Transcript
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hello everyone and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host Kamran Javadezadeh and I just cannot think of a time when I've been more excited to record an episode of this podcast than I am today.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah My guest today is my dear friend, Megan Quigley, friend and colleague, friend of many years, friend whom I have been trying to get onto this podcast from the beginning, and she keeps putting me off, but my my persuasion finally won her over.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And, um and it is our treat mine and yours to have Megan Quigley on today to talk about the poet T.S. Eliot and his marvelous important and ah much celebrated poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Kamran Javadizadeh: We're going to hear a lot more about Eliot and about Prufrock, obviously, in the next hour or so. This one might go long to come. But before we get to that, let me tell you about Megan. Megan is an associate professor of English at Villanova University, um and ah she's also where she's also on the Irish Studies and Gender and Women's Studies faculty.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah Megan is the author of Modernist Fiction and Vagueness, Philosophy, Form, and Language, which was published by Cambridge in 2015. And more recently, and perhaps even more relevantly to today's conversation, she is the co-editor of a volume called Elliot Now, ah which was published by Bloomsbury in 2024, and which Megan tells me is due out in paperback a month from now, less than a month from now. in Well, I don't know exactly when you'll be hearing this, but in August of 2025.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So if that's your past, by the time you hear this, make sure you've ordered that book if you haven't already, Eliot Now. It's a collection of amazing essays on T.S. Eliot and what it's like to read T.S. Eliot in the 21st century.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um Megan is also the editor of two clusters ah of essays on ah the related topics of the Me Too movement, T.S. Eliot and Modernism in Modernism Modernity's Print Plus ah platform. Those clusters appeared in 2019 and 2020. I highly recommend them.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um And Megan has written a great many essays that have appeared in places like the James Joyce Quarterly Modernism, Modernity Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, LA Review of Books, the T.S. Eliot Studies Annual, nonstite ah Nonsite, sorry um and the Cambridge Companion to European Modernism.
Kamran Javadizadeh: She is a a ah many times over lecturer and seminar leader at the T.S. Eliot International Summer School. ah where I have sometimes had the pleasure of leading a seminar with Megan. And I can say ah um by way of firsthand report that Megan is a a rock star and a celebrity in the T.S. Eliot world.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um So we're especially lucky to have her here. She's laughing. Her current... Stay muted, Megan. Her current project is The Love Song of modernism Modernism and Fan Fiction. And she has two other works in progress that I think that that's a book, but she has two other works in progress on um AI, artificial intelligence and literature.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um And an essay forthcoming um with the provocative title T.S. Eliot's Women um in a volume called A Companion ts elili ah to Eliot's Complete Prose.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um So those are the facts. I don't know where to begin in terms of introducing this friend of mine to yours. We've been friends for 25 years. ah which is an astounding fact. Megan and I have the unusual luck of having been in the same cohort in graduate school. I mean, that was lucky enough. What was ah mind-blowingly more lucky than that is that we wound up teaching at the same institution ah where we've we've both been at Villanova. Megan got there before I did. Characteristically, she, you know,
Kamran Javadizadeh: got herself situated and she's ahead of me, you know, even though we started grad school at the same time. um ah But I've been, i guess, at Villanova for 13 years, 14 years, Megan for a couple years longer than that. um And it's funny because, you know, not only are we great friends, not only are we colleagues, we work on pretty similar stuff. um In fact, we sometimes joke about how the two of us were hired to to fill the field that had been left by ah colleague and friend of both of ours, Vince Sherry, who sort of between the two of us, we cover what Vince used to do at Villanova.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um ah Though, having said that, we i I think it's fair to say, Megan, I think you'll agree with me, um that we we often come at similar topics from very different angles and with very different sort of sensibilities and methodologies and...
Kamran Javadizadeh: um intellectual temperaments, which often means, and perhaps perhaps today is no will be no different, that we are having to explain to people who um are witnessing our ah you know banter for the first time that actually we love each other and we're very good friends.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Because often it can seem like we're kind of frustrated with each other or interrupting each other or disagreeing with each other. um But it's the best kind of um it's the best kind of friendship, I think, to have. I often kid Megan about how her shelves of her office are full of these binders that just have copious notes in them on every topic imaginable, everything she's ever taught, everything she's ever written about.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um I think probably every class she took all those years ago in graduate school. um And though I kid her about them, I really admire the side of Megan that those seem to represent.
Kamran Javadizadeh: she she Her career comes out of a place of great ambition, I think. Her projects come out of a place of great ambition. um Megan wants...
Kamran Javadizadeh: to do the conceptually, intellectually most advanced version of the topics that she works on. She's not easily content ah with the ideas that she's able to formulate or with the ideas that she encounters in other people's work.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So something that I always enjoy about Megan is sitting beside her at a lecture or a talk or at somebody's presentation And there will always come a moment, however brilliant the speaker is, where when I see on Megan's face a kind of frustrated or impatient look, and I can see that bubbling up is some idea which, when she often, when she first formulates it, will be so kind of... Because there is so much energy behind it, so much intellectual excitement behind it, it often um isn't totally legible yet.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But she'll just, you know... like ah she, she, wrote I remember she read something that I wrote once and, um and she just yelled at me, Freud,
Kamran Javadizadeh: as though I should know what that meant. i mean, quickly enough, I did know what it meant, but you know, she, she brings this great excitement. The stakes are very high for Megan. um The work that she produces is, is so ambitious, is so intellectually rigorous. It's scholarship of, of the first order.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And, um, And so it's it it seems like no surprise to me that Megan would be drawn to modernism as a literary field, um that she would work not just on literature but on philosophy, that she would be turning her attention right now to the um to the question that is dominating discussion in every English department I'm familiar with. That is the question of artificial intelligence and what it represents for the work that we're doing.
Kamran Javadizadeh: She doesn't see something like that on the horizon and simply want to hide from it, as I often do. She wants to understand it and um and help us understand it and have something new and interesting to say about it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um So for all of those reasons and too many others besides, I am so delighted to see and ah ah Megan Quigley's face on my screen right now to be joined by her in this conversation.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Megan Quigley, welcome to Close Readings, my humble podcast. How are you doing today?
Emily Hale: I am great, thank you. I can neither live up to that introduction, nor can I help adding that I might have to put, stay muted, Megan, which is what you said to me.
Emily Hale: i want to emphasize that. Maybe put it on my gravestone.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, no, don't put it there.
Emily Hale: Enough, we've heard enough.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All right. No, we we will and I'll say unmute, Megan. Okay. ah
Emily Hale: And also, I do want to say, i saw this podcast when it was just a tiny germ that you were thinking about possibly doing and how proud I am and amazed by the work you've done, um the the listeners that you have reached.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Megan. Yeah.
Emily Hale: It's really fantastic. And if I haven't come on it until now, it's partially that I'm just in awe.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, that's very sweet of you to say. Thank you, Megan. I was just trying to get you to be i'm not so busy that you could actually listen to an episode or two.
