Waste Land in class (the most important poem of the 20th century)

Complete structure (all five parts as a whole)
It's greatness lies in it's ability to connect with us all, as in Prufrock and Eliot's other early poetry.

Traveling through a series of images (sorta like Dante?) Go home and listen to Eliot read it and check out the power point.
----The tarot prediction in the first section is explicated throughout the rest of the poem; the next four parts explain/live out the prediction in the Burial of the Dead.

Luke Skywalker is the Hanged Man! In Episode 2 when he loses his hand and falls off the antenna upside down. Upside-down means it will be resurrected and reversed.




This is the most helpful hypertext I could find:
http://world.std.com/~raparker/exploring/thewasteland/table/explore5.html

Burial of the dead
What's wrong with the world, how the earth is now a waste land
Begins the same as Chaucer--in April, so he's well-read/well-versed in literature


Game of Chess
Failures of married love/life the game isn't being played right; the strategies are wrong; how to make life worth living again through love and marriage

Fire Sermon
Failure of lust (unstructured love); awkward love/sex relationships; sexuality and desire (stirred by spring rain?); practicing 'free love' in a philosophical way, of course;


Death by water
low point; sparagmos;


Thunder said
Eliot's last attempt to make sense of the world before converting to Christianity; water cures the waste land since it's dry and rocky;

Blog the themes I identified in parts of Burial, sections 2, 3 and 5 (I'm a 5!)

"Full Fathom Five..."

(From "The Tempest")

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

Waste Land

This was a difficult piece. I read all the interpretations I could find and I agree that it is difficult to wake up after sleeping for a long time. "Warm, covering in forgetful snow" is an excellent description of the sleepy, waking dream of depression. I've spent medicated years covered in forgetful snow, subsisting on dried tubers, and Summer definitely surprised me when I decided to stop taking all those meds. I argued with my doctors and eventually did it on my own as memory and desire stirred the dull roots of the life I was no longer living so much as stumbling through. I think I need more than a week to adequately discover what lies between the lines of this song for me; a year ago or so, I would have sailed through this and known it all but I've come a long way with lots of therapy and trying to bury the snow under fresh new hyacinth flowers.

The Chess Game had a different meaning for me. I spent this summer in group therapy for a very old event that changed my life; it took me 15 years to come forward and ask for help. I admit I didn't "get it" but when I read the interpretations and learned that the Chess game is a cover-up and a description of a rape, I read it again with old eyes and came away with the nightingale who filled all the desert with inviolable voice: that's how the group sessions felt, actually, being able to give voice to such a terrible act and the struggle to find meaning in the senselessness of it, and that sometimes a death is merely symbolic and just to give life to something new. Yes, I understand the sacrifice of the old king for a bountiful harvest; I've always been enamored of ancient legends and myths, and tarot is nothing new but I studied I suppose a different pantheon with different symbols.

The waste land

At work, I was dutifully reading my Waste Land texts, all the explanations (because I needed them). I have always LOVED Prufrock but I guess I never bothered to pick up anything else by Eliot and was rather unprepared for the complexity of Waste Land. So one of my co-workers looked over my shoulder, the cook, and said "What's that? Waste Land? That's why I dropped out of high school! How're you doing with it?"
Well at least it's not just me that doesn't get it! I'm quite frustrated.

room

Ch 2--women in literature
1. general topic of chapter (s)
2. most important section, carries thematic weight, close reading
3. other thematic issues carried over from rest of book
4. compare/contrast with tse
5. problematic passages (don't understand or self contradicting)

went to the British Museum to research; BM is "where it's at" at the time for any research. everybody who's anybody went there to do their research.

Male/female dichotomies--contradicting ideas about women; we were the literary ideal yet in truth, flung about the room and owned by any male in the family be it father or husband

Money--allows for education and the opportunities to write
p38-freedom! I need not hate any man, he can take nothing from me; I need not flatter, he has nothing to give me.

subjective/objective--usually subjective, Virginia flips into objective and impersonal at times, like she flips truth/lies while fact-finding

Ch 3--
fictional story of Shakespeare's sister, Judith and history of women writers (made up the earlies story since there is no history of women that far back to Elizabethan women) and covers several known women-writers.
Why weren't there more woman writers? They couldn't own property because they were property; had no access to education or reading; Brontes (female authors, sisters) all published under pseudonyms (____ Bell)

p56 You shouldn't be able to tell what the writer is thinking, the writer's personality should not pervade through his/her work. The work should stand alone; grudges, spites and antipathies do not show through in Shakespeare's works and that makes him a good author.
the Great Artist is impersonal, objective

Ch 4--
the learning? lonely? world of the female writer; giving us (the readers) a coherent history of women writers, offering an alternate cannon!
p63 a contrast to Eliot who was not a fan of the romantics puts writers on a pedestal above ordinary people on the street
p64 a woman, the first who makes her living on writing, and the middle-class women who begin to write
Histories are written by men, who catalog wars, because Men think wars are important but Virginia Woolf writes about the beginning of women writing a lot as the significance worth noting over wars (Did women have a renaissance and what was it?)
Jane Austin--did not have a room of her own, was constantly disturbed by comings and goings in the public parlor of the home, yet nothing of her life shows through to harm her work, not distracted by pettiness, anger and fear.

