Twelve experienced faculty members from across the United States present their analyses of ground-breaking modern American poets in richly illustrated video lectures. The course highlights both major poets—from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson through T.S. Eliot, H.D., Amy Lowell, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, and many others—and influential movements. The course mixes historical overview with close readings of individual poets and poems. Most courses give only one instructor’s point of view. This one matches the diversity of US poetry with lectures by a score of talented faculty. They bring their special perspective to the material while also presenting a coherent view of more than fifty years of US poetry. Throughout the course the lectures are illustrated with vivid images of the events, people, and places mentioned in the poems themselves. Readings by both the poets themselves and experienced faculty highlight the texts. On screen displays of text and quotations make it easy to follow the material. This is a course that takes advantage of the medium to bring you sights and sounds that would be difficult to incorporate in classroom lectures.
Developing the Cultural Epic: From Eliot’s Cultural Elegy to Rukeyser’s Documentary Testament (Part 1)
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From the course by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Modern American Poetry
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From the lesson
Module 4
Modernism's Legacies
Meet the Instructors
Cary NelsonJubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences
English Department
[MUSIC]
This is the bridge before and
after from Eliot's cultural elegy to Rukeyser's documentary testament.
This talk is for those who been reading along with the bridge,
two poetic sequence's that help define their own era's T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
published in 1922 and Muriel Rukeyser's The Book of the Dead published in 1938.
The Bridge has sometimes been described as a sequence that stands alone,
an abhorrent text that was too late for the modernism of the 1920s and
not prepared for the social activism of the 1930s.
This talk positions these three long poems in general relation to each other.
But they also suggest how Eliot might be a predecessor for Crane and
Crane a predecessor for Rukeyser.
How do Crane and Eliot together establish different polarities for
this evolving form the cultural epic?
What aspects of Eliot can be found in that section of the bridge,
the tunnel, that Eliot accepted for printing in the journal he edited and
how does Rukeyser's writing evolve in response to Crane?
As a predecessor in her first two books published 1935 and
1938 both enormously influential in their time.
Viewing these works as interactively connected,
it's possible to see elements in all these sequences that helpfully defines
significant aspects of the cultural epic in three widely read publications.
One, The Wasteland as cultural eulogy.
No poem had as sensational an impact on its own time as The Wasteland.
Published in The Dial in 1922, and then book form
by Horace Liveright who would be the publisher of The Bridge eight years later.
The Waste Land was widely reviewed but with mixed results.
It divided literary intellectuals, was targeted as a hoax and
ingeniously parodied in elite journals.
The esteem it enjoyed, John Xiros Cooper has remarked, was the worst possible kind.
The consumer society that Cooper sees as just beginning to learn how to consume new
styles of art and aesthetic shock effects reacted to Eliot's
active disperse of terrorism by denaturing it.
Embracing it as the most fashionable avant guard artifact of the 1920's.
Instead of changing hearts and
minds, the poem contributed only a few more fashionable langours.
To imitate Eliot's tone in the 1920's was a fashionable undertaking that,
could also launch a career in poetry.
Eliot's tone of voice was distinctive enough to mimic and
a young Archibald MacLeish began his career as a follower.
In the opening section of his extended sequence, The Pot of Earth 1925,
he approached important dilemmas only to pull back from them
with a skittish uncertainty that was a hallmark of Eliot.
So listen to the pattern of his off rhymes.
There are things I have to do.
More than just to live and die.
More than just to die of living.
I have seen the moonlight leaving.
Twig by twig the elms and wondered.
Where I go, where I have wandered.
Do and die, living and leaving, wondered and wandered.
What Eliott in his writing has scrupulously delineated this a kind of
agony, MacLeish turns into delicate dissidence.
Imitators of Eliot were legion in the 1920s.
The year Liveright published The Bridge,
his firm also released Charles Recht's Manhattan Made, whose 26 page,
four section poem titled Syncretism and Confused Keys,
demonstrated how Eliot's distressed view of London could be translated to New York.
>> Soon the drab dusk comes apace.
Your cross home neighbors drone the prepared enjoyment on the gramophone.
