The Four Quartets (1943) T.S. Eliot

The Four Quartets began with “Burnt Norton” in 1934 and completed in 1943, are not so much reports of secure faith as dramatizations of the difficult process of arriving at belief. The Four Quartets move away from the fragmentary quotation and college techniques of The Waste Land in favor of plainer expository statement grounded in particular times and places–the England of Eliot’s chosen citizenship and the America of his origins–while aspiring to a timeless religious faith.

Burnt Norton

Summary

The first of the quartets, “Burnt Norton,” is named for a ruined country house in Gloucestershire. This quartet is the most explicitly concerned with time as an abstract principle. The first section combines a hypothesis on time–that the past and the future are always contained in the present–with a description of a rose garden where children hide, laughing. A bird serves as the poet’s guide, bringing him into the garden, showing him around, and saving him from despair at not being able to reach the laughing children.

The second section begins with a sort of song, filled with abstract images of a vaguely pagan flavor. The poem shifts midway through the section, where it again assumes a more meditative tone in order to sort out the differences between consciousness and living in time. The speaker asserts,

“To be conscious is not to be in time”

for consciousness implies a fixed perspective while time is characterized by a transient relativity (around the fixed point of the present). However, this statement does not intend to devalue memory and temporal existence, which, according to the poem, allow the moments of greatest beauty.

The third section of “Burnt Norton” reads like the bridge section of a song, in which the key changes. In this section, Eliot describes a “place of disaffection”–perhaps the everyday world–which allows neither transcendence (“darkness”) nor the beauty of the moment (“daylight”).

The fourth, very short section returns to a sort of melody (some of the lines rhyme) to describe the unattainable, fictional point of fixity around which time is organized. This point is described as surrounded by flowers and birds; perhaps it can be found in the rose garden of the first section.

The final section of this quartet returns to reality. Despite the apparent vitality of words and music, these must die; the children’s laughter in the garden becomes a mocking laughter, scorning our enslavement to time.

Form

Eliot is much less experimental with rhyme and meter here than he is in his earlier works. Instead, he displays a mature language consciousness. Through the repetition of words and the use of structures like chiasmus and pastiche, he creates a rhythm not dependent on previous poetic forms. It is as if the mere meaning of the words is not enough to express the philosophical concepts Eliot wants to explore, as they “decay with impression,” he must exploit the physical properties of the words themselves. The repetition and circularity of language that are this poem’s hallmarks highlight the infinite circularity of time. Just as past, present, and future cannot be separated with any precision, neither can the words used to describe them. Rather than exploiting bizarre combinations of images or intricate formal devices, Eliot uses the gravity of terms like “past” and “present” to create a beautiful monument of ideas.

Commentary

The Four Quartets were written over a period of eight years from 1935 to 1942. These years span World War II, they also follow Eliot’s conversion to the Church of England and his naturalization as a British subject. These poems are the work of an older, more mature, spiritually attuned poet, facing a world torn by war and increasingly neglectful of the past. Each of the Four Quartets considers spiritual existence, consciousness, and the relationship of the present to the past. Whereas The Waste Land and others of Eliot’s early works take an interest in the effects of time on culture, the Quartets are concerned with the conflict between individual mortality and the endless span of human existence. Accordingly, each quartet focuses on a particular place with its own distinctive significance to human history and takes off from that place to propose a series of ideas about spirituality and meaningful experience. Each quartet separates into five sections; Eliot used these divisions and the transitions between them to try to create an effect he described as similar to the musical form of the sonata. The Quartets, thus, display none of the fragmentation or collage-like qualities of Eliot’s earlier poetry; instead Eliot substitutes an elegant measuredness and a new awareness of language. Puns and other forms of wordplay occur with some frequency.

Eliot does not hide the ideas behind the poetry here. His meditations on time and being are stated fairly explicitly and can be easily traced in the poem. “Burnt Norton” is, however, a poem about distraction, and two of the more interesting aspects of the poem are also two of its most understated moments. The first of these surrounds the garden in which the first section is set. Certainly the garden–“our first world”–references the Garden of Eden, a place of unattainable peace (and in this case insight) that is normally forbidden to mere mortals but that exists in memory and in literature as a standard to which everyday existence must be unfavorably compared. Yet the garden is also a part of the ruined estate from which this quartet takes its name. It bears the marks of human presence and abandonment–empty pools and formal hedges gone wild. The wreck of the garden brings to mind the ruins so prominent in Eliot’s earlier poetry, except that, here, ruins are a symbol of the futility of human aspirations and particularly of the futility of trying to alter the natural order.

Ruins also call to mind fragments, especially of the kind that make up Eliot’s earlier poetry. The first line of the second section of “Burnt Norton”–“Garlic and sapphires in the mud”–highlights Eliot’s new attitude toward the fragmentary nature of modern culture. This famous line juxtaposes a series of random things, but the effect is not the atmosphere of belatedness and melancholy characteristic of The Waste Land. Rather, the collage-like arrangements of this section form a nearly coherent whole, a meaningless song that sounds traditional but isn’t. Again fragments and ruins stand in defiance of human aspirations, only this poem does not lament that things once made sense and have now ceased to do so; rather, it declares that coherence never existed at all–that meaning and human experience are necessarily mutually exclusive.

The second center of interest in this quartet is constructed around the Chinese vase and the ruminations on poetry in the fifth section. This section clearly owes a debt to Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with which it shares some of its thematic concerns and its imagery. The Chinese jar represents the capacity of art to transcend the limitations of the moment, to achieve a kind of victory over, or perspective upon, time. In its form and pattern, in its physical existence, the jar is able to overcome the usual imprecision of human expression. By emphasizing form and pattern, Eliot suggests that poetry, which takes advantage of the linguistic versions of these, may also be able to achieve transcendence. Nevertheless, at the end there still remains the ghostly laughter of children in the garden, mocking “the waste sad time” of the poet and of poetry. The place of poetry and Eliot’s own poetic practices will be a subject of scrutiny elsewhere in the Quartets.

East Coker

Summary

This, the second of the Quartets, appeared in 1940. It takes its name from the village in Somerset, England, that was the home of Eliot’s first forebear to leave for America in the 17th c. This poem is most concerned with the place of man in the natural order and with the idea of renewal. The most explicitly Christian of the quartets, this is also the one that addresses the War most directly, particularly in its pessimism and visions of destruction. In addition, Eliot here engages in what is perhaps his most extended and direct meditation on his poetic career.

The first section of “East Coker” describes the cycle of renewal and decay as Eliot sees it. Houses and other signs of human habitation become empty fields or freeway overpasses. In the fields on summer nights, if one listens carefully enough, one can hear the sounds of the simple rural life of the past. The language of this section is reminiscent of the biblical book of Ecclesiastes, with its emphasis on natural cycles and harmony. Time here, however, is less cyclical than it is linear: “In my beginning is my end.”

The second section of the poem opens with a lyric on the disturbance of the seasons. Suddenly, the poem reverses itself, and Eliot attacks his own poetic work as “not very satisfactory: / …worn-out poetical fashion.” Eliot rejects “the knowledge derived from experience” as having “only a limited value,” and he identifies humility as the only wisdom possible for humans. The section ends with a reminder that the houses and the dancers of the first section have all disappeared.

The third section provides a continuation of the string of disappearances, as Eliot catalogues those who have passed into the darkness of death. This recalls the first section of The Waste Land (“I had not thought death had undone so many,”), except that it is, of course, much more pessimistic: Here, there are not even the ghosts of former friends with whom to converse. The meditative portion of this section combines an Eastern nihiliism and rhetorical structure with a more Christian message, as the poet tells himself to wait patiently and to expect a difficult route to awareness.

