Poet and translator Ivan V. Lalić will write about Eliot: "He is not only one of the greatest but also one of the most controversially understood and accepted poets of the twentieth century". Lalić states that Eliot's historical importance is beyond any doubt.
And outside academia? What does Thomas Sterns Eliot mean today for the living poetic word - exactly 60 years since he died in London? Perhaps I could give an approximate answer only if I first remember what he meant to my generation of poets - the one that started publishing between the middle and the end of the eighties of the last century.
It is convenient to make it concrete by asking myself: what did Eliot mean to you on January 4, 1985, twenty years after his death, and 40 years from the moment you write this?
TURN NON-POETIC INTO POETRY
Even the 1948 Nobel Prize awarded to Eliot did not remove the need for the poet's guild to declare for or against him. It didn't escape my generation either. Some admired the breadth of education and the intertextual web that held Eliot's lines like an armature. From this poet it was possible to learn that footnotes are an integral part of a poem, sometimes its key. In addition, the incorporation of Latin, Greek, French, and German into the fabric of English poetry suggested a constant poetic interweaving of the great European languages and poetic traditions in the creation of world lyricism. Eliot made it all visible for us.
However, most of the future poets were skeptical of what has been called "poeta doctus" - a learned poet since ancient times. Closer to them was the romantic cult of genius, the myth of the poet as a medium of the divine, a man who in a "holy ecstasy" raves about prophetic secrets that are inaccessible to mortals. Closer to them were all those poets who joined behind the existing lyrical heritage, or those who created avant-garde provocation. Ultimately, everyone who entered the field of mass subcultures to speak with a contemporary voice was more understandable to them.
Now I would say that most of us were not even able to understand Eliot - we lacked the life and intellectual experience. And the vantage point to which a group of socialist students inclined to poetry could climb did not offer the same vantage point as the vantage point from which poetry and the world were observed by an elite poet who studied at Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford. To me, his lyrics still offered a kind of vibrancy, a melody and a dark tangle of meanings. I was attracted to that sung material whose real meanings elude me.
Ivan V. Lalić actually wrote a key introduction to that poetry with his preface to the book Eliot's Selected Poems, published in 1978 by the late BIGZ. Not a single lecture at the faculties could reach the breadth and clarity of that text. In the eighties, I got hold of that book and absorbed the preface uncritically, like a sponge. It raised expectations. What followed was a hard collision with Eliot's verses that I was not prepared for.
My high school heroes were mostly local poets. From Vojislav Ilić to AB Šimić. And, of course, Miljković's bright-dark glow. But continental poetry from Helderlin to Baudelaire was no stranger to me either.
Russian noisy futurists from one side and pictures that seem to have been drawn with the precise scalpel of Gottfried Behn - all of that went into the luggage. At that time I was discovering American beatniks, Cohen, Borges. Nothing prepared me for meeting Eliot.
In the years when I tried to find my voice, my poetic personality, I read Eliot's essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" from 1919. In it, following his study of Buddhism, he advocated "the impersonality of the poet." In his preface to Prosveta's book from 1963, which collected Eliot's essays on literature, Jovan Hristić recalled that the confessional convention in poetry is the most common from ancient times to the present day. "I call the use of one 'I' in poetic language a confessional convention, with which we are never clear: whether it refers to the poet or not." And Eliot questions exactly that. "The progress of an artist is a permanent self-sacrifice, a permanent cancellation of one's own personality," wrote the thirty-one-year-old poet in 1919, and I, ten years younger in the mid-eighties, almost got angry with him. I understand him now.
AN EXCITING WALK THROUGH THE DESERTED LAND
In his preface, Lalić warned me that Eliot builds his poetic structure on pillars that are missing from the Anglo-Saxon tradition - above all on French symbolism.
