By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The following constitutes a very brief summary of the six sections of T. S. Eliot’s long poem Ash-Wednesday (1930), which was the first major poem Eliot wrote after his conversion to Christianity in 1927. (That same year, he wrote ‘Journey of the Magi’, but Ash-Wednesday was a poem on an altogether larger scale – so the following brief summary may help to clarify the ‘narrative’ of the poem and how it charts the religious journey of the poet.
A brief introduction to a modernist epic
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. Is The Cantos a masterpiece of twentieth-century poetry or an artistic failure? Is it sheer self-indulgent verbiage or an under-read and underappreciated epic for the modern world? We can hardly scratch the surface in this short introduction to Pound’s Cantos, but we’re going to address some of the key aspects of the poem and offer an analysis of its overall aims and features.
Ezra Pound referred to The Cantos as, variously, ‘an epic including history’ and, with more muted self-praise, a ‘ragbag’. Yet although it is undeniably a ragbag, there are a number of key themes running through The Cantos. Pound has started out with Imagism, in 1912, and the idea of ‘superposition’: placing, as it were, one image on top of another, so that in his most famous early poem, the two-line ‘In a Station of the Metro’, the faces of the commuters in the Metro station are placed next to the image of petals on the wet, black bough of a tree.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Four Quartets was T. S. Eliot’s last great achievement as a poet. After its publication in the early 1940s, Eliot would write occasional minor verses, but much of his creative energy was directed into the theatre, where he wrote a series of attempts to bring about a renaissance in English verse drama (with mixed results).