The fourth section of “East Coker” provides the most explicit reminder of the war. It describes a hospital staffed by a “wounded surgeon” and a “dying nurse” where patients are not healed but are led through painful illness to death and a tenuous salvation. The section ends with a reference to Good Friday, the day of Christ’s crucifixion–a reminder that anything worthy must come through suffering, forbearance, and deferral to a higher authority.

The final section of the poem again focuses on Eliot’s failure as a poet. He has wasted his youth and has only learned how to articulate ideas that are no longer useful. His life is a struggle to “recover what has been lost.” Finally, he settles for an unsatisfying earthly existence followed by the promise of darkness and death, in which he will finally find that “[i]n my end is my beginning.”

Form

In this Quartet, Eliot continues to reject previous poetic forms in favor of an experiment with language. Terms like “end” and “beginning” take on multiple meanings and shadings as they are reused and juxtaposed. Eliot here displays a certain cleverness with words (the “receipt for deceit” that our forebears leave us, for example) that suggests frustration with trying to communicate via his normal tone of high seriousness. The fourth section of “East Coker” is written in perfect ababb rhyme and is one of the few works in which Eliot uses a sustained formal structure. Perhaps in this submission to the authority of tradition, Eliot mirrors his thematic submission to the authority of God in this section, which ends with the reference to Good Friday. Perhaps Eliot resorts to a more formal structure in the feeling that many of his previous poetic efforts seem futile. Either way, “East Coker” represents a continued shift away from the highly fragmented style that characterizes The Waste Land and the other early works.

Commentary

In “East Coker,” Eliot continues to work with a set of images that have appeared in his poetry since The Waste Land. Encounters with “shades,” or ghosts, come to represent the poet’s own mortality. They also come to represent a level of understanding that is always within sight, yet forever unattainable. In this quartet, the children in the garden from “Burnt Norton” and the shades on London Bridge from The Waste Land have been replaced by villagers on the green, dancing in celebration of a wedding. The poem even shifts into archaic English at this point, as if to assert that the apparitions are momentarily speaking through the poet. The villagers reappear at other moments in the poem, often just when Eliot remarks that they have disappeared, and are supplemented by the shades of section three, who represent literally the citizens of London descending into subway tunnels to escape World War II air raids but who also seem to denote the masses of humanity who have lived and died without making a mark on the world. Everything cycles endlessly but without meaning: What could it possibly mean to be a part of something the whole of which no one will ever have sufficient perspective to see?

Even Eliot’s take on Christianity is colored by despair. The rebirth he describes as resulting from Christ’s crucifixion is no rebirth at all but a terrifying stay at a hospital staffed by corpses. The best we can hope for is to “die of the absolute paternal care.” Eliot emphasizes not Easter Sunday–the day of the Resurrection–but instead Good Friday: the day of Christ’s death, for which humans bear responsibility. The hospital imagery and the emphasis on human malignity are obvious references to the European war raging while Eliot was writing. They also, though, represent his realization that human folly and the inability to see the larger designs behind history doom any human endeavors to failure.

Particularly doomed to failure are Eliot’s own attempts at poetry. This is by far the poet at his most pessimistic. The beautiful, if confusing and despairing, lyric that opens the second section is erased by the harsh assessment of poetry that follows it. Here words not only fail to signify completely but indeed actively falsify, for they fail to appreciate the pattern rendered anew “in every moment” for what is truly is: “a new and shocking valuation of all we have been.” This is the same assessment of time and perspective that Eliot had made in his earlier essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” except that here, the destruction and renovation brought about by time does not enable poetry or enrich the cultural tradition–rather, it is merely crippling. The contemporary world in this poem is made up not of past glories that were featured in The Waste Land, but of disconnected, entirely new and culturally blank features: overpasses and subway tunnels. Thus, “East Coker” offers little hope for either humanity or poetry.

The Dry Salvages

Summary

The third of the Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” appeared in 1941. The word “salvages” in the title should be pronounced, as Eliot mentions in a note to the poem, to rhyme with “assuages,” with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable. The Dry Salvages are a group of small, rocky islands with a lighthouse off the coast of Massachusetts. Eliot presumably visited them or at least knew of them as a boy. This quartet departs from the pessimism and human ruins of the other three to consider humanity as a whole, as an entity with a unified subconscious and memory that produces mythic structures. Humanity is, thus, placed on a level with the natural world as something with a history and with cycles of rebirth and renewal.

The first section of “Dry Salvages” makes an explicit comparison between a river and the sea as models for the unknowable. A river, while it may figure prominently in human mythologies, is something that can eventually be crossed and conquered, while the sea represents an endless reserve of depths and mysteries: Man can live with the ocean but he will never master it.

The second section of the poem seems to signify a reconciliation with the human lot. The sea will never be either a blank slate or an easily circumscribed pond; “there is no end of it,” and man must always keep working in good faith. Time destroys but it also preserves, and just as there is no mastery there is also no escape.

The third section of the poem ruminates on words attributed to Krishna, advising humanity not to “fare well” but to “fare forward.” This is an exhortation to give up aspirations–to stop seeking to do “well”–and to be satisfied with mere existence. Again Eliot uses a ghostly figure, in this case a voice from high in a ship’s rigging, to represent a level of awareness unattainable for the series of travelers he describes here.

The fourth section is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, figured as a statue watching over the sea, asking her to pray for those who voyage on the sea and those who wait for them at home. Both the sailors and their loved ones stand in for all of humanity, faced with uncertain conditions and a lack of knowledge.

The final section of “The Dry Salvages” at last offers something akin to hope. While man will always strive in vain to:

…apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
with time…

everyday existence nevertheless contains moments of only half-noticed grace–moments at which:

you are the music
while the music lasts

Moreover, “right action,” while it will never be entirely successful, is nevertheless almost the only way available to man to subvert the “daemonic” forces that drive him.

Form

This quartet returns to some of the same easy music of “Burnt Norton.” Again, Eliot plays with words (“womb, or tomb”), and, particularly in the second section, there are moments in which the gravity of the ideas forces the poetry into a somber, prose-like mode. In general, though, Eliot uses far less repetition and circular language in this section, effectively lightening the tone. The poem also makes use of extended “landscapes”–the river and the sea–that allow Eliot to engage in flights of descriptive language free from the philosophical seriousness of the rest of the Quartets. Again, too, formal structures are borrowed from religious and philosophical sources, as in the prayer of section four and the Krishna material in the third section. In a way, Eliot is associating his poetic efforts with the other struggles for knowledge listed in the final section–astrology, palm-reading, animal sacrifices–and this leads him to take himself far less seriously, to look instead for the moments of hidden beauty in his language.

Commentary

“The Dry Salvages” is interrupted at least twice by the ringing of a bell. In both cases it is a bell at sea, either on a ship or on a buoy. The bell is a human intervention that is meant to illuminate the vastness both of the sea and of mere existence and to point out the futility of trying to master it with anything as ineffectual as a bell. In both cases, the bell goes unheard: In the first mention, it is a bell on a buoy out to sea, which will be heard most likely only by those about to be wrecked on the rocks the buoy is supposed to mark. Placed there by man, the bell has nevertheless come under the control of the sea and has become irrelevant as a marker of human intention. The second bell is rung for the dead, for those lost at sea. They are where the sound of the bell cannot reach them; the bell, therefore, tolls not for them but for those left behind. This bell is mentioned in the exhortation to the Virgin Mary to pray for those lost and those still here. Like prayer, the bell represents an attempt to appeal to a higher power, to admit one’s own mortal limits. The bell directly refutes poetic endeavor, too: human-made, a bell’s ring is an attempt to communicate without words, and admission that words have failed.

