brett masters : is such an incredible poet and this is one of his best

SightlessUnless : This poem is the reason I write poetry

Nassy Fesharaki : Nice poem

And this poem...the most classic in during our course...is...possibly, the richest

JonHazle : lol act4istone wats a firey wath

Rem Adore : This is where I would ask the story of redemption; If God so loved the world, will kindness be sent along side the firey wath?

Hack Jouley : Drew can get weird though

Hack Jouley : Drew Franklin and I are best friends BUT.. not as close of friends as Mr. Hastings and I!!

Hack Jouley : April fools bruh

Hack Jouley : BTW guys I'm jack houley I'm kinda a big deal I'm on varsity lacrosse and soccer

Hack Jouley : I love english so much its so fun and mr hastings is cool

Hack Jouley : Mr hastings is my best friend ever!!!

Solving Ennui : So many of my poems start so strong, and the cross associations between the first stanza are great! Loving it.

Marco Dellorusso : It's a powerful poem. I love the imagery it invokes, as well as it's esoteric meaning. Much better then The Waste Land.

Emilyelisabethwr : I love this poem

Bevlyn T Mashava : I love this poem it tacks me back to those days in school and stil keeps me going.

D I Harrison : I shall re-read The Four Quartets shortly, at the moment for a little while I'm focusing on John Clare and George Herbert. However, you might feel, given what you think  are my views on Eliot, that I have just written an extended poem (a Science Fiction story in sometimes rhymes, and sometimes not, that owes a little of it's construction - but not style - on the Great Eliot himself.

There are a couple of direct quotes from The Hollow Man. I think I said my favourite Eliot poem - and I never actually said I didn't like him and I never said I didn't like The Wasteland, which in fact I do. It is possible to like something, to admire it, but find a great many things that you are unhappy with.I have a settled opinion, that's true, but  which came from recent exhaustive reading and study of the short volume of 'Selected Poems' [Faber (1948) revised edition - I believe in the early or mid 60's) I do hope you are not assuming that, as with some people, I have a problem with Eliot simply because I had not read enough.

I do hope that we might continue on with this little, ultra-non-group 'group' of whoever's interested enough to joinin thoughtful discussion of poetry. I have enjoyed reading your thoughts on Eliot, and got some satisfaction over putting some of my thoughts out there to catch what they catch.

Anyway, back to the point. I have also shamelessly lifted the title of this poem to use as the title of my poem. called 'The Hollow Men?', I have entered it into a contest to write a Science Fiction poem. If you would care to take a look, I'd be very interested in your feedback, and a little light unpaid proofing(?). You have a good intellect, and one which I can respect - so your opinion on some of my writings would be an invaluable service to me.

Kind regards,

D I H

Morag : Have you written your poem made up of quotations yet?  I'd love to see it.

Eliot did not write poetry about the Great War.  The obvious reason was that he wasn't in it.  Even if he hadn't been American, his health problems mean that he would never have made a soldier.  However, The Waste Land is clearly about the aftermath of the war.  Look at the characters - the exiled Russian aristocrat, Madame Sosostris, the couple in 'A Game of Chess', the typist and her boyfriend - they are all part of the feverish disillusionment of the 20s, the feeling of "everything's pointless, so let's try to distract ourselves with sex, occultism, drugs - anything to keep reality out."  For so many people that time was a Waste Land all right.

However, you're right - we'll never agree on this.  I like the poem and you don't.  Why not try The Four Quartets?  They're very different.

D I Harrison : I want you pointing out my tiny errors. We can all improve. Yes, I did read The Four Quartets, but a while ago - so I probably need to re-read. I fear we will never agree on The Wasteland. For me, Eliot could have revised it a thousand times more and, in my view, the comments I make remain valid.

I believe all T.S.Eliot was doing was the poetic equivalent of asking the orchestra on the Titanic if they knew any good waltzes. However wonderfully Eliot put together the references and revised the arrangement, all that proves to me that his was a towering intellect (probably one of the great intellects of the 20th century), he had a prodigious and more than encyclopedic knowledge, and understanding, of much of the humanities, classics, literature and a dozen other -ologies. What it most certainly does not prove to me is that he had a great poetic imagination. One of his most important works, The Wasteland - what does it mean?

Where is there, in any of his work, writings on the Great War; that most terrible of wars, just finished. Utterly destructive of people's lives, bodies, minds, and souls; the most important conflict of at least the last 300 years (with the Thirty Years War' which shattered it's way through 17th century Europe).  The War de-railed Empires that still seemed strong, it altered the course of the 20th century from it's beginning. It changed the relationships of workers to their employers; it began the process of changing the role of women; put sex, drug, and the Charleston into the spotlight - I could go on (as an historian). Where is the work of Eliot that says "I noticed it"? On this, the most apposite I can be, I bring Zola's exclamation to the table: Eliot - "J'accuse".