And from the paralleling street comes the undertone of taxis, trucks, and feet.
You reach for self-expression the words are labored, blurred.
Your conduct diagnosed, ergo, is irrational, absurd.
You plan a psychic survey or perhaps to drink a good deal more.
When you startle, rise.
You were certain that you heard a woman's footsteps, tiptoe, your waiting door.
>> It's almost certainly not a woman there.
We're warned by Recht's title that stylistic shifts will keep this poem
moving all about though its tone is locked in place.
As he browses around the edges of the city.
He surveys the panorama of all man's wasted years, searching for
a tendril like a thread unbroken.
He duplicates the cadence of the wasteland and has mastered its
edge of self-reproach, but he employs it only to languish in its soft extravagance.
Eliot's sequences, needless to say, more serious, dreadfully serious.
And while it lends itself to imitation, it is by no means easy to summarize.
This highly experimental writing, with its tantalising gaps, depends on readers who
rather like the protagonist, who's at the center of the poem,
must work toward finding their own meanings within it.
No single reading of the Waste Land is likely to satisfy.
Indeed, the poem's incompleteness determines it will stay open,
as open as a wound it could be said.
For the work so helplessly reveals its relation to World War I,
to the growing discord spreading across Europe in the years after and
the devastation suffered by London.
But that brutalized environment as Eliot is careful to present it is just what
Eliot wants to show cannot be encountered with any directness.
Everyone in Europe may feel its weight, but
everyone also suffers some degree of emotional damage.
Civilization appears now to have been a thin veneer,
cruelly stripped away under war time to reveal unexpected depths of primitivism.
A violence now draws near that once had been contained by rituals
that are no longer abiding.
And the shadows from that catastrophic war now cast themselves in every direction.
Most keenly and painfully present in that most basic of drives the sexual.
The Waste Land presents itself as a cultural elegy to a postwar London
helplessly resisting alien forces that have invaded it.
Eliot exposes a common approach to dealing with deep cultural trauma.
The one rarely written about so bluntly.
The disastrous process if to fiercely compartmentalized emotions.
A strategy that sets aside even moments or remember delight recalling them as tinge
with failure, making them paradoxically unbearable because now so remote.
Ronald Bush has pointed out that Eliot completed drafts of the poem's first three
sections after obtaining release time from his job to solicit psychiatric help.
These sections were made to resemble,
in Bush's words, the disparate segments of our most distressing dreams.
And, these otherwise quite different segments share this dreamlike quality in
which the same impulses reappear veiled in different objects or persons.
Eliot ministers to cultural despair that is,
using as a a model, how his analysts are administering to him.
Their skill is to administer aid by crafting a slow progress that
moves away from numb paralysis to tentative understandings
as do these three opening sections.
The first section the burial of the dead presents and
array of ever shifting anecdotes.
As soon as they start taking shape they're broken away from,
abandoned until the stereotype figures on tarot cards begin to seem more real
than the people who flash before us.
The second section, a Game of Chess,
consists of efforts at dialogue between men and women.
And though these conversations keep disintegrating, the fact that similar
examples of non-communication exist across all social classes from the aristocratic
to the professional to the blue collar can be a positive step in breaking away from
the too rapid compartmentalization that separates the texts in
the opening section into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces that don't quite fit.
Anxiety about sexuality maybe a common thread that if followed
could disclose underlying cultural assumptions.
And in section three, the fire sermon Eliot's intimate
investigations are predatory sexuality as appalling as many examples are.
Also revealed the resilience in human affairs.
Women who submitted to men in the shadows of the river front initially appeared in
this section as inseparable from other wastes discarded along the Thames.
They were the best side actors in a fleeting drama from a summer that
seems long ago.
The picking on the role of Tiresias, the Greek cursed by the gods to experience
life as man and as woman, Eliot's transgendered perspective lets him linger
past the male moment of sexual congress to see the female in its aftermath,
not destroyed but returning to the rhythms of her life.
And now the women discarded in the opening end this section with their voices moving
in counterpoint and covertly uniting in the enduring structure of a sonnet.
To craft a sonnet is hardly a breakthrough but in a text dominated by ruin,
it is significant to attain even this degree of order weak as it may be.
