Speaking of Michelangelo...

Like the modernist prose (Howard's End) and critical essays that have been assigned thusfar, Eliot's early poetry tends to dwell upon the vissicitudes of modern life, whether the crowd that "rubs and questions" the artistic "bloom" to its own diminishment, or the imagery of disposal and waste in old newspapers of his Prelude's first stanza. Indeed, T.S. Eliot's first works appear to already contain a sense of intimidation, or repulsion, by crowds or swarms -- for example, the horrofic glut of faceless "sirens" that Prufock perceives women to be, or the "trampling" of feet in the Preludes that implicitly buries the soul. Obviously, the flux of humanity Eliot depicts is always a part of his hard-boiled city vignettes, blending in with the atmosphere and presenting a homogenity and a soullessness that gives the early poetry its unique, dull pain. Nevertheless, it is quite interesting that Eliot's themes are similar to Forster's, a man who is starkly different in both personality and politics. Eliot's Portait of a Lady and Le Figlia Che Piagne strategically break with their homogenous environment in his use of second person, portraying at once a crucial, potential connection and that connection's failure to fully "bloom" or materialize.

While all of our reading excluding the Preludes could be interpreted as love or courtship poetry, Eliot transcends this category by postulating heterosexual romance as a method to heal the fragmented isolation endemic to modern life rather than an ultimate and monothematic end unto itself. For this reason, as well as his sensitive Portrait of a dying woman who quietly and heroically "serves tea to friends," I cannot peg T.S. Eliot or even Prufrock as one-dimensional, "conservative" misogynists. The female gender is not the "Other" to Prufock: all of humanity is.

It is apparent that Eliot was already conceptualizing his theories on poetry, and the direction it should take in the Modern world, in his early works. For me, La Figlia Che Piange most visibly demonstrated the ideas Eliot expressed in his "Tradition and the Individual Talent": the love-interest that "weaves the sunlight" into her hair almost insidiously invites a conventional reading of the poem, which is soon disrupted and skewed by the metaphor of the "fugitive" with its contemporary, near-politicized diction. This sort of ambivalent or contradictory reading that such a work invites is obviously a New Critic's dream, particularly in the last line where the weeping girl disturbs both the "troubled midnight" and "noon's repose" -- because of his failed connection with her, he cannot have the comfort of sinking into either complacency or despair. Beginning with Eliot, the New Criticism is by necessity wedded to a particular form of a particular era, removing the poet from his (yes, in this era of criticism, his) poetry in a manner that may have been freeing to an antiromantic, yet emotional individual.

We should not forget that Eliot and his critical posse were once avante-garde, with a new style to purify and canonize. And yet, for all his talk of rebellion from the near-past of Romanticism and Victorianism, this week's selection of Eliot appears to borrow extensively from Robert Browning's experiments with dramatic monologue. Eliot incorporates this technique to both draw in and distance his audience, leaving it ambiguous whether the "you" in his poems is the reader or is another character with whom his speaker is conversing. This method intriguingly mirrors his commercial strategy of catering to an elite, "select" audience, increasing his poetry's premium artistic value while still, of course, selling poetry. I would not categorize Eliot's style as a commercial formula, but I would also not rule such considerations out altogether: indeed, such an interpretation would lend a layer of irony to the "rubbed rose" of the private Chopin concert in his Portrait or the discarded newspapers of his Preludes. Furthermore, Eliot reflects upon modern life's commodification of both artistic and human relationships in his censored Pervigilium and in Portrait of a Lady's epitaph and very title. The latter perhaps refereces Manet's Olympia, in which the sexualized subject of an artistic elite's private consumption gazes back.