Perhaps the most famous part of this poem is its opening, with the description of the river as “a strong brown god.” These lines are often coopted and used to describe the Mississippi and to talk about the mythological importance of rivers. Curiously, though, Eliot is actually demoting the river to the status of a false god, by pointing out its inferiority to the sea as an object for contemplating. Popular culture’s glorification of these lines indeed illustrates the very inanity of human action that Eliot describes later in the poem: Dazzled by the lines’ rhetorical force, we tend to attribute greater meaning to the language than is really there, while we ignore what is actually being said. In the second section of the poem, the river becomes a conduit for refuse and unpleasant memories, a shallow channel rather than a “strong brown god.” Just as we can neither escape nor romanticize the river, nor can we master the past. The final lines of “The Dry Salvages” combine a resigned pessimism with a suggestion of hope. Couched in the beauty of the lines is a dark meaning: “our temporal reversion” is death, which is beneficial only if we become “significant soil” that might nourish a tree. By hiding behind such flights of language, Eliot once again retreats into the refuge of the poet. He may not be able to master time and experience but he is master of the world that he writes into being. Futility does not diminish beauty.

Little Gidding

Summary

“Little Gidding” was the last of the Quartets to be written. It appeared in print in 1942; in 1943, the four pieces were collected and published together. “Little Gidding,” named after a 17th-century Anglican monastery renowned for its devotion, is the place where the problems of time and human fallibility are more or less resolved.

The first section describes a sunny winter’s day, where everything is dead yet blazing with the sun’s fire. The poem considers those who have come to the monastery, who come only

…to kneel
Where prayer has been valid.

It is here that man can encounter the “intersection of the timeless” with the present moment, often by heeding the words of the dead, whose speech is given a vitality by a burning fire.

The second section opens with a lyric on the death of the four elements (air, earth, water, and fire) that have figured so prominently in the previous quartets. The scene then shifts to the poet walking at dawn. He meets the ghost of some former master, whom he does not quite recognize. The two speak, and the ghost gives the poet the burdens of wisdom: awareness of folly, a loss of perception and beauty, and shame at one’s past deeds. The spirit tells him that only if he is “restored by…refining fire” will he escape these curses. The spirit then leaves him with a benediction, and a horn blows, which may be an air-raid siren.

The third section is more propositional in nature. The poet declares that attachment, detachment, and indifference are all related; all three look alike but indifference comes only through the exercise of memory to create abstractions. The second part of this section asserts that, despite this, “all shall be well.” As the poet thinks on the people who have come to Little Gidding seeking spiritual renewal and peace, he realizes that the dead have left us only “a symbol,” one that has been perfected but is nevertheless still only a representation or an abstraction.

The fourth section is a formal two-stanza piece describing first a dove with a tongue of fire, which both purifies and destroys; the second stanza then considers love as the chief torment of man, which can redeem as well as torture. Either way, we are caught between two kinds of fire.

The final section of the poem, and of the whole of the Quartets, brings the spiritual and the aesthetic together in a final reconciliation. Perfect language results in poetry in which every word and every phrase is “an end and a beginning.” The timeless and the time-bound are interchangeable and in the moment, if one is in the right place, like the chapel at Little Gidding. All will be well when the fires that both destroy and redeem come together to form a knot and “the fire and the rose”–divine wrath and mercy–become one.

Form

This is the most dramatic of the Four Quartets, in that is is here that the language most closely approaches the rhythms of everyday speech. The diction is measured, intellectual, but always self-conscious in its repetitiveness and in the palpable presence of the speaker. Certain sections of “Little Gidding” (“And all shall be well and/ All manner of thing shall be well”) borrow from litrugical language to create the effect of attending an ideal religious service.

The fourth section, like the fourth sections of the other quartets, is a sustained formal piece that serves as a sort of contrapuntal melody to the rest of the poem. Although not as elegant as “Burnt Norton” or as musical as “East Coker,” “Little Gidding” is perhaps the most balanced of the quartets in its attention to imagery and language.

Commentary

Fire and roses are the main images of this poem. Both have a double meaning. Roses, a traditional symbol of English royalty, represent all of England, but they also are made to stand for divine love, mercy, and the garden where the children in “Burnt Norton” hide (they reappear at the end of this poem). Fire is both the flame of divine harshness and the spiritual ether capable of purifying the human soul and bringing understanding. The series of double images creates a strong sense of paradox: Just as one seemingly cannot exist both in and out of time, one cannot be simultaneously both purified and destroyed.

This sense of paradox leads to the creation of an alternative world, rendered through spiritual retreat and supernatural figures. The dead, with their words “tongued with fire,” offer an alternative set of possibilities for the poet seeking to escape the fetters of reality. By going to a place “where prayer has been valid,” Eliot proposes that imagination and a little faith can conquer the strictures placed upon man by time and history; as the ghost in the third section reminds the poet, escape is always possible. This is particularly significant when we notice that the ghost’s words are actually generated by the speaker (who “assumed a double part”), actually engaged in a dialogue with himself. While the dead can offer us only a “symbol,” symbols nevertheless give us an opportunity for interpretation and exercise of the imagination. By allowing us a way to bypass the realities of our world, they open up a spiritual freedom.

This poem, finally, celebrates the ability of human vision to transcend the apparent limitations of human mortality. In a place set away from the world, one can hear, if one chooses, the children laughing in the garden. War, suffering, and the modern condition have provided Eliot with an opportunity for spiritual reflection that ultimately transcends events and the burden of history. While not an overtly optimistic work, “Little Gidding” and Four Quartets as a whole offer a reasoned sense of hope. Poetry may suffer from language’s inherent lack of precision, but it provides the aesthetic faculty with an opportunity to disregard human limitations, if only for a moment.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) Ernest Hemingway

This novel presents the stripped-down Hemingway style at its finest. “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg,” he told an interviewer, “There is seven-eights of it under water for every part that shows.” Narrated by Jake Barnes, whose WWI wounds have left him sexually impotent, it depicts Jake’s efforts to live according to a self-conscious code of dignity, of “grace under pressure,” in the midst of a circle of self-seeking American and English expatriates in Paris. He finds an ideal in the rich tradition of Spanish peasant life, especially as epitomized in bullfighting and the bullfigher.

Hemingway’s search for a controlled modern style explains his parody of his mentor Sherwood Anderson in Torrents of Spring (1926); it is also the theme of this first novel, a book explicitly about the commanding pressures of modernity, about the Twenties seen both as historical condition and as fashion, a new era of style. The novel remains one of Hemingway’s very best precisely because it does give a historical location for his vision, a psycho-history for his prototypical hero, a pathology for his romantic existentialism. Here that hero, and the book’s narrator, is Jake Barnes, a writer who, genitally wounded in the war, experiencing the compulsory stoicism of his sexlessness, is compelled to hunt for a new manner of living, a style for his situation:

I did not care what it was all about. All I wanted to know was how to live in it. Maybe if you found out how to live in it you learned from what it was all about.

-Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises

“Learning to live in it” is the collective activity of the book, Hemingway’s most explicitly ‘fashionable,’ set as it is in the expatriate Paris and Spain of the Twenties, among American and European artists and cosmopolities and their attachments and hangers-on. The book is a Baedeker of social and moral knowledge, a suitable education in the right drinks, the right places, and the right sensibility; it turns on knowingness, the initiate’s access Hemingway’s work would always provide. But fashion, the attempt to realize the instant of history, is a condition, and the achievement of The Sun Also Rises is its penetration into what that condition is: by acquiring a style of living we may indeed learn ‘what it was all about.’

The novel is a portrait of a modern elect, the ‘herd’ of initiates who seek the territorial, social, and emotional map appropriate to their troubled selves, for whom fashion and cynicism have replaced traditional morality, religion, and idealism. A new romanticism prevails, but it is in the romanticism of managed and stoic pain, arising from the capacity to display strength and exactitude, to discover in the world of potentially false experience occasions of pleasure and joy, without forgoing the sense of modern trauma or crossing the line beyond justly expended emotion. In the clean tight performance of Romero’s bullfighting in Spain, the clear momentary natural joy of the fishing trip, the images of exactitude come, the small essence of chaotic existence.