Emily Hale: I did, I did.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Megan is a very, ah very busy person. ah Megan, so when when you when eventually, or as I think i was convincing you to consider coming on the podcast, you know ah there are a great many poets you you might have talked about.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Um, you chose Eliot and, um, I, and I, and I was so pleased about that because of course he's, he's a fascinating figure. He's a really important poet. You you love him or hate him. Um, he's, he's a hugely important poet.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Um, um, not just for English or American or Anglophone poetry, but, um, but for world poetry, um, I think. Um, but, Maybe we could just begin, though, with you telling us about how you first encountered T.S.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Eliot and what that first encounter was like for you.
Emily Hale: Yeah, look, I'm gonna be rude and not even answer your question and tell you that as you're speaking, all I can think of is we just had an Elliott Society meeting and Trinity College Dublin, and there were people there from all over the world. It was great.
Emily Hale: One of the things was there was a staging of Sweeney Agonistes and the clever ah theater folk had gotten T.S. Elliott's reading voice to announce all of the sort of earlier material.
Emily Hale: So saying like, turn off your phone, but in the voice of Elliott monotone reading. And that's what I'm thinking of right now as you talked. Here's a place of disaffection. Turn off your phones.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: um So that's the most recently that I've heard Elliot. i actually exactly know when I started reading Elliot, um which was junior year abroad in college. And I was taking a tutorial um at Oxford on the metaphysical poets.
Emily Hale: And I was feeling kind of lonely. And I was on a bus ride back from London. We'd seen... Shakespeare play. It was some group of people. I don't know who they were. And these two girls across the way, we'd just been introduced and one of them had looked at me. I said, yeah, i'm Megan Quigley. And one of them had turned to the other in her British accent and said, um,
Emily Hale: Quigley, what a quaint to Irish name. And, and I was thinking I'm from, I'm from Queens. I don't, I don't know. It doesn't. And I was feeling alone and I had four quartets assigned for the next week and I read it and I i started reading it and I thought, wait, I get this.
Emily Hale: Like for the first time I felt I understood sort of instinctively and it's not my favorite of Elliot's, but there was something about the, um,
Emily Hale: the way that Elliot would state something beautifully lyric and poetic and then disagree with himself. Words strain, crack, cannot stay in place, decay with imprecision. That kind of idea that really resonated with me. So both, and then I read Proofrock and the Wasteland, but sort of alienation. i thought it sounded pretty American, um even though I knew he, I had thought he was an English poet.
Emily Hale: ah So I learned more about him and And then I went back to college and kept working on Eliot and wrote a dissertation on the relationship between Adrienne Rich um and T.S. Eliot. And so I've worked on Eliot for a while, but I think it was that first moment of sort of feeling that there was a voice that was questioning itself and making statements and counter statements.
Emily Hale: And I also thought it was pretty beautiful. And that's what sort of drew me in. Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's fascinating. It's funny that I i i did not know that story or that I didn't know that the quartets is where you started, which feels like a really unusual place. I mean, I would think that for most people, it's the poem that we're talking about today or or maybe the wasteland or i don't know what else, but um that that would be the place to begin.
Emily Hale: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah For people who don't know, the quartets come a bit later Eliot's career um and are, obviously there are continuities between
Emily Hale: hu
Kamran Javadizadeh: that work and the work that we're, we're going to be talking about today, but also discontinuities and differences that they, they, they feel a bit different, um, to me, um, the thing on, on rich and Adrian rich and Elliot, uh, was, uh, an undergraduate, um, thesis.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: That's right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: and
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. And then, um, and then Elliot has obviously returned, returned to you, I think even at the dissertation dissertation stage.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And at the book, as a critic, sometimes more than a poet, like how he influenced new criticism, the new criticism, or how his ideas about impersonality or objectivity, how we react a sort of scientific approaches to language came up a bunch in the book.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. right
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Oh, great. Okay. So, but and already you've, you've like, um you've hit a couple of points that I think maybe it would be good to hear a more kind of continuous narrative about that would, that would help us think about who Elliot was and um where he fits into literary history. Obviously these are huge questions that one could answer,
Kamran Javadizadeh: um you know, write whole volumes about and so forth and so on. but But maybe just to have a kind of thumbnail sketch of them in mind. I mean, a couple of things that I that i wonder if you could address.
Kamran Javadizadeh: You said, oh, you thought he was an English poet.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And that's interesting, right? Because... you know, that's that's not where he's from. um So maybe tell us about that. um Also, you've gestured towards Eliot as a critic and Eliot's kind of influence in the history of of criticism.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah We're here today to talk about Eliot as a poet, but obviously these roles are mutually um ah you know reinforcing, ah constitu mutually sort of constitutive roles.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And so it would be useful to hear something about all of that.
Emily Hale: ah Especially, sorry, especially for somebody like Elliot who said he wrote criticism to sort of create an audience for his poetry.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, go ahead, please.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All right, so back let's back up.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: St. Louis, maybe we can start there.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: who Who was T.S. Eliot? When did he live? And how does he fit into your mental map of, ah say, modernism?
Emily Hale: Yeah. Well, I think For a long time, Eliot was thought of as Virginia Woolf called him, the poet in the four piece suit, more British than the British, living in London, he became a British citizen.
Emily Hale: um He converged to Catholicism, but I'm gonna step back because lot of work in the past few decades, but I would actually say right now as well, um has been thinking about Eliot's American roots in St. Louis.
Emily Hale: And, and In fact, Francis Dickey has a book coming out, but and her work on Eliot and St. Louis and race is just fantastic, um called Prelude in St. Louis, T.S. Eliot's First City.
Emily Hale: But she has pieces in Modernist Madonna every week and look at it because she actually thinks it's been totally underestimated how much um Jim Crow laws influenced what we think of as Eliot's alienation, that the at least the germ of it in St. Louis had a lot to do with race and segregation because he was born um September 26, 1888 in St. Louis to a fancy Boston Brahmin family who had, oh, actually, I'm not giving it in good order.
Emily Hale: One of his ancestors, this is such a great fact, um who moved from as Elliot was proud, Somerset, England, over to Salem, Massachusetts, 16th, mid 17th century, um was a judge in the Salem witch trials.
Kamran Javadizadeh: No, no way.
Emily Hale: Yeah, which given my work on Elliot, me too, is fascinating. But anyway, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Apple doesn't fall far from the the grand great grand tree, I guess. Whatever.
Emily Hale: He later did, it he did apologize later.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's funny.
Emily Hale: And then um they were Boston, fancy Boston family for a long time with the Alcotts and all sorts of people.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All right.
Emily Hale: Then his grandfather, moved to Missouri ah to set up a Unitarian church and was also one of the co co-founders of Wash Washington University St.
Emily Hale: Louis.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: And Elliot spent the first 16 years of his life in St. Louis. um Dickey's work has shown us that there was a lot of gentrification and white flight at that point. And the Elliot family clung to the the inner city where people were flying from. So their neighbors ended up being mixed race.
Emily Hale: They were sort of on the outskirts of the red light district, which all relates to Prufrock, right? um
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Lots of prostitution and now around where they were. Then at age 16, he moved to Boston. And a great word to associate with Eliot is medic.
