These Fragments I Have Shored Against My Ruins Ts Eliot Quote Art Drawings

"Modernist art is perhaps the commencement consciously to absorb the principle for which Marshall McLuhan found words a generation afterward, that 'the medium is the message.' Modernist artists – in the novel, poesy, the drama, music, the dance, architecture and elsewhere – understand that, to articulate their sense of the differentness of modern experience and of existence in the modernistic world, they must change their medium, likewise every bit, and as much as – if not more than than – what the medium 'says'."

In light of this remark I discuss The Waste Land and several other poems by Eliot.

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On publication of his kickoff poem T.S Eliot was regarded every bit 'a disruptive progressive iconoclast' (Jones ix). In 1915, at the insistence of Ezra Pound, Poetry Magazine published 'The Love Vocal of J. Alfred Prufrock'; what had been evident to Mr. Pound was now axiomatic to all who had more than than a passing interest in verse in the English language language, something new had arrived, Modern Poesy had a voice. The now immortal image from 'Prufrock' of the "patient etherized upon a table" ironically revived the intellectual climate of contemporary poetry and heralded the arrival of a new perspective, the urban mural, the verse of the city. This is precisely what Eliot had intended. He regarded himself an active revolutionary, a rebel, and his purpose "was to direct attention towards the particular sources of poetic power whose neglect had led, he felt, to a progressive devitalization of poetic art". (Drew 36) Drawing from all literature that preceded his identify in history Eliot consciously devoted himself, both philosophically and creatively, to the evolution of a new poetic vocalism. His aim was to modernize himself and his chosen medium, poetry. With 'The Wasteland' (1922) he succeeded, giving the reader non simply descriptions that were startlingly new, "That corpse you planted concluding year in your garden, / 'Has it begun to sprout?'" (Eliot 53. 71-72) but as well metaphors and allusions which are as multi-layered every bit they are striking. He also offers new interpretations of the mythic man as opposed to the existent man, struggling for identity, meaning and purpose in the post war, modern, industrialized globe:

He, the boyfriend, carbuncular, arrives,
A small business firm amanuensis's clerk, with 1 bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford Millionaire. (lx. 231-234)

Eliot gave us a rich, cluttered tapestry of verse that "…juxtaposes the remote and the familiar, the traditional and the contemporary".(Headings 17) By combining his intense, studied interest in the medium of poetry with his natural talent for the musicality of languages, T.S. Eliot produced some of the greatest poems ever written in English and in the process, permanently inverse the medium of poetry itself.

The Princeton Encyclopedia of Verse and Poetics summarizes T.S Eliot's position on poetry with this brief, humorous passage:A poet's task during creation is to give expression to some extremely complex state of mind that has been forming itself unconsciously out of his stored experiences and is now beginning to agitate him obscurely (Preminger 515). When first embarking upon a study of 'The Wasteland' (1922), this may seem an apt determination. The reader is confronted with a foreign metaphysical landscape that although steeped in obscurity somehow seems familiar, the remnants of both objects and ideas, memories and desires, characters from the past and imagined in the hereafter hover on the peripheries, where "…you cannot say or judge, for you know just / A heap of cleaved images…". Eliot literally evokes a wasteland, haunted by the ghost(south) of what once was, the reader left reeling about the wreckage unable to notice shelter, death looming in the shadows. Sometimes the reader is given a glance of something recognizable only then information technology slips away, like someone flashing around a torch in a cave. This jigsaw, shattered mirror technique, coupled with dark fragmented reflections and glimpses of what are perhaps the poets own private rituals, builds an nearly unnerving image in the mind of the reader. However, and despite this trepidation, further assay of the text shows Preminger's summary should non be considered the final prognosis of 'The Wasteland'. Once you melody in to the poem, when yous discover all the secret rhymes, "…the audio of horns and motors, which shall bring/Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the leap" you learn to notice without judgment and to appreciate the text despite personal preconceptions of what a verse form should 'be' or 'do'.