The Sun Also Rises is prefaced by two epigraphs, one from Ecclesiastes about the endurance of the earth, the other form Gertrude Stein: “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway clearly meant them to be read together, and wanted the lost generation tag removed when it became a cliché. Gertrude Stein doubted whether she had ever said it. Nevertheless the book does turn firmly on the idea of the coming of a distinct new generation, functioning in a new nature and a new history, transfigured by war and its aftermath, tested and reduced in expectation by it, bearing certain kinds of psychic trauma and certain kind of knowledge unknown to their predecessors–or for that matter to innocent contemporaries like Robert Cohn, who uses wrong language, reads the wrong books, likes the wrong countries, etc.

Of that new awareness the most resonant symbol is the wound, actual or metaphor–that intolerable intrusion into the self which is also the ultimate realism, initiating, pointing to modern exposure, the assault from nothingness, the vacancy of present history. It leads to a world of trauma, sleeplessness, loss, consciousness of nothing, the void in the universe; it also creates common consciousness in those who–like, above all, Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, the British aristocrat man-woman whose nymphomania is the counterpart to Jake’s enforced sterility–share the insight of the modern, mixing romantic desire with a sense of its displacement.

Beyond nothingness and sterility there are glimpses of renewal: Jake’s wound is in fact an ambiguous symbol, affording him strange protection against sexual disorder and the new, androgynous world of sexual relations. In this world decadent indirections are necessary: Jake’s impotence, Brett’s nymphomania, are complex interlocking images of sterility turned to heroism.

The book’s final image of the policeman’s upraised baton suggests the entire condition of its world; direct emotion is obstructed but redeployed indirectly, either as a wasteful using up of experience or as contained lonely purity. The need is to find the clean line; Jake’s impotence keeps him within a world of tight male comradeship, of men without women, the things one cannot lose; thought it is ‘pretty to think’ that things might be otherwise, prettiness is not to be had. But contained survival is possible, in the right places, beyond the social world, in the primitive pastoral life glimpsed in Spain and on the fishing trip. Indurant nature, the abiding earth with its muted hostility, can be encountered, if finesse and craft are present, in a ritual, manage expenditure of self.

Cane (1923) Jean Toomer

Overview

Cane received immediate acclaim when it appeared. Toomer describes African American communities from Chicago and Washington, D.C. to small-town Georgia through the analytic filter of a modernist, urban literary style. Part I of Cane, set in rural Georgia, depicts a black community based in the rhythms of cotton culture, charged with sexual desire, and menaced by white violence. Part II shows black life in Washington, D.C., and Chicago, the fast-paced urban hives of money and ambition. The autobiographical third part describes an African American intellectual teaching in the South, trying to put down roots in an unfamiliar setting that he struggles to recognize as the source of his own artistic ambitions. This three-part structure held together by a narrator who alternates steps forward in a first-person voice and recedes into third-person narration, poetry, or drama. Cane’s shifting voices explore whether a northern urban African American can understand himself and his vocation by immersion in a black folk heritage that he has never known. The work is distinguished by its poetic, imagistic, evocative prose, its linguistic innovativeness, and its experimental construction.

Plot Summary

First Section

Cane is not organized like most novels. It is an impressionistic piece, with many character sketches, stories, and poems that are similar in theme, leaving readers with an overall impression rather than an experience of having followed a unified narrative. Though the smaller parts of Cane do not follow a continuing plot, and only a few minor characters are carried over from one chapter to the next, the book still falls into three distinct sections, which Toomer envisioned as leading readers in a circular progression.

The first section takes place in rural Georgia and concerns itself with the lives of poor blacks, especially focusing on women who live in this environment. It starts with the brief, poetic story of Karintha, a black woman who is noticeably beautiful from childhood on. The men all work hard for money to give her, implying that their ignorance of who she really is and her naivete work together to repress them all.

“Karintha” is followed by a poem, “Reapers,” about a reaping machine with sharp blades being drawn through a field by black horses and cutting a field rat in half. The following poem, “November Cotton Flower,” is about one winter, a time of drought, when cotton unexpectedly bloomed, giving hope that led to love.

The book then picks up with the story of Becky, a white woman who has two black children. Nobody in this small town knows who the father or fathers of these boys might be, and both blacks and whites ostracize Becky, although some charitable people try to help her out, donating land, lumber, and food that no one else wants. The boys grow up to be town bullies, ferocious to both black and whites. One day Becky’s house is found collapsed, with her under the wreckage, unable to survive social disapproval like the rat mowed down by the reaper.

Two more poems follow: “Face,” which gives a portrait of a sturdy old woman, and “Cotton Song,” which provides a biblical-sounding chant that might be sung by workers in the field.

The next story, “Carma,” concerns a woman whose husband hears that his wife has been unfaithful, and he goes to confront her about it. After the ensuing argument, Carma runs out of the house and into the cane field. Hearing a gunshot, he gathers a group of neighbors to look for her, and when she turns out to be fine, he feels fooled, and, frustrated, slashes the nearest man with a knife. He ends up in prison, in what the story describes twice as “the crudest melodrama.”

“Song of the Son” is a poem that presents the sun and earth, with Negro slaves, who sang, identified with nature. “Georgia Dusk” contrasts the previous poem by focusing on the people and machinery that have taken over the land in the decades since slavery. These lead into the story of “Fern,” a girl of black and Jewish roots who is presented as almost totally a product of her environment. The story is lushly told, with little action: the unnamed narrator becomes infatuated with Fern and goes to her, asking her to walk with him in the cane fields, but once she is out there she is overwhelmed with her powerful feelings about the place and she faints.

The poem “Nullo” follows, giving an impressionistic picture of pine needles falling in the Georgia forest. “Evening Song” is a poem about a narrator and a woman, Cloine, who lazily dozes off in his arms as the moon rises.

The story “Esther” follows the maturation of a young woman, from nine to sixteen to twenty-two- to twenty-seven. Early in life, she witnesses a man, King Barlo, fall into a religious trance in the street, and as years pass Esther becomes more and more convinced that Barlo is destined to be her lover. The story ends when, years later, she goes to offer herself to him, and he and the people he is partying with laugh at her.

There are two more poems: “Conversion” contrasting an ancient African religion with Christianity, and “Portrait in Georgia,” which offers a physical description of a weathered woman who lives in this land. The last part of this section is “Blood-Burning Moon,” a story about Louisa, who is courted by two men, one white and one black. When the white man attacks the black man, the white man is killed. A white lynch mob comes, captures the black man, and burns him alive.

Second Section

The second section, which was written at the request of Toomer’s publisher in order to bring Cane to a decent book length, takes place in the North, in Chicago and Washington, D.C. It opens with the sketch “Seventh Street,” a mix of poetry and prose that describes urban life in the section of Washington where black people live, emphasizing fast pace and the old-fashioned belief in God. “Robert,” the following character sketch, shows a strong, suffering man, his legs bent by a childhood disease, who bears his hardships as if wearing his house around on his head.

The story “Avey” presents a girl whom the boys hanging around on the Washington street corner fantasized about, imagining what she does when she goes upstairs to visit her boyfriend. The narrator of the story finally manages to date her, and she seems only vaguely interested in returning his affection, leading him to the self-comforting conclusion that she is just too lazy for serious commitment. After years pass, he meets her again, and takes her out to a secluded spot in the park, but she falls into a deep, fatigued sleep.

Two poems follow: “Beehive,” which compares the city to a beehive, with one bee wishing to fly away to “a far-off farmland flower,” and “Storm Ending,” which uses similar imagery of bees and flowers, but here they are victims of the violence of a beautiful thunderstorm. The story “Theater” is a brief piece of two upwardly-mobile urban blacks, John and Dorris: John is the brother of a theater owner, and Dorris dances in the chorus at the theater. She is attracted to him. Watching her dance, he dreams of being her boyfriend, but she thinks that the vacant look on his face while he is looking at her means that he does not care for her, so she leaves before he has the chance to talk to her.

