UD admires T.S. Eliot. She recently, on this blog, discussed a short poem of his.
As UD prepares to teach – next week – a course on modernism, she checks to make sure Eliot’s cultural centrality numbers are as high as ever.
***************************
Here’s her first hit on Google News for T.S. Eliot, from the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette:
“Not with a bang but a whimper.”
T.S. Eliot was talking about the end of the world, not the power-charged Pontiac, proud maker of Firebirds, GTOs and other muscle cars.
You could probably have gotten a good deal on a Pontiac this week – such as a discount and 0 percent financing – with GM phasing out the brand at year’s end ..
The Waste Land is the Eliot poem everyone knows about, of course, but The Hollow Men — its last lines anticipating the death of the GTO — has also worked its way into the popular mind.
***********************************
Two items of interest about The Waste Land convey how powerful that work remains.
The beach shelter at Margate, where Eliot went for a few weeks in 1921 to recover from a mental breakdown, and where he wrote an early draft of the poem (“On Margate Sands / I can connect / Nothing with nothing.”), has been designated a protected Special Architectural or Historic Interest site. “To anyone that cares about poetry, the shelter is a shrine, a temple, a small monument to a great genius,” comments Andrew Motion, a recent poet laureate.
Plus there’s a current production of The Waste Land on a London stage. Excerpts from the show, and some conversation about it, here.
January 8th, 2010 at 9:45PM
Sigh. I love him. Ever since my foray into “Prufrock” in an undergrad poetry workshop.