8-Hamlet and others

I really only enjoyed the movie Hamlet because of Mel Gibson. I'd never found it interesting in high school, and now I know why: because Hamlet himself is made more important than the story, which I suppose is why the Mel Gibson version did so well. I must admit it's been quite a while since I've taken the Shakespeare class and don't remember whether or not the play was 'satisfactory' to me when we dealt with it in class. I believe Hamlet could have handled his situation better with a little more communication but don't understand quite how a playwright could have made a better story with less confusion. Since I did enjoy the movie, it wasn't a complete artistic failure, just needed a better setting to succeed than was available when this essay was written. Hamlet is generally portrayed as a buffoon, expressing the" buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art" but how would one react to the death of one's father by his (or her) mother's treachery? I cannot relate to that emotion since I've never experienced such a betrayal; it is an amazing leap to delve into the psyche of the disturbed, especially one so intelligent as Hamlet.

As for the metaphysical poets, I enjoy the reading for the pleasant development of words as the subject progresses. I find the poems to be great works because they are lovely and justified, and do not as a rule try to pick apart pretty things just to discern their underlying meaning. Metaphors are not my strong point, I think, and admire the poets who excel in their use ( I watched too much tv as a child perhaps). "The poets of the 17th century, the successors of the dramatists of the 16th, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience" I believe suggests what TIT states, that a great work of art is not created simply because the subject is great. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder and the poem just preceding the quote, beginning with "One walked between his wife and child;/with measured footfall firm and mild..." simply yet elegantly illuminates the simple beauty of a family, happy together. God made mountains and forests and oceans and humans, all of which are beautiful in themselves, but when human nature lends towards the chaotic, there is great beauty in the harmony we seldom create together and the words that describe this harmony, in my opinion, are greater because the subject is so much more obscure than the simplicity of describing the beauty of the lake or river, because it is less easily obtained.

adding clasmates blog urls

I went into edit my profile and it's under Links. Just add the url and it will appear at the bottom of the blog, after all my posts. There's a new gadget called 'Followers' to list people who follow my blog and I added it but I'm not sure yet how to add everyone's address. I only have two classmates blog addresses anyway so it doesn't do me much good, but I'll work on it when I get more. Perhaps we could all add ourselves to the followers to easily check each other's works?

7-Tradition and the Individual Talent

feelings=images, impressions; emotions=strings of feelings, events or experiences
the work, the poem itself as opposed to the poet
which is more beautiful: a poem about grand beauty, or the beauty in the everyday? (the progression of words and word-images, development of the subject)

As an aspiring writer myself, I of course model my works after what I've read before. When I read a fantastic story, I try to recreate it (my favorite inspiration is generally Borges; I like the way he makes the ordinary extraordinary). I like reading a fantastic story and finding out at the end it was simply something mundane that the author looked at through a different lens. Is what I write new and fantastic? No; it's traditional, modeled after a style I fancy at the moment, but it's new for me if it's a subject or style I've never come across before (some are good, some are pitiful attempts at greatness that fall far short) but even the stories that don't pass muster are part of the process, part of the cannon (in this case, my own personal canon) and each attempt changes forever the future forays into this style or that. Eliot is quite critical of writers, rather critics, who only look for what's new but how do you discern what is 'new' if you don't know what else is there?
I find that works that discuss the everyday and make it beautiful are my favorites. I read a poem once about a shiny metal goddess whose worshipers placed offerings in her belly and she gave them bread and cookies. The metal goddess was a Hobart mixer (like a Kitchen Aid mixer on your counter but the gigantic, industrial floor model). I'd never thought of working as a baker like that, and I've made my share of sheet cakes and loaves by the dozen in commercial kitchens, berating the choices that brought me into the heat of the kitchen, but jobs like that have a beauty of their own, too, if you know where to look. Not everybody goes to the Alps, so reading a poem about them may create images in my mind but only if very skillfully written. Most of us, even those who don't cook, at least know the machines that line the shelves at Target and Bed, Bath and Beyond and can picture the metal goddess in a new light next time you go shopping after reading that poem and find beauty in the every-day ordinary as it becomes extra-ordinary. How does a feeling become an emotion? Do you have to 'experience' the feeling often before it transforms itself or does it simply rise in intensity and recreate itself into the more solid designation of emotion? And who determines which it is? The poet, the poem or the reader? "Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past". So every time I've ever poured ingredients into a mixing bowl, I was placing my offerings into the goddess who exchanged my gift into a gift for me. How wonderful it is to bake and be part of the fantastic ritual of feeding my loved ones! I had no idea how the exchange was part of a plan; I just thought I wanted a cookie. So now my feelings about working as a baker have been changed by words, exchanged the feelings I had years before I experienced the poem, and feelings become emotions attached to the action of creating yummy things from plain old boring ingredients.