The poem “Hot Lips Are Copper Wire” shows Toomer’s amazement at the telephone, a relatively new invention then. “Call Jesus” presents a woman’s soul as something separate from her, following her around like a dog. “Box Seat” is a relatively long story about a man, Dan Moore, who is dating a schoolteacher, Muriel. He is sure that she is repressing her true nature, and he tries to force himself on her: first physically, on the couch of her home, and then later by shouting to her in a crowded theater. It ends with Dan going out of the theater to fight with a man he has offended, but then wandering off, having forgotten his anger once he is out of doors.

The poem “Prayer,” which follows, is a meditation on the nature of the human soul, followed by “Harvest Song,” a poem that presents modern urban people as reapers of the harvest of the world’s greatness. The last part of Section Two is the story of Bona, a white woman, and Paul, a mulatto: Bona is interested in dating Paul, and he likes her, but he is hesitant about a relationship because he cannot believe that Bona, raised in the South, would not look on him with some prejudice. In the end, he decides to cast his worries aside, but while he was deliberating, she left.

Third Section

The final section of the book is comprised entirely of the novella “Kabnis,” the story of a man of mixed ethnicity, like Toomer, who has gone to Georgia to teach and finds himself attracted to the beauty of the land and repulsed by the ugliness of the way blacks are treated. At first, he is just lonely, working for a school that has strict rules for its teachers, with his behavior closely monitored. He sees irony in this, noting that “where they burn and hang men, you can’t smoke.” In the second part of this section, Ralph Kabnis interacts with some of the local people, important men in town. They tell him stories about the lynchings they have seen, which makes him paranoid, afraid that the local whites will find him too bold and come to get him. He runs home to hide, and when his friends find out what is bothering him, they laugh and give him a drink, which gets him fired.

Kabnis ends up working in the repair shop of his friend, Halsey. The local values have dragged him down, making him give up his intellectual interests and take on physical labor, which was considered the place of black men in the South. While working at the shop, he sinks even further, spending the night drinking with some friends and the prostitutes that they bring over, so that in the morning, when it is time to go to work, he is helpless and cannot even stand up on his own. This leads back to the beginning of the book, with downtrodden Georgia blacks trapped by society into a cycle of ignorance, drink and lust.

The Age of Innocence (1920) Edith Wharton

Overview

With her best late novel, The Age of Innocence, Wharton left that modern scene for a backward glance at the 1870s, when the American patriciate was first encroached on by a new and upstart wealth of the Gilded Age. She applies her ironies equally to that patriciate, trying to live by a provincial, puritanized version of European culture, and using it as appurtenance and convenience, and to the new wealth, even more vulgar than the old, producing yet more displacement. Again, the story becomes one of enforced renunciations. Newland Archer, the sensitive married hero, cannot find his place, and his drama comes when he falls in love with the European Countess Olenska, who does not fit American mores. Politics is corrupted and action denied; the intelligent are caught in the Henry Adams syndrome of being displaced from significant action. The old rich marry their children to the new, and these follow Teddy Roosevelt into politics and materialism. At the end of the book, Newland Archer, having sustained the conventions, unlike his Jamesian namesake Isabel, is caught in the opposite version of her prison. He stands in Paris, looks up at the Countess’s window, feels the city’s richness, “the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and association thrown up by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners,” and knows he has lost the flower of life.

In hindsight, the idea that The Age of Innocence offered a wholesome escape is almost incomprehensible. To the extent that the novel is still seen as superficial, some scholars have worked to establish its larger significance, particularly in its status as a “war novel” that drew deeply from the chasm of the First World War. Wharton began writing the novel almost immediately after the war’s end. She was living in Paris and had spent the war years in typically energetic, achievement-oriented exertion, serving as the head of the American Hostels for Refugees, as large international organization that provided housing, food, and care of all kinds to those who arrived in Paris by the thousands during the war. In 1916, she received a noteworthy honor for her work when she was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. To be sure, The Age of Innocence bears many marks of the world out of which it was born. It is a melancholic survey of a battle-scarred and lost way of life, a big novel in a longer (but waning) tradition that explored America’s relationship with Europe, posing that relationship as an important component in intellectual and aesthetic life.

The work presents a picture of upper-class New York society in the late 19th century. The story is presented as a kind of anthropological study of this society through references to the families and their activities as tribal. Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the novel was written in the fragmented aftermath of the First World War, which Edith Wharton experienced firsthand in Paris.

Newland Archer, the ambivalent protagonist, represents the apogee of good breeding. He is the ultimate insider in post-Civil War New York society. Although engaged in May Welland, a beautiful and proper fellow member of society, he is attracted to the free-spirited Countess Ellen Olenska, May’s cousin and a former member of their circle who has been living in Europe but has left her husband, a cruel Polish nobleman, under mysterious circumstances and returned to her family’s New York milieu. His upcoming marriage to the young socialite will unite two of New York’s oldest families, but from the novel’s opening pages, Olenska imports a passionate intensity and mysterious Old World eccentricity that disrupt the conventional world of order-obsessed New York. Ellen’s hopes of being set free from her past are dashed when she is forced to choose between conformity and exile, while Newland’s appointment by the Welland family as Ellen’s legal consultant beings an emotional entanglement the force of which he could never have imagined.

Drawing on the distinct observational style of anthropology, then a burgeoning science, Wharton narrates a romance doomed by duty in 1870s “Old New York.” Though Wharton’s is a critical eye, mindful of the suffering often inflicted by the unimaginative, oppressive enforcement of arbitrary mores, the equation of greater liberty with unqualified happiness does not go unquestioned.

Plot Summary

The story opens at a performance of Faust at the old Academy of Music. A man named Newland Archer is in attendance, and revels in his success and prospects. The scion of one of the wealthiest and most socially important New York families, he is a successful lawyer and is set to marry the young, beautiful, and sheltered May Welland. May is an ideal social match for Newland, and he anticipates the perfection of their marriage in terms of the parties and connections opening up before him. Newland meets May’s cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska. Thirty years old and beautiful, Ellen is independent and shows her scorn for the social niceties of wealthy society. Ellen is cultured and intelligent, but has caused scandal by leaving her husband, Count Olenska. Newland finds himself powerfully attracted to Ellen, and suddenly see May as a dull and provincial girl.

When Ellen announces her intention to divorce her husband–an act that would ruin the Welland family name–one of Newland’s law partners asks that he intervene with Ellen and convince her otherwise. Newland begins calling on the Countess in order to convince her that she should simply remains living separately from her husband. Newland and Ellen begin corresponding via letters, and come to know each other very well as a result. Newland enjoys Ellen’s intelligence and her willingness to question society’s rules and her role in them, where May’s willingness to play by those rules and conform to her family’s wishes seem increasingly unattractive. Ellen agrees not to divorce her husband.

His admiration and attraction to Ellen grows during this period. Alarmed at his feelings for Ellen, Newland travels to Florida to visit with May and her family and asks May to move up their wedding date because he can sense his resolve crumbling. May refuses, horrified at upsetting the careful balance of society rules. She accuses Newland of having second thoughts about her appropriateness to be his wife, and Newland insists he still loves her.

Newland confesses his love to Ellen, who is shocked. She agrees to remain in America only if Newland promises they will merely be platonic friends, which he does. May relents and sends a telegram agreeing to accelerate the wedding plans, hinting that she understands better than Newland what is happening.

Newland and May marry. Their marriage is one of convenience; there is no love or passion and Newland finds May dull. He also finds his old life of parties and social events dull, and thinks constantly of Ellen. Ellen has moved to Washington D.C., and their correspondence has ended, but Newland finds himself thinking of her constantly. He meets Ellen by chance in Newport, Rhode Island and finds her circumstances have changed: The family has cut off her allowance because Count Olenska wishes her to return to him and she refuses.

