In 2015 I published a short book — or a long essay — on British and Irish poetry. It was called The Whitsun Wedding Video, because its starting point was the widespread influence of Philip Larkin on contemporary verse.
But it had other preoccupations. One was the afterlife of T.S. Eliot. In 2015 — a century after the first appearance of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — it seemed appropriate to acknowledge Eliot’s own view of centenaries. Here is the beginning of Chapter 2.
One hundred years ago, T. S. Eliot published a poem which began:
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
With the bewildering simile of the third line, observed the poet John Berryman, “modern poetry begins”. It is as though “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” has two beginnings. There is a neat rhyming couplet (I/sky), and then the metrically and logically off-beat one: the rhythm falters, the rhyme fails, and we run on into a completely new kind of poetic proposition, curbed with mock-propriety by a semi-colon.
As first-time readers, we can have no idea how such a poem is going to end, and it keeps us in this state of suspense: picking images up and dropping them; beginning and ending rhyme schemes; rhythmically advancing and retreating; and, in general, digressing from every expectation.
In 1915, such tendencies put Eliot’s work outside the definition of poetry itself for some readers. Eliot’s friend, Ezra Pound, had to persuade the editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Harriet Monroe, to publish the poem. When it appeared again in the book Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), the Times Literary Supplement protested:
The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to any one — even to himself. They certainly have no relation to “poetry,” and we only give an example because some of the pieces, he states, have appeared in a periodical which claims that word as its title.
The last time anyone asked, however — 2009 — T. S. Eliot was the Nation’s Favourite Poet. And it would be an impressively perverse critic today who could seriously maintain that “Prufrock” was not poetry of some kind. An immortal reputation can be an unhappy fate for a poet too, though, as Eliot knew. On the centenary of John Keats’s death in 1921, he observed:
All the approved critics, each in a different paper, blew a blast of glory enough to lay Keats’ ghost for twenty years. I have never read such unanimous rubbish, and yet Keats was a poet.
This weekend, as you may know, is the centenary of the first publication of The Waste Land. I wrote some more about that here:
[I am very grateful to Rack Press for publishing The Whitsun Wedding Video, and also to the now-defunct “Irish Poetry Shop” (online purveyor of imaginary merchandise) for the illustrations — including the mug above, featuring Eliot’s words, and mug.
If you would like a copy of the book for £5 inc. p&p let me know — or Paypal me — on jnoeltod@hotmail.com.]