R A 05 (382)

Rachel Christian Introduction to Modernist Poetry Dr. Foss began class on April 5, 2012 with the wonderful announcement that there would be no reward quiz, for the slightly less than wonderful reason that the poems up for discussion are just too difficult for us to be quizzed on. In other words, the introduction to our Modernist poetry discussion was good preparation for what would follow.

Dr. Foss then passed back all but three of our exams, ignored the emotional trauma/pleas for points of the unfortunate few, and informed the class that overall the objective portions of the exams went well, but that we still need to work on our essay writing for the final. However, he then finished up by saying he was on (sinus) drugs and may or may not fall off the table at any moment during class, which perked quite a few people up. With that cheery announcement, we began our large group discussion of T. S. Eliot.

Class discussion of T. S. Eliot began with a quick look at his biographical information (found on page 2284), in which we discovered that the Modernist period can be referred to as the age of Eliot, or also as the age of Yeats, leading many of us to conclude that Modernists were extremely fickle people. We also learned that many of the generalizations about what a Modernist text should look like come from Eliot’s poetry (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land). From there, we began our discussion of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” as it is chronologically the earliest of the poems we would be discussing.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was composed between 1910 and 1911, before The Great War. However, it still touches upon the astonishing loss of life for Great Britain during the war. Dr. Foss briefly explained some of the statistics regarding the first World War, including the fact that there were on average 1500 casualties a day, and trying to make the class conceptualize that number in terms of our own reactions to Afghanistan and Iraq casualty announcements, where the numbers are much smaller. He then concluded that we can never underestimate the effect the war had on Britain’s national psyche. Specific to “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” you can see the effects of shell shock and concern about meaninglessness in the Modernist perspective from even before the war. The poem also builds on the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning (pp. 2285), except neither the lover nor the beloved figures in the poem actually exist. Dr. Foss told the class to think about Matthew Arnold (“Dover Beach,” “The Buried Life”) and Oscar Wilde, who wrote about relationships and love without solidity, to connect this poem back to texts we’ve already read. A few people looked like they attempted this, but most of the class continued to frown at T. S. Eliot like grumpy expressions would magically explain the poem.

The figure of Prufrock in the poem was supposed to represent modern European humanity. However, the class was then asked the question of whether or not the “essential core” from “The Buried Life” was present in Prufrock. The poem centers around themes of loneliness, isolation, and alienation - so Eliot wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel, but he turns the idea of alienation into a modern version where your isolation from others mirrors your isolation from yourself (“internalized alienation”). We then turned to the epigraph of the poem (2287), which is from Dante’s Inferno, which lead the class to wonder what we’d take from the poem. While the class was wondering about this, and other more mundane topics, we were asked how we could talk about the isolation, meaninglessness, and indecision present in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” as being modern.

Caroline talked about the poem questioning the standards of culture and said that the parenthetical comments make Prufrock feel as if someone is behind his back and talking about him. Dr. Foss then raised the idea that the poem’s first line (“Let us go then, you and I...”) might actually be a lie, and asked if we thought it was about two people or just happening in the speaker’s head. Everyone looked a little confused, but Claire thought that the “you” in the poem’s opening was Eliot addressing Dante, since the first poem in Dante’s Vita Nuova contains his plea to other poets to interpret what love is like for him and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” could be Eliot’s response. We were then informed that almost all practitioners of the British love “song” or poem are looking back to Dante and Beatrice in some way (but what about Petrarch?). Eric decided to talk about the feeling that things are meaningless in the poem, quoting the passage of time (“in a minute”) and the fact that you can make as many decisions as you want in the poem, but none of them matter (“do I dare?” - do I break out of my routine?, and the “life measured out in coffee spoons”). Foss then asked the class how we responded to Prufrock, offering that he usually got annoyed with the character, or found him pitiable, but sometimes was able to relate to him. For Elizabeth, two passages stood out. The first was in lines 83-86, in which Prufrock is aging. Dr. Foss said that part of the poem is about leaving behind youth and passion and all the associated fun times you can have before your old, before also explaining the allusion to John the Baptist, who literally loses his head for disturbing the universe. Elizabeth then talked about the last stanza, which refers to daring, disturbing the universe, and asking questions. She was wondering if it could be talking about temptation and love, with the mermaids being an illusion. Nia agreed with the idea about the mermaids, since the “chambers of the sea” could be a dream world until the real world wakes you and you drown. During our class discussion, Katherine thought that Prufrock was a liar since Guido from the epigraph is one. Dr. Foss said that the poem sets us up to understand that we’ll never be able to trust what we’re hearing. So if there’s some grand epiphany at the end of it, we don’t know if we should take it seriously or not, since we’re forced to take up Prufrock’s position of judgement. Foss then made a joke about what happens when you presume things, and the class decided to humour him and laugh anyway because we are all nice people and he was on drugs. The class discussion wrapped up with Dr. Foss asking us if we are supposed to learn from Prufrock’s example. Is Prufrock a personification of modern life? We don’t know. However, I measure out my life in coffee spoons every day and actually enjoy it, so I kind of think he is.