He tells her he wishes to become her mistress, since divorce would be impossible for both of them. Ellen initially refuses, and returns to New York to care for her grandmother in order to have her allowance reinstate. Newland, with renewed access to Ellen, becomes determined to seize his chance at happiness and keeps pushing Ellen to become his mistress. When Ellen tells Newland she will consummate their relationship, Newland is ecstatic–but then Ellen informs him suddenly that she is returning to Europe, without explanation. Newland decides to leave May and accompany Ellen there.

May announces to Newland that she is pregnant, however–and furthermore tells him she had confessed as much to Ellen earlier. Newland understands that Ellen decided to flee back to Europe because of this news, and that May, far from the innocent girl he assumed she was, intended this news to drive Ellen away, revealing that she has always suspected Newland’s feelings for her cousin. Newland realizes he is trapped–he cannot leave May now under any circumstances. He resolves to remain with May in their joyless marriage and raise his children properly.

Decades later, May has passed away and Newland is in Paris with his oldest son. His son is surprised to discover that his mother’s cousin is living there and makes arrangements to visit Ellen. Newland is stunned to realize that Ellen is in Paris, and goes with his son to her apartments. However, once there he stays downstairs and sends his son up alone, unable to join him. He stares up at the balcony hoping to see Ellen, but does not go up, instead walking back to the hotel.

Trilogy (1946) H.D.

Trilogy is three long related poems inspired by the bombardment of London during World War II and comprised of The Walls Do Not Fall (1944), Tribute to Angels (1945), and The Flowering of the Rod (1946). In them she combined layers of historical and personal experience; wars going back to the Trojan War all fused in one image of humankind forever imposing and enduring violence.

When Hilda Doolitte (H.D.) and her husband Richard Aldington walked into a bomb-damaged house during the First World War, Aldington found an abandoned volume of Robert Browning’s poetry and kicked it across the room. What use was poetry in the face of such destruction? But poetry tends to endure in wartime: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets would largely be written during the next world war, while H.D.’s own poetry would have a curious and poignant afterlife: sections of her poem “The Walls Do Not Fall” were inscribed by an anonymous graffitist among the ruins of the World Trade Center after 9/11.

H.D.’s imagist poetry had largely ignored the First World War, but “The Walls Do Not Fall” and the subsequent two poems are resolutely a response to the Second World War. Modernist poets’ responses to the events of the 1930s and 1940s became larger-scale, more all-encompassing, than their earlier work, as the generic nature of their titles reveals.

Like The Waste Land, Eliot’s response to the fallout from another war, Trilogy fuses different traditions and world religions. The first part, “The Walls Do Not Fall,” bears the inscription “To Bryher for Karnak 1923 from London 1942.” Bryher was H.D.’s friend, lesbian lover, and companion who had stayed with her in Egypt in the early 1920s (they were nearby when Howard Carter uncovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings), but the juxtaposition of Karnak and London points up the internationalism of H.D.’s poetic enterprise: like Eliot’s The Waste Land and “Little Gidding,” Trilogy is both a London poem and a world-poem.

Each of the three parts of Trilogy is divided into forty-three sections and is written in couplets throughout. These couplets are unrhymed, continuing the free verse style H.D. pioneered in such imagist poems as “Oread” and “The Pool.” The poem also recalls, in its mixture of imagistic precision and conversational style, the destabilized quatrains of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly.” As with H.D.’s imagist period, there’s a mixture of tautness and looseness: tautness because of the carefully chosen and vivid imagery deployed, and looseness because of the sprawling and irregular nature of the couplets, and the efforts to capture the rhythms of natural speech throughout.

Trilogy is about more than the Second World War, or H.D.’s private history, or Karnak, or London. It is a poem in search of the key to the meaning of life, which, like The Waste Land, considers the major world religions, Greek and Roman mythology, and, in H.D.’s case, the zodiac itself (the Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Waterman, and Fish appear in one section).

To this “barren search” for meaning, as H.D. puts it at one point, we can add psychoanalysis: she had traveled to Vienna in the early 1930s to be analyzed by Freud, and Trilogy reflects her knowledge of Freud’s ideas. The unconscious, for H.D., is full of “incongruent monsters” and “imagery done to death.” So, of course, is poetry, and so is the private battle to come to terns with her own identity is also a public struggle to move forward as a poet, and to move poetry itself forward.

The Waste Land (1922) T.S. Eliot

Overview

The publication in 1922 of The Waste Land in the British magazine Criterion and the American The Dial was a cultural and literary event. The poem’s title and the view it incorporated of modern civilization seemed to many to catch precisely the state of culture and society after World War I. The war, supposedly fought to save European civilization, had been the most brutal and destructive in Western history: what kind of civilization could have allowed it to take place? The long, fragmented structure of The Waste Land, too, contained so many technical innovations that ideas of what poetry was and how it worked seemed fundamentally changed. A generation of poets either imitated or resisted it. Eliot began working on The Waste Land in 1921 and finished it in a Swiss sanatorium while recovering from a mental collapse brought on by overwork, marital problems, and general depression. He accepted some alterations suggested by his wife and cut huge chunks out of the poem on Pound’s advice. Although Pound’s work on the poem was all excision, so different was the manuscript that some consider it to be jointly authored.

The Waste Land consists of five discontinuous segments each composed of fragments incorporating multiple voices and characters, literary and historical allusions and quotations, vignettes of contemporary life, surrealistic images, myths, and legends. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins,” the poet writes, asking whether he can form any coherent structure from the splinters of civilization. The poem’s discontinuous elements are organized by recurrent allusions to the myth of seasonal death, burial, and rebirth that, according to much anthropological thinking of the time, underlay all religions. In Sir James Franzen’s multivolume The Golden Bough (1890-1915) and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), Eliot found a repertory of myths through which he could invoke, without specifically naming any religion, the story of a desert land brought to life by a king’s sacrifice. Although it gestures toward religious belief, The Waste land concludes with the outcome of the quest for regeneration uncertain in a cacophonous, desolate landscape. The poem may have been Eliot’s indirect confession of personal discord, for which he sought resolution in social orders beyond those of poetry.

Eliot’s poem draws on a vast number of literary and religious texts and traditions. In addition to this, there is what is called the “mythic method”: Eliot’s use of a mythic narrative or structure. Civilization has been reduced to a “waste land” and the land has lost its fertility and ability to bring forth life. Even the living seem to be suffering from some kind of spiritual wound. But how can we fix this society? By regaining spiritual and psychological enlightenment and making peace with our demons.

Summary

“The Burial of the Dead” is the first of five sections that make up the Waste Land. The section opens with the famous declaration that April is the cruellest month because it breeds lilacs out of a land that is dead, and that the winter snows were preferable because they covered this dead land, allowing us to forget what lay beneath.

Then, we have a countess, Marie, recalling how she used to stay at her cousin’s the archduke’s, and they went sledding. Another speaker talks of a mysterious shadow rising to meet us, and then we have a woman’s voice, describing herself as the Hyacinth girl. The (presumably male) speaker who answers her seems to have lost all grip on reality when confronted with the woman coming out of the garden with her arms full of flowers and her hair wet.

Then we have a section involving Tarot cards, used to foretell the future, which are dealt out by the clairvoyant, Madame Sosostris. This first part of The Waste Land ends with a male speaker meeting Stetson, whom he fought alongside in the Battle of Mylae (one of the Punic Wars in ancient times). He asks Stetson whether the corpse he planted in his garden has begun to sprout, returning us to the imagery from the beginning of the poem.