It seems to me, that with his choice of references and allusions, Eliot looked to, and brought the past to him. He did not, however, in this reader's opinion look to, or bring into the future any of that. Those are my further thoughts on this. :-)

Morag : I'd be delighted.  Meanwhile, you haven't said what you think about the passage I quoted from 'Little Gidding'. Have you read 'The Four Quartets'?

In 'The Waste Land', Eliot was drawing on cultural references to create a multi-layered work.  You don't have to like it, but it certainly isn't true that he simply slapped down a lot of quotations and wrote a few linking passages.  If you seriously doubt whether Eliot revised his work, try googling 'The Waste Land original manuscript image'.  He cut and revised and rewrote.  He also asked his friend Ezra Pound to edit the poem, resulting in about half being cut out.  A facsimile of the original manuscript, together with transcriptions and notes, is available in book form: it runs to 184 pages.

I've written comments on some of your poems.  I think they are very good, but as a trained proofreader I am unable to stop myself pointing out tiny errors.  Sorry.

D I Harrison : Thank you very much for your reply, Morag. It is always interesting to get a perspective from someone like yourself, who clearly love's Eliot's work. And thoughtful and considering so that you have spent considerable time reading his poetry. I cannot claim to have your knowledge of the subject, clearly not as I failed to pick up on the biblical references in 'The Chase'.

However, I will continue to commit to some of my points. You are, of course, correct in pointing out the reference to Dante's 'Inferno' is one Eliot points out in the notes to this, and I was aware of it before I wrote the first comment. I had access to these notes because they are, helpfully, included in the Faber Paperback edition of 'Selected Poems', (1948). I believe this version contains much the same poems as the later edition, from the 60s.

The simple fact of his acknowledging their attribution is, to me, not a big enough fig leaf for him to cover my problem with what he does. As a practising poet who hopes to improve, but having been described (many years ago now) as 'a good poet' by the Visiting Professor of English at the University of California at San Francisco, David Rees.

He was a very good, if unheralded critic. The man who first taught me some rules to abide by:  1)  If you write something of which some is brilliant and other parts not More Is Not Better. 2) If you write something that is too long to point of bashing the reader over the head with boredom, then cjut out everything you've written up to the point you think this is. Next day, come back and find places to cut another third out.3) You don't get rid of what you've cut out. It'd likely that there will parts you can use elsewhere. 4) 'Cogito ergo sum' - A poem is in a constant state of being written as long as you can think.5) Be your own worst critic.

My apologies for having gone about this at somw length, it was however necessary so that you would understand the agenda I have. Merely using references from far and wide and coming up with a few, or more, original parts to link them (or, indeed, as Eliot does quite a lot zaps off at a tangent where the reader is expected to change tack suddenly) does not, as far as I'm concerned, constitute poetry. As far as I am concerned, plagiarism is plagiarism no matter what shiny new outfits you give it.

To me, what Eliot did was use his intellectual and knowledge, nothing more. And, being someone who writes poetry I know first hand how difficult the task of writing is. I think Einstein said that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". I make no claims to be a genius, indeed far from it, but I believe it true nonetheless in whatever field you are.

One of my continuing troubles with Eliot is that I can get no sense from his work that he has gone through this.For me, what Eliot has done is take a whole stack of references, of which he had cartloads and a prodigious knowledge of them. He also, I grant, had a magnificent intellect. In that sense, I believe, Eliot towered over his contemporaries. What he writes is, to me, simply an intellectual exercise. And to show you what I mean here I have undertaken the task of myself writing a poem which uses these 'cheats'.

I will post it both here, and in my published poems by tomorrow, and your task(if you choose to accept it) will be, at least firstly, to identify and attribute the references I use.

Morag : Eliot quotes a lot from the work of other poets.  I can understand that it can be disappointing to admire an image and then find it wasn't original, but I am surprised that it was such a shock in the case you quote.  The Dante passage is given in the notes, which are always printed with The Waste Land.

Eliot is often criticised for writing a poem so obscure that he had to provide it with notes - and the notes appear to assume that the reader is already familiar with Dante's Inferno.  If s/he is, then by quoting a single line Eliot is able to link the crowds of commuters crossing London Bridge with the crowds of dead approaching Hell.

I agree that the Choruses from the Rock are far from being Eliot's best work.  However, they do not represent Eliot 'naked', without quotations.  'Waste and void.  And darkness on the face of the deep' is a quotation from Genesis 1:2, and 'In this land no man has hired us' is a quotation from the  Matthew 20:7.  I think the first line you quote is deliberately ugly, to reflect the ugliness he sees in the kind of life he describes, and the whole thing is flat and stilted because he is trying to imitate the Chorus in classical Greek plays.