Another innovative technique of Eliot'due south, evident early on in his career with 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (1915) is the weariness credible in the tone of the narrators voice, a blasé, world-weary guide through the density and the vastness of the allusions in the text. In 'The Wasteland' (1922) this technique lulls the reader into a semi-detached, almost hypnotic country, allowing Eliot to nowadays shocking imagery while suppressing his audition'due south expected inclination to moral outrage. This dead-pan innovation also serves to concur the explosion, to understate the immensity of what you are reading, you find yourself continuing at that place, without drama, numb among the junk. This weariness is also combined with an ingenious apply of the inherent musicality of the English language, vowels and consonants resounding off one another with an nigh preternatural clarity. Repeat out loud this quotation equally an example:

The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of Metropolis directors;
Departed, have left no addresses. (Eliot 58)

The music of Eliot's language was, to early 20th century ears, a new music – disjointed, like the first uncertain notes of a broken opera, struggling to encompass an atrocity. At once hopeful and fearful of the future, it vanquish a new pulsate and heralded the arrival of the new mod self-conscious human, one who did not merely discard and disregard the past only one who had arrived in 'the now' dragging behind them all that they had learned, all that was useful, to forge a new time to come from the bricks and dust of the old empires.

In 'The Wasteland' Eliot as well employs an innovative use of parataxis (the placing together of sentences, clauses, or phrases without a conjunctive word or words) every bit demonstrated past the line "O the moon shone brilliant on Mrs. Porter / And on her daughter / They wash their feet in soda water…" Ezra Pound, the editor of the original manuscript of 'The Wasteland', himself renowned internationally for his innovations in poetry, was and so impressed he remarked "About enough, Eliot's poem, to make the rest of us shut upwardly shop…" (Eliot, Valerie xxii)

Pound, in turn, has left his mark on 'The Wasteland', existence largely responsible for the format of the poem equally we know it today. In fact the bitty, 'blown autonomously' presentation of the poem is a effect of the redactions of Pound, and Eliot (ever the innovator) choosing to leave blank spaces where the edits occurred, rather than reformatting the poem'south structure. An example can be seen where, in the unedited manuscript, the lines appeared every bit:

Unreal City, I have seen and see
Under the brown fog of your winter noon…
(Eliot,V 43. Lines 93-94)

In the published version, after Pound's edit, Eliot chose not to reduce the poem:

Unreal Metropolis
Under the dark-brown fog of a wintertime noon…
(Eliot, T.S 59. Lines 207-208)

Some other, more obvious, case can be seen where the original manuscript read:

At the violet hr, the hour when eyes and back and mitt
Turn upwards from the desk, the man engine waits—
Like a taxi throbbing waiting at a stand—
(Eliot, V 43. Lines 121-123)

While the published version, after Pound's editorial interjections, read:

At the violet hr, the hour when eyes and back
Turn upwardly from the desk, when the human being engine waits
Similar a taxi throbbing waiting,
(Eliot, T.S. 59. Lines 207-208)

This results in the 'cutting brusque rhyme' upshot and as well the fragmentary presentation, both very effective in portraying the 'wasteland' Eliot intended.

The balance and rhythmic flow, the measured inflections and modulation of the vowels and consonants, and the measured beat of the voice in Eliot'south verse was self consciously revolutionary. In a lecture that Eliot gave in 1950 he spoke directly of two of his major poetic influences, Jules Laforgue and Charles Baudelaire. From Laforgue, "[Eliot] learned that his own speech idioms had poetic possibilities, and from Baudelaire, that his urban feel could exist material for verse…[and that] juxtaposing the realistic and the fantastic could produce striking effects". (Headings twenty) 'Prufrock' (1915) – written when Eliot was only twenty iii – presents u.s.a. with a line that critic Piers Grayness called "an astonishing achievement'due south astonishing achievement" (Grayness 83), he gives us a glimpse of his gifts of cadence and the influence of Baudelaire with sharp binary contrasts:

There will be fourth dimension, there will be fourth dimension
to prepare a confront to meet the faces that you meet;
There will exist fourth dimension to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of easily
That lift and drop a question on your plate.
(The Honey Vocal of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1915)