6-kew and mark

I liked the continuity between these two stories, that a snail was witness to all surrounding it while being obscurely present either noticed on a wall or unseen beneath the towering flowers in the gardens.
Mark was the first of Woolf's works that I've ever attempted to read and I found it very difficult to follow as she meandered through time with various fantastic explanations for this curious mark on the wall she was not interested enough in to stand up and find out just what it was. I get lost in reveries, especially with the flickering tongues of fire (whose image is forever ruined by Harry Potter's communication system and faces popping out of fire places, talking). It was interesting that when a human voice woke her from her reverie, she did not drown like Eliot/Prufrock but was freed by the knowledge that the mysterious mark on the wall was a snail: mystery over! Her works, while confusing, seem to have cheerful, happy overtones that uplift the determined reader who wades through all the trails of her reveries.
Kew gardens, when I read it, was of course difficult to follow but at least I'd had other stories by Woolf under my belt by then and expected the digressions. But the snippets of conversations that the reader is privy to in this story are just what a snail living in such a garden would hear. How confusing people must seem when one only knows bits and pieces! From the perspective of the snail, the entire world of humans must indeed seem large and knowledge only gained in pieces. The story flowed like a walk in the garden, too, and wasn't as confusing as Mark, in which the narrator never actually got up from the chair or did anything at all. In Kew, there is action observed and discussed as it occurs. And the little snail remains while the world goes on about, unaware of it's existence.

I started A Room of One's Own today and got totally lost in her reverie before dinner was served so I was completely confused when she stopped mid-sentence and jumped to the next paragraph with dinner being served; it was quite vexing and I had to go back a page or two to figure out where I went wrong only to discover that she really did jump around like that. Kew and Mark on the Wall evoked similar emotions, although Kew was easier to picture because it was quite scenic. And what is a Beadle?
I'm not sure how to follow her reveries. I meander through my writings, too, sometimes and during conversation have been told it's difficult to follow me; now I know how frustrating it is! I did enjoy the Haunted House, though, and it gave me ideas for my second life project since the story is set in Asheham. I guess Woolf's writings just take some time to get used to. Perhaps Haunted House was easier to follow since it was shorter than the others and she didn’t jump around like a cat that’s trying to stay out of the bath tub.
I had seen the quote "One can not sleep well, live well, love well if one has not dined well" in Friend's Food with a Flair restaurant in Anderson, my favorite restaurant until the owners retired, and I'd always wondered who said that (it says Virginia Woolf, but the name didn't mean anything to me) so imagine my pleasant surprise when I found those very words in the first chapter of A Room of One's Own!

modernism

Throughout antiquity, thinking has been the province of a select, radical few. Others were merely to believe their teachers and respond accordingly, not to come up with new ideas on their own. Gradually, individual thinking became encouraged and eventually the norm. As our societies expanded, so did our knowledge of the world itself and new theories disproved old theories which required a complete re-construction of the ways we learned. Instead of re-vamping old theories, more and more students were experimenting with them and learning that many old theories just don't hold up to scientific inquiries. The learned of this time period had to re-invent themselves and their classification to include new ways of thinking, not just learning. And thwarted at every turn by the Church in their Justifications to leave the masses ignorant, they had quite a fight before education even resembled what we know today.

Education, historically, has been for males, especially after industrialization allowed men to go out into the world to work and learn. Women were once again shunted to the rear in order to care for the basic daily chores to sustain living while their men were out reconfiguring the landscape of the educational universe and reinventing more complicated, mechanized ways of doing traditional chores. Even still, women found a way to reinvent the landscape themselves: they began reading their husbands' and fathers' books and theses and began to think for themselves much the same as men were expanding their knowledge base. (The song that's playing in my head while I write this is Eurythmic's "Sister's are Doin' it For Themselves").

Modernist works include women more so than many other time periods in history, as well as a delve into the individual psyche. A new, personal accountability arose in this time that every little nuance of self was not in some way beholden to some specific deity (i.e. the furies, if one was angry or maddeningly off-kilter with everyone else, the anger or radical behavior could be blamed on the furies of myths) so much as to one's own character; this shift upset the natural order of things, but the old ways were on their way out anyway. If one could not blame the furies or other external influence, then where did these feelings come from? Freud posed the theory of the unconscious to explain where indeed we get our emotions that we cannot always control. And if these things come from within, then we are accountable for our own actions. Always.
So Prufrock, in olden times, could perhaps have blamed the fates for not weaving his life together with a woman he desired but in the modernist times in which he lived, he had only himself to blame.