"I think I learned from Baudelaire something which is a precedent for the possibilities of poetry, never developed by any poet who writes in my language, - to deal with those dirty aspects of the modern metropolis; about the possibilities of fusion of the dirty realistic and the phantasmagoric, the possibility of juxtaposition of the factual and the fantastic. From him, as well as from Laforgo, I learned that the kind of material that was given to me, the kind of experience that a minor could have had in some industrial city in America, could be material for poetry; and that the source of new poetry can be found in what has been considered impossible, barren, stubborn, unpoetic until now. That, in fact, the poet's job is to create poetry from unexplored stocks of the unpoetic; that the poet is actually obliged by his vocation to turn non-poetic into poetry".
Yes, that was the easier part to understand.
In 1922, Eliot returned from Switzerland to London after recovering from a mental crisis. He brought with him 54 pages of a poem he called "The Waste Land". The initial idea was to describe a long route from pub to pub. The manuscript fell into the hands of a master named Ezra Pound. This one shortened the poem by two thirds. Without Pound, there would be no famous opening line: "April is the cruelest month...". Pound was aware of the strength of the manuscript entrusted to him. He will write to Eliot: "Compliments, son of a bitch! All seven jealousies caught me". Eliot called Pound the midwife of "The Waste Land" and wrote in the dedication: "il miglior fabbro Ezra Pound". It refers to a line from Dante's "Divine Comedy" - Pound is labeled as "a better smith of the mother tongue".
After a series of decades, a brilliant critic said that "The Waste Land" is to poetry what "Ulysses" by James Joyce is to prose, a work that is beyond all categories for its genre.
Before "Pusta zemlje" was written "Love song by Dž. Alfred Prufrock". It has been available to me all these decades in different translations. It is enough to compare the three and we will realize that what Eliot wrote and what is available to us in translation are different after all. In one case, we immediately know that it is "two" - the lyrical self addresses a woman: "So let's go now, the two of us,/ while the evening is spreading across the sky, which is/ Like a sick man drunk on the table". The second translation already has the color of the kind of morbid expressionism that made Gottfried Behn famous: "Let's go, you and I now,/ While evening falls in the sky/ Like anesthesia for a patient". And in the third case, the evening does not fall as "anesthesia on the patient", but as "a hundred patients in narcosis". (Well, let's go, you and I now/ while the evening descends and falls/ like a patient under anesthesia).
In fact, Eliot says: “Let's go now, you and I, while the evening spreads across the sky/ like a patient under anesthesia on the table".
Anyway, it was an exciting invitation to any poetry lover to step into Eliot's world.
TOM FROM ST LOUIS
The boy who was born in September 1888 was the seventh, youngest child in the marriage of Henry Weir Eliot, a brickyard owner, and Charlotte Champ Stearns, who worked as a teacher until her marriage. The boy was named Tomas, they called him Tom. The city where he was born, St. Louis, Missouri, was founded in 1764 by French fur traders. It is named after the French king from the 13th century, Louis IX, who was declared a saint. The United States bought the area in 1803. As an important port on the Mississippi, the city flourished in the 19th century. The boy inherited all of this - the city's interesting past, his father's family history that goes back to England in the 17th century through Boston, his mother's penchant for writing songs and the family's well-being, which was then reflected in his education. He studied Latin, Greek, French and German at a school for boys. This was followed by studying at Harvard - he entered college at the age of 17 and finished it in three years instead of four. He then went to France to study at the Sorbonne for two years. At the beginning of the second decade of the last century, Paris was globally significant for art, especially for poetry. In 1914, Eliot stayed in Marburg, Germany, where he was caught up in the First World War. He managed to travel to England via Belgium as an American citizen - his country was officially neutral at the time. It was recorded that he settled the bill for the apartment in Marburg only after the war, by delivering the sum to the landlord's widow after the establishment of payment transactions. He stayed in London, received a scholarship at Oxford. At the beginning of 1915, he meets Vivien Haj-Vud, they will marry half a year later. In England, Thomas Sterns Eliot is friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell - evil tongues say that the philosopher showed much more interest in his wife Vivien than in his poetry.
