After Electromagnetism

2020 ◽  
pp. 85-109
Author(s):  
David Trotter
Keyword(s):  
Human Perception ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Return Stroke ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Almond Trees ◽  
Technology And Literature ◽  
Opening Up

The topic of this chapter is a quickening in the pace of change, in both technology and literature, brought about from the 1880s onwards by the harnessing of electricity’s alliance with magnetism to transform methods of telecommunication. The consequent opening up of the ‘Olympian frequency domain’ (Friedrich Kittler) fundamentally undermined the sovereignty of human consciousness. The chapter explores two uses of the metaphor of lightning in literature, philosophy, anthropology, and folklore: first, to mark the limit of unaided human perception; secondly, to indicate, by an emphasis on the return stroke, that two-way communication between earth and heaven is at least conceivable. The focus is on D. H. Lawrence’s fiction, essays, and poetry (especially the extraordinary ‘Bare Almond Trees’); and on Hope Mirrlees’s encoding of her relationship with the eminent classicist Jane Harrison into Paris (1920), a modernist long poem worthy of comparison with T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).

Beckett's Early Verse and the Modernist Long Poem: A Study of ‘Enueg I’

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-213
Author(s):  
Sławomir Studniarz
Keyword(s):  
Long Poem ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Artistic Activity ◽  
Underlying Network ◽  
Experimental Works ◽  
The Cantos ◽  
Semantic Dimension ◽  
Psychological Dimensions

The premise of the article is the contention that Beckett studies have been focused too much on the philosophical, cultural and psychological dimensions of his established canon, at the expense of the artistry. That research on Beckett's work is issue-driven rather than otherwise, and the slender extant body of criticism specifically on his poetic achievements bears no comparison with the massive exploration of the other facets of Beckett's artistic activity. The critical neglect of Beckett's poetry may not be commensurate with the quality of his verse. And it is in the spirit of remedying this oversight that the present article is offered, focusing on ‘Enueg I’, a representative poem from Echo's Bones, which exhibits all the salient features of Beckett's early poetry. It is argued that Beckett's early verse display the twofold influence, that of the transatlantic Modernism of Eliot and Pound, and of French poetry, specifically the visionary and experimental works of Rimbaud, Apollinaire, and the surrealists. Furthermore, the article also demonstrates that ‘Enueg I’ testifies to Beckett's ambition to compose a complex long Modernist poem in the vein of The Waste Land or The Cantos. Beckett's ‘Enueg I’ has much in common with Eliot's exemplary disjunctive Modernist long poem. Both poems are premised on the acutely felt cultural crisis and display the similar tenor in their ending. Finally, they both close with the vision of the doomed and paralyzed world, and the prevalent sense of sterility and dissolution. In the subsequent analysis, which takes up the bulk of the article, careful attention is paid to the patterning of the verbal material, including also the most fundamental level, that of the arrangements of phonemes, with a view to uncovering the underlying network of sound patterns, which contributes decisively to the semantic dimension of the poem.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns (1888–1965)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin Templeton
Keyword(s):  
Academic Career ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Bachelor's Degree ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Postgraduate Studies ◽  
Post War

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888–1965) was an essayist, editor, playwright, poet, and publisher. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He is perhaps best known for his long poem The Waste Land. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri and attended Harvard University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Eliot’s postgraduate studies in philosophy took him to the Sorbonne in 1910/11 and to Oxford in 1914. Once he arrived in England, however, he spent much of his time in London. There he met two of the most influential people of his literary life: the American poet Ezra Pound and a young Englishwoman named Vivienne Haigh-Wood, whom Eliot would marry in 1915 after a four-month courtship. Pound encouraged Eliot, who had been planning an academic career, to keep writing poetry and to submit "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to Poetry magazine for publication. In addition to writing poetry, Eliot also took a position with Lloyd’s Bank in 1917, managing foreign accounts. Pound and Eliot frequently collaborated and critiqued each other’s work throughout the 1920s and 1930s and remained friends until Eliot’s death, despite divergent political and religious paths. The most famous of these collaborations, The Waste Land, has been documented in a published facsimile edition of the poem (1972) that reveals Pound’s numerous comments on Eliot’s manuscript. The Waste Land is revolutionary both in its form, free verse, and its subject matter, which links urbanization, technology, sexuality, and post-war alienation to dozens of classical allusions in seven languages. The poem is a pastiche of voices and fragments linked both thematically and tonally.

