Critics Flashcards
(23 cards)
What did Eliot say to Conrad Aiken in a letter about university towns?
‘I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere.’
What did Eliot proclaim himself?
‘A classicist in Literature.’
What did Eliot argue in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’?
Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art.
This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist’s previous works.
What did The Times Literary Supplement remark about ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’?
That the ideas explored in ‘Prufrock’ ‘certainly have no relation to poetry.’
Bush - How were Eliot’s early poems received?
The early poems ‘staggered Eliot’s contemporaries.’
Edmund Wilson - Authenticity
‘One of our only authentic poets.’
When did Eliot’s reputation as a poet peak?
Only after the publication of the ‘Four Quartets.’
What is Eliot’s comment on spirituality?
‘I see the path of progress for modern man in his occupation with his own self, with his inner being.’
He cited Goethe as an exemplar of such a direction.
What paper did Eliot write in 1939 on religion?
In 1939 he wrote ‘The Idea of a Christian Society’ which suggests the dilemma of the serious observer of Western culture in the 1930s before the outbreak of the Second World War.
What did Strand and Boland suggest about open forms and innovation?
That modernists who pioneered open forms, especially T.S. Eliot, did not display ‘wilful abandonments of what had gone before. They were in fact in a passionate dialogue with it.’
What was Ezra Pound’s slogan?
‘Make it New.’
What did Eliot call modern life?
‘A fragmentary mess.’
What is a psychoanalytic interpretation of Prufrock informed by Freud’s psychology?
The ‘you’ established in the opening of the poem could be an extension of Prufrock’s conscience of a separation of his psyche.
The rhyme of the last lines creates a bathetic ending. The use of the plural pronoun ‘we’ unites his psyche for a brief moment, but this is violated by the death on the shore.
What did Kathleen McCoy say about Prufrock?
Prufrock represents ‘thwarted desires and modern disillusionment.’
What does Anne Stillman suggest about Prufrock and its depiction of sexuality?
That there is a ‘tangible absence of intimacy.’
What quote from Eliot relates to poetry?
‘Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.’
What did Andrew Green say about ‘Portrait of a Lady’?
Eliot draws ‘on a range of different sources as a means of presenting self’. The poem is a ‘performance which is necessary in the attempt to convey meaning.’
What did J.C.C. Mays say about the irony of ‘Portrait of a Lady’?
The irony of the poem ‘makes the possibility of an innocent and conventionally pretty verse music impossible.’
What did D. Chakraborty say about ‘Preludes’?
Eliot was ‘deeply affected by the ambient disorderliness of the industrial city.’
What did A.A. Mendilow say about the structure of ‘Preludes’?
Eliot’s poem has a ‘quintuple structure’, or structural irony, whereby the poet attempts to maintain harmony and unity between his vignettes but loses this to the decay of the modern world.
What did Anthony David Moody say about ‘Gerontion’?
The use of differing pronouns such as the plural ‘us’ and the first-person ‘I’ regarding the speaker presents the same sexual themes of confusion that face Prufrock, only in the body of an older man.
What is an alternative reading from Donald J. Childs on ‘Gerontion’?
The poem attempts to present the theme of Christianity from the viewpoint of the modernist individual with various references to the Incarnation and salvation.
‘Depraved May’ and ‘flowering Judas’ allude to the Crucifixion, and he suggests that this contemplates the ‘paradoxical recovery of freedom through slavery and grace through sin.’
What did Russell Kirk say about ‘Gerontion’?
The poem is a ‘description of life devoid of faith, drearily parched, it is cautionary.’