The class then moved on to “The Hollow Men” (2318), which has two epigraphs - one from Heart of Darkness, the other to Guy Fawkes. We then moved into a brief discussion of Heart of Darkness, which is about the end of the Victorian period and alienation, with pilgrims on an imperial project to conquer the heart of darkness being represented as meaningless. Kurtz’s ending in that novel, where he becomes corrupted by the end, shows that he becomes a hollow man. Just like in The Waste Land, there is a desert landscape. Katherine connects this to Prufrock’s loneliness, since loneliness and deserts go together like peanut butter and jelly. Elizabeth thought that “death’s dream kingdom” (line 29) is where Kurtz got lost and went insane. Dr. Foss talks about Things Fall Apart and how it’s fine for dead white men to cry about civilization falling apart because they still have all the power. We also talk about leaving the Victorian period and the disintegration of the Empire. Camille talked about the “we” in the poem referring to community, but not individuals, and related it back to Prufrock and Arnold’s “The Buried Life” since there is emptiness in it, and even if you have substance it’s only fluff (unlike in “The Buried Life,” where there is at least a core). We talked about lines 11-12 and the similar lines on pp. 2320, which were about a poet wanting inspiration. Foss told us to think of this in terms of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” with the need to see yourself as an artist and the sense of isolation that comes if you can’t. The class then moved on to Yeats.

Dr. Foss told us to ignore the editor’s comments about Yeats’s ambivalence in “Easter, 1916,” because the ending seems sincere and to think about the “terrible beauty” that has come out nowhere to be born. We then went into small groups to talk about the other three poems. In my group, Rita thought that “sailing to Byzantium” was a metaphor for going to Heaven. The rest of us brought up the point that Byzantium no longer exists in the form Yeats writes about, which lead us to wonder if the poem could be connected to ideas from the Age of Doubt, with Yeats wanting to believe in something but ultimately knowing he was aiming for something that doesn’t exist. Sarah contributed to this idea by talking about the monument image in the poem as being similar to trying to stabilize something falling apart or decaying, while Diana said that since the center of Byzantium became Muslim, we don’t really know what any of it used to look like. Rita then changed her idea about the poem to the idea that since no one knew what Byzantium looked like, Yeats could use it as a stand-in for his image of Heaven. However, the group then pointed out the fact that Byzantium is not a happy place in the poem, because it’s frozen, and nothing grows or changes. Nia brought up the lines “All man is, all mere complexities...” as particularly interesting to her, since she thought that you were supposed to analyze it on a deeper level (“complexities”) but the “mere” makes it meaningless. My group also talked about the references to a strange sort of Hell through the repeated mentions of Hades and the agony of flame which exists but can’t be felt, before moving on to the next poem, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” which was so difficult for us to understand that our conversation mostly dissolved into Diana telling us fun facts about Yeats - he was dyslexic and had strange taste in women, apparently. We also talked about Kathleen ni Houlihan and how it was a weird story, since several people in the group knew it and could explain the gist of it.

Dr. Foss then called us back to large group to discuss Yeats. Eric’s group talked about “Sailing to Byzantium” the most, and how the sensory nature of life isn’t as fulfilling as the soul. Foss connected the “aged man” as “a paltry thing” to the “tattered coat upon a stick” in “The Hollow Men.” We were then asked what Byzantium was - Istanbul? Constantinopole? Ireland? The Middle Ages? Art? Eternity? No one knows. Jake’s group talked about the idea of sailing to place that’s already been conquered as an exercise in futility. The class also talks about whether or not Byzantium can keep begetting fresh images or if we are left in the “gong-tormented sea” of time. The discussion then moved on to “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”

We talked about how “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” includes Yeats self-referencing works he’s already done on Irish myths, and how it could refer to his inability to come up with something new. Elizabeth talks about how the poem was written near the end of his life when he knows that he will have no more creativity. Nia asks where the artistic images come from, and if it’s from “the sweepings of the street.” The class is asked to think about if you can ascend if your heart is from a broken reality. We talked about reality and truth versus falsehood and the idea of reconciling humanity and death together in this poem. From there, we talked about Auden’s poem in memory of Yeats for the last few minutes of class.

As the class concluded, we gained a sense of some of the central themes of Modernist poetry - the sense of isolation and alienation; creating a response to Death (either as an entity, like in Yeats, or as a reference to the war-time deaths seen in Eliot); dealing with the new, modern condition; the feelings of meaninglessnes and futility; and, overall, the complexity of language required to talk about these new themes.