Tuesday, April 01, 2008

Today's must read ...

... at least for me: Meaning and Abstraction.

So much of what Art says in this is right that it's hard to know where to begin. As he suggests, insofar as Eliot may be said to be a modernist, it is by virtue of "The Waste Land." And he is also correct that the Eliot of the Quartets had abandoned modernism. I re-read the Quartets regularly and always get something new out of them. Conrad Aiken, of course, is one of my favorite poets and, as Art says, unjustly neglected. Consider "Winter For A Moment Takes The Mind." And yes, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" was an episode of Night Gallery - narrated by Orson Welles, in fact. I would love to see it again. Anyone one know how to get a copy?
One final note about Eliot the man. Like many a shy person, he was given to adopting personae, but they were not necessarily accurate reflections of the man, rather disguises merely. This is a guy who placed firecrackers under the seats of the Faber & Faber board of directors when they were having a meeting one Fourth of July, who corresponded with Groucho Marx and when they met wanted only to talk about the Marx brothers, not poetry. Had he lived to receive the Tony for Cats he would have been delighted beyond measure.

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