These techniques were refined and his gifts developed when seven years later he penned these lines in "The Wasteland"; hidden in the pleasant rhythm and bearded with every day sounding words is what appears to be a scene depicting a sexual assault, or at the very least a sterile indifferent copulation:

The fourth dimension is at present propitious, as he guesses,
The meal is ended, she is bored and tired,
Endeavours to engage her in caresses
Which all the same are unreproved, if undesired.
Flushed and decided he assaults at once;
Exploring hands encounter no defence. (235-240)

All of these important innovations in Eliot's verse are as consciously realized as the seemingly loose but highly designed tapestry of literary and philosophical allusions and references he invents or modifies. Eliot himself said that "the dandy poet is the human who 'out of intense and personal experience is able to limited a general truth : retaining all the particularity of his experience to make it a general symbol'" (Drew 91). Eliot's intention was to portray his time, a world in literal and spiritual ruin, to cultivate his innate skills of observation and abilities with language to metaphorically shake the reader awake. To effectively enunciate this time and place he effectively "trained himself and modernized himself, on his own!" (Stock 166) as Ezra Pound commented after their first meeting. Through the medium of verse Eliot built a new temple in a moral Sahara, in this 'wasteland' of compromised ethics and spiritual barrenness he succeeded in growing an intellectual flower. Eliot knew what he wanted to say and he conceived a very constructive way to say it, his aim "to achieve comprehensiveness through innuendo, meaning through dislocation" (Gray 225) and his witting endeavor to get "equally much as possible of the whole weight of the history of the language backside his words" (225) was, as history has demonstrated, a very successful aim indeed. Eliot took the boilerplate man from his time, placed them amongst the ruins, gently awoke them from their collective fugue, all the while reminding them that what they had lived through was epic, worthy of myth. His equally epic verse form, 'The Wasteland' portrays his vision of the modern man, getting upwards from the ending, dusting off his coat, taking account of what he has learned, what he has inherited, and continuing on, as the poem concludes, "These fragments I have shored against my ruins…"

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© Brentley Frazer

Works Cited

Drew, Elizabeth. T.S. Eliot, The Pattern of his Poetry. Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1950
Eliot, T.S The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917. Selected Poems. Faber and Faber 1961
Eliot, T.S The Wasteland 1922. Selected Poems. Faber and Faber 1961
Eliot, Valerie, Editor. T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland: A facsimile and transcript of the original draft including the annotations of Ezra Pound. Faber and Faber. London 1971.
Greyness, Piers. T.S Eliot's Intellectual and Poetic evolution 1909-1922. The Harvester Press, Sussex, 1982.
Headings, Philip. R. Bowman, Sylvia Eastward. Editor. T.S Eliot. Twayne Publishers/University of Illinois, 1964.
Jones, Genesius. Arroyo to the Purpose; A Written report of the Verse of T.Due south Eliot. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1964.
Preminger, Alex. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton Academy Press, New Bailiwick of jersey 1974.
Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. Pantheon Books/Random House, New York 1970

Works Consulted

Ackroyd, Peter. T.S. Eliot. Hamish Hamilton, London 1984.
Eliot, T.Southward. Ezra Pound: His Metric And Poetry. Kessinger Publishing, U.s. 2004.
Gordon, Lyndall T.Due south. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. W. W. Norton & Visitor 1999.
Menand, Louis. Discovering Modernism: T. S. Eliot and His Context. Oxford Academy Press, U.s.; 2 edition 2007.
Stone Dale, Alzina. T.South. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet. Backinprint.com 2004.
Song recording of T.Southward. Eliot reading The Honey Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 1917 – http://www.youtube.com/sentry?v=NhiCMAG658M
Vocal recording of T.Due south. Eliot reading The Wasteland 1922 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?5=3tqK5zQlCDQ&characteristic=related

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Source: http://bareknucklepoet.com/the-corpse-in-the-garden-ts-eliot-iconoclast-by-brentley-frazer/

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