Emily Hale: That's how he sort of defined himself, that he was always alien to any um society where, of course, he used a Greek word, metoikos. But um so that when he moved to Boston, where he'd spent his summers by the sea, growing up in the Cape Ann, whatever, um he felt an alien there too. So he felt he didn't fit in either in St. Louis because of his kind of Boston accent or, and actually he used a racial slur for his accent his Southern Missouri accent when he lived in Boston.
Kamran Javadizadeh: his end role, right?
Emily Hale: Yes, exactly.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: Um, and he lived, then he stayed in Boston. He did a PG year at Milton Academy, um, and was at Harvard. Um, and 1910, 1911 is important year because he went abroad and was in France, um, and experienced, listened to Henri Bergson's lectures and, um,
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: strolled strolled along the boulevards. Then he went back to Harvard, did his PhD in philosophy and Bradley. um And everyone thought he would become a professor of philosophy. i'd like to think about the two figures of Henry James and William James.
Emily Hale: Everyone thought he would become like the next William James. And he had that same Boston background.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Hmm.
Emily Hale: And instead, and he left family and friends, went to England, allegedly to study under Bradley. ah But while he was there, he met Ezra Pound and the rest is history.
Emily Hale: i Also left behind his family, um the young woman, Emily Hale, who he had met and professed his love to. um When he was living in ah Cambridge, he, um met a young woman.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Cambridge, of Massachusetts.
Emily Hale: No, sorry, over in England.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, sorry.
Emily Hale: Met a young woman, Vivian, and um very quickly they got married.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, okay.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And their troubled marriage is, of course, the wasteland, the source of the wasteland, um in part, as Elliot said, but also the movie Tom and Viv, which people which people have seen. um a very
Kamran Javadizadeh: I think the wasteland is the more significant outcome there in the movie, Tom and Viv.
Emily Hale: ah the Tom and Viv movie.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But anyway, go on.
Emily Hale: um And where were we? oh he never went back.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, he's in England.
Emily Hale: and
Kamran Javadizadeh: He marries. He becomes a poet, right?
Emily Hale: becomes a poet, is working at Lloyd's Bank, ah which I think is sort of a fascinating part of his history, and was not able to serve in the war because of the congenital hernia, which he suffered from as a child as well, which is why he was such a big reader.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: um And he worked, he started the Criterion in 1922, which is the same year that The Wasteland was published. He left the bank, um and then he became the famous editor that he was, where he edited all sorts of people like Auden, Spender, Faber and Faber.
Kamran Javadizadeh: At Faber and Faber.
Emily Hale: um In 1932 was another big year because it's when he left England and went to give, to teach at Harvard, to give some lectures, including some some the disturbing lectures that he gave at UVA.
Emily Hale: ah But he left his wife, Vivian, then. They'd had a tumultuous ah marriage for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that she probably had an affair with ah Bertrand Russell on her right soon after their honeymoon, um who had been Elliot's mentor. um But also because they both had strong personalities. and They both could write and were poets. She was probably addicted to drugs that she'd been prescribed as well. 1932, he leaves and they are never back. They're never together again. he separates from her. And that is a very torturous part of his history because
Emily Hale: He then later had a hand, she they wouldn't he wouldn't divorce in institutionalizing her and she didn't want to be institutionalized. She didn't want the marriage to be over and she died in an institution.
Emily Hale: um So that's another complicated part of Eliot's life, which in some ways, well, we'll get to Dante, but sort of dream woman versus reality.
Kamran Javadizadeh: well
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right, yeah. He didn't want a divorce, and I think you you mentioned this earlier, well that he moved to England, became more English than the English and so forth, but that also included a religious conversion, yeah, right.
Emily Hale: Yeah, yeah, became Anglo-Catholic. And his famous pronunciation was classicist, monarchist, and Anglo-Catholic.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, and but then and then once she died, he eventually did remarry, right? He remarried as secretary, yeah?
Emily Hale: Well, that's complicated too, because she died in 1947, sort of suddenly.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: um He had never visited her, um in her institution nor opened any letters that she sent, but he was struck horrified when she died.
Emily Hale: And then everyone thought he would marry Emily Hale, um including his family, ah the woman to whom he had met all the way back in 1912 or 13 in America and who he'd written
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. The woman he'd met in in America and left behind. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Lauren Ruffin, 1131 letters to in the interim, which were just opened. Lauren Ruffin, From Princeton archive and they're amazing um and now they're published, you can see them on ah Elliot calm the website, you can see all of his letters to and edited by john happened in.
Emily Hale: um But he didn't marry her. And in fact, one of the most powerful letters that he writes to Hale, and he had given her a ring and everything. She wasn't crazy. In her career, um she was an actress. She'd sort of given that up for him.
Emily Hale: One of the craziest letters that he wrote, which you should go read right away if you can, is where he sort of describes when his wife died and he realized that his love for Emily Hale wasn't real active love. It was just sort of imagined.
Emily Hale: And that he was sort of like he uses the language of a mummy or a sarcophagus and it all crumbles apart and there's nothing left. And I try to imagine reading that letter, like the devastation of you thought someone loved you and was going to come marry you and you were going to live happily ever after. And instead they thought they were in some sort of like Egyptian horror story.
Emily Hale: Um, And, but he did remarry, you're right, when he was ah much older and now he was filling stadiums, giving poetry readings, 12,000 people in a poetry reading in Minnesota. He's now winning the Nobel Prize in poetry.
Emily Hale: and he, a young woman who was a fan of his, went to work for him, ah Valerie, um and you they ended up getting married. He was much older than she was and they spent the rest of their lives together.
Emily Hale: um And when he died, the rest of his life, sorry.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, the rest of his life together. Yeah.
Emily Hale: and Good point.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: She had a lot more to live and give to his memory.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All right.
Emily Hale: So she spent the rest of her life sort of working on his letters and trying to, that's why it took a long time for the letters have now come out. The 10th volume of the letter, Letters is out.
Emily Hale: The Complete Prose is out. Rick's um rickx and McHugh's poetry is now out. So there's sort of a new generation of Eliot materials ah that we're all looking at, which is exciting.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And in part, thank you.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Part of what your, your book Elliot now is about so, so beautifully.
Emily Hale: Yes. Thank you.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: But part of that part of that's Valerie's legacy that she started a really hard project and then people since have picked it up.
Kamran Javadizadeh: You, but you wanted to say something else.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Okay. That's, that's a I mean, ah ah fantastic biography that you've just given us. I mean, it's so fascinating.
Emily Hale: I don't think there were any dates, sorry.
Kamran Javadizadeh: it Well, there were plenty, actually. And there's so much, obviously, i mean, there's so many more like key moments that we might want to dip into. Like, how did he write The Wasteland? Which, you know, that that was published in 22 to place us here.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Prufrock, the poem that we're talking about today, was first published in 1915, but was, but, but Eliot had basically finished writing it, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: years prior to that, I think 1910, 1911 is when he writes it.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um And I guess maybe just sort of in tying those facts down, maybe one more thing I could ask you to say before we get to the poem is, i mean, you've given us the biography.
Kamran Javadizadeh: i'd I'd also asked about his place in kind of literary history or the history of modernism and maybe just Again, that that to to do that justice would would take us too far afield, I think, today from the poem.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But maybe the shorthand version of that that we could get is you've used a word, I think, a couple of times, impersonality, um which for people um you know who are in literary academia or are deeply poetry people is maybe a familiar sort of what that
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: word or concept refers to and like in the landscape of literature is already apparent. But maybe there are other people who are ah sort of unsure. i mean, you've just told such an interestingly, personally um riveting story.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So maybe just tell us a little bit about what impersonality sort of designates for Eliot and what, yeah um, that sort of how that concept might be a, a, a window into the influence or the place he has in literary, in the literary culture of the 20th century.
Emily Hale: I guess with Prufrock in mind, If we think of the great romantics who came before him um and poetry being the expression of a soul or something like that, um what Eliot and Pound and Teehee Hume and all of the the people who came out, I'm making strong muscle um because that's what they thought of themselves, the men of 1914.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: ah they wanted to get rid of that sort of mushy Georgian romantic emotionality and instead to have a harder kind of art that would be um impersonal.
Emily Hale: It wouldn't be, and would be, ah think Ezra Pound and imagism. It would be more like a photograph or be more like a fact. And it wouldn't just be this slushy expression of one individual. And instead maybe it would,
Emily Hale: be epic. That's but one suggestion.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: That's a word that Eliot uses. would return to classical times. We would think about epics and myths. And we wouldn't instead care about and individual can can isn' and is not as interesting as what art can do. And art can be a kind of salvation. and an impersonal art um can help a culture to find itself in some ways. So the move away from romanticism into a stronger version of modernism.
Emily Hale: And Eliot's hated for part of that, right? Because that can go in all sorts of terrible ways um when you move away.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Kamran Javadizadeh: The mid-century the mid-cent American poet Delmore Schwartz referred to the the mid the middle of the 20th century as the the literary dictatorship of T.S. Eliot. right right This idea yeah that that
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: that that that ah that maybe plays into the development of um the American new Criticism,
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: where Eliot's an influential progenitor of those ideas, maybe, that we should read literature objectively somehow, or there's this sort of quasi-scientific kind of set of values that but apply to literature.
Emily Hale: hmm. Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I mean... Eliot, as you've described him to us already, and as we're about to find out in in much greater detail, is full of contradiction and and is interested in contradiction.
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: So, you know, we offer these ideas maybe as a kind of handle on Eliot, but not as the final word on on who this this poet was. Megan, I think we should we should listen to the poem. What do you think?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Do you have something else you wanted to say to set set it up? Or you don't have to.
Emily Hale: Who was it who said to you that when Eliot... First of all, listen to how Eliot says the word tea in restaurant in the very beginning. I think that's interesting. And then also, who is it who said to you that when ether when he says etherized, that that was like the end of...
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: That was the beginning of modernism?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Yeah. I don't think he just said it to me. I, I,
Emily Hale: Was it just you and Frank Cremone hanging out, having a coffee? Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: No, well, it's funny. It's sort of like halfway in between that that the funny image you've just given us and the truth is um i I'm pretty sure that's Lanny Hammer. um Landon Hammer, former Lanny's great claim to fame is that he's a twice over guest of close readings.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah But ah professor of English at Yale University, my teacher, um his, ah as many people no doubt already know, but you should hurry and find out if you don't already, his undergraduate lecture course at Yale called Modern Poetry is online and free.
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um and is easy to find, and it includes it at least one, but I think more than one, probably two or three lectures on Eliot, where I think he's he's he talks about this idea that that with the third line of this poem, the first two lines of this poem are, let us go, then you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky.
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: The third line of the poem is, like a patient etherized upon a table. I think it's Lanny in those lectures who says something like, with that line begins modern poetry.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um the The recording we're about to hear is not the recording of a young man, which is interesting, I think, actually, right?
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: So but the poem was published in 1915, written when he was an even younger man in 1910, so wrote it when he was in his early 20s, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah, very early.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Just barely. Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Hale: And he'd been carrying around parts of it for a long time.
Kamran Javadizadeh: there
Emily Hale: And in fact, the Prince Hamlet part was a holdover from a lot earlier. So teens.
Kamran Javadizadeh: from like when he was in college or a teenager even.
Emily Hale: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: oh It was crazy.
Emily Hale: Yep. I know.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um The recording we're going to hear, I think you have told us is probably from 1955. fifty five
Emily Hale: Yeah, I think that's the one it is.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So, and the whole business, I mean, I would say, and it's a question I'm going to want for us to get into of like age. And how, you know, first of all, who is J. Alfred Prufrock? I mean, I suppose he must be some kind of like stocking horse version, caricatured version of T.S. Eliot.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But how old is he um is a really interesting question. So I sort of like the idea that we we have a young man's poem that you're about to hear read by an older man.
Emily Hale: Yeah, that's great.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um and um and And I will just say, too, like buckle up, listeners, for people who don't know, This is a longer poem than we tend to do on the podcast. The recording itself takes about eight minutes to play in its entirety, so settle in.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um And there is a text of ah the poem that that is linked to in the episode notes. um I think i I will have given you the Poetry Foundation's text of the poem. And interestingly enough, right the Poetry Foundation the website associated with Poetry Magazine, which is in fact, in this case, where the poem was first published in 1915.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So interesting enough. um All right. Here is T.S. Eliot reading the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, that is a hard act to follow. That's T.S. Eliot reading the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Megan, um what are you hearing in his voice?
Emily Hale: I wonder, listening to it, when you see the words on the page,
Emily Hale: I can feel the kind of reason that it felt like when when he gave when ah Conrad Aitken first read it out, was called like, The Ravings of a Madman. or someone just like spitting out different quotations or words, like it didn't seem a love song.
Emily Hale: When you hear it all read by Elliot, the older man, and this sort of soporific, would you call it soporific or would you call it more automaton?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: um Does it sound robotic?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, I mean, a bit. I guess it's all, these things are all relative, right? But no, actually, i was surprised in, um and maybe if only because I have that view of the kind of stiff, you know, four-piece suit version of Eliot in mind, so firmly in mind, that I'm sort of surprised at how many different places in the reading that we just heard he he does a little voice or he does a little bit or he picks up the cadence or he, um he seems to be in on the joke somehow, you know, to me, to my ear.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um It, it's It's also a beautiful recording, and he has that he has a great voice. And so, I mean, I'm just hearing that, too.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah You know, one question I have is, he doesn't sound like he's American to me.
Emily Hale: It doesn't.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And maybe by now, you know, I guess but and when I say now, I mean 1955 or whatever, like legally and technically he isn't.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm. Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um In fact, i have this I once read this funny letter from Elliott. For my book, I was um doing research into an event that took place in the Library of Congress in 1962 called the National Poetry Festival.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And they had invited Elliott to be like the keynote speaker at the festival. And in Elliott's response, he said that the festival was meant to be a ah the the a gathering of American poetry, a celebration of American poetry.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And his his response, which was to decline the invitations, one of the things he said was, I ceased being an American poet a long time ago. Right.
Emily Hale: Wow. And I'm thinking of his line about whatever Auden is, I'm the opposite.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That.
Emily Hale: So he said that somewhere.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, right.
Emily Hale: So like, if if Auden is now American, I must be English.
