The fourth installment of our Lockdown T.S.Eliot Bookclub is published in the “Inklings and Friends” section of the blog. The book club is a place for Donor Subscribers to read my comments and posts about T.S.Eliot and his work. Here is an excerpt
Eliot wants you to feel bewildered because he wants you to feel a particular emotion. He wants you to feel horror and even disgust. I mentioned in the last post and the article I recommended, that Eliot was greatly influenced by the modern French Symbolist poets. They used images to evoke emotions. It didn’t matter if you understood the image specifically and could explain it. Instead it was the sort of language of dreams. The image did not make you think as much as it produced within you an emotion. The emotion was your emotion, and the poet’s job was to produce that emotion if he could.
This is interesting because Eliot’s own emotional life was barren. Brought up in a strict, puritanical Protestantism he was starved of love and life. The staid, Boston aristocracy and the clean and neat and respectable Unitarian religion was devoid of any zest, any lust, any raw emotion. We saw this in his satirical verses about Cousin Nancy and Aunt Helen, and we saw Eliot’s own self exaggerated self portrait in The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock. The timid young man with a bald patch going downstairs to the dull tea party…does he dare to eat a peach? Does he dare to walk along the beach? Does he dare to ask the overwhelming question? Does he dare to romance the woman or even make love to the woman? He does not. He is paralyzed by it all, and when he does search out some other life in the backstreets of Boston or Paris he is disgusted by what he finds.