T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965) “Falling in Love or Reading Spinoza" [1] #spinoza

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:

“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.]

Zie b.v. deze diapresentatie over “Metaphysical poetry - c.1600–c.1690” [PDF]

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.”