Eliot's final two sections begin to confront things that had been mentioned
but strenuously avoided so far.
The fable-like Death by Water animates the figure who is recognizably the drowned
sailor from the pack of tarot cards.
No longer a discard, but now recycled.
And a sign that other inanimate figures may stir into life.
The message he delivers that all must die is bleak but universal.
And as a universalizing message,
it introduces a point of view that may help restore stability and sanity.
The willingness to see oneself in others.
In the concluding section, What the Thunder Said,
the poem's speaker begins imagining himself as an attentive pilgrim.
When the stony limits of the city are re-figured as the setting for
a quest, the nightmarish refusal to confront the fearful that dominated
the opening section is countered when such confrontations evaporate fear.
Suddenly dry bones are no longer terrifying,
a cry recalls a rooster crowing to announce the dawn and
wind moving through dry grass carries the sound of singing.
All signs that life giving rain is possible, promising relief.
Deeply rooted terrors that once curled at the edge of the poem now turn into
guideposts as the thunders enigmatic sound reveals linguistic roots in Sanskrit,
the very old becomes progenitive, that translates into directives,
[FOREIGN] give, sympathize and control.
Each of these is a prompt that sets in motion lyrical vignettes that
Harriet Davidson has described as conveying the sense of being in a social
cultural world.
One should reach to others to act on the awful daring of a moment's surrender.
One can escape from isolation for each holds the key that imprisons us and
that unlocks it if we hear whispers that yearn the etherial rumors that revive
another and one needs to imagine desire as both controllable and propulsive.
As a hand expert, with sail and oar brings calm to responsive sea winds.
Though the very last lines of the poem slip into disarray, their chaotic
phrases are not constricting, but instead emerge as crossroads in a clearing.
Pathways stretching off in different directions, signaling both confusion and
possibility.
To face such uncertainty is a positive mark,
a considerable distance from the numb vacillation with which the poem opened.
For tracing so progressive a tangent through Eliot's project,
as I have done has the disadvantage of downplaying the poem's many obstacles.
That neglects for example the heavy baggage imposed by Eliot's footnotes.
Some helpful, some misleading, some baffling, and
their intervention in our interpretations.
It also overlooks the false starts and dead end segments in earlier versions,
expose from the drafts of the original were discovered and
offered additional insights.
But in this brief forum, this talk allows, it conveys elements that are both
important to Eliott yet provocative for Crane including these three.
First, the priority given to grounding a poem within a specific modern city,
London in the aftermath of the Great War, which seems to be largely
successful as a financial enterprise with bankers, merchants, and clerks, but
failing as a social organization with wives, mothers, and working women.
Crane will identify his poem with New York City in the boom time of the 1920s,
a very different prospect.
Second, the emphasis on sexual anxiety and early theories of psychology and
anthropology.
Some of which reveal signs of primitive rituals persisting in advanced
civilizations, endowing suffering and sacrifice as culturally central.
Crane will draw on a very different anthropology,
one that traces an expansive pathway from the mediterranean to the middle
of America and that celebrates adaptation, transformation and renewal.
And last of all the authority granted to a protagonist like Eliot's whose effort
to relate to a painful, emotional environment establishes
psychological adjustment as the primary need.
Prescribing a shift in attitude as the best corrective to sustaining
a degree of order.
Crane by contrast will propose alliances between individuals essential to
any social rearrangement.
And arrangement looks toward the future, rather than stabilizing the present.
The bridge never directly addresses the waste land,
even as that poem's presence is detectable in almost every point.
Krane's writing effectively takes it's course by steering along side it.
Taking cues from Eliot's writing, and
drawing on many of the same techniques but almost pressing them in another direction.
One result is that these two poems as contraries of each other established
useful polarities that mark distinguishing traits of this new form
that is evolving in modernist poetry, the cultural epic.
We can see the outlines of this new form by considering
how Crane uses similar means to pursue different ends from Eliot.
Examining the two sequences side by side as each mapping terrain that extends their
own boarders can be specially helpful as the following talk hopes to show.
[MUSIC]
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