He first worked for a large bank for several years, and then became an editor at the publishing house "Faber and Faber". He left a deep mark in it, not only with his author's books but also with publications signed by, among others, Winston Hugh Auden, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Jean Cocteau, and later Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter. This series of names already testifies to the fact that the publishing house, which was largely imbued with Eliot's spirit, was one of the most important in the last century. His play "Death in the Cathedral", which he was not satisfied with, made him one of the important playwrights, and "Cocktail Party" was a success on Broadway.
Eliot was a European by spiritual orientation anyway. In England, he consciously returned to his roots and rejected the American tradition. He even adopted an English accent. He converted from the Catholic to the Anglican faith. He went to America in the thirties as a visiting professor at Harvard. His wife had serious mental problems. In 1933 they divorced. She died in 1947 in a psychiatric institution, where she spent seven years. Eliot married again in 1957, the chosen one being his young secretary Valerie Fletcher.
CONSERVATIVE INTERPRETER OF CIVILIZATION
In addition to poetry, Eliot also left a significant mark as an essayist who reflects on the civilization of which he is a part. About culture, he wrote that "saving this word is the farthest point of my aspirations". His resistance to the modern world based on the dynamism of change was uncompromising: "Every change we make leads to the creation of a new civilization whose nature is unknown to us and in which we would all be unhappy." Gradual evolution, not the revolutionary leap of the world, was all he could approve: "What our concern for civilization can lead us to do is to improve this civilization we have because we can imagine no other." He did not have a high opinion of his time, in which the civilization of the country in which he was born was becoming increasingly dominant: "We can say with some certainty that our time is a time of decline." Cultural pessimism went hand in hand with his conservative criticism of the modern world: "I see no reason why the decay of culture should not go even further and why we should not even foresee a period (of some length) which can be said to have no culture".
In doing so, he defined culture differently from the thinkers of his time: "Culture can even be simply described as what makes life worth living." According to Eliot, culture is everything - from classical music to gastronomy. With a touch of humor, he stated that "a symptom of the decline of British culture is the lack of interest in the art of food preparation". He believed that culture without religion is unthinkable because it is "the incarnation of the religion of a nation". Since both the Church of England and horse and dog racing are part of English culture, Eliot says with a hint of irony: "Christians are embarrassed to find that as Christians they do not believe enough, and on the other hand, like everyone else, they believe in too many things: well however, the consequence of such thinking is that bishops are part of English culture, and horses and dogs are part of English religion".
He did not believe in a world culture that would equalize everything: "A world culture that would simply be a uniform culture would not be any culture at all. We would get a dehumanized humanity”. He believed in the interweaving of national and local cultures and warned that their mutual isolation would cause incalculable damage to a closing culture. He believed that any patriotism, with its exaggeration, "becomes its own parody".
But there is no doubt that he would see globalization and digitization as cultural degradation. For Eliot, Europe was both his spiritual homeland and his homeland by choice. He advocated "an international brotherhood of men of the pen within Europe".
When talking about European culture, Eliot is careful to make clear “the difference between the material organization of Europe and the spiritual organism of Europe. If the latter dies, then what you are organizing will not be Europe, but simply one mass of human beings speaking several different languages”.
Eliot's transgenerational admonitions - and he was also respected as a critic and ten-year editor of the magazine "The Criterion" - may no longer reach the youngest generations of poets in which it is common for poets to read only each other, breaking the continuity with the poetry of the previous generation, let alone with books from the analog era. Eliot, reflecting on Dante and Shakespeare as his contemporaries, wrote: "No poet, no artist has a complete meaning for himself. His significance, the evaluation of his work is the evaluation of his relationship to dead poets and artists. Because you can't just judge him; you have to place him among the dead for the sake of contrast and comparison".
There are many ways to spend a morning in a cafe. One of the best is to resurrect in you the brilliant thoughts of people who have been dead for six decades.
Bonus video:
