An Introduction to Eliot, Stevens, and Cummings Freudian
Approaches to Reading (essayoption) T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J.
Alfred Prufrock Wallace Stevens: The Emperor of Ice Cream e. e.
cummings: i carry your heart with me, in time of daffodils(who
know, anyone lived in a pretty how town Note: all material not
covered today will be moved to next week! Peer Partner Assignment:
Selecting a focus for your Term Paper Question Set #4 on the
Readings/Discussion
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Take notes Be patient and take it all in Ask Questions (lots of
them) Write down terms that you need more help in understanding; I
can work with you one-on-one You can do poetry
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You have a handout on how to read poetry** Reading at this
level requires writing Engage Question Take nothing at face value
Take risks
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6 May 1856 23 September 1939
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psychoa'nalysis. Treating disorders of the personality or
behavior by bringing into a patients consciousness his unconscious
conflicts and fantasies (which are attributed chiefly to the
development of the sexual instinct) through the free association of
ideas, analysis and interpretation of dreams and allowing him to
relive them by transference. A theory of personality and psychical
life derived from this, based on concepts of the ego, id, and
super-ego, the conscious, pre- conscious, and unconscious levels of
the mind, and the repression of the sexual instinct; more widely, a
branch of psychology dealing with the unconscious.
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The Interpretation of Dreams, 1899/1900
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Like the work of many other important thinkers, Freud s work is
complex and not fully consistent. His thinking evolved over the
course of 50 years, and he often changed or rejected parts of his
earlier thinking. Many later parts of his work, when he was old and
mortally ill, were expressed quite schematically. Broadly speaking,
Freud s work traces the relationship among a number of different
systems or structures of the human psyche. The elements
include:
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The Id The Ego The Superego
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The Unconscious The Preconscious The Conscious
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Eros Thanatos
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At birth the individual is psychically not fully formed--
totally unconscious mass of instinctive desires The individual is
unaware that she or he is an individual The child assumes that it
is the world, complete and self- sufficient The child has no real
awareness of self The child is a bundle of drives seeking to
fulfill the pleasure principle
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All its actions are pure manifestations of the two major drives
EROS and THANATOS, though at this stage EROS seems completely
dominant The child is thus totally driven to seek pleasure; it is a
collection of wants in search of immediate satisfaction The primary
satisfaction it seeks is through its oral area, by putting things
in its mouth
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Advances in technology World War I, World War II
Industrialization Media and wide-spread knowledge distribution
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The term modernism refers to the radical shift in aesthetic and
cultural sensibilities in art and literature after World War I. The
ordered, stable and inherently meaningful world view of the
nineteenth century could not, wrote T.S. Eliot, accord with the
immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history... rejecting nineteenth- century optimism, [modernists]
presented a profoundly pessimistic picture of a culture in
disarray.
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18881965
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BIRTH: Thomas Stearns Eliot September 26, 1888 in Missouri
CHILDHOOD: father, Henry Ware Eliot the president of the Hydraulic
Brick Company mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns volunteer at the
Humanity Club of St. Louis was a teacher. At the time of Eliots
birth, his parents were in their mid-forties siblings were already
grown. EDUCATION: attended Harvard University left with a masters
and undergraduate degrees. returned to Harvard to receive a Phd in
philosophy
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Toured the continent after Harvard 1915 married first wife,
Vivienne Haigh- Wood 1917 began working at Lloyds bank in London
1925 left the bank to work at a publishing firm 1927 converted to
Anglicanism, dropped U.S. citizenship, became a British subject
1933 separated from Vivienne
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1948 won Nobel prize 1957 married Esme Valerie Fletcher Had
been his secretary at the publishing house since 1949 37 years his
junior (he was nearly 70, she was 32) Preserved his literary legacy
after Eliots death In 1965, he died of emphysema in London at the
age of seventy-seven 1983 won two posthumous Tony Awards for
Cats
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Eliots theories about modern poetry are enacted in his work:
his writing exemplifies not only modernity, but also the modernist
mode it seeks to put the reader off balance so as to capture the
incoherence and dislocations of a bewildering age. the modern
individual is no longer at ease here he has witnessed the birth of
something new and unprecedented, and finds the change to be a
[h]ard and bitter agony he also attempts to counteract its
disorderliness: bringing disparate elements into some sort of
conceptual unity. The poets mind is in fact a receptacle for
seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which
remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new
compound are present together
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A poem should be an organic thing in itself, a made object Once
it is finished, the poet will no longer have control of it It
should be judged, analyzed by itself without the interference of
the poets personal influence and intentional elements and other
elements
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Modern life is chaotic, futile, fragmentary Eliot argues that
modern poetry must be difficult to match the intricacy of modern
experience. poetry should reflect this fragmentary nature of life:
The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive,
more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning this nature of life should be projected,
not analyzed
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disconnected images/symbols literary allusions/references
Sometimes VERY obscure!!! highly expressive meter rhythm of free
verses metaphysical whimsical images/whims flexible tone
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock love indecision
Powerlessness, impotence Stream-of-consciousness The impotence and
sterility of the modern world; cultural fragmentation disaffected
sexual relationships in the modern, faithless world The disrupted
cycles of: death and regeneration decay and growth; the possibility
of spiritual and aesthetic unity: through religious belief and
mythic structure;
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The devotion to the making of money and poetry as a
businessman, a lawyer, and a poet: moneysensuous experiencethe
basic element of his poetry Stay-at-home type: not through
traveling but through art, literature, and philosophy to acquire
the essence of the European culture Influenced by French symbolist
poets: the philosophical thoughts are instilled in his poetry
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Focus: the relationship between reality and poetry, nature and
imagination 2 kinds of reality: a. The objective reality: the
perceptions by the five senses b. The subjective reality: mental
world dominated by imagination (to arrange the chaotic information
from the sensual perception)
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Hedonism: the significance on the enjoyment of sensual emotions
Poetry of statement: an act of faith in the sense of nothingness in
reality Simple lines: an emphasis on vocabulary and imagery rather
than prosody The faith in poetry: when no one believes in God, it
is necessary to believe in something else, such as poetry, a thing
created by imagination
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Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him
whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
--------------------------------------------------------
concupiscent: a strong desire, especially sexual desire; lust.
curds: a coagulated liquid
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Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear,
and let the boys 5 Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
-------------------------------------------------------- wench: a
young woman or girl, especially a peasant girl; a wanton woman
dawdle: to waste time by idling
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Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of
ice- cream.
-------------------------------------------------------- be: what
is finale: the concluding part seem: what appears
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Take from the dresser of deal, Lacking the three glass knobs,
that sheet 10 On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it
so as to cover her face.
--------------------------------------------- deal:plain,
unfinished wood. fantails: any of a breed of domestic pigeons
having a rounded, fan-shaped tail
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If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is,
and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. 15 The only emperor is the
emperor of ice- cream.
-------------------------------------------------------- horny:
tough and calloused; (vulgar slang: sexually aroused) protrude: to
push outward affix: secure, append
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1894-1962
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Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1894. He received his B.A.
in 1915 and his M.A. in 1916, both from Harvard. During the First
World War, Cummings worked as an ambulance driver in France, but
was interned in a prison camp by the French authorities (an
experience recounted in his novel, The Enormous Room) for his
outspoken anti-war convictions. After the war, he settled into a
life divided between houses in rural Connecticut and Greenwich
Village, with frequent visits to Paris.
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In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form,
punctuation, spelling and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques
and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of
poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for
settling into his signature style and not pressing his work towards
further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity,
especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language,
his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.
At the time of his death in 1962, he was the second most widely
read poet in the United States, after Robert Frost.Robert
Frost