English 333 - T.S. Eliot

Jefferson Hunter

T 3:00-4:50 p.m.

 

In this seminar we'll read and discuss Eliot's major poetry and two of his plays, considering a few of his critical essays along the way. Eliot began his poetic career as a French-inflected Dandy—someone eager to leave all traces of St Louis, Missouri, his birthplace, behind—then re-invented metaphysical poetry for the twentieth century and, in 1922, with the publication of The Waste Land , helped to define Modernism, shaping an aesthetic for a whole generation. Still later, a devout Christian and a British subject, Eliot wrote poetry of faith and the struggle for faith in Ash Wednesday and the Four Quartets . He finished his astonishing career by reintroducing verse to the London theater, in plays like The Cocktail Party , his updating of Euripides' Alcestis . Not that Eliot was only influenced by classics: part of our business will be following his poetry into the music-hall and its songs, gangster life in the Thirties, stories by Kipling . . . as an intellectual tourist (in this sense, he was always an American) he visited some surprising places. We'll confront the twin issues of his allusiveness (“mature poets steal,” he wrote) and his difficulty (“Words strain / Crack and sometimes break, under the burden”) and do something practical about them both by reading the poetry along with B. C. Southam's Guide to the Selected Poems . We'll also consider controversies about Eliot, especially charges of anti-semitism recently lodged against him, and in general try to define his place not just in his own time but in ours.

The emphasis will fall on Eliot's own works, but there will be regular assignments in Lyndall Gordon's biography of the poet, and occasional readings in criticism; we'll listen to recordings of Eliot reading aloud and look closely at Fiona Shaw's brilliant 1995 staging of The Waste Land as a performance piece. Writing assignments: a weekly reading journal and a 10 - 15 page term paper, based on some independent research and done in drafts. In class we'll proceed by discussion, and perhaps the occasional short oral report.