Kamran Javadizadeh: They traded.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. Yeah, it's so funny to me. And of course, we have so I don't know. But it's interesting to me, too, that like in the narrative you gave of the biography you gave us of his life. You know, one way to begin is just to begin the story in St.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Louis. But another way to begin is to begin the story in Boston, where his family is from and where he to to a place to which he would return.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But yet another place to begin that Elliot, it seemed, in the account you gave us would want us to begin is the ancestors who came over the Atlantic from England, the place to which he returned.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So there are these greater and greater sort of geographic sort of reboundings or returns that we can chart in in just the space of his voice or of his life.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Emily Hale: In the space of his voice and also
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: That, I like your, though you said he sounds in on the joke and that many of his contemporaries saw him as sort of the, like the consummate actor.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: And there is that famous story that he like went to parties with green makeup on his face, which is whether or not that was true, but why would you exactly wear a green pallard like to make you look more ill than you are, but always in some sort of costume.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All
Emily Hale: and
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: and I do want to mention when I hear that reading, um do you know the, the great quotation from Braithwaite um about listening to Elliot?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, to give it to us, yeah.
Emily Hale: The, that Jahan Ramazani talks about, but Braithwaite says it was Elliot's actual voice, or rather his recorded voice reading preludes or love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, which turned us on.
Emily Hale: And here he is in Barbados thinking about this.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: in that that dry deadpan delivery, the rhythms of St.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Louis were stark and clear for those of us who at the same time were listening to the dislocations of Burr, Dizzy, and Kluke, so jazz.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Emily Hale: And it is interesting that on the whole, the establishment could not stand Eliot's voice and far less stand jazz. So that for Braithwaite listening from far away, and Jahan Ramazani talks about this as like,
Emily Hale: an ironic moment of 20th century exchange where Eliot, who's this, ah at that point seen as like canonical, reactionary, white, somehow the record, something ah about his maybe being in on the joke, as you said, in the recording seemed an opening for poets around the world who wanted to sort of react against the status quo.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. Yeah, that's that's really interesting. um And maybe it brings us to another kind of approach we can take here, because I think, you know, sometimes in this podcast, the poem is short enough for the guest and I to be able to do a kind of line by line almost explication du text or something, right? ah ah A close reading in that tradition.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um Here are the poem is just too long for us to do that. And so I think it would be maybe useful for us to try the outset of this conversation about the poem anyway, to um come up with some way, some sort of schema that we can use to describe the whole thing, to get a view of the whole.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um i have some you know particular questions that I might ask you, Megan, that would help us do that. But I don't know. how is there Is there something you could say to describe the the form of the poem, the shape of the poem, the style of it?
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um I'm noticing as I'm As I was listening to the recording just now, I was really noticing the kind of rhyme ah which the which isn't regular scheme, but the rhyme that's persistent throughout the poem and the little sort of rhythmical eddies that pick up that are sort of these local weather, you know, for this these lines or those lines over there, which feel maybe in part, in some ways, like the legacy of jazz, that maybe there are literary legacies as well um that that we can describe.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Emily Hale: Mm hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So how would how would you kind of... um and I mean, not not at the not at the biographical or or whatever level, but but but just at a kind of formal level or at a level of poetics, is there a way that you can step back from the poem and sort of take its measure for us?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Emily Hale: I think I'm thinking of the fact that One of my students once said to me, Elliot's like the master of lines that get stuck in your head.
Emily Hale: In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: Oh, it sticks right in there. Or like the earworm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Um, and he later said that this poem was really under the influence of the symbolists, Arthur Simmons, but Jules Laforgue, who was, ah who came up with free verse, Ver Libra.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: So not, not particularly, um, formal poetry. And yet then Elliot wrote, but Ver Libra is fake.
Emily Hale: there will always be a rhythm. There will always be something that poets are aiming at. So I think when i when i teach but I teach this poem, I don't know if this is the same thing as giving sort of the meter of it, but when I teach it, one thing I ask the students is like, a your first question, like how old is this speaker?
Kamran Javadizadeh: yeah
Emily Hale: um Why is it a ah ah love song? The original title was called Proof Rock Among the Women, but why is it a love song? And then also, does he go anywhere? So that's a big question.
Emily Hale: Like he's trying to ask a question. It seems like the speaker goes somewhere and maybe does he ever leave his room or is he just stuck there with his thoughts?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Does he ever leave his room? That question.
Emily Hale: um
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: So those are some ways that like bigger picture, I think about it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Great.
Emily Hale: And that's not really, not really formal per se.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But that's fine.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: that's That's really helpful. And it leads right into the title. So let's talk about the title. um I mean, I think of and i think if the title as um encouraging us to ask two questions. One is like, love song.
Emily Hale: Okay.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: In what sense is it a love song, and if at all? um And then, ah too, like, what's up with this name, J. Alfred Prufrock? I mean, um it's ah it's a kind of ridiculous-sounding name.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um are there Is there a story that we can tell that would help to explain it? um do do you want to say which Which order do you want to take that those parts of the title up in? Because both seem important to me.
Emily Hale: Um, maybe I'll take the name on first.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: I read something by Christopher Ricks that made me laugh out loud, which was, it was about, um, which is ironic if, but anyway, that which is, um, why that the poet had a hard time coming up with a name for himself. Something I took this poet a lot time to get named and Elliot and people kept writing his name wrong.
Emily Hale: Um, when they printed his poems or as a student, but he did go by T. Stern's Elliot for a little while.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: um So the love song of T.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Sorry, we should we just let's say, I don't think we've said Thomas Stearns Elliott is the full name.
Emily Hale: Thomas Stearns, Elliot.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay.
Emily Hale: is So T. Stearns, Elliot, he did sign some of his poets. So it's not as strong as James Joyce, like actually signing postcards, Stephen Dedalus, when you're like, huh, I wonder what he thought about that.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: But he he did go by T. Stearns. It was also later discovered. i mean, Elliot's memory was freakish of things from St. Louis, and that's
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: you'll, you'll, eat that more and more, but there was a, um, furniture store, uh, which is well known by called proof rock. And so he claimed he'd forgotten that though.
Emily Hale: In another anecdote, he said, I used to walk by it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And then, uh, Jamie Stare has shown that there are advertisements for it in his school magazine for proof rocks furniture.
Kamran Javadizadeh: amazing.
Emily Hale: So is this kind of a bourgeois middle-aged man who sells these businessmen and this is his love song. So it's sort of like what happens in middle age,
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Is that what we're meant to see by this name? Or is it just like a really funny, I think it's a funny sounding name, Proof Rock.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Elliot thought it sounded, what did he write one time about it? Like euphemous, like it sounded pretty or something like that?
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's interesting. You know, for some reason I had never thought of, and maybe it's right now because I'm talking to you, I'm thinking about philosophy and that kind of thing, proof and rock as being sort of two kind of sort of concepts that have a kind of philosophical genealogy or something like that.
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Emily Hale: Yeah, totally.
Emily Hale: No, that's really interesting because Bergson was also a huge influence on it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: and Yeah, go ahead. All
Emily Hale: When people asked if this was one of Eliot's Christian poems later, so Eliot became Christian, he said, oh no, Prufrock, I was totally under the sign of Bergson.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: and And tell us why Berkson would be irrelevant.
