What a lovely passage by T.S. Eliot on how his dual citizenship effectively began in childhood: 'In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.'
Eliot could really turn on the lyrical prose when he wanted to -- it's a pity that he seems to have done it so little! There is another memorable evocation of the American landscape at the start of After Strange Gods, which unfortunately then becomes a horrible mess of a critical argument...
Wow — astonishing to suddenly have a specific referent for that passage from Ash Wednesday, especially. It’s like a door opening up. I don’t know why, but it somehow never occurs to me to think that Eliot is drawing on material experiences or memories when he puts images like that into a poem. Perhaps it’s because he’s successfully convinced me to buy into the poem as depersonalized, as you say he intended. Thanks for this, so interesting. Look forward to reading the longer Prospect piece.
I think Eliot increasingly dropped 'personal' moments into his poetry, and prose, as he became more of a public figure -- culminating in Four Quartets, where he speaks as the 'T.S. Eliot' everyone knew.
(Apologies, by the way, for posting, then deleting and reposting, comments like this. One can’t edit comments in the apo, and sometimes one can’t stand to let the typos etc remain 😊).
What a lovely passage by T.S. Eliot on how his dual citizenship effectively began in childhood: 'In New England I missed the long dark river, the ailanthus trees, the flaming cardinal birds, the high limestone bluffs where we searched for fossil shell-fish; in Missouri I missed the fir trees, the bay and goldenrod, the song-sparrows, the red granite and the blue sea of Massachusetts.'
Eliot could really turn on the lyrical prose when he wanted to -- it's a pity that he seems to have done it so little! There is another memorable evocation of the American landscape at the start of After Strange Gods, which unfortunately then becomes a horrible mess of a critical argument...
Wow — astonishing to suddenly have a specific referent for that passage from Ash Wednesday, especially. It’s like a door opening up. I don’t know why, but it somehow never occurs to me to think that Eliot is drawing on material experiences or memories when he puts images like that into a poem. Perhaps it’s because he’s successfully convinced me to buy into the poem as depersonalized, as you say he intended. Thanks for this, so interesting. Look forward to reading the longer Prospect piece.
I think Eliot increasingly dropped 'personal' moments into his poetry, and prose, as he became more of a public figure -- culminating in Four Quartets, where he speaks as the 'T.S. Eliot' everyone knew.
(Apologies, by the way, for posting, then deleting and reposting, comments like this. One can’t edit comments in the apo, and sometimes one can’t stand to let the typos etc remain 😊).
I didn't even see there was a revision!