/lit/ - Literature

I don't understand this man. His poetry seems second-rate and his criticism is substandard. I know I am wrong because he is esteemed and I am a casual so help me understand his appeal.

>April is the cruellest month, breeding
>Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
>Memory and desire, stirring
>Dull roots with spring rain.

>In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past."[93]
>This essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a "simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.[94]
sounds retarded frfr

>>22583750
T.S. Eliot

>T.S. Eliot’s Jew-hatred was racial. It was not (as Harold Bloom claimed) “simply a mark of the authenticity of his Neo-Christianity.” This is evident from his imagery, full of horror at the stereotypical appearance of Jews, and is explicit in his 1933 lecture, “After Strange Gods.” In it he claimed:
>"The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background; and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."

Do I dare to eat a peach?

>George Orwell disapproved of Burnt Norton and stated that the religious nature of the poem and the inherent antisemitism of Christianity coincided with Eliot's poems no longer having what made his earlier works great.
Damn, didn't know Orwell was such a jew cuck.

>George Orwell disapproved of Burnt Norton and stated that the religious nature of the poem and the inherent antisemitism of Christianity coincided with Eliot's poems no longer having what made his earlier works great. The later critic Russell Kirk agreed with Orwell in part, but felt that Orwell's attacks on Eliot's religiosity within the poems fell flat. In particular, he argued that "Over the past quarter of a century, most serious critics—whether or not they find Christian faith impossible—have found in the Quartets the greatest twentieth-century achievements in the poetry of philosophy and religion."
Strange considering that Elliot works are mumbo gumbo.

>Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.

Is the literary critic doomed to self-insert? Should criticism be the purview of logicians?

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

is he /lit/-approved?

>>17280236
>O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
>It’s so elegant
>So intelligent

>people are bringing up Byron as a counterexemple of good poetry itt

Eliot was right, you can camouflage tin ear and wonky prosody with rhyming and dilettantes wouldn't be any wiser.

Stop reading Hamlet.

>Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
>Shantih shantih shantih
What did he mean by this?

>Mistah Kurtz -- he dead

How did T.S. Eliot get away with a literal murder confession?

Main purpose of this thread is to post your own poetry and critique each other
Don't be shy, this is anonymous after all

Also feel free to just share poetry you like and talk about anything relating to poetry such as techniques and what inspires your poetry etc.

Bloom hated this man because he retroactively BTFO the kind of affective, impressionist criticsm Bloom went on to practice.

>>12420970

Itt we post overrated hacks

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

>>10943072
Nice, don't forget to give Herbert, Crashaw and Marvell a read if you haven't already.

>>10945801
>>10945915
>>10945731

Good picks, but I hope you're not reading the French and Germans in translation.

>>10945855
Poetry is not translatable.

Eliot is my favourite poet because he combines the qualities and techniques of English Metaphysicals and French Symbolists, two of the most interesting poetical movements of all time.

I recommend giving all of his long poems a close reading. Some critics see a divide between his earlier works (Prufrock & The Wasteland) and his later work, following his joining the Church of England (Ash Wednesday & The Four Quartets). I think this view is overrated and that his major poems form a coherent body of work, which is one of the most thoughtful reflections on the human condition ever put into words.

Here is Eliot reading what are in my opinion his best four poems, enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAO3QTU4PzY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rpFBSO65P4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEUlzDTGd44

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga8tQrG4ZSw

>>10913162
>implying Protestantism = Lutheranism

The Anglican Communion is the only reasonable position.

It's pretty amazing that he managed to be at once the greatest critic and the greatest poet of the 20th Century.