Emily Hale: Henri Bergson is a philosopher and um thought a lot about the relationship of time and
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: memory and matter um but what proof would mean for a philosopher and the the difference between like thinking about descartes and um i think therefore i am and the and so rock being sort of the way you're talking about it from a philosophical point of view elliott also wrote a play later in life called the rock um so that's cool to think about proof and rock being some somehow philosophical questions because some people read this poem as really
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: Elliot thinking through existential crises and philosophical questions.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right. right. All right. That's great. Okay. That's cool. Okay. What about love song? I mean.
Emily Hale: Let us go then, you and i Who's the you, who's the i is it Is it a love song in the traditional sort of, is it a, mark you know, we hear references to to his coy mistress ah by Andrew Marvell later in there.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And is there a way that
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: this is someone hoping to go visit someone um with whom they hope to have an encounter?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, so a a love song might be song that is sung to the beloved, ah right or or a song of seduction, or a song about my love for you.
Kamran Javadizadeh: or or maybe it's a song about my experience vis-a-vis love, right? Which isn't, which might be minimal.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: You and I were joking before about how the Elliot who wrote this poem was not such an experienced lover and the poem itself seems to be troubled by I don't know if that I want to use the word sort of there's a sort of incel energy in this poem but yeah yeah
Emily Hale: Oh my gosh, that makes me sad, but it's not the first time I've heard it. Yes, like the fear of women and their hair on the arm, fear of someone putting him on a pin, making looking at him, judging his body in some sort of way.
Kamran Javadizadeh: yeah okay the letter to Aiken right
Emily Hale: um I'm trying to find that quotation from the letter by Conrad Aiken that you and i were talking about to Aiken about Elliot wanting to get... rid of his virginity.
Emily Hale: And this was written later, um that he was walking through the city, sort of like Prufrock is walking through the city in this poem, and is having one of those, and he says this to his friend, Conrad Aiken, one of those nervous sexual attacks that he's sometimes prone to, so an account attack of the nerves, and he he wishes that he had, sometimes he wishes that his virginity was just gone because he he feels so anxious about it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: So that there's a very
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Yeah. OK.
Emily Hale: If that's what the love song is. Oh no, it's a love song to Aiken about his fear of love.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. I mean, it would be a different thing, right, if we had a love song but by a poet who was like, i don't know, Lord Byron or someone like, you know, right, the the the poet as experienced lover.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But this is like a love song from a ah sexually anxious person.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: young slash old man, right?
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um One thing that Elliot doesn't read, at least it wasn't picked up in the recording as I played it here, is the epigraph to the poem, which is in Italian, which I won't make you read unless you're feeling like you want to, Megan, in it Italian.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: siio colde se emirro roos No, I won't. Although I did tragically move to Italy in order to try to understand Dante in the original because Eliot did. So, um,
Kamran Javadizadeh: see that listeners is the Megan Quigley of the binders that I was telling you about. um Although it's like a good excuse also to move to Italy.
Emily Hale: a perfectly good excuse.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um
Emily Hale: Yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I can read, right. It's a, it's a, an excerpt from, i think, Canto 27 of Inferno um that I have noted down here in the Longfellow tradition, translation, which I can read.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: If I believe that my reply were made to one who to the world would e'er return, this flame without more flickering would stand still. But inasmuch as never from this depth did anyone return, if I hear true, without the fear of infamy, I answer.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um I guess paraphrasing the the idea, so Dante's in hell, he's talking to people, this one person to whom he's talking says, well, i you know, I would...
Kamran Javadizadeh: I might not tell you my story if I thought that in telling it to you, it would get repeated, but I know since you're down here and no one who's down here ever leaves down here that I can tell you my story safely because you can't spread the rumors about me or whatever. Right.
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's the unpoetic sort of gist of it for people who aren't familiar with it, which is a really, I mean, what, what work is that doing Megan for you as an epigraph? Like, well, What is that telling us about the the nature of the you and I, say, in the first line of the poem?
Emily Hale: And
Emily Hale: yeah. And also Guido da Montefeltro, who's the one talking, is in hell because he gave false counsel.
Emily Hale: He advised someone badly. So he's sort of doubly bad. And and it's also not translated.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm.
Emily Hale: So that's some of the ways that some sometimes people think Elliot's a terrible snob.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Like, come on, why why is there an epigraph in Italian? And what kind of audience or reader do you think that I am, that I'm going to know, A, that's from Dante, B, how to get the answer to it. And then C, if I do spend that time, I look it up or I'm just naturally know it.
Emily Hale: um Then maybe you're saying um everything you're telling me is a lie because you shouldn't have gotten out of hell to be able to repeat this to me.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, there's something very meta about it.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's interesting. But it's also, it's just kind of like English thing of, you know, like you, if you ask the price of something and like, well, if you have to ask, you can't afford it sort of.
Emily Hale: That's English? I thought that was if you wanted to buy a yacht.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. I don't know.
Emily Hale: Like, if you ever say like, oh, how much would a boat cost?
Kamran Javadizadeh: I think of that all as kind of thing. Yeah.
Emily Hale: you're like, oh, you can't afford it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, if you have to ask, you can't afford it. um But okay, maybe the idea is the poem is sort of playing with the idea of saying, I have something to tell you. It's a sort of shameful thing to confess.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But I'm only telling you because I assume the fact that you're here to listen to me means that you're dead.
Emily Hale: Yeah. and
Kamran Javadizadeh: And I'm dead too.
Emily Hale: And trapped here with me.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah You're here with me.
Emily Hale: You can't take it. You can't take this information away. So, hey, reader, if you if you if you bother to figure out what this means, you're also in hell with me. Like maybe you shouldn't have looked it up.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, and there's a kind of intimacy though that we have down here in our damned state or something, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: We're going to share this. And it are the you and I then...
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Dante the pilgrim with the person talking to him or is it Elliot and the reader in some way like you've spent the time if you spent the time figuring out what I'm talking about now let's go and see what we what was this what is this that I'm going to confess to you now because I'm safe to tell you
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right, right. and And then there's also something, it seems to me, like, You know, he's like a young guy right who writes this poem. He begins writing it when he's in his teens, I think you said, and he has not had much experience.
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: I mean, we can continue to joke about the sexual experience, but just like experience period, maybe we could say, at this point in his life. And he's writing this sort of anguished testimony of his frustrations and anxieties and so forth at this point.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There's something so pretentious, isn't there, about... choosing Dante and, and this, you know, um you know, pretentious because, because it's Italian, because it's epic, because it's, you know, canonical, because it's, um it's voiced from a person who was accomplished and had lived ah an interesting life.
Emily Hale: Yeah. yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: But the idea is like the heroic kind of register of that applies even to me and my stupid little life.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All right.
Emily Hale: Yeah. And that's where I feel like maybe it's not pretentious. It's another way to look at it is I'm taking down that, that heroic epic and saying modern man walking around in this tiny life that I'm living feels the same way.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And kind of Joyce's Ulysses kind of way.