The Long Poem

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Jaussen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
American Modernism ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Long Poems ◽  
Historical Rhetoric ◽  
Organizational Principles ◽  
Poetic Work

In its most basic sense, the ‘long poem’ refers to any extended poetic work, from the long lyric to the epic. Within the context of modernism, the long poem emerged as a significant genre, channeling the authority and scope of the epic yet rejecting many traditional epic devices. Most notably, many modernist long poems abandoned narrative, replacing it with other organizational principles, ranging from symbolism to collage. The practice became particularly significant within the context of Anglo-American modernism, largely due to the influence of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, although the long poem can also be considered a transnational genre, with examples in French, such as Saint-John Perse’s Anabase (1924), and Spanish, like Federico García Lorca’s sequence Poeta en Nueva York (1940). One of the most famous and influential examples of the genre is Eliot’s The Waste Land, published in 1922. Adapting mythological themes, literary allusions, and a symbolic framework, Eliot’s work combined the traditional historical rhetoric of earlier long poetics, from Chaucer to the Arthurian legends, with the language and concerns of World War I England.

Satire

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert S. Lehman
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Aesthetic Judgment ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Final Version ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Lock In ◽  
Standards Of Beauty

The second chapter treats the formal role played by satire in the drafts of The Waste Land, focusing in particular on T. S. Eliot’s parody of Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock in an early version of “The Fire Sermon.” In Eliot’s hands, satire becomes a means of responding to a specifically modernist crisis in aesthetic judgment: the seeming impossibility of distinguishing, after the collapse of traditional standards of beauty, popular charlatans from individuals of real talent. By placing The Waste Land under the sign of satire, Eliot attempts to distinguish his long poem from the wasteland of literary history that it recollects. The disappearance of satire from the final version of The Waste Land following the editorial suggestions of Pound, and Eliot’s replacement of his earlier satirical method by the so-called “mythical method” reflect satire’s failure to accomplish its task.

Zukofsky, Louis (1904–1978)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Jennison
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Major Influence ◽  
Musical Structure ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Louis Zukofsky ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Waste Land ◽  
Black Mountain

Louis Zukofsky was an American avant-garde poet active from the 1920s upto the 1970s. Zukofsky’s masterwork long poem, ‘A’ (in company with his many other shorter works of poetry and prose), had a profound effect on the shape and development of American poetics. His work can be counted as a major influence on the Black Mountain, Beat, and Language poets, and on other contemporary poets working in conversation with the historical avant-garde. Major themes in Zukofsky’s work include the materiality of language, formalism, the place of the poem in history and politics, the musical structure of poesis and vice versa, and translation. Zukofsky was born to working-class, Orthodox Jewish, Yiddish-speaking parents in the Lower East Side of New York City. His poetic career began following his graduation from Columbia University with an MA in English. A parody of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, entitled ‘Poem Beginning ‘The’’, received the admiration of Ezra Pound. The poem features one of Zukofsky’s signature formal techniques: the strategic parataxis (juxtaposition) of high and low cultures, placed in the service of an anti-reactionary, and sometimes Marxist and revolutionary, avant-garde poetics. Zukofsky’s epistolary relationship with Pound was extensive, and the older poet would be a lifelong object of admiration — and negation — for Zukofsky.

THE REFERENCE TO ‘STETSON’ IN THE WASTE LAND

2000 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 338-339
Author(s):  
JAMES T. BRATCHER
Keyword(s):  
The Waste Land ◽  
Waste Land
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