Prufrock

· The epigraph is from Dante's Inferno (Canto 27): the section where Dante speaks with a man burning in the eighth circle of hell for the sin of fraud through evil counsel. The man agrees to tell Dante the story of his life, but only because he knows that no one in hell will ever return to earth to publicize his story:

If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return to the world, this flame would shake no more. But since none ever did return alive from this depth, if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.

What context does this epigraph set up for the poem? Why did Eliot choose it to introduce "a love song"? What does it tell us about the speaker in the poem and his situation?

The poem is the private thoughts of a shy gentleman. These thoughts were recorded under the assumption that they would remain private, that no one would know. The speaker is shy and insecure, totally unaware that everyone feels that way at some time or other. I believe Eliot made it a love song because it reflects the underlying emotions and internal struggles that one faces before beginning the courtship; this is what goes on before the speaker (any speaker, if he or she is human and thus subject to human shortcomings) begins wooing his lady-friend. This poem tells the reader that Mr. Prufrock is very shy and unassuming, humble and takes pride in his (however humble) appearance: in short, perhaps rather shallow, since he worries more about how he appears or he fears the object of his desire is shallow and will reject him based on his appearance.

· All of the repetitions about time and how there will be so much time are back-references to a seventeenth-century poem written by Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress":

This is a seduction poem; the man is trying to convince the woman to make love with him. He says, we gotta do it now because there just isn't enough time to mess around and be coy. And besides we are all going to die and what good will your chastity be then?

Considering this earlier poem, why do you think Prufrock keeps repeating that there will be enough time? Does the reference to the Marvell poem give us any clue as to what the "question" may be about?

Prufrock repeats that there will be time because he is patient. He is willing to chance that he will never reach his goal if it means that he will not have to "force the moment to it's crisis". He is more like the coy mistress than Marvell in this sense.

There is another reference to the Marvell poem later on in "Prufrocck." Can you find it? How does it work?

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness, up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife,

Through the iron gates of life.

To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question

Marvell rolls it all into a ball to concentrate his pleasure into a specific area. Prufrock squeezes his universe into a ball to stall for time before he has to roll it towards some overwhelming question. He is merely biding time before he must face the inevitable, whereas Marvell simply cannot wait to throw the ball into his coy mistress' park so she can throw it back to him. Marvell enjoys the courtship game, positively revels in it, at least as much as succeeding in the game; Prufrock dreads the entire process with an awesome, fearsome dread.

· When he starts talking about the "bald spot" in the middle of his head, what do you think he is worrying about?

And indeed there will be time...time to turn back and descend the stair, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair and they will say How his hair is getting thin!

He waits and waits and waits, perhaps too long. The moment is gone and he might never get another chance to 'force the moment to it's crisis' but he let it slip by just in case there's a better moment on the horizon that would make the beginning of their courtship even more special. But like the coy mistress, perhaps the worms will get the best of him as he waits until his hair grows thin and he has even less to offer the woman he desires.

When he starts talking about having known all the evenings already, what kind of a life do you think he has led?

He's enjoyed a rather social life, but always as the "friend" of the ladies, never as the boyfriend. He's perpetually the third wheel or the confidant or even just the guy the girls call when things go wrong with their boyfriends and they need a shoulder to cry on, never guessing it's pure torment to him to have what he really wants above all else so close and be unable to articulate his desire, unable to rise to the occasion (as the poet was unable to rise to the occasion?) So he has known them all already, known them all...because they come to him when they need to talk about their lives for his perhaps cautious advice. He knows what makes each woman tick, but even so armored in this knowledge, he's unable to advance to the next level of the game.

In the stanza beginning "And would it have been worth it, after all," the speaker suddenly changes tenses; now he speaks in the pst tense. What does this change of tenses suggest about what he is thinking?

Perhaps he knows that some of the squabbles that the girls get into with their love lives are simply because they are spoiled and/or just high maintenance women, so perhaps he's dodged the proverbial bullet by not being able to force the moment to it's crisis. Would it have been worth it after all? Who knows. Perhaps the women are unhappy because the only man who really knows them is Prufrock, and he's unable to please them, or at least not confident enough to try. He changes tenses because his musings have led him down the road a bit farther than his feet have taken him. He knows he doesn't have the nerve to roll his "universe-ball" to the Overwhelming Question so he allows his imagination to invent reasons why it wouldn't be worth it, after all, to make his failure less his own shortcomings and more an Informed Withdrawal.