Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface to second edition
- Introduction
- 1 The growth of the poet's mind
- PART ONE 1905–1912 – AN INDIVIDUAL TALENT
- Oxford University Extension Lectures
- PART TWO 1912–1922 – ‘SHALL I AT LEAST SET MY LANDS IN ORDER?’
- PART THREE 1922–1930 – ‘ORDINA QUEST’ AMORE, O TU CHE M' AMI'
- 5 The poet saved from himself
- 6 Love through the looking-glass
- PART FOUR 1931–1939 – THE WORD IN THE DESERT
- PART FIVE 1939–1945 – APOCALYPSE
- AFTERWORDS
- APPENDICES
- Notes
- Index
5 - The poet saved from himself
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface to second edition
- Introduction
- 1 The growth of the poet's mind
- PART ONE 1905–1912 – AN INDIVIDUAL TALENT
- Oxford University Extension Lectures
- PART TWO 1912–1922 – ‘SHALL I AT LEAST SET MY LANDS IN ORDER?’
- PART THREE 1922–1930 – ‘ORDINA QUEST’ AMORE, O TU CHE M' AMI'
- 5 The poet saved from himself
- 6 Love through the looking-glass
- PART FOUR 1931–1939 – THE WORD IN THE DESERT
- PART FIVE 1939–1945 – APOCALYPSE
- AFTERWORDS
- APPENDICES
- Notes
- Index
Summary
the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of emotion.
‘As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned’ – this was in November 1922, just a month after its first appearance in print – ‘and I am now feeling toward a new form and style’. The difference between that poem and the work of the next decade is obvious at a glance; and the thicket of notes separates them past question. Yet The Waste Land had not completed what began in the hyacinth garden; nor is the form and style of The Hollow Men wholly new. This, with Ash-Wednesday, completes the preceding work; and they do it by carrying further the new style of the Thames-daughters' song and the water-dripping song. They are a further development, not a new start.
Through The Waste Land the poet liberates himself from the ‘unreal’. But at the end the love by which alone he exists is not yet redeemed from unreality. The response to ‘Damyata’ leaves the relationship broken off, unresolved. Moreover, his absolution in the desert is that of a solitary, a sanctified Narcissus, or the more ambiguous self-immolating soul of ‘Exequy’. Of course, the poet's recovery of his vital powers in ‘What the Thunder Said’ is so positive that we scarcely attend to this limitation.
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- Information
- Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet , pp. 115 - 131Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995