Kamran Javadizadeh: okay
Emily Hale: Like now we're realizing that our, maybe we're not writing Dante, but our crises still matter.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. And I can tell the story of a day in my life in Dublin that is every bit as heroic as Odysseus returning home from Troy.
Emily Hale: Exactly.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um
Emily Hale: And that's that's some of the work that modernism does, is it takes down the epic to the to the to the ordinary, rather than just seeing.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay, let's talk. Right. Right. That's one way of looking at it, but the other way is to say that it lifts the ordinary up to the epic, right, okay.
Emily Hale: Yeah. Yes, exactly.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um ah But I mean, a good segue and argument for your view there, the the view that you were advancing is I think that third line, which is a real line of diminishment, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or not maybe not diminishment, maybe that maybe there's a different word for it.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Let us go then you and I, line one, when the evening is spread out against the sky, line two. Interestingly, the poem is teaching us that it rhymes in its first two lines.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um And then we get, like a patient etherized upon a table. So... I don't know, Megan, can you read Lanny Hammer's mind? Like, why does why would he why would a person say that modern poetry begins with that line? Or what's modern about that line? Or forget about the literary history of it, if you like, or the way of using it to place the poem in literary history.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And just talk about that image of a patient etherized upon, to say that, as ah if I take it right, the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table, right?
Emily Hale: such a famous line that I feel like humble, even, you know, I feel like everyone from, ah rock stars to novelists, like this line, like a patient etherized upon a table.
Emily Hale: what How does that hit you? And because it, it's, it has, um, you know, i work on fan culture and how many people think about proof rock in a variety of ways from the Allman brothers writing an album, um,
Kamran Javadizadeh: All
Kamran Javadizadeh: I'll eat a peach.
Emily Hale: eat a peach, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: But like a patient etherized upon a table. I think Elliot ether and the i and sort of medicalized terminology. um They had Ether was not that, that long around at that point. There was a monument put up in the Boston Public Gardens to ether because it had changed what you could do with ah medical anesthesia.
Emily Hale: And also William James in Varieties of Ridgidist Experience, I believe, talked about how ether allowed you to have um sort of like psychedelic experiences.
Emily Hale: So through that one word of ether, and then I have to give one other which he couldn't have known, ramification, was that of course the wife that he would later have, part of her problem was that she was addicted to ether.
Emily Hale: So that line foreshadows in a weird way many of the problems that his own love song would have. um So the the idea that the sky is like a patient etherized upon a table, it's really depressing as an image in some ways, right? Like it's knocked out unless it's allowing us once again, maybe with Guido to go out into the city in our own minds and have them some sort of visionary experience.
Emily Hale: Do you read that as like depressing, negative, the bot youre the the night is like a corpse?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Or do you read it like the night is is going to to now take me on an Allen Ginsberg sort of like trip?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, having never, you know, recreationally
Kamran Javadizadeh: indulged in ether, at least so far as I know, i mean, i guess i I guess the way I think of it is as not as like a hallucinogenic kind of thing, though maybe it has that effect, um but instead as a kind of sedative or anesthetic kind of thing, as a way of...
Emily Hale: Okay. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um of, um, you know, diminishing or reducing one's nerves sufficiently to, so as to be able to allow for some kind of, um, otherwise painful or, or upsetting experience.
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: Um, though, mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: But then in the poet tradition, like, oh my gosh, a sunset. What could be more beautiful, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right.
Emily Hale: And then there is your diminishment to...
Kamran Javadizadeh: The evening spread out. I mean, even that line, by the way, the second line is kind of weird and interesting to me.
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: Because what does it mean to say the evening is spread out against the sky as though the sky were the canvas and the evening were the painting or something, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Yeah, the noun is wrong there.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, I don't know.
Emily Hale: Evening.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's interesting. But spread out against, but then like a patient etherized upon a table, that, that I mean, because i i I can't reconstruct the first time I've read the poem, by the time i read that, when I read that line now, I'm already thinking about being pinned, you know, the the the later lines of sprawling on a pin, pinned and wriggling on a wall.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. right um I think of the patient etherized um upon a table as being in something like that position, sort of immobilized by some force outside of me.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Emily Hale: Yeah. And medical medical terminology somehow becoming
Kamran Javadizadeh: Patient here as...
Emily Hale: And I like had to have lyrical um power, the idea of anesthesia or being pinned or even the magic lantern that's gonna come up later that might be an x-ray machine.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Like why are any of those things, things we wanna write about in poetry exactly?
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's interesting. Yeah, that's interesting. But also, you know, the word patient, right? And so I'll do the nerdy work here of of ah of giving us some etymology, you know, patient from the, you know, the Latin for patio or to suffer ah the kind of, pat you know, cognate with passive.
Emily Hale: Oh yes,
Kamran Javadizadeh: The patient is the person to whom things are done, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Not who is doing things. that you know, the the passion that that's the sense in which we get like the passion of the Christ, right? um Is the the Christ who suffers, who who takes something on.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And and um and so but So the evening is like that, but I guess there's this messy sort of bleeds into the suggestion that I am kind of like that as the speaker of the poem that you, if you join me are kind are kind of going to be like that too.
Emily Hale: yes
Kamran Javadizadeh: I don't know. I mean, I guess maybe let's zoom out slightly because we're going to, have to yeah, go.
Emily Hale: and Well, it lends to the argument that nothing happens, that he doesn't go anywhere. If in fact, it's all one of experience being put upon you.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, good. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Like this guy can't get up and walk around the city streets and see modern life and energy because he is passive.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Right. Right. right Right. Okay, so, well, you've already begun to answer the question that I was just starting to ask, which is like, well, what is, ah you know, I think like zoom out a little if if you can sort of break this poem up into sections a little bit.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um Like in this first part of the poem, if we take up this invitation, let us go then, you know, if we're going to do this with him, what is it exactly that we're being invited to do?
Kamran Javadizadeh: How would you tip of, you know, characterize it or what typifies it? You know, it's a, yeah I think you were just saying it's a tour of the modern city.
Emily Hale: Tour of the modern city.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's what we're being invited to do.
Emily Hale: People mistakenly think it's London often, sort of like we just thought his voice sounded English because of the great cat, the feline fog imagery.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm. Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm.
Emily Hale: But actually that's probably St. Louis and it might be pollution.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm.
Emily Hale: um that he's looking at.
Kamran Javadizadeh: yeah. yeah.
Emily Hale: So people who read Eliot as sort of a poet of modern, like, eco-poetics ah think about that fog and how it's actually sort of lovely.
Emily Hale: Julia Daniel has a reading of that, like, maybe it's not bad. um But do we should you we go should we go meet these women who are talking of Michelangelo? um Eliot in the reading pronounces it Michelangelo.
Kamran Javadizadeh: yeah
Emily Hale: But when you see it on the page, it's Michelangelo, right? So why, and the rhyme works so perfectly. Are we mocking those women who come and go talking of Michelangelo?
Emily Hale: Are they like upper class British women?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, what do we think of them?
Emily Hale: Ricks talks a lot about how Elliot plays with prejudice in his book, it's Elliot and Prejudice. And one of the one of the lines, well, first of all, he talks about that Elliot in the restaurants and sawdust restaurants, that Elliot pronounces the T there, which isn't a very American thing actually to do.
