3 results
3 - Prufrock and Other Observations
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- By Anne Stillman, Clare College
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
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- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
- Published online:
- 01 December 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2016, pp 41-54
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
In 1917, T. S. Eliot published “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” a prose dialogue between two figures modelled on caricatures of himself and Ezra Pound. Eeldrop is Eliot:
“I test people,” said Eeldrop, “by the way in which I imagine them as waking up in the morning. I am not drawing on memory when I imagine Edith waking to a room strewn with clothes, papers, cosmetics, letters and a few books, the smell of Violettes de Parme and stale tobacco. The sunlight beating in through broken blinds, and broken blinds keeping out the sun until Edith can compel herself to attend to another day. Yet the vision does not give me much pain.”
(CP1 530)Eeldrop's test follows from a remark Appleplex makes about Edith: “‘Everyone says of her, “How perfectly impenetrable!” I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret’” (CP1 530). Eeldrop picks up on Appleplex's “dusty garret,” but he is less explicit about the distinction between what may be within Edith's person and what may be around her; where Appleplex speculates about the kind of room within Edith's person, Eeldrop imagines her placed within a room. The expression “waking to a room” (emphasis added) slightly alters the expected prepositional locution of “waking in a room.” As Eeldrop phrases it, Edith wakes to her setting, as if, say, waking to remorse. The specific moment of regaining consciousness is temporally afloat, as if part of Eeldrop's test is to imagine the act of waking in order to speculate when, and how, a person and the world may come together, but also to show the difficulty of locating any such finite place or time when a sharp distinction might be drawn between a person and the world. Edith wakes to a setting which is itself a threshold in the double aspect of the sunlight beating in and being kept out: the broken blinds recall the shaded peripheries between figures, rooms and worlds in Eliot's “Preludes,” where the “showers beat / On broken blinds,” and where “the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters” (CPP 22, 23).
“Rooms,” “scenes,” “atmospheres,” “situations” – these words repeatedly play a part in Eliot's early poems and critical prose: “the contact and cross-contact of souls, the breath and scent of the room” (CP1 488).
3 - Prufrock and Other Observations
-
- By Anne Stillman, Clare College
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
-
- Book:
- The New Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot
- Published online:
- 01 December 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 November 2016, pp 41-54
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
In 1917, T. S. Eliot published “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” a prose dialogue between two figures modelled on caricatures of himself and Ezra Pound. Eeldrop is Eliot:
“I test people,” said Eeldrop, “by the way in which I imagine them as waking up in the morning. I am not drawing on memory when I imagine Edith waking to a room strewn with clothes, papers, cosmetics, letters and a few books, the smell of Violettes de Parme and stale tobacco. The sunlight beating in through broken blinds, and broken blinds keeping out the sun until Edith can compel herself to attend to another day. Yet the vision does not give me much pain.”
(CP1 530) Eeldrop's test follows from a remark Appleplex makes about Edith: “‘Everyone says of her, “How perfectly impenetrable!” I suspect that within there is only the confusion of a dusty garret’” (CP1 530). Eeldrop picks up on Appleplex's “dusty garret,” but he is less explicit about the distinction between what may be within Edith's person and what may be around her; where Appleplex speculates about the kind of room within Edith's person, Eeldrop imagines her placed within a room. The expression “waking to a room” (emphasis added) slightly alters the expected prepositional locution of “waking in a room.” As Eeldrop phrases it, Edith wakes to her setting, as if, say, waking to remorse. The specific moment of regaining consciousness is temporally afloat, as if part of Eeldrop's test is to imagine the act of waking in order to speculate when, and how, a person and the world may come together, but also to show the difficulty of locating any such finite place or time when a sharp distinction might be drawn between a person and the world. Edith wakes to a setting which is itself a threshold in the double aspect of the sunlight beating in and being kept out: the broken blinds recall the shaded peripheries between figures, rooms and worlds in Eliot's “Preludes,” where the “showers beat / On broken blinds,” and where “the world came back / And the light crept up between the shutters” (CPP 22, 23).
“Rooms,” “scenes,” “atmospheres,” “situations” – these words repeatedly play a part in Eliot's early poems and critical prose: “the contact and cross-contact of souls, the breath and scent of the room” (CP1 488).
24 - Ezra Pound
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- By Anne Stillman, Cambridge University
- Edited by Jason Harding, University of Durham
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- Book:
- T. S. Eliot in Context
- Published online:
- 05 August 2012
- Print publication:
- 31 March 2011, pp 241-251
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
In ‘Desolation Row’ Bob Dylan sings:
And everybody's shouting
‘Which Side Are You On?’
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fisherman hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot turn up in a line where ‘and’ is sent in two syntactical directions: ‘And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot’. Eliot's early poem ‘Opera’ begins with ‘Tristan and Isolde / And the fatalistic horns’ (IMH, 17), swerving from fusing two selves to point out structural distinctions. In Dylan's song the first ‘and’ spotlights how the next conjunction works differently, linking Pound and Eliot in an intimately antagonistic double act. The tuneful pairing of their names, like Bonnie and Clyde, Laurel and Hardy, Tristan and Isolde, might prompt us to wonder about the nature of the ‘and’ in pairs so famous, seeming to join two persons, elusively, as one. Our habituation to the cadences of pairing (after all, why not Clyde and Bonnie or Cleopatra and Antony?), registers how we become culturally accustomed to the sound of a composite identity, hailing from two persons but not exactly belonging to either of them.