T.S. Elliot was an English poet, playwright and literary critic. His representative poem "The Wasteland" shows the difficulties of the modern mind, and "Four Quartets" makes him the winner of the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature with "outstanding contributions to the avant-garde of modern poetry".
Although Eliot has long enjoyed a huge world reputation, many readers are still stuck in the obscurity of his poetry. Guangxi Normal University Press recently introduced the literary critic Helen Gardner's The Art of T.S. Elliot, which has been recognized as an authoritative bibliography for the study of Elliot for more than 70 years, and is also a timeless reading guide for Elliot. In the book, Gardner introduces Eliot's poetic art around the Quartet of Four. She not only pays attention to the details of words, rhythms, rhymes, and sentences in Eliot's work, but also analyzes the ideas and philosophies behind the verses.
The Four Quartets is a work of Eliot's creative maturity. The poem consists of four long poems, Namely The Burned Norton, East Cook, Ganselvechs, and Little Giding, each of which is divided into five parts. The traditional Dualistic thought of the West is the philosophical background of the "Four Quartets", in which Eliot presents a series of dualistic ideas such as finite and infinite, instantaneous and eternal, past and future, life and death, trying to find a way to solve the dualistic contradiction. Borrowing the musical concept of "quartet", he perfectly combines poetry and music, and in his pen, the vocabulary is transformed into dexterous notes, and the change in the length of the verse stimulates the rhythm of the music.
From The Four Quartets to The Wasteland, Eliot has completed poetic innovations and enriched the English poetic tradition after a long period of experimentation. As Gardner points out, Eliot's greatness as a poet lies in his acceptance of the language of his time for the creative transformation of poetry. He permeates the conscious level of thought and emotion through the auditory imagination, energizing each word, "fusing the obliterated meaning of the past, the meaning of the old, the meaning of the present, the meaning of novelty, the oldest meaning, and the most modern meaning." Thus linguistically decaying poetry into magic, creating a new poetic style different from Shakespeare and Milton.
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The Art of T.S. Eliot (excerpt).</h3>
Text | Translated by Helen Gardner | Li Xiaojun
Eliot's first collection of poems was published more than thirty years ago, and he has so far laid down his own style and has been rewarded for it. His poetry is no longer the private collection of fervent admirers in small circles, but has "a large group of readers of all kinds." As he put it, the poet naturally wanted his work to be read. These readers, though confused by the difficulty of his thoughts and styles, are evident in their scramble to buy works that interpret his poetry, but are convinced of his great poetry. They genuinely want to understand his words more completely, to understand the way he speaks.
The study of a poet's art generally begins with the beginning of his writing career. But I'm going to go a different way, starting with The Quartet and ending with The Quartet. I think the Quartet is Eliot's classic, and it contains more comprehensive poetic answers to specific problems as a poet than his earlier poems. His problems stem partly from his temperament and partly from the era of writing. I first analyzed the Four Quartets as works of art, and then traced the development of Eliot's art, aiming to prove that all his works have a fundamental unity.
The Four Quartets essentially had to be seen as a long poem. In this work, Eliot's art seems to be the most bold and confident. The Four Quartets is a work of Eliot's creative maturity. After a long period of experimentation, he completed the poetic innovation and enriched the English poetic tradition. Eliot's poetic innovations have an effect on the context of time. His poetry became part of the English literary tradition and also transformed our reading experience of his previous poetry. His poetry influences our tastes and judgments, awakens our reactions to things that may be overlooked, and habituates our ears to specific poetic effects and rhythms. By revolutionizing the poetic language of our time, Eliot revolutionized our appreciation of the poetic language of the poets before him. He made us realize that there is much potential in the language we often use and numb; he made us realize that there is much dynamism in the language we take for granted.
<h3>Auditory imagination</h3>
It was by relying on the auditory imagination that Shakespeare surpassed other English poets. Logan Pilsa Smith believes that Shakespeare's language "radiates magic light" all by unparalleled boldness and innovation. Shakespeare swims like Cleopatra's dolphin in the ocean of words. What is "auditory imagination"? Eliot has defined it in literary theory and has also stated it in poetry. In his essay The Use of Poetry (1933), he defined it as follows:
Auditory imagination refers to this sense of syllables and rhythms, which penetrates downward into the conscious level of thought and emotion, energizing each word, sinking into the most primitive, completely forgotten places, returning to the beginning and bringing something back, it can trace the beginning and the end. To be sure, it works through meaning (even the ordinary one), and it fuses the obsolete meaning of the past, the meaning of the old, the meaning of the present, the meaning of the novel, the meaning of the oldest, and the most modern.
