Literature students, lovers, critics, poets, lecteurs, lend me your ears and opinions
Jeremy1012
Posts: 7,170
I'm writing an essay and would like opinions and criticisms of what I have written thus far.
[/i]Eliot applauded Joyce for employing the ’mythical method’ as a way of giving order to modern life. Examine and account for the uses of myth in the work of any one or two modern writers.[/i]
In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S Eliot details his views on the poetic tradition in depth, and addresses the question of “individual talent” thus: “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. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”. The notion that literature should be written and read in parallel with and relation to the literature canon is one of historical criticism but also as Eliot explains, a principal of aesthetics also. The idea of using mythology in the newer literary works of modernism was not restricted therefore to some notion of devotion to the dead poets but is also as a means of giving birth to the writer’s own voice through his precedents. Rebirth is the essence of modernism and rebirth is inextricably reliant on and subject to the past, even as it seeks to break it down and seek to reinvent it. The mythical method is employed to give shape to and bring an understanding of the modern world through the critique of artistic precedent but it is as much a poetic device, certainly in the hands of Eliot and Ezra Pound among others, for the impersonality of art as it for providing an elucidation of humanity by addressing traditions.
In The Poetics of Impersonality, Maud Ellman addresses the latter concept, arguing that while Eliot’s understanding of poetry is that of personal emotion (though he criticises the pervasion of the writer’s own subjectivity), and Pound argues against this in favour of the objectivity of poetry to a scientific absolute, they both seek to provide an impersonalised poetry “through masks, personae, and ventriloquy”. Eliot’s praises Joyce for employing the “mythical method” for similar reasons. Joyce’s Ulysses uses a polyphony of voices to mirror the disengagement of a modern Dublin, and the Homeric parallel can be seen as an extension of this. Leopold Bloom is not the traditional heroic figure we have come to know from the likes of the Iliad and the Odyssey but he is the perfect hero for Joyce’s Dublin and for his own Odyssey.
The same polyphony is key to Eliot’s own poem, The Waste Land. If Eliot is to be seen as a writer attempting to withdraw the subjectivity of the author from the text, then the use of mythology and supposedly obscurantist references which abound in the poem are more easily understood. The poem is, after all, Europe attempting to address itself in the modern world. Eliot’s initial working title for the poem, via Charles Dickens, was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. Naturally Eliot wishes for none of these voices to be identified as his own; in referencing Eliot’s The Method of Mr Pound, Ellman describes his objection to poems that “make you conscious of having been written by somebody”, and this is not merely an objection to the presence of the author but also to the presence of writing. Eliot wishes for the poetry to exist as an end, not a method for reaching it - he seeks “To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strives to get beyond music”.
The use of myth in the poem is therefore extremely useful for Eliot in giving voice to his Waste Land without putting himself, the poet, in the poem. The treatment of death in the poem is the element which ties together the seemingly disjointed images, particularly in the first part, The Burial of the Dead. The narrator speaks of a “heap of broken images” but they are not arbitrarily chosen. Eliot’s Europe is in a state of suspension, the dead are not buried, they are representative of the withering and decay of the Waste Land itself. In The Burial of the Dead they flow over London Bridge in large numbers; Eliot references Dante’s Inferno here - “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The Waste Land makes use of mythological references of death and suffering on display too, the painting of Philomela, raped and rendered dumb by Tereus, hung “above the antique mantel”. The mythical method in the poem is a reminder that the past is not undone, it is part of the cycle of rebirth. The suffering and death is literally hung on display in the poem, but not as a sign of finality. In Marjorie Donker’s The Waste Land and the Aeneid, she notes that “the two poems share a particular mythical configuration, a pattern of quest that involves a descent into and a return from an experience of mystery and sacred knowledge”. The “return from” is important; Eliot’s Europe continues to exist, though we can view it is stagnant. This echoes the poem’s epigraph, a passage from Petronius’ Satyricon; the Cumaean Sybil, immortal but lacking eternal youth exists with a gift of the gods and the curse of humanity.
