T.S. Eliot & Thomas Hardy Context/Critics (Hugo)

the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

Eliot on Tiresias

The historic sense involves a perception [...] of the pastness of the past, [and also] of its presence.

Eliot in "Tradition and the Individual Talent"

gradual breakdown of the west of a moral and spiritual framework

Simon Mold on the cultural background of the Waste Land

notes of sterility and desperation

Mold on the Waste Land's pessimism

unshaped fragments are collected by their hearers to infer meaning

Perry on the Waste Land's fragmentation

universe of non-ending

Perry soundbite

an assemblage of human cries

Hughes on voicing in the Waste Land

the poem stops short of regeneration

Gordon on the ending of the Waste Land

the inescapability of social conventions and the stifling prescriptions of polite decorum constitute a new kind of infernal entrapment

Perry on Prufrock

a portrait of a failure, or of a character who fails.

Ezra Pound on Prufrock

all contain a consciousness of broken connections [...] [and an] inability to connect

J.S. Brooker on poems in the Prufrock collection

searching for form in a formless age

Brooker on form

collapse differences and hope of change

Mays on Preludes

The man struggles with his own ambivalence, longing for freedom, but choosing to remain bound

Laurentia on Portrait

dreaminess and inability to stay on the point

Kaveney on Prufrock

fearfulness of connection

Perry on the Hollow Men

moments of experience [...] that he can't pin a label on

Perry on Journey of the Magi

Murphy on Preludes

world hovers on the brink of moral disaster and has certainly embraced despair and decay

Murphy on magi

Seen the light but is unable to...recognise its source.

scepticism, loss of faith, and that sense of eviction from the consolations of traditional religion

Paulin on Hardy's faith

Hardy the traditionalist and Eliot the modernist

Davie (attributed) on Hardy and Eliot's differences

memory for Hardy was bound up intrinsically with the sense of loss

Shelston on Hardy's memory

consciousness is composed of fragments of memory

Shelston on memory for Hardy and Eliot

paraphrased, the poem reads: Stupid bird!

Cash on The Darkling Thrush

finite man in an infinite universe

Cash on Hardy's poetry

hopeless hope

McRae on the Oxen

the only part that justifies the whole

Eliot on part V of the Waste Land

to see beneath both beauty and ugliness, to see boredom, and horror, and the glory

Eliot in The Use of Poetry

the principle of spontaneity

Hardy on the Gothic principle

silence is central to this poem

Gordon on sound in the waste land

myth is a way of "controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape [...] to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy"

Eliot on myth in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth"

"The poem is itself a means of participating in the afterlife of a 'dear ghost'".

Ford on Hardy

"With trance-like casualness, 'At Castle Boterel' folds into the Orphic myth of the quest for the lost beloved the sorts of quotidian detail that belong to realist fiction, while simultaneously opening time like a fan".

Ford on Hardy

"the onward progress to disaster...is suspended, and Emma is allowed to preserve, like a figure in a photograph, her girlish form."

Ford on Hardy

"by both literally and poetically retracing the footsteps of their old love, Hardy strove to keep his 'dear ghost' imaginatively alive, resurrected 'for a breath' from 'the transitory in Earth's long order, until the remorseless contractual terms of elegy return her".

Ford on Hardy

"Emma's death thus represented a double challenge and a double grief, confronting Hardy with the truth of his marriage."

Armstrong on 1912-13 Collection

"Hardy's epigraph itself asks questions about the status of remembered passion. The words position Hardy as Dido, falling in love again."

Armstrong on 1912-13 Collection

"For Davie the three poems added at the end of the sequence in 1919 represent a betrayal of the powerful affirmative vision of 'At Castle Boterel', turning metaphysical insights into mere moments in the psychology of grief."

Armstrong on 1912-13 Collection

In 'Where the Picnic Was', Hardy "sees the devastation for what it is."

Armstrong on 1912-13 Collection

"In few other elegies has the poet gone so far to undermine his own identity or had to fight so desperately for his own survival".

Sacks on Hardy's elegies

There is "a great deal of aggression in some of the poems" (The Going, Lament, A Circular, Castle Boterel)

Armstrong on elegiac speaker

Poems "incorporate and trope on elements of elegiac tradition", but "are harsher than most of his models". He uses traditional elements (Seasons, flowers, childism), but follows these poem with "Without Ceremony".

Armstrong on Hardy

The final vision of Emma in 'At Castle Boterel' is "Orphic, over the shoulder...finally leaving Emma's image amidst the rainy gloom of what seems close to an underworld".

Armstrong on 'At Castle Boterel'

Hardy makes "himself one of the vestigia" with "a wintry stoicism". "It is Emma's death which is the event which makes him as a poet".

Armstrong on closure in 'Where the Picnic Was'

"The purples which prink the main as seen from Beeny Cliff are the spiritual light of sexual love".

Davis on imagery in Beeny Cliff

Hardy "pulled in the three extra poems so as to deny his own experience, to persuade himself and others that the experience had not happened".

Davis on final 3 poems of 1912-13 Collection.

In 'At Castle Boterel', Miller thinks that Emma is a ghost of past love in Hardy's mind, Davis repudiates and says Hardy is asserting that love conquers time.

McSweeney on argument

"Emma of latter years has been superseded by the Emma of early days—the dame by the maiden."

McSweeney on 1912-13 Collection

'Spell of the Rose' and 'St. Launce's Revisited' "provide a temporal and psychological space between the closing poems of the eighteen-poem sequence" and the final one, 'Where the Picnic Was' "serves as a coda to the sequence".

McSweeney on final 3 from 1912-13 Collection

"It is still, of course, "a phantom of his own figuring," not a metaphysical one. Yet, unlike the earlier phantoms in the sequence, this one is not in any way merely imagined, or talked into exis-tence, or speculated about, or a conventional one that must disappear at dawn; it remains "warm, real, and keen," as if phantom and substance have finally become one."

Sexton on recovery in 'Phantom Horsewoman'

"The themes of the entire sequence culminate here. The speaking haunters and brief glimpses of the earlier poems"

Sexton on 'Phantom Horsewoman' as zenith

The phantom is "a transmuted and stylized version of the real Emma who carries the redemptive power to renew time".

Sexton on what Hardy's figuring represents

"In the climax of the "there" poems, the identity between past and present was momentarily perfect. Here there is constant awareness of change, decay and death."

Sexton on first 18 vs. final 3 from Hardy's 1912-13 Collection

Recovery is brought about...by the creative process itself.

Sexton on PH