My drawings of T. S. Eliot

New Book on Four Quartets

I've just received an excellent new book on Four Quartets. By Herman Servotte, and translated by Dr. Ethel Grene, it is entitled Annotations to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. It is formatted to run parallel to the Faber text of FQ, page by page, and it takes into account opinions of major scholars in the field. I would recommend it to any reader of the poet, in or out of academe.

Parody of Eliot by Henry Reed (probably the best single parody ever of TSE); thanks to Slate website

Reed, Henry. "Chard Whitlow (Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)." New Statesman and Nation 21, no. 533 (10 May 1941): 494 (.pdf).


CHARD WHITLOW

(Mr. Eliot's Sunday Evening Postscript)

As we get older we do not get any younger.
Seasons return, and today I am fifty-five,
And this time last year I was fifty-four,
And this time next year I shall be sixty-two.
And I cannot say I should like (to speak for myself)
To see my time over again— if you can call it time:
Fidgeting uneasily under a draughty stair,
Or counting sleepless nights in the crowded Tube.

There are certain precautions— though none of them very reliable—
Against the blast from bombs and the flying splinter,
But not against the blast from heaven, vento dei venti,
The wind within a wind unable to speak for wind;
And the frigid burnings of purgatory will not be touched
By any emollient.
I think you will find this put,
Better than I could ever hope to express it,
In the words of Kharma: "It is, we believe,
Idle to hope that the simple stirrup-pump
Will extinguish hell."
Oh, listeners,
And you especially who have turned off the wireless,
And sit in Stoke or Basingstoke listening appreciatively to the silence,
(Which is also the silence of hell) pray not for your selves but your souls.
And pray for me also under the draughty stair.
As we get older we do not get any younger.

And pray for Kharma under the holy mountain.

Public Eliot Sightings; Eliot at the Center for Advanced Study, 1948

A couple of public TSE sightings:

All Will Be Well: A Memoir (Knopf 2006), by John McGahern, Irish novelist. A phrase from "Little Gidding," the fourth of Four Quartets, TSE's last great poem.

Disturbing the Universe (Pan Books, 1976), by Freeman Dyson. Cited in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (Vintage 2006). A adapted phrase from an early poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Bird and Sherwin retell an amusing anecdote: In 1948, thanks to a newly established "Director's Fund," Oppie invited TSE, among other humanists, to the Center for Advanced Studies at Princeton -- TSE accepting for fall term 1948. TSE was "snubbed" by the center's mathematicians, and anyway kept to himself, spending more time at the university than at the center. "Oppenheimer was disappointed. 'I invited Eliot here,' he told Freeman Dyson, 'in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.'" (Bird and Sherwin 377)

Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet; by James Loucks