Poem of the Day (February 25)

[Anonymous No.19983822]

What are your thoughts on this poem, /lit/?

The Hollow Men I by T. S. Eliot

Yesterday's poem >>19979782

[Anonymous No.19983823]

>T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965), the 1948 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of the giants of modern literature, highly distinguished as a poet, literary critic, dramatist, and editor and publisher. In 1910 and 1911, while still a college student, he wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and other poems that are landmarks in the history of literature. In these college poems, Eliot articulated distinctly modern themes in forms that were both a striking development of and a marked departure from those of 19th-century poetry. Within a few years he had composed another landmark poem, “Gerontion” (1920), and within a decade, one of the most famous and influential poems of the century, The Waste Land (1922). While the origins of The Waste Land are in part personal, the voices projected are universal. Eliot later denied that he had large cultural problems in mind, but, nevertheless, in The Waste Land he diagnosed the malaise of his generation and indeed of Western civilization in the 20th century. In 1930 he published his next major poem, Ash-Wednesday, written after his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism. Conspicuously different in style and tone from his earlier work, this confessional sequence charts his continued search for order in his personal life and in history. The culmination of this search as well as of Eliot’s poetic writing is his meditation on time and history, the works known collectively as Four Quartets (1943): Burnt Norton (1941), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941), and Little Gidding (1942).

[Anonymous No.19983840]

Eliot realizing here he has no talent or anything worth saying. Sad poem.

[Anonymous No.19983922]

>>19983822
ESL here what's the difference between shape and form

[Anonymous No.19984061]

>>19983922
checked
shape is abstract
the difference between shape and form is substance

[Anonymous No.19984065]

>>19984061
What about shade and color?

[Anonymous No.19984077]

>>19984065
shade can mean ghost so they can be seen as ghosts without color

[Anonymous No.19984211]

Why post a fragment? The best part is part 3. "There are no eyes here"

[Anonymous No.19984840]

>>19984211
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
.

[Anonymous No.19984843]

>>19984840
IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V
Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

[Anonymous No.19985648]

>>19983822
This is my favorite of Eliot's "great" poems. It's also the one with the lowest vocabulary. It's remarkable the effect he produces with lines so sparse.
The imagery of sunlight on a broken column, the swinging trees, the singing wind, the desire and the spasm, haven't left me since I first read this poem years ago.

[Anonymous No.19985814]

This is my favorite poem of all time. It's one of the only poems I can recite from memory just because I've read and listened to it so much. Listen to Eliot's reading if you haven't, particularly the last line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAWaZqDf-VE

[Anonymous No.19986598]

>>19985814
he sounds rather homosexual

[Anonymous No.19986636]

>>19986598
Fun fact: Eliot did not lose his virginity until his mid-twenties.

[Anonymous No.19986659]

eliot is shit compared to yeats and the romantics (not that hes not great compared to recent "poetry") but the imagery of the dead remembering us as stuffed men is compelling

[Anonymous No.19986662]

I don't care for it.

[Anonymous No.19986705]

>>19986659
You’re a pleb. The romantics led to Whitman and Swinburne which led to modernism which lead to post modernism. If you were truly opposed to it you’d be praising Melville and Cowper not fucking Keats and Wordsworth. Now I’m not criticizing any poet mentioned don’t get me wrong.

[Anonymous No.19987727]

>>19983822
eliot's problem for me is that his poetry while shockingly authentic to the "dismal," is still F****ING DISMAL!!

I don't want dismal, my life can be too dismal, I want beauty.

But yeah, damn good poet cause he says what he meanses and means what he sayses. Just the subject is all wrong.

Sam damn problem with Fitzgerald. Best prose author in modern english but all he cared about was writing hte novelizations of F*(*ing new yorker cartoons

[Anonymous No.19987734]

>>19986636
high IQ trait.

>>19985814
F*** it actually like Prufrock in that it produces a palpable boredom and Nausea. Why is that "good" poetry?

[Anonymous No.19987754]

>>19984077
Y'know I'd never heard of shade meaning ghost until your post. Then I picked up a book that evening and saw shade used as ghost on the very next page.

[Anonymous No.19987759]

>>19987754
the true philologist sees that language was more truthful than it is now. the scriptures and antique poetry bear more weighthy truths than modern mind can take.

[Anonymous No.19987763]

>>19986705
never read whitman and swinburne desu are they good? i just think ts eliot and ezra pound arre hacks and everything ive tried reading after has been worse. i dont like any pomo novels either

[Anonymous No.19987774]

>>19987763
Hate Pound. Hate Eliot. Hate Whitman. Love Swinburne.
too long to post in the thread but this is a good one:
>https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45283/dolores-notre-dame-des-sept-douleurs
i really like this bit:
For the crown of our life as it closes
Is darkness, the fruit thereof dust;
No thorns go as deep as a rose's,
And love is more cruel than lust.
Time turns the old days to derision,
Our loves into corpses or wives;
And marriage and death and division
Make barren our lives.

[Anonymous No.19987799]

>>19983822
God this poem is really not good.

[Anonymous No.19987819]

>>19987774
Like Poe, Swinburne is a poet for those of youthful temperament and romantic, dreamy sentiment, he filters the spiritual norwoods, the wife-havers, the sex-havers, the christcucks, the moralfags, the redditors, etc.
also a good one
>https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45288/the-garden-of-proserpine
my fave bit:
Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love's who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands.

She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born;
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.