Eliot – The Poems

‘It is an art of the nerves, this art of Laforgue, and it is what all art would tend towards if we followed our nerves on all our journeys.’ These lines come from Symons’ The Symbolist Movement in Literature concerning the poet Jules Laforgue. ‘Eliot followed his nerves in Prufrock’ is C. K. Stead’s brilliant insight in an essay full of brilliant in sights. This journey of the nerves was to last a lifetime and at considerable cost to Eliot’s health. Though ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ is now acknowledged as the first great poem of the twentieth century, Eliot was ‘heartlessly indifferent to its fate’ according to Conrad Aiken, who, with Ezra Pound, tried everyone they could think of to have it published. It was no easy task as Ackroyd notes. One publisher turned it down on the basis that ‘it’s completely insane’.

Do not ask ‘What is it?’ Accept J. Alfred’s invitation: ‘Let us go then, you and I’. You will never regret accompanying the middle-aged narrator on his visit. C. K. Stead notes however, that Eliot, in a conversation with Hugh Kenner, disputed the term ‘middle-aged’: ‘Prufrock is a young man.’ Of whatever age, he is the repressed, inadequate ‘attendant lord’ whose surname once adorned a hardware shop in Eliot’s home town of St Louis. When asked about ‘the love life of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Eliot replied, ‘I’m afraid that J. Alfred Prufrock didn’t have much of a love life.’ The lady in ‘Portrait of a Lady’ may have suffered a similar fate. It is another poem of nervous tension and the constant possibility of explosive anger. The hyper-awareness of the narrator – not only to the actual words but to the under note in each statement of ‘The Lady’ – creates a mood of claustrophobic unease in this piece, often described as the shortest one-act play in literature. She was, according to Ackroyd, Miss Adelaide Moffatt whom Eliot used to visit to ‘take tea’ and he believes that she represented a Boston way of life with which Eliot was becoming increasingly frustrated. Many find amusement in this poem. I’ve always found it to be one of subtle, polite cruelty. The chasm between the two individuals is unbridgeable and not just because of the age differential. Their conversation is a duet of misunderstanding and misapprehension, and eventually sadness as she becomes increasingly aware that what she’d hoped for is slipping away into the colder actuality of their relationship. ‘I have been wondering frequently of late/(But our beginnings never know our ends!)/Why we have not developed into friends.’ The unnamed narrator ponders a final, more cruel question: ‘. . . what if she should die some afternoon . . ./And should I have the right to smile?’ Ironic? Yes, brutally so.

‘The Hollow Men’ was influenced by Brutus’ line from Julius Caesar, ‘Between the acting of a dreadful thing/And the first motion, all the interim is/Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:’, which in Eliot becomes ‘Between the idea/And the reality/Between the motion/And the act/Falls the Shadow’. The iconic line from Conrad’s masterpiece Heart of Darkness ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead.’ – is epigram to the poem. In Francis Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now Marlon Brando speaks the lines: ‘We are the hollow men/ We are the stuffed men/Leaning together/Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!’ Heaney calls it, ‘Rare music’. It certainly is – down to the last beat: ‘This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper.’

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