“The Burial of the Dead” establishes some of the core themes of The Waste Land: death, burial, rebirth. It also hints at the impact of the First World War on the people of Europe. T.S. Eliot said that his research into vegetation rituals and ceremonies fed into The Waste Land and this analysis of “The Burial of the Dead” highlights all of the curious ways in which things which are dead won’t lie down, but get up and walk again.

In “A Game of Chess”, the second section, the chief focus is two scenes involving women: the first an upper-class woman and the second a lower-class one. There is a suggestion that they are both trying to cope with husbands who have served in the recent war, but are also dealing with their own issues, too. The section opens with a long and detailed description of the upper-class woman’s dressing room, where she is using perfumes and other products to make herself look and smell nice. Then we have a conversation between her and (we infer) her husband, where they fail to communicate meaningfully with each other, partly because the woman is nervous and jittery, and because there is a suggestion that the man is suffering from shell-shock or PTSD.

From this scene, we move to a pub in the East End of London, where a working-class woman, Lou, is talking to Bill and some of her other friends about her friend Lil, whose husband Albert has come back from the war, wanting to have sex with his wife again. Lil’s numerous children are mentioned, and we are given a grim picture of poor Lil, who has grown prematurely old, partly as a result of the numerous pregnancies and partly because she has been using abortion pills. The question that the speaker tells us she asked Lil–what did she get married for if she doesn’t want children?–foregrounds one of the main themes of The Waste Land as a whole: marriage, and more widely, relationships, especially sexual relationships, in the modern world.

“A Game of Chess” is chiefly about two very different women in the modern world and their unfulfilling relationships with men. They are both trapped in a cycle of repetition. The only escape is death, and that seems unthinkable. Yet the women they are associated with–Cleopatra in the case of the first, Ophelia in the case of the second–both grasped the nettle (or the asp in the case of Cleopatra) and took their own lives. In the modern age, Eliot seems to say, escape is not so easy.

“The Fire Sermon,” the third section of The Waste Land (and a reference to the Buddhist Fire Sermon, which encourages the individual to liberate himself from suffering through detachment from the five senses and the conscious mind), focuses not on marriage but on other sexual relationships: the section opens with a euphemistic reference to nymphs (i.e. prostitutes) plying their trade on the banks of the Thames, and goes on to refer to Sweeney (a latter-day Neanerthal figure, a modern caveman in a suit who features in several of Eliot’s other poems) visiting Mrs. Porter’s brothel, an Australian drinking song about prostitutes, the rape of Philomela by her brother-in-law Tereus (from Ovid’s Metamorphoses), a foreign merchant propositioning the male speaker to a dirty weekend down in Brighton with him, and–most famously–a typist and a young estate agent’s clerk engaging in mechanical lovemaking (although love is largely absent here). We then have several different female voices, the supposed Thames-daughters (as Eliot’s notes call them), telling us their stories of how they were undone by men.

“The Fire Sermon” ends with a quotation from St. Augustine’s Confessions (‘To Carthage then I came’), which returns us not only to the First Punic War (Rome against Carthage) at Mylae, mentioned in “The Burial of the Dead,” but also underscores the gulf between the spiritual and the physical: Augustine was the one who said, “Give me chastity and continence, O lord, but not yet.” In other words, let me give way to my sensual passions first, and then renounce it all. Which is what the Fire Sermon is designed to enable the Buddhist to do, but also what Eliot’s “Fire Sermon” is ultimately about.

“Death by Water” is a relief after the longer third section: a short lyric of just ten lines, it focuses on Phlebas, a Phoenician tradesman from classical times, who has drowned at sea (the title of this section takes us back to the Tarot card in the first section, which warned us to fear death by water and referred to a drowned Phoenician sailor).

The fifth and final section, “What the Thunder Said,” is overwhelming, written in unpunctuated, unrhymed, irregular free verse. It is as if the lack of water has led the speaker of “What the Thunder Said,” in his desire for water, to lapse into semi-coherent snatches of speech. We find ourselves in a dry land, among people undertaking a quest to find the Holy Grail.

Much of this final section of the poem is about a desire for water: the waste land is a land of drought where little will grow. Water is needed to restore life to the earth, to return a sterile land to fertility. Along the way, we get a digression which sees the speaker asking about a hallucinated third person s/he imagines walking alongside his/her travelling companion. Shades of the Gothic are introduced here, which are echoed by the bats with the baby faces in the chapel. We are also in the realms of Arthurian myth here, and the Grail quest: the Chapel Perilous was the place, in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, where Lancelot was tempted–as with “The Fire Sermon,” temptation re-emerges as a theme. Can one remain spiritually pure and focused, or will the lure of the body become too strong? This section–and the poem–ends with the arrival of rain in a thunderstorm, where the DA sound of the thunderclap is interpreted in light of the Hindu Upanishads.

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) T.S. Eliot

Overview

Greatly inspirational to the New Critics, in this essay, Eliot defines the English and European poetic tradition as a self-sufficient organic whole, an elastic equilibrium that constantly reformed itself to accommodate new poets. What makes poems matter, in Eliot’s definition of tradition, is their effect on other poems, not their capacity to act upon the world outside of poetry. Poets contribute to the tradition, he argued, not through the direct expression of individual emotion but through a difficult process of distancing “the man who suffers” from “the mind which creates.” Readers, therefore, should focus on the feeling embodied in the poem itself rather than reading the poem through the life of the poet. Through New Criticism, Eliot’s “impersonal” approach to poetry had a powerful role in shaping the literary curriculum in American higher education, especially following World War I.

Summary

“Tradition and the Individual Talent” sees Eliot defending the role of tradition in helping new writers to be modern. This is one of the central paradoxes of Eliot’s writing–indeed, of much modernism–that in order to move forward it often looks to the past, even more directly and more pointedly than previous poets had.

This theory of tradition also highlights Eliot’s anti-Romanticism. Unlike the Romantics’ idea of original creation and inspiration, Eliot’s conception of tradition foregrounds how important older writers are to contemporary writers: Homer and Dante are Eliot’s contemporaries because they inform his work as much as those alive in the twentieth century do.

James Joyce looked back to ancient Greek myth (the story of Odysseus) for his novel set in modern Dublin, Ulysses (1922). Ezra Pound often looked back to the troubadours and poets of the Middle Ages. H.D.’s Imagist poetry was steeped in Greek references and ideas. As Eliot puts it, “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

He goes on to argue that a modern poet should write the literature of all previous ages “in his bones,” as though Homer and Shakespeare were his (or her) contemporaries: “This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity.”

In short, knowledge of writers of the past makes contemporary writers both part of that tradition and part of the contemporary scene. Eliot’s own poetry, for instance, is simultaneously in the tradition of Homer and Dante and the work of a modern poet, and it is because of his debt to Homer and Dante that he is both modern and traditional.

Eliot’s essay goes on to champion impersonality over personality. This is, the poet’s personality does not matter, as it’s poetry that s/he produces that is important. Famously, he observes: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”

This is more or less a direct riposte to William Wordsworth’s statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1880) that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Once again, Eliot sets himself apart from such a Romantic notion of poetry. This is in keeping with his earlier argument about the importance of tradition: the poet’s personality does not matter, only how their work responds to, and fits into, the poetic tradition.”

Quotes

Criticism is as inevitable as breathing […] for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to it successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged […] novelty is better than repetition.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.

I have tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author.

The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.

[…] the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.

The Longman Anthology of British Literature, 3rd E., Vol. 2C (Pearson Longman: New York, 2006): 2544-2547.

To Have and Have Not (1937) Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not is the story of an honest, trusting Floridian who is driven to crime during the Depression. Being cheated as a sports fishing guide, Harry Morgan smuggles alcohol and human beings, twice double-crossing the criminals who hire his services. The second time proves fatal for Morgan, who is to widow Marie, a good man whose kind will not be seen again.

