By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Ezra Pound’s colossal work of modernist poetry, The Cantos, runs to nearly 800 pages and took him over half his life to write – and even then, he never finished it. Pound himself said that the structure of The Cantos could be analysed as follows: ‘Live man goes down into world of dead. “The repeat in history.” The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust through from quotidian into “divine or permanent world.” Gods, etc.’
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Romanticism and Classicism’ by T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) was posthumously published as part of the 1924 collection Speculations but probably written in 1911-12. It’s an important attack on romanticism in art and poetry, and was an influential defence of the ‘philosophy’ (though that may be too grand a word for it) underpinning much modernist poetry in English.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Little Gidding’ is the last of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, but it is also his last significant poem. What’s more, there is a sense in this poem of Eliot seeking to join the threads of his work together, to ‘set a crown upon a lifetime’s effort’, as he puts it in ‘Little Gidding’ itself. But this remains a puzzlingly abstract poem in some ways, resisting any straightforward explication or analysis. There is nothing little about ‘Little Gidding’. You can read the poem here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Air was the loose elemental theme of ‘Burnt Norton’, earth the element of ‘East Coker’. In ‘The Dry Salvages’, the third of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, we find ourselves among a different element: water. The Dry Salvages, as Eliot’s note tells us, is probably derived from the French les trois sauvages, and is a small group of rocks off Cape Ann in Massachusetts. (‘Salvages’ should be pronounced ‘sal-VAY-jiz’ rather than ‘SAL-vi-jiz’.) In this poem, Eliot further analyses and explores a number of themes including Christianity and divination, the future and the past, using water as a chief symbol. You can read ‘The Dry Salvages’ here.
We begin the first of the five sections of ‘The Dry Salvages’ with what we might style a comparative analysis of the river and the sea. The ‘strong brown’ river, the Mississippi, which is ‘untamed and intractable’, and has served as a frontier and as a conduit for commerce. But unlike the river, which is within us, the sea is all about us. The river is a ‘god’, but the sea has ‘many gods’ and ‘many voices’: a polytheistic force of nature.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘East Coker’ is the second poem in T. S. Eliot’s four-part sequence, Four Quartets. Eliot wrote ‘East Coker’ during the Second World War, and the poem was published in 1940. It became an immediate bestseller, selling 12,000 copies shortly after publication. (Characteristically, Eliot’s response was to say the poem can’t have been very good if so many people liked it.) The themes and images Eliot uses in ‘East Coker’ have been analysed and interpreted in a variety of ways.
Start with that title: as with the previous poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, the small Somerset village of East Coker is a place that Eliot had visited shortly before writing the poem. It was his ancestral home, where his namesake and distant ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot lived in the sixteenth century. Eliot will quote from Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) in the first section of ‘East Coker’.