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poliphiloT.S. Eliot wasn't a particularly likeable person.
Neither was Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
But out of the transcendental fuck-up that was their marriage came a certain amount of poetry that we still value.
And because of the certain amount of poetry people continue to write books about the transcendental fuck-up- even though the events and emotions at the heart of it remain beyond the reach of research.
I've just been reading a review of one of those books. Pah!
Take one very chilly person and one very needy person (a vast over-simplification of course) and grind them together- and what you get is this odd, fragmentary, evasive, horribly memorable corpus of verse that we have been gullible enough to accept as a profound statement of the human condition...
Almost as a work of scriptural authority...
And we've been conned.
I have a passing fancy to grab my Collected Eliot off the shelf and take it to the charity shop...
And so free myself of its witchery.
But, then again, so much of it is so very beautiful...
Neither was Vivienne Haigh-Wood.
But out of the transcendental fuck-up that was their marriage came a certain amount of poetry that we still value.
And because of the certain amount of poetry people continue to write books about the transcendental fuck-up- even though the events and emotions at the heart of it remain beyond the reach of research.
I've just been reading a review of one of those books. Pah!
Take one very chilly person and one very needy person (a vast over-simplification of course) and grind them together- and what you get is this odd, fragmentary, evasive, horribly memorable corpus of verse that we have been gullible enough to accept as a profound statement of the human condition...
Almost as a work of scriptural authority...
And we've been conned.
I have a passing fancy to grab my Collected Eliot off the shelf and take it to the charity shop...
And so free myself of its witchery.
But, then again, so much of it is so very beautiful...
no subject
Date: 2021-07-10 11:38 am (UTC)The great work would fill one slim volume.
You can say the same of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. I'm very uncomfortable with a man who drove two women to their deaths.
It's the same with Peter Warlock in the musical world. Fine composer, dreadful man!
They remind me how much I love Thom Gunn of that generation. There was someone who spent a long time picking up the pieces for others in the US gay community during HIV/AIDS and he wrote about it. By God he wrote about it!
no subject
Date: 2021-07-10 04:56 pm (UTC)I dislike Hughes. I find his work overwrought, bordering on hysterical- and his treatment of the women in his life is alienating.
Plath was the better poet, I think.
Gunn's early work did nothing very much for me- and so I never got into the habit of reading him...
Most poets produce a very small body of vital work. The 19th century giants- like Wordsworth, Tennyson and Browning- produced reams and reams of stuff- most of which is now neglected, going on forgotten...