Pleasure boat captain Harry Morgan tells a tale of woe, being swindled by an inattentive sports fisherman after turning down good money to smuggle Cubans into the Florida Keys. Pal Frankie introduces Morgan to a Chinese businessman, Mr. Sing, who wants to take illegal aliens to Tortugas. Morgan refuses to take his friends along and sets to sea heavily armed. Alcoholic Eddy stows away and proves useful as Morgan double-crosses Sing. With the aliens locked below decks and money in hand, Morgan kills Sing and sinks his body.

The next spring, Morgan and mate Wesley are shot by Cuban officials while loading bootleg alcohol and survive a major storm en route to Key West. Morgan sinks the contraband in shallow water for another boat to pick up. During the operation, in which Wesley cannot take part because of his pain, a high-ranking U.S. government official happens by on a fishing trip and turns Morgan in. His boat is impounded and his right arm has to be amputated.

By winter, Morgan is desperate to keep his family fed. Sleazy lawyer “Bee-lips” Simmons brokers a meeting with Cuban revolutionaries, and Morgan plans another double-cross. He easily steals his boat from the Navy Yard impound but loses it again when someone sees it hiding. He then charters Freddy’s boat and goes home for what proves to be the last time. Lusty wife Marie fetches his Thompson submachine fun, loads clips, and weeps as they say goodbye. The Cubans rob a bank, race aboard, kill Tracy in cold blood, and force Morgan to race seaward. While Emelio expounds on the Cuban revolution, Morgan looks to avenge Albert. Morgan opens fire on the robbers, but merely wounds one who then shoots him in the gut.

While Morgan drifts in agony and despair, both Gordons commit adultery and end their marriage with great acrimony. He ends up in Freddy’s bar buying drinks for World War I veterans, and slugs MacWalsey, who is cuckolding him. The Coast Guard tows Freddy’s boat into Key West past the yacht basin where the diverse lives of the idle rich are peeked into before revealing Morgan’s fate. They include a gay couple, a desperate tax evader, a picture postcard family, two Estonian writers, and a beautiful insomniac with an alcoholic husband and lover. As the basin sleeps, a crowd forms to see Morgan carried ashore and taken to the hospital, where he dies in surgery. The sheriff secures the baffling crime scene, Marie skips the funeral, and a week afterward considers what a man she has lost and prefers to be the victim rather than the survivor.

Summary: Toni Morrison on To Have and Have Not in Playing the Dark

Hemingway shows Harry is knowing, virile, free, brave, and moral. In the first part, Harry refers to the black man he hires to assist him on his deep-sea fishing vessel as n***** and always thinks of him that way. In Part Two, when the narration shifts, Harry’s speech has two formulations of the black man: he both remains nameless and stereotyped and becomes named and personalized: when Harry speaks of him he is named “Wesley,” when Hemingway writes of him he writes n*****. “The term [n*] occupies a territory between man and animal and thus withholds specificity even while making it.” The sentence construction “saw he had seen” in order to prevent the black man from speaking; he was the first to see the fish on the sportsman fishing excursion, but isn’t allowed to communicate this knowledge. Instead Harry “saw he had seen” the fish. Humanizing the black man and allowing him to speak would have characterized Harry very differently.

Native Son (1940) Richard Wright

Overview

With the publication of Native Son, Richard Wright became the first African American author of a bestseller. Native Son is an uncompromising study of an African American underclass youth who is goaded to brutal violence by the oppression, hatred, and incomprehension of the white world. The sensational story disregarded conventional wisdom about how black authors should approach a white reading audience. Bigger Thomas, the main character, embodied everything that such an audience might fear and detest, but by situating the point of view within the character’s consciousness, Wright forced readers to see the world through Bigger’s eyes and thus to understand him. The novel was structured like a hard-boiled detective story, contained layers of literary allusion and symbol, and combined Marxist social analysis with existential philosophy–in brief, it was at once a powerful social statement and a complex work of literary art. The title of Native Son made the point that the United States is as much the country of black as of white; the story showed that blacks had been deprived of their inheritance.

Plot Summary

This novel is the story of Bigger Thomas, a Mississippi-born young black man living in the Black Belt of Chicago, who over the course of the novel kills a young white woman, rapes and kills a young black woman, stands trial for the murder of the white woman, and is sentenced to death. It is divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate.

The “Fear” section opens with a long scene of a rat attack first thing in the morning. Bigger is awakened by the alarm clock in the one room apartment that he shares with his mother, sister, and brother. A giant rat is loose in the room, and his brother and he chase it and finally kill it with a frying pan, though not after being attacked by the monstrous creature. Bigger then goes to the pool hall, where he and his friends have planned to assemble before robbing a white jewelry store; in keeping with this section’s theme, Bigger is able to talk his friends out of the heist, realizing that their plan was too dangerous. He then goes to the home of the Dalton’s, a rich family (who, it is revealed, are the ultimate owners of the dilapidated building which he lives) who are big supports of Negro uplift programs, who have offered to hire Bigger as their chauffeur, as Bigger’s family is about to lose their relief money for food.

One of Bigger’s first duties is to drive the college-aged Mary Dalton allegedly to a university lecture, though once in the car she insists that he instead pick up her friend Jan Erlone, a member of the Communist party who, along with Mary, tries to show Bigger solidarity through sitting in the front of the car with him and insisting that he eat with them in a restaurant, “one of those places where colored people eat, not one of those show places.” Mary’s and Jan’s behavior toward Bigger confuses and upsets him, as his conditioning of strict deference to white people has taught him to fear what they intend as human kindness as a possible trick. Though their intentions are good, they still have come across as not only condescending but racist, in Jan’s request for “authenticity” and Mary’s claim that “[Negros] have so much emotion!” and her insistence on hearing Bigger sing. Mary gets so drunk during their night out that Bigger has to carry her to her bedroom; once inside, her blind mother comes in to check on her before Bigger can escape. In his attempt to keep Mary quiet with a pillow, he accidentally smothers and kills her. Bigger, in his terror at having killed Mary, covers up his murder by stuffing her in the furnace (which it is his job to tend), chopping off her head with an axe in the process in order to make her corpse fit.

In the “Flight” section, Bigger tries to capitalize on his situation by attempting to blackmail the family after they discover Mary’s absence. Bigger tries to implicate Jan in her disappearance, as he knows Jan’s Communism is as damning as his own black skin. Mary’s body is discovered, however, by reporters who find her bones and an earring in the furnace after it starts smoking, and Bigger escapes into the Black Belt section of town. An enormous police and vigilante search for Bigger targets this part of the city, as thousands of white men harrass, arrest, assault, and attack black men (and the black part of town more generally) as part of their search for Bigger. Bigger hides out for an evening with his girl Bessie, and tries to include her as part of his extortion and escape plan. However, as Bessie’s refusal to participate, Bigger rapes her and then kills her in her sleep by bludgeoning her to death with a brick. He then drops her body down an air shaft, realizing too late that the money he had stolen from Mary’s purse was still with Bessie. The rest of this section consists of Bigger’s attempt to flee as the captors move in tighter and tighter.

The final section, “Fate,” describes Bigger’s stay in jail and his trial. Jan reappears and provides Bigger with his attorney, Max. Max tries valiantly to portray Bigger as a victim of circumstance: in Max’s words, “I shall endeavor to show, through the discussion of evidence, the mental and emotional attitude of this boy and the degree of responsibility he had in these crimes.” Max’s devotion to justice evokes just enough hope in Bigger as to make his inevitable sentencing more poignant and painful, as Max is the first person Bigger has ever felt has seen him as a man.

In the essay “How Bigger Was Born” included as an addendum of sorts to the novel, Wright explains this motive for writing Native Son in reaction to the response to his 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children. Wright states, “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” Indeed, Native Son is unflinching and “hard,” in that it forces the reader to identify with Bigger’s point of view. Just a few pages before raping Bessie, for example, Bigger reflects on how being black in America is itself a form of rape: “But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one.”