With the exception of Ganselvicius, the final movement of each poem in the Quartet begins with a contemplation of the common theme of words. The atmospheres of the four quartets vary and the ways in which common themes are expressed, so in the three poems "Burning Norton," "East Cook," and "Little Gideon," the paths to the mysterious language are also different. "Burned Norton" is the most abstract and philosophical poem in the Four Quartets, and its path is the philosophical path, which reflects on the nature of the words:
Word movement, musical movement,
Only in time, but that is only alive
Only to die. Words, enter after speaking
quiescence. Only by virtue of form, pattern,
Words and music can only be achieved
Still, like a still Chinese vase
Always moving in stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, the notes are still lingering,
Not only that, but coexistence,
Or the end is before it starts.
And the end and the beginning have always existed,
Before the beginning and after the end,
Everything is always now. word load,
Fractures under heavy pressure and often breaks,
Slipping away, slipping away, disappearing in tension,
Corrupt because of impreciseness,
Cannot stand still. Screaming voice
Rebuke, ridicule, chatter,
Always in the words of the attack. A road in the desert
especially attacked by seductive voices,
The shadow of weeping in the funeral dance,
The inconsolable spitting fire monster cried out loudly.
Words, like notes in music, only make sense when they relate to other words. Words exist in time and usage; due to changes in context and usage, the life of words is a process of continuous death. But in a grammatical, in a poem, the life of the word is almost magically preserved, becoming a real life, beyond its life in the discourse. It is in poetry that the life of words is stable.
Our time is full of undigested technical words, inaccessible metaphors, and clichés that cannot be favorable conditions for poets. Eliot's greatness as a poet lies in his acceptance of the language of his time for the creative transformation of poetry. He did it on purpose, because he said:
I believe that any language ——— as long as it is the original language——— has its own rules and restrictions, its own allowable range of variation, and its own requirements for the rhythm and format of the language. Language is always changing, its development in vocabulary, syntax, pronunciation, and intonation——— and even, in the long run, its degeneration ——— must be accepted and fully utilized by the poet. The poet, in turn, has the privilege of helping language to develop, to maintain the qualities and abilities of language to express broad and subtle feelings and emotions; his task is both to react to change and make people aware of it, and to rebel against the language's degeneration into the standards of the past as he knows it.
In terms of words, the length of verses and the rhythm, the first movement of "Gan Servikis" is particularly beautiful and bold. It, like any section of comparable length, is able to show the musicality of Eliot's poetry and provides us with a convenient starting point for capturing elements of its mature style.
<h3>The musicality of poetry</h3>
At the beginning of Ganselvicius, Eliot compares the river to a "strong, brown god," and his tone is only a hint, a myth that is half joking and half seriously crafted.
At the beginning of the second paragraph, the poet turns to the ocean, the rhythm remains firm, but the language has more power. This is evident in powerful verbs, two of which are emphasized by the rhyme of the words that are reread next. It is these verbs that show the changing atmosphere of the ocean: the verb "enter" describes the lapping of the sea, the verb "throw up" depicts the arbitrary power of the sea, and the verb "let" shows the tranquility of the ocean:
The river is in us, the sea is all around us,
The sea is the edge of the land, and the sea is lapping
Into the granite, the waves are thrown on the beach,
Those hints of older, other creations:
The dorsal spine of starfish, hermit crabs, whales;
In a stall of water, let us curiously
See more and more exquisite seaweed and anemones.
The oceans roll in our losses, tearing up the seine seine,
Broken lobster baskets, broken paddles, and more
Rigging of the exotic dead. The ocean has many sounds,
Many gods and voices.
Salt on thorny roses,
Fog in the fir trees.
This power of writing about the ever-changing ocean comes from a change in wording. In order to achieve precision, the poem contains the everyday term "lobster basket", the technical word "purse seine", and the botanical word "seaweed". The originally mysterious phrase "hints of more ancient, other creations" becomes precise and terrifying as it entails a list of strange things found on the beach. The meticulous depictions of "broken lobster baskets" and "torn purse seines" contrast with the universal term "rigging" in "Rigging of the Exotic Dead", which has its unspeakable lament, which is different from the mourning brought about by the shattering of familiar things. With the help of two imagery of taste or smell, "salt" and "fog", this very vivid and figurative part eventually returns to the expression of mythology. These two images, within reach, omnipresent, lingering, invisible, suggest that the inland feels the mysterious threat of the ocean.
Returning to the myth and those two elusive imagery paves the way to the final paragraph. The last paragraph is not a visual but an auditory effect. Before the end of this movement, no more powerful verbs appear. It is only at its end that the only verb "ringing," which has long been prepared and anticipated, and the only object it modifies, "bell," catches our ears:
The trumpet of the sea is called,
The cry of the sea is often heard together
Different voices; the wailing in the rigging,
On the surface of the sea, the waves of broken waves threaten and caress,
The distant sound of waves in the granite teeth,
And a cry of warning from the nearby headland,
These are the sounds of the ocean, on the way home
Groaning buoy, seagull:
Under the oppression of the dreary fog
The bells are loud
Counting the time that is not our time, for
Slowly the huge waves of the seabed swept by, longer than the astronomical clock time
A time older than anxious
The time the women counted was an older time,
They lay with their eyes open, arranging for the future,
Try to take it apart, untie it, separate it,
And the past and the future are intertwined,
In the middle of midnight and dawn, that moment passed full of deception,
The future has no future, before the morning bell,
Time pauses, time never ends;
And the great waves on the ocean floor that originated at the beginning of time,
Ring
Bell.
