De
aanleiding voor dit blog wordt het Spinoza-gedicht van Allison Pitinii Davis
"Falls in Love, or Reads Spinoza" waarnaar ik in het blog van 17 april 2018 verwees en dat de dichteres mij
toezond om op dit blog te publiceren. Dat doe ik in een volgend blog. Zij gaf
aan het gedicht als motto enige beroemde regels van T.S. Eliot mee, waaruit ze ook
de titel van haar gedicht destilleerde. Het leek mij nuttig ter voorbereiding
op dat gedicht eerst enige inleidende blogs te maken. Over T.S. Eliot.
Thomas
Stearns Eliot was dichter, toneelschrijver en invloedrijk literair criticus.
Hij ontving de Nobelprijs in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer
contribution to present-day poetry." Hij schreef gedichten als The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday,
en Four Quartets; van de zeven toneelstukken
Murder in the Cathedral en The Cocktail Party; en het essay Tradition and the Individual Talent.
Eliot was geboren als Amerikaan, vertrok in 1914 toen hij 25 was naar het
Verenigd Koninkrijk en werd Brits onderdaan in 1927. [cf. en.wikipedia
en www.britannica.com/biography/T-S-Eliot]
Reading
Spinoza or falling in love
T. S. Eliot was zoals gezegd niet alleen dichter, maar ook criticus. In de Times Literary Supplement van oktober 1921 schreef hij een review van Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Selected and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press. London; Milford).
Het werd bekend als zijn essay "The Metaphysical Poets" [cf. html en pdf], “an extremely influential essay,” waarnaar veel wordt verwezen en waaruit vooral de volgende passage dikwijls is geciteerd en besproken:
T. S. Eliot was zoals gezegd niet alleen dichter, maar ook criticus. In de Times Literary Supplement van oktober 1921 schreef hij een review van Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler. Selected and edited, with an Essay, by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Clarendon Press. London; Milford).
Het werd bekend als zijn essay "The Metaphysical Poets" [cf. html en pdf], “an extremely influential essay,” waarnaar veel wordt verwezen en waaruit vooral de volgende passage dikwijls is geciteerd en besproken:
“When a
poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular,
fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two
experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the
typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences
are always forming new wholes.”
Ik
geef van de toepassing en bespreking van deze passage een paar voorbeelden.
Zo
schrijft dr. Isola Rajagopalan, METAPHYSICAL POETRY - AN INTRODUCTION. [In: Shanlax International Journal of English,
Vol. 2 No. 2 March, 2014 - PDF] n.a.v. van dit citaat:
The
most striking characteristic of the metaphysical poets is their possession of what
T.S. Eliot calls "unification of sensibility". The phrase denotes the
fusion of thought and emotion. Grierson rightly points out that the
"peculiar blend of passion and thought, feeling and ratiocination, is the
greatest achievement of the metaphysical poets".
The
metaphysical poets felt their thought. In these poets there is a "direct
sensuous apprehension of thought or a recreation of thought into feeling".
As James Reeves says "Intellect and emotion are inseparably united, they
exist in harmony, not in opposition", in these poets. But on the contrary,
in the poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, or other romantic poets, there is tension
between the two, viz., thought and feeling, rarely union. We cannot imagine
Donne sighing, as Keats did "for a life of sensations rather than of
thoughts".
Leigh
Wilson, Modernism and Magic. Experiments
with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult. Edinburgh University Press,
2013, 2015, p. 194 books.google
Het
citaat speelt een grote rol in Chapter 7, “Free Verse and Poetry” In Charles O.
Hartman, Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody.
Northwestern University Press, 1996– books.google
Een recent
boek is van een schrijver die meer boeken over Eliot schreef: G. Douglas
Atkins, T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal
Meaning and Embodied Truth [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013] met daarin Chapter 3: « Falling in Love and Reading Spinoza: Some Forms of
Approach to “Amalgamating Disparate Experience” »
Abstract: From beginning to end, in verse and prose alike,
Eliot was concerned with “separation”: for example, in the fragmentariness of
modern awareness, of thought and feeling of men and women from each other, of
the modern world and the wellsprings of cultural and spiritual understanding,
as of letter and spirit. He famously sought to overcome the “dissociation of
sensibility” and to “amalgamate disparate experience” The Incarnation—that
“impossible union”—instances the way to bring differences and even opposites
together, with far-flung implications. Eliot’s discovery of “tension” as
figuring, for example, the effective relation of Church and State stems from
Incarnational understanding. [Cf.]
Tot slot een
passage uit het hoofdstuk van Gregory S. Jay, “Discovering the Corpus” in Harold
Bloom (Ed.), T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land
[New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986; updated edition New York: Chelsea
House / Infobase Publishing, 2007 p. 75 – 94 en m.n. op p. 86 books.google
According
to Eliot, the disinheritance of the modern poets occurred when feeling and
intellect split, as they do in the "ordinary" mind. "When a
poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular,
fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two
experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the
typewriter or the smell of cooking: in the mind of the poet these experiences
are always forming new wholes" (SE, 247). J. Hillis Miller observes that
these "are a miscellaneous lot," betraying Eliot's "feeling that
experience is in fact chaotic" and harmonized only by "ironic conjunction."
11 This miscellany, however, is no random choice, for it represents
just those experiences that The Waste
Land tries to set in order. In his essays on Leibniz (1916), Eliot's
passing references to Spinoza are in the context of debates over the connections
between mind and matter or body and soul. "Spinoza represents a definite
emotional attitude," he asserts, leaving this attitude undefined, though
we may infer a reference again to "Spinoza's naturalism ... his disbelief
in free-will and immortality" and the "materialistic
epiphenomenalism" of his "view of the relation of mind and body"
(ICE, 198, 194). Reading Spinoza plunges one into a deterministic
"naturalism" that leaves little room for the soul to govern its responses
to sensory influences. The doctrines of this heretical, exiled philosopher
question the modality of a soul that would transcend, yet still involve,
sensation—a doubt Eliot attempts to resolve by recourse to Aristotle and
Bradley (ICE, 194-95, 205-206). Falling in love and the smell of cooking awaken
the natural emotions and senses that lead to these dilemmas. From the
"Preludes" to "Burbank with a Baedeker" and
"Gerontion," Eliot explores the disturbing effects of sensory life on
the orders of consciousness. Of course, it is up to the "noise of the
typewriter" to write these feelings into a satisfying accord.”
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