T.S. Eliot & The Modernists
Born: 1888; Died 1965. T.S. Eliot famously remarked that he was a "classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion". He felt he was both a "New Englander and a Southwesterner"-- he was born in St. Louis and died in London; both America and
England try to claim him as one of their own. His family visited Boston every summer and kept a connection to New England. He attended Harvard and excelled-- he received an M.A. in English Lit. He was fluent in many languages, including French and German.
In 1908, while browsing through the Harvard Library, Eliot came upon the book "The Symbolist Movement in Literature" by Arthur Symons; this book changed his life. His introduction to Symbolist poetry, (Remember Rimbaud), esp. Jules Laforgue, gave Eliot his own voice. He said that these were the poets from who "he first learned ot speak". He became Secretary of Harvard's literary magazine, the "Advocate". He would eventually return to Harvard to work on his Doctorate. In 1910, he spent the fall in Paris, France, where he "entered the intellectual life of France"... he was able to meet numerous contemporary artists and writers. It was here that he met Jean Verdenal, a medical student who would later die in war, a friend to whom he'd dedicate "Prufrock".
"In 1910 and 1911 Eliot copied into a leather notebook the poems that would establish his reputation: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "Portrait of a Lady," "La Figlia Che Piange," "Preludes," and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." Combining some of the robustness of Robert Browning's monologues with the incantatory elegance of symbolist verse, and compacting Laforgue's poetry of alienation with the moral earnestness of what Eliot once called "Boston doubt," these poems explore the subtleties of the unconscious with a caustic wit. Their effect was both unique and compelling, and their assurance staggered his contemporaries who were privileged to read them in manuscript.His friend Conrad Aiken, for example, marveled at "how sharp and complete and sui generis the whole thing was, from the outset. The wholeness is there, from the very beginning."
"In August 1914 he was in London with Aiken and by September Aiken had shown Eliot's manuscript poems to Ezra Pound (leading American Poet), who, not easily impressed, was won over. Pound called on Eliot in late September and wrote to Harriet Monroe at Poetry magazine that Eliot had "actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own."The two initiated a collaboration that would change Anglo-American poetry, but not before Eliot put down deep English roots."
Through his friend Bertrand Russell (philosopher), Eliot would meet his wife. Eliot married Viven Haigh-Wood in 1915. She had physical and emotional problems, and Eliot's family never quite took to her. They would have no children. Eliot would take a job at a bank and would keep it-- balancing the work with his poetic endeavors.
"Prufrock and Other Poems" was released in 1917 with the financial backing of Ezra Pound. Through a very elite group of friends, Eliot found himself at the center of the intellectual world. He was able to spend time with leading figures in Poetry, Art, Philosophy, etc... he was in the right circles.
In 1921, Eliot's problems came to a head; he had impending guilt about his father's death and was dealing with the burden of his wife's physical and emotional problems, and Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown. He had 3 months of writer's block following this, but when he snapped out of it, the result was "a series of dramatic vignettes" , inspired by jazz,-- "intense, diverse and ryhtmic"-- and centered around Eliot's London life. A poem suffused with Eliot's horror of life, it was taken over by the postwar generation as a rallying cry for its sense of disillusionment: this was the poem that shaped the Modernist movement. Pound gave the work excessive praise. The poem was very successful and won the 2,000$ prize and publication in "Dial", a literary magazine. However, Eliot's life was still distressed, especially after Viven's NEAR death in 1923-- Eliot was close to a second breakdown. It was after this that his poetry would begin to deal with religious situations. It was then that he began to "exchange the symbolist fluidity of the psychological lyric for a more traditional dramatic form."
After 1925, his marriage steadily deteriorated, but he did not consider divorce due to his Anglican religious beliefs. Viven was committed to a mental hospital in 1938. During the war, he would publish a 4-part structure poem very sombre in voice, the last of which, "Little Gidding" would examine the "subject of the individual's duties in a world of human suffering". "Four Quartets" would replace "The Waste Land" as Eliot's most celebrated work. After the war, Eliot would write no more major poetic works... he devoted the end of his career to writing literary criticism (most notably on the French Symbolists) and to drama.
One guiding theme in Eliot's poetry is "love in its various forms"... And like with "Prufrock", Eliot's poems project a painful sincerity.
:"Lovesong" is about a man who ironically never sings his love song to any woman. It begins with an epigraph that takes us to Dante's Hell-- the idea is of a voice that is a "flickering flame", a voice that cannot be understood. There is an intimacy about the poem; it begins with "you and I" on the way to a party. The 2nd paragraph evokes a modern world that is tainted (symbols?). Then there's a discussion about time as he contemplates the notion that we can put thigns off because there will "always be more time" (what do you think about this?). He questions himself-- wonders if he should approach this woman, but his self-doubt keeps him from doing it.. Inconsequential things, like his bald spot, hinders his confidence. He worries about how he is perceived and is bothered by his appearance. He says that he has lived for a while now but can't figure out how to "presume", to move forward. He discusses the women that he's known; he is taken by their perfume and their dress, yet he can't approach them-- can only admire them from afar. He admits, "I was afraid" and contemplates if it would have been worth it to approach a woman and let her in... is it "better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all??" He talks about who he is not-- not "hamlet, a lord, a prince", etc... and equates himself to "the FOOL", the joke whom no one will take seriously. He 'grows old' and is lonely, and it ends this way.
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas was born in Wales in 1914. He was a neurotic, sickly child who shied away from school and preferred reading on his own; he read all of D. H. Lawrence's poetry, impressed by Lawrence's descriptions of a vivid natural world. Fascinated by language, he excelled in English and reading, but neglected other subjects and dropped out of school at sixteen. His first book, Eighteen Poems, was published to great acclaim when he was twenty. Thomas did not sympathize with T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden's thematic concerns with social and intellectual issues, and his writing, with its intense lyricism and highly charged emotion, has more in common with the Romantic tradition. Thomas first visited America in January 1950, at the age of thirty-five. His reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39 after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in 1953. -from poets.org
"Do Not Go Gently" is a villanelle: A villanelle is a poetic form which entered English-language poetry in the 1800s from the imitation of French models.[1] A villanelle has only two rhyme sounds. The first and third lines of the first stanza are rhyming refrains that alternate as the third line in each successive stanza and form a couplet at the close. A villanelle is nineteen lines long, consisting of five tercets and one concluding quatrain. [2]
It was produced for his dying father in 1952 and is his most quoted work. "The speaker addresses his father using wise men, good men, wild men, or grave men as examples to illustrate the same message: that no matter how they have lived their lives or what they feel at the end they should die fighting. It is one of Thomas' most popular, most easily accessible poems, and implies that one should not die without fighting for one's life, or after life."
It is reported that Thomas never showed this poem to his father.
Raymond Carver:
Biography Raymond Carver
The American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver was born in Clatskanie, Oregon, on May 25, 1938, and lived in Port Angeles, Washington during his last ten, sober years until his death from cancer on August 2, 1988. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1979 and was twice awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1983 Carver received the prestigious Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award which gave him $35,000 per year tax free and required that he give up any employment other than writing, and in 1985 Poetry magazine\'s Levinson Prize. In 1988 he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Hartford. He received a Brandeis Citation for fiction in 1988. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages.
At least that\'s the basic biography. Of course there\'s no room in it for the nature of the hardship he and his family went through during most of those fifty years between birth and death. There\'s no mention of his marriage at 19, the birth of his two children, Christine and Vance, by the time he was 21. No mention of his sometimes ferocious fights with his first wife, Maryann. No mention, either, of his near death, the hospitalizations - four times in 1976 and 1977 - for acute alcoholism. -from agonia.net