The "many sounds" of the sea, so subtle but absolutely discernible: the cry of the sea, the cry of the sea, the "wailing in the rigging", the "threat and caressing of the broken waves on the surface of the sea", relying on the accumulation of experience and the regular rhythm, almost let us fall asleep until the expectation of the ear receives the impact of the last sound:
Under the suppression of the dull fog, the bells were loud
The abrupt termination of the rhythm brought about a change in tone and wording. The contrast in the opening paragraph reappears. On the one hand, it is this glorious conception of time, which is not our time; "from the beginning of time", a verse used for liturgy that gives this time a spectacle and meaning, which is expressed in the last resounding verb, "ringing.". On the other hand, it is the time of our daily experience, the time we want to measure precisely with tools, the time we want to understand in the mind. The ordinary and "anxious women," the repetitive verbs "try to take apart, unravel, separate," ——— them and the next line "concatenate the past and the future again," suggesting an endless process of "mending the seams——— expressing an almost pale and desperate futility.
<h3>The pleasure of poetry</h3>
The analysis of the words of a movement in this way must be equivalent to "dismemberment and murder", because the life of this movement is in its rhythm, and it is the rhythm that unifies the different elements of the words together, creating a general poetic impression and unifying the different effects produced by each line of poetry. With the help of flexible and powerful poetry, it is possible to change the wording, and it is possible to melt the everyday, formal, colloquial, bizarre, precise, and suggestive words into one furnace. Flexibility and power are the characteristics of the poetic style of "Four Quartets". The creation of this poetic style is perhaps Eliot's greatest poetic achievement.
The transformation of Eliot's poetic style began in 1925's Hollow Man. Connected with this is the transformation of the poetic style. It is quite possible that the transformation of the poetic form is the fundamental transformation, because it is this new poetic style that makes it possible for him to pursue a new liberation with poetic language. Until The Wasteland, Eliot's poetry, like most post-Spencer English poetry, could be more or less "analyzed" by decent criteria. But after The Hollow Man, that's no longer the case. In poetry, the poet walks in front, and the poetic bodyologist lags behind, often lagging behind for a long time. I am neither a poet nor a poeticist, and the only thing I dare to say now is that a new beginning has taken place after The Wasteland, which is recognizable at first sight. This new beginning was a break with the British tradition of non-lyric poetry. Ever since Spencer demonstrated the potential of heroic poetry in the Shepherd's Calendar, this tradition has dominated.
Milton is in front of him, and it is impossible for the hereafter to create great epics; Shakespeare is in front of him, and it is impossible for the hereafter to create great poetry; such a situation is inevitable, and such a situation will continue to exist unless the language is changed and there is no danger of imitation (which is easy to say). Even today, those who want to write poetry should know that half of his energy must have been spent trying to escape Shakespeare's tight net: as long as attention is slack, as long as the mind is not concentrated, he will write crappy poetry. For a long time, after epic writers like Milton, or after dramatic poets like Shakespeare, there was nothing that could be done. But the effort to escape their influence must be tried repeatedly; for it is impossible for us to foresee when the moment when a new epic or a new poetic drama may arise will come; and when this moment is indeed approaching, it is possible that a genius poet will complete the final changes in language and poeticization and create new poetry.
Elliot's practice did not support the distinction he insisted on. His experiments in the writing of dramatic poetry actually led him to create the poetic forms that were used in the Four Quartets for non-dramatic purposes.
If we think of Milton, who established original music in rhymeless poems on the basis of syllable normalization, then we can think of Elliot, just as Milton rebelled against the prerogatives of the dramatist, and Elliot rebelled against this music, building his music on the basis of emphasis on rereading or beats.
The merit of Eliot's new poems is largely that they allow him to appropriate re-reading rhythms, which are included in the musical effect. Most of us are experiencing the pleasure of this poetic style for the first time. However, the greatest advantage of Eliot's new poems is that it gives him the freedom to use a variety of words, and to use poetic and scattered languages without restraint. His new poems also give him the freedom to express his outlook on life in a form that perfectly matches means and ends. This is the form of the quartet. This form is based on pacing; it is by pacing that new poems are produced.
Excerpts from the book "The Art of T.S. Eliot" are excerpted from the original text, and the subtitle is the editor's own draft, which is published with the permission of the publishing house.