Here is a section from 'Little Gidding'.  I can't spot any quotations in it, though I could be wrong.  Why not take this as an example of 'naked' Eliot?

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
    Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre—
    To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
    We only live, only suspire
    Consumed by either fire or fire.

Personally, I loved Eliot's poetry even when I understood very little of what he was talking about, and I love it all the more now.  Every time I read it I find something new.

D I Harrison : Oh, heresies of heresies! While this poem is one of my favourites of Eliot's, and it is a very good example of his style. I have to say, after reading Eliot's 'Selected Poems' (the Faber paperback edition), in the beginning the more I read the more I was liking them. But in order to try and understand them I was reading each poem 4,5, and 6 times. This, of course,made me quite conversive with a number of his poems, and I checked his references (and part of his poems that I didn't follow both with his own notes and references I found with internet searches).

The first thing, and it isn't not obvious and I wonder if anyone has picked this up, 'The Hollow Men' was considered by Eliot, from his own notes, to be the poem he wrote most directly connected with World War 1. 500 bonus points to anyone who, hand on heart, say that they could pick that up from the poem. Because I couldn't, even after reading this more 6 times in the 3 month period when I was immersing my in an ocean of Eliot.

Secondly, many of the what are called 'the references' of Eliot to works elsewhere, such as Dante, are in fact something slightly more than simply references. I'm afraid old Eliot was a little bit of a plagiarist when it comes down to it. He did not  just make reference, he took whole passages, mixed up the wording a bit, and stuck them in his work.

I cannot be sure whether he has done this in this particular work, once I realised he was doing it I became uninterested in where he did it after that point. Here, however, is (to me) the worst example. Worst because, until I'd found out, it had been my favourite image from Eliot. I found it so moving, and full of compressed humanity. Just two little lines and these are they:


From 'The Wasteland':
"A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many."
(LL. 62-63 'The Burial of the Dead')

And Dante's 'Inferno'?:
'...after it there came so long a train
Of people, that I ne'er would have believed
That ever Death so many had undone.'
(LL. 52 – 57)

I'm very much afraid, that's case proved to me. There are other examples throughout his work, but that being to me the most glaring is the one that stands out.

Thirdly, when I read 'The Chase' from Choruses in ,The Rock', the last in my collection, I discovered Eliot when he was, as it were, naked. Without all the dressing up in other writers words an imagery. This is a representative portion:
'Chorus:
What does the world say, does the whole world stray in
  high powered cars on a by-pass way?

Voice of the Unemployed (more faintly):
                                  In this land
No man has hired us...

Chorus:
Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on
       the face of the deep.
Has the Church failed mankind, or has mankind failed
      the Church?
When the Church is no longer regarded, not even opposed,
              and men have forgotten
All gods except Usury, Lust and Power.'

Personally, I find that to be tired, full of cliche, bland and boring imagery and appalling rhymes. 'say, stray, and way'? The unemployed saying no-one's hired them, well forgive me if I'm stating the bleedin' obvious but (to coin a phrase) "they would say that, wouldn't they?". It is hardly earth-shattering as a pointed reflection of the state of workmen when there are millions unemployed. I could go on, and on. So I'll stop.

For these reasons, amongst others, Eliot would not make near the Top 20 Most Important British Poets Ever; nor would he be near the top of any list I could make, personally, of Great British Poets of the 20th century. Not when we have Owen, Yeats, Auden, Plath and Larkin to be accounted for. If anyone gets to the end of this, I would be very interested in your thoughts.

asthewindbehaves : I just love every haunting word of this beautiful poem. Ahhhhhhhhh Eliot You have outdone yourself, sir.

GriffGriffin :

I grow old, I grow old.... I find that this poem reminds me that as a youth I was filled with wondrous hope and possibility, and as I age, I only see the futility of all things.

Ezra Pounder : TS Eliot, I thank you for creating such masterful work. Inspiration drips from every carefully crafted line. Bravo.
Kind Regards
Ezra

Morag : If that's how you feel about the re-election of a man who didn't write off 47% of Americans as worthless scroungers, this is certainly the right poem for you.

Susan Craig :

A fitting poem for a morning when we wake to find our nation has chosen to slide into mediocrity rather than work for recovery.

:

This poem had a big influence on me when I first read it in college.

It is a very accurate description of the hopelessness that fills those who have passed on to the spiritual world. We the living need to fill the hollow feeling within us with a life of goodness and living for the sake of others. Life is short and we shouldn't have any regrets for what we have done or not done.