack of faith, religion and morality.

The young T. S. Eliot spent a year as a student in Paris, in 1910-1911. Why did he come there? What experiences did he have during that year? The paper focuses on Eliot's fascination for French poetry, his attending Bergson's lessons at the Collège de France and the lasting impact those lessons had on his poetry, and his encounter with the Action française.

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" appeared in 1922, Rilke's "Duino Elegies" in 1923. So both belong to the great decade of 'classical' Modernism in which many authors tried to account for, or even to compensate for the breakdown of the European cultural tradition, which the Great War had completed rather than caused. In this cultural crisis, doubt in the vitality of the occidental tradition and a sceptical attitude towards the newly risen forces of modernisanon led to a wide-spread interest in myth and in ancient and foreign cultural traditions.
This, in short, is the historical background of my essay. I will try to show that "The Waste Land" and the "Duino Elegies" use dialogical poetics (which can both be described in the terminology of the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin) in very different ways, and that the difference between these versions of dialogism can help to elucidate basis differences between Eliot's and Rilke's versions of poetic Modernism.

Focusing on the way the configurations of language allow us to conceive reality and inhabit a world, including the experience of temporality, this seminar will address the forms of historical synthesis that characterize modernist poetics. Following an introduction to the relationship between the economy of poetic figures and the constitution of historical experience (which will draw on conceptions from P. Ricoeur, J. Rancière, A. Danto, H. White, and others), the seminar will center on readings of literary and critical works by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Given these writers’ acute awareness of the relationship between their radical linguistic experimentation and new possibilities of knowledge and experience, particular attention will be paid to the modes of historical synthesis or apprehension of a number of poetic forms of meaning that can be grouped under three main headings: (1) “irony” (skepticism and enthusiasm – negation and critical sublation); (2) “translation” (insemination and afterlife – deployment of the past); and (3) “montage” (fragmentation and juxtaposition – synchronization of temporal dispersion). The aim is thereby to elucidate the specificity of a poetics which, confronted with the crisis of the historiographical discourse of Modernity (essentially, of the ideology of progress and historicism), and by contrast with other avant-garde movements contemporary to it, sought not a simplistic break with the past but rather its critical reabsorption through literary strategies of resistance and insemination, disjunction and superposition. Ultimately, the question remains as to the extent to which this “Poetics of History,” forged during the first quarter of the twentieth century, is one which is on its way to being superseded or, rather, one whose implications are still being worked out.

The aim of the B. A. thesis called “The poetry of John Donne: T.S.Eliot as Critic and Poet” is to analyse Eliot’s view of John Donne in relation to his own poetry and critical work. This is also reflected in the structure of the paper.
The first chapter following the introduction is devoted to the description of Eliot’s critical positions. The chapter should create a general background of the following discussion of Eliot’s view of John Donne. It deals with the issues like Eliot’s concept of tradition, the theory of depersonalization, Eliot’s attitude to the problem of Romanticism and Classicism, and his earlier account of metaphysical poetry.
The next chapter discusses Eliot’s specific view of John Donne on the bases of his definition of metaphysical poetry. At first, it sets the problems connected with the definition to a wider perspective of literary criticism. It shows that there are not only different interpretations of the phrase “metaphysical poetry,” but the critics differ in the answer to the question which particular poets should belong to this group. Eliot deals with this topic in his lectures on metaphysical poets collected under the title The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. In this material, we can trace two complementary definitions of metaphysical poetry. Eliot stresses that the term has a general value, and he speaks about three metaphysical periods which are represented by the work of Dante, Donne and Laforgue. He shows that there was always philosophy and mysticism in the background of each poet, and that it is a necessary prerequisite of their metaphysical quality. That is why the rest of the chapter describes the philosophical and mystical background of the poetry of John Donne. Donne is regarded as a man influenced by modern philosophy which was influenced by Jesuitism. Ignatian imaginative method of meditation stands also on the background of Donne’s mysticism.
The last chapter compares and contrasts Donne and Eliot in the perspective of Eliot’s idea of Donne’s peculiar type of metaphysical poetry. It includes concrete analyses of Donne’s and Eliot’s poems illustrating described relations. The first problem which the chapter deals with is the role of mysticism in metaphysical poetry in general and Donne’s and Eliot’s relation to the imaginative method of St.Ignatius. In a similar way, the paper compares and contrast Eliot’s and Donne’s philosophical background.
As a result of the whole paper, we can see an interesting connection between Eliot’s critical work and his poetry, and his reflection of the work of John Donne.

The postwar disillusionment of the 1920s led many literary figures to voice out the predicament and moral dilemma that modern life faces. Of many poets of war, T.S. Eliot is a distinguished figure and a leading voice in picturing the crises of the time known as ‘age of worry’. His groundbreaking poem, The Waste Land (1922) appears like an earthquake and deconstructs the structure of modernism and everything it offered. It portrays a claustrophobic world where regeneration and hopefulness seem far-fetched. This ‘disease of the age’ becomes the core issue of the poem. Eliot follows the ‘mythical method’ in the poem and connects existing panoramic setbacks of modern life to antiquities. Thus, it implies a reproachful question on modernism. Exposing a picture of mundane wasteland that symbolically suggests the spiritual death of modern men, Eliot ties the malaise with the eternal human problem and looks East for a possible remedy.