I Read a Poem
So, I read a poem. I read The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot, knowing nothing about it, I was totally ignorant of how it tied into the First World War if you can believe, I thought it was just going to be about the emptiness of modernity. I quite liked it, it painted intimate, highly-coloured images, although I didn’t really care about the short chapter on the sailor and the final chapter about well, walking through very dry lands.
I gave each section lots of time to sink in and I read them each a few times. I did a bit of background reading about the “Georgian” poets of the 1900s and teens, who still mainly praised the beauty of nature and individual responses to that. I read one academic’s blog which had a section explaining the potential sources for and meanings of each section of The Wasteland, and found that pretty useful, but in the end, we don’t know “exactly” what is going on in The Wasteland, we have interpretations.
Through this blog I was suggested three poems to read alongside of The Wasteland, to contextualize it. Well, two were outright suggested in the academic’s article and linked directly, the third was only mentioned (but we will get to that). So, getting a bit of a taste for something I appear to have been missing my whole life, I read Rupert Brook’s 1912 poem “Grantchester” and found it MARVELOUS. Apparently Georgian poetry, and RHYMES are for me, and I think I will attempt to commit this one to memory. The rhymes are sufficiently jingly enough, I believe, and it praises Cambridge, which is alright I guess. This poem was being offered as the “pre-War” selection, and yes, it preserves the vanished sunshine of those mythic afternoons, of which we have by now heard so much about, absolutely everyone everywhere was having a fantastic time before 1914…but still, I like this poem a lot.
The War poem that was suggested, also as a modern-style poem was “Antwerp” written by Ford Madox Ford and published in 1914. There was despair and the gloom of war here, the waste, the overturning of those old, pretend glorious-battle ideals. One knows that this sort of disillusion happened, and some poets record the carnage, poetically, but it’s wonderful, in a sombre way, for me to read this eyewitness account from so close to the time. Already by 1914 pathos was being admitted as a war-experience, and it would get so much worse. At home I have a book of poetry from the First World War, this made me think I would explore it more. We only ever learned (year after year after year) ‘In Flanders Fields’ which I still have by heart, and its basically the only thing I do.
The most surprising thing, was that when I searched out the third-mentioned poem, which I could only get as a pdf someone had scanned (and it is true, apparently only 175 copies were ever printed) was that it was truly great. The Wasteland is also great, this is not a ranking competition, but what was certainly underplayed on this blog was HOW modern Hope Merrillees’ Paris: A Poem was, published 1919, in both form and typeography. In content it is very similar to The Wasteland which appeared three years later, Paris involves multitudes of Classical allusions, but who or what is speaking is more vague than in The Wasteland, facts and fancies just seem to emanate out of the city of Paris itself. T.S. Eliot’s poem is more people-focused, and in this way, not quite as ‘high-art’ I think, he has to have speakers telling us what to think. You don’t know what is happening in either poem, and they both do make you feel, but I think I prefer Merrilees. I want to read it again. The Wasteland is certainly worth a re-read (except the boring last section, blergh) but there are very few things that strike me exactly right, so much that I would want to read them again.
What is also interesting in this story is the sexism, or I should rather say, the “accidents of history.” It’s true, Merrilees poem didn’t seem to ‘catch-on’ when it was first published, maybe it was even a bit too early. And it has never been reprinted, it seems, outside of scholarly editions of her works, of which now about 5 exist. Apparently there is even an acronym I saw used in just the first few lines of a TLS column I cannot get ahold of, FFM, for “forgotten female modernist.” So maybe there have been a bevy of ladies who just fell into the cracks in The Wasteland.
But, it IS worth nothing that Merrilees’ work was published three years before Eliot’s, by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press, and T.S. Lewis was an acquaintance/friend of hers and also, apparently of Merrilees. I think it is almost a certainty that he read her poem, and the fact that she first mentions April’s unkindness as a month, twice in her poem…it seems…that with some work on the subject it could be established that The Wasteland borrows from Paris: a Poem, mainly with the method of referencing the classical world (I know that is done a lot, but the way in which it is done in both poems seems to a casual reader, quite similar). What T.S. Eliot did not borrow was her interesting typeography (I love it myself) which would have been a bit of a giveaway. Eliot separates his poem into sections headed by Roman numerals just like Ford Madox Ford’s Antwerp (which may be why it was suggested as something that should be read alongside The Wasteland). Ford does not go crazy in his word-imagery though, it is still very “understandable” what is happening in his poem.
I’m just going to end with something that rankled. Now (since about 1990) it is beginning to be realized that there was (at least one) poem which very much presaged The Wasteland. But this certainly hasn’t affected what is taught to us normals. I have only ever heard of T.S. Eliot, and how you should read his modern work which changed everything. Oh, I have also heard of Ezra Pound, and that he did quite a decent amount of pruning to The Wasteland (and also, about his awful politics). And what is worse, is that the academic blog I read also tries to explain Paris: A Poem away, as a coincidence, writing (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t find it again) “it almost seems as if the post-world War I world required such responses.”
I know, I know, it seems tiny. But this is the difference between men’s and women’s contributions. The same blog says The Wasteland is “timeless” and “landmark”, while admitting it has several precedents, but that nevertheless T.S. Eliot “took modernism to new heights.” Not that there has to be a direct comparison, and The Wasteland is also great, but it actually doesn’t go farther than Paris: A Poem, because that poem also plays with the layout of words on a page, which I think makes it categorically “more modern.” And it is fine, to laud a great man, I’m sure that tendency is not going to go away soon. Fine. But it is the totally unconscious down-playing of Merrilees’ poem’s rights of originality and precedence, by implying, oh so casually, only when speaking of her work, that sometimes the Zeitgeist just makes works like this appear. Just births them magically into existence.
No. No. It’s not an accident, when a woman hits upon genius and originality. It is genius. Punkt.
Do read them though. Read all four. This is a new sensation for me, to be able to encourage you to read something I did, but I am ever so glad I read these poems! And I would not be adverse to reading more of any of these authors in the future.