Eliotism . . . enigma in poetry
SAMUEL Beckett crossed the limits of decency when he compared TS Eliot to 'toilet', insisting that the reverse order of the letters of 'T Eliot' was what he wrote. The poet was thus an unfortunate victim of anagram. Eliot also received flak from other critics. He was accused of intentional complexity in poetry for perplexing his readers. Some even condemned him as unoriginal and plagiaristic. FW Bateson criticised his poetry as a manifestation of pseudo-learning. CS Lewis trashed his poetry as 'superficial and unscholarly', terming him a great evil. Ideologically, he was also charged with anti-Semitism. Despite all poisonous arrows hurled at him, TS Eliot is one of the finest poets the world has ever seen. He is the guru of all modern poets. He initiated a modernist movement in the twentieth century, making poetry an object of serious academic study. He made it mystic and mythical, abstruse and ambiguous, with stultifying novelty in diction and phrasing, blurred with elliptical syntax. Now any course in modern or twentieth century poetry is incomplete and ineffective without Eliot. A poetry reader aspires to see the world through the eyes of Eliot. With his sublime verses Eliot set the stylistic criteria which might aptly be termed 'Eliotism'. Eliotism is justified by the poetic style that Eliot had -- allusive and illusive, factual as well as fictional, holistic amid fragments, with a mix of order and chaos, promising both to tradition and innovation, in the confluence of imagination and reality. Eliot's poetry is difficult because it demands a lot of linguistic, philosophical, theological, mythological, historical and geographical knowledge as well as a good measure of skill in literary technicality. That difficulty is essentially the triumph of Eliotism. Eliotism is synonymous with elitism in poetry, which was strengthened by other modern poets like Ezra Pound, James Joyce and WB Yeats. The epithet Eliotism in fact implies a craze which works in the minds of the young generation, suspicious of their entities in an ailing time, living in an 'unreal city', sterile and depraved, dull and ugly. No poet among his contemporaries and after Eliot could surpass his popularity. He reigned in the twentieth century and will be reigning in the twenty-first century and onwards, I suppose, with even greater acceptance. The first mark of Eliotism was imprinted by The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, a milestone in modern poetry. Eliot created the character of Prufrock to make a mockery of the modern mind manifest in uncertainty, indecision, shallowness, timidity, fear and loneliness. The poet in a pensive mood observes the evening which 'is spread out against the sky … like a patient etherised upon a table' as there is no healing available. He goes on observing until the last catastrophe: 'We have lingered in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.' Eliotism electrified the whole world when The Waste Land, a modern classic in poetry --- a compressed epic, as it has been sometimes called --- was published in 1922. Eliot laid bare the barrenness of western society and expressed his dissatisfaction with modern life. The poem, enwrapped in a glaring opacity, holds out the symptoms of modern failures. It depicts a world which is replete with 'a heap of broken images', where there is only 'dry stone' with 'no sound of water', and where dry grass sings in an empty voice. Eliotism was fortified by such later creations as The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets. The Hollow Men hit the nadir of despair and desolation of a modern man: 'This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper'. More notes of despair: "Between the desire / And the spasm / Between the potency / And the existence / Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow". The poet in vain tries to figure out 'shape without form, shade without colour / Paralysed force, gesture without motion.' He finds everything hollow, including the vision: "There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley The broken jaw of our lost kingdoms." Richly and ambiguously allusive, Ash Wednesday moves from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The poet struggles with 'the devil of the stairs who wears the deceitful face of hope and of despair'. Life gets stuck in an eternal vacillation between two opposite forces. On the one hand he discovers: 'The stair was dark / Damp, jagged, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond repair / Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.' On the other hand, he discerns the light of salvation in the emergence of 'blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden.' At last he discerns: 'The single Rose / Is now the Garden / Where all loves end / Terminate torment.' Associated with four classical elements -- air, earth, water and fire -- Four Quartets (1946) deals with Christian spiritualism in a subtle way. The four parts are titled 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding'. It earned Eliot the 1948 Nobel Prize in literature. In the poem the poet is on a mission of 'Turning shadow into transient beauty / With slow rotation suggesting permanence.' He is aware of human frailty, though. He realises 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.' Therefore he takes shelter in the eternity of time but not with much comfort: 'Time present and time past / And both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past. / If time is eternally present / all time is unredeemable.' He flies to a land where the demarcation between beginning and end disappears: 'What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.' And of himself he asserts: 'In my beginning is my end.' The aesthetics of Eliotism is also evident in drama. He revived the tradition of verse drama through Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Cocktail Party (1949) with much success. Readers can hardly forget the famous words in The Cocktail Party: "What is hell? / Hell is oneself / Hell is alone, the other figures in it / Merely projections." His other plays are: The Rock (1934), The Family Reunion (1939), The Confidential Clerk (1953) and The Elder Statesman (1959). Eliotism was bolstered up by the poet's significant body of literary criticism. His Tradition and the Individual Talent is regarded as the most influential critical work in the twentieth century. It gave a new direction to New Criticism, claiming that the value of an art work must be viewed in the context of all previous works. He said: "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." He elaborated his poetic vision in it: "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." He believed that poetry might make us occasionally a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our life is mostly a constant "evasion of ourselves." He wrote superb critical essays on the metaphysical poets Donne and Marvell, as well as Dante, Blake, Swinburne, Marlow, Johnson, and on Shakespeare's Hamlet. His concepts of the 'impersonality of the poet' and the 'objective correlative' have been part of the critical currency ever since. The wave of Eliotism was worldwide. Not even Bangla literature could evade its impact. Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the Bengali poet crowned with the Nobel Prize, somehow kept out of the rippling effect in fashion, strictly adhering to the Romantic tradition. Tagore was such a dazzling star that anyone who composed poetry during his time could not but be overwhelmed by his beaming influence. Only a small group of poets called Panchapandav --- Jibanananda Das, Buddhadev Bose, Sudhindranath Dutta, Bishnu Dey and Amiya Chakravarty --- during the thirties and forties of the twentieth century could come out of the halo of Tagore by way of adopting innovative styles. They could do it as they derived inspiration from Eliot, a poetic powerhouse. In modern Bangladesh, all major poets, including Shamsur Rahman, Syed Shamsul Huq, Asad Chowdhury and Nirmalendu Goon, have demonstrative the Eliotic influence. Eliotism has nourished and nurtured the modern poetic mind in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Eliotism is the other name of supreme artistry, egoistically esoteric, with a mark of unbeaten sophistication. Eliot was not unaware of his strength. He wrote of himself, wittily: "How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot! With his features of clerical cut, And his brow so grim And his mouth so prim And his conversation so nicely Restricted to What Precisely And If and Perhaps and But." (Five-Finger Exercises) Eliotism is pleasantly unpleasant with its formidably difficult features. In the poet's own terms, it is characterised by grimness, primness, nicety, preciseness and uncertainty. Eliotism is the epitome of twentieth century enigma in poetry.
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