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| ISBN-13: | 9781849023306 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Benediction Books |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2011 |
| Pages: | 76 |
| Sales rank: | 343,595 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.31(d) |
| Age Range: | 14 Years |
About the Author
Frank Kermode (1919–2010) was one of the twentieth century's greatest critics. He wrote and edited many works, among them The Sense of Ending and Shakespeare’s Language.
Read an Excerpt
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S’io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma perciocchè che giammai di questo fondo
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question . . .
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
* * * *
Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? . . .
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
* * * *
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep . . . tired . . . or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat,
and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say, “That is not what I meant at all;
“That is not it, at all.”
* * * *
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Table of Contents
Preface ix
A Note on the Texts xiii
Introduction xvii
Poetry 1
Prufrock and Other Observations 3
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 5
Portrait of a Lady 9
Preludes 13
Rhapsody on a Windy Night 15
Morning at the Window 17
The Boston Evening Transcript 18
Aunt Helen 19
Cousin Nancy 20
Mr. Apollinax 21
Hysteria 22
Conversation Galante 23
La Figlia Che Piange 24
From Poems (1920) 25
Gerontion 25
Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar 28
Sweeney Erect 30
A Cooking Egg 32
The Hippopotamus 34
Whispers of Immortality 36
Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service 38
Sweeney Among the Nightingales 40
The Waste Land 43
I The Burial of the Dead 45
II A Game of Chess 48
III The Fire Sermon 51
IV Death by Water 56
V What the Thunder Said 56
Eliot's Notes to The Waste Land 61
Contexts 67
Sources of the Waste Land 69
The King of the Wood Sir James G. Frazer 69
The Influence of the Sexes on Vegetation 70
The Killing of the Divine King 72
[Adonis and Christ] 73
[The Grail Legend] Jessie L. Weston 75
[The Grail Quest] 76
[The Tarot Pack] 77
The Fisher King 78
[The Perilous Chapel] 79
[Conclusion] 79
[Madame Sosostris] Aldous Huxley 81
To the Reader Charles Baudelaire 83
The Seven Old Men 84
[Cornelia's Dirge from The White Devil] John Webster 86
[The Blinding of Tiresias] Ovid 86
[The Story of Tereus and Philomela] 87
That Shakespearian Rag Gene Buck Herman Ruby 92
The Fire-Sermon Gotama Buddha 96
From Prothalamion Edmund Spenser 97
[Olivia's Song from The Vicar of Wakefield] Oliver Goldsmith 98
[Elizabeth and Leicester] James Anthony Froude 99
From Confessions St. Augustine 99
From The King James Bible • [The Road to Emmaus] 100
[The Extra Man] Sir Ernest Shackleton 101
[The Downfall of Europe] Hermann Hesse 102
From Brihadaranyaka Upanishad • The Three Great Disciplines 104
From Pervigilium Veneris 105
From The Spanish Tragedie Thomas Kyd 106
Composition and Publication of the Waste Land 109
[The Composition of The Waste Land] Lyndall Gordon 109
[Publishing The Waste Land] Lawrence Rainey 117
Eliot on the Waste Land 135
[The Disillusionment of a Generation] 135
[A Piece of Rhythmical Grumbling] 135
[On the Waste Land Notes] 136
[Allusions to Dante] 136
Eliot: Essays and London Letters 139
Reflections on Vers Libre 139
From Reflections on Contemporary Poetry 145
From Tradition and the Individual Talent 147
Hamlet and His Problems 154
From The Metaphysical Poets 158
Ulysses, Order, and Myth 165
The True Church and the Nineteen Churches 168
[The Rite of Spring and The Golden Bough] 169
Criticism 171
Reviews and First Reactions 173
From The New Poetry Arthur Waugh 173
[Review of Prufock and Other Observations] Ezra Pound 176
Prufrock and Other Observations: A Criticism May Sinclair 180
Is This Poetry? Virginia Woolf 186
[Eliot Chants The Waste Land] 188
Times Literary Supplement • [Mr. Eliot's Poem] 189
The Poetry of Drouth Edmund Wilson 189
Mr. Eliot's Slug-Horn Elinor Wylie 195
An Anatomy of Melancholy Conrad Aiken 198
[The Dilemma of The Waste Land] Malcolm Cowley 203
[The Waste Land and Jazz] Ralph Ellison 206
Twentieth-Century Criticism 207
["Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar"] Laura Riding Robert Graves 207
Prufrock of St. Louis Hush Kenner 212
From The Poetry of T. S. Eliot I. A. Richards 218
[The Significance of the Modern Waste Land] F. R. Leavis 221
The Waste Land: An Analysis Cleanth Brooks, Jr. 233
T. S. Eliot as the International Hero Delmore Schwartz 259
A Sphinx without a Secret Maud Ellmann 265
[Eliot's Waste Paper] Tim Armstrong 283
Reconsiderations and New Readings 291
[Inventing Prufrock] Flelen Vendler 291
[Rereading Eliot's "Gerontion"] Marjorie Perloff 297
From T. S. Eliot and Cinema David Trotter 315
[The Gramophone in The Waste Land] Juan A. Suarez 322
[Violence in The Waste Land] Sarah Cole 329
T. S. Eliot: A Chronology 337
Selected Bibliography 341
Interviews
A wonderful collection of poems. Some are comical and playful, others satirical and serious, each exemplifying Eliot's titanic influence on modernist literature.