[/i]Eliot applauded Joyce for employing the ’mythical method’ as a way of giving order to modern life. Examine and account for the uses of myth in the work of any one or two modern writers.[/i]
In his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, T.S Eliot details his views on the poetic tradition in depth, and addresses the question of “individual talent” thus: “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. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”. The notion that literature should be written and read in parallel with and relation to the literature canon is one of historical criticism but also as Eliot explains, a principal of aesthetics also. The idea of using mythology in the newer literary works of modernism was not restricted therefore to some notion of devotion to the dead poets but is also as a means of giving birth to the writer’s own voice through his precedents. Rebirth is the essence of modernism and rebirth is inextricably reliant on and subject to the past, even as it seeks to break it down and seek to reinvent it. The mythical method is employed to give shape to and bring an understanding of the modern world through the critique of artistic precedent but it is as much a poetic device, certainly in the hands of Eliot and Ezra Pound among others, for the impersonality of art as it for providing an elucidation of humanity by addressing traditions.
In The Poetics of Impersonality, Maud Ellman addresses the latter concept, arguing that while Eliot’s understanding of poetry is that of personal emotion (though he criticises the pervasion of the writer’s own subjectivity), and Pound argues against this in favour of the objectivity of poetry to a scientific absolute, they both seek to provide an impersonalised poetry “through masks, personae, and ventriloquy”. Eliot’s praises Joyce for employing the “mythical method” for similar reasons. Joyce’s Ulysses uses a polyphony of voices to mirror the disengagement of a modern Dublin, and the Homeric parallel can be seen as an extension of this. Leopold Bloom is not the traditional heroic figure we have come to know from the likes of the Iliad and the Odyssey but he is the perfect hero for Joyce’s Dublin and for his own Odyssey.
The same polyphony is key to Eliot’s own poem, The Waste Land. If Eliot is to be seen as a writer attempting to withdraw the subjectivity of the author from the text, then the use of mythology and supposedly obscurantist references which abound in the poem are more easily understood. The poem is, after all, Europe attempting to address itself in the modern world. Eliot’s initial working title for the poem, via Charles Dickens, was “He Do the Police in Different Voices”. Naturally Eliot wishes for none of these voices to be identified as his own; in referencing Eliot’s The Method of Mr Pound, Ellman describes his objection to poems that “make you conscious of having been written by somebody”, and this is not merely an objection to the presence of the author but also to the presence of writing. Eliot wishes for the poetry to exist as an end, not a method for reaching it - he seeks “To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strives to get beyond music”.
The use of myth in the poem is therefore extremely useful for Eliot in giving voice to his Waste Land without putting himself, the poet, in the poem. The treatment of death in the poem is the element which ties together the seemingly disjointed images, particularly in the first part, The Burial of the Dead. The narrator speaks of a “heap of broken images” but they are not arbitrarily chosen. Eliot’s Europe is in a state of suspension, the dead are not buried, they are representative of the withering and decay of the Waste Land itself. In The Burial of the Dead they flow over London Bridge in large numbers; Eliot references Dante’s Inferno here - “I had not thought death had undone so many”. The Waste Land makes use of mythological references of death and suffering on display too, the painting of Philomela, raped and rendered dumb by Tereus, hung “above the antique mantel”. The mythical method in the poem is a reminder that the past is not undone, it is part of the cycle of rebirth. The suffering and death is literally hung on display in the poem, but not as a sign of finality. In Marjorie Donker’s The Waste Land and the Aeneid, she notes that “the two poems share a particular mythical configuration, a pattern of quest that involves a descent into and a return from an experience of mystery and sacred knowledge”. The “return from” is important; Eliot’s Europe continues to exist, though we can view it is stagnant. This echoes the poem’s epigraph, a passage from Petronius’ Satyricon; the Cumaean Sybil, immortal but lacking eternal youth exists with a gift of the gods and the curse of humanity.
"I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead, I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land — every colour, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike — all snored in the same language"
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Comments
It looks like you're doing a good job of it thus far, though. I wish I could grant you some insight but I know little of Eliot's work.