Kamran Javadizadeh: With oyster shells, yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm.
Emily Hale: that probably a ah British speaker would say restaurant.
Kamran Javadizadeh: so So probably, yeah, it's one of those things where like, um it's interesting the poets that are like this. I've had similar experiences with Sylvia Plath, listening to her recorded voice. American poets who go, who live in England, know, and wind up working in England, that to American ears, they often sound English.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But to English years, they sound American or something, right?
Emily Hale: Totally, yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: you know Which is sort of the predicament that Eliot was in you know as the St. Louis kid who went to Harvard, who was at home in either place.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: a familiar kind of immigrant story. fun to think it Funny to think of Eliot in those terms, but there we have it.
Emily Hale: But playing off of that, the the way that Michelangelo is is written is kind of who's hearing it sound like that?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, yeah, good.
Emily Hale: And are these women therefore um feigning sort of Italian eye art high art knowledge because they la they make it Italian sounding?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And I think Eliot's conscious of voice and play there as is maybe Prufrock who's scared to go out and wander around the city because these upper
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: and let's pretend we're in Boston now, are drinking tea and talking about art and and instead this this young speaker, if speaker there is, is terrified to say anything or even eat some toast and drink some tea.
Emily Hale: So sort of the, like, paralyzation of the patient, like you said.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There's something really interesting, right? In such close proximity to have the untranslated Dante there is epigraph.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: you know Clearly, this is a poet who is at least acting as though Italian may as well be ah native language, right? Not just Italian, but the Italian of Dante.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um And then to have Michelangelo, um i think there must be a kind of ironic lampooning, a kind of mean-spirited almost making fun of these women who are you know being pretentious or or or being, you know it's a kind of parody of a certain kind of society woman or something, right?
Emily Hale: yeah
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. And that line, I mean, interestingly, there's that little couplet in the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo is, I mean, I was just saying, formally with respect to the poem is one of the poem's refrains or the poem's refrain.
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: male refrain um in the room, the women come and go. Is come and go there just to get the rhyme with Michelangelo?
Emily Hale: Mm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or is it, um you know, what the work that come and go is being doing? I don't know. There's a kind of aimless sort of milling about um circulation.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Is there a sexual pun?
Emily Hale: That's funny. It feels more relentless to me.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I don't think so. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Like those women come and they go and they come and they go. And ah I think I'm thinking portrait of a lady is later poem, but sort of a woman pinning you down.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh. Oh, that's interesting.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's interesting.
Emily Hale: And so I feel like the women are coming and they're going and they're coming and going and it doesn't feel aimless, but it feels entrapping in some way.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Fair enough. That's interesting. Okay. You you said something earlier about the the cat, um the extended sort of cat simile.
Emily Hale: Meow. You should look at the Julian beater Peters um graphic novel version. Have you seen it?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, I think so. But yeah, right.
Emily Hale: With the cat. I think the cat's really cute there. Elliot definitely said he did not want anyone to do any graphic the images of his poetry. And yet I think that, but then he also had exceptions to that.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's funny.
Emily Hale: And he also said he didn't want annotations and Christopher Ricks and Jim McHugh give that an ample amount of annotations.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Wow. Listen, but he has only himself to blame on the annotations front.
Emily Hale: Exactly. Um,
Kamran Javadizadeh: But um but should we is there, i mean, is it interesting that the fog is a CAD? Is there, um does that change the way, i don't know.
Emily Hale: and It feels more um welcoming and kind as part of the love song than those women do.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh
Emily Hale: Like maybe he's maybe he's a cat person.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah yeah.
Emily Hale: He just wants to, like Taylor Swift, hang out with his cat because
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, famously, right, Elliot is the author of Cats, right?
Emily Hale: Macavity, Macavity. um You should go see the Jellicle Ball if you haven't yet, um which is the, it's like the trans version of ballroom culture, ah just winning a lot of awards and now is gonna hopefully move to Broadway.
Emily Hale: But it's a version of Cats, and it's great.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay. Okay.
Emily Hale: um But it's, again, yeah, Elliot loved Cats, wrote poems to his friend's kids about cats.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Cool.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: And so, yes, here's our first early on um version of Elliot having affection, or the speaker at least having affection towards cats.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And he never says then the word cat. I mean, in my experience, also, this is a passage that is um great, at least it was for me, like in the high school classroom, where you can...
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: it help the students um you know it's it's it's sort of to understand the way a kind of simile might work or the the different scale at which it might work but there there is another um line just just below that i mean i don't i feel badly because in a way like we're kind of we're going to kind of have to race through the poem a little bit or skip around a little bit but um so if you want to say more about the cat
Emily Hale: Okay.
Emily Hale: okay
Kamran Javadizadeh: stanza or verse paragraph, by all means, please do so.
Emily Hale: okay
Kamran Javadizadeh: But right after that moment, there is the line, and indeed there will be time. um And that idea of there will be time, there will be time.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um i'm I'm really curious about that, um about um
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah how that refrain on its own is trying to sort of establish sense of temporality or, I mean, when a person says there will be time, don't worry. i mean, is that the idea? Don't worry. There'll be time to do that.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Which means if there will be time to do something, we don't need to do it now. right do it We can do it later because there will be time to, we're we're in no rush.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right um So it seems to me like if we can use the sort of language of i know pop psychology or something, it seems sort of like an an avoidant line.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right Like ah I don't want to do it yet because I can do it later.
Emily Hale: Oh, yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There's something procrastinatory about that.
Emily Hale: Yeah, and the word time comes up eight times in that stanza.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There will be time.
Emily Hale: That's what I was looking at, like repeated over and over.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, that's great. Yeah. Read, read, read the lines for us.
Emily Hale: There will be time.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Remind us of the lines.
Emily Hale: And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street rubbing its back upon the windowpain. There will be time, there will be time to prepare, food but there will be time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea.
Emily Hale: and
Kamran Javadizadeh: um
Emily Hale: in my In my college notes on the side of this written in tiny little, I have the ennui of consciousness.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Well,
Kamran Javadizadeh: yeah man not much more to say than that it is it is it is like that consciousness well i don't know yeah talk about time in bergson if you like is that what you were gonna say
Emily Hale: that is That is what that time says. they Proof for up.
Emily Hale: um
Emily Hale: Can we drop some more bergson?
Emily Hale: Right? The difference between, yeah, clock time and durée, sort of idea that we all live in, we've overemphasized the importance of clock time.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Emily Hale: And in fact, our internal clock or our internal time is where we actually are living. Maybe this podcast seems interminable to somebody and to others.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: We're flying by right now. And that really do-ray is what matters, how long the experience is. And so maybe Elliot sort of trying to think through the difference between like how much time you have to achieve something or is all time at this exact moment.
Emily Hale: um I don't know if that's useful.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. This this kind of imagining or projecting of a future that might seem sort of boundless. There will be time for this and time for that and, you know, time to murder and create.
Emily Hale: hmm
Kamran Javadizadeh: I don't know why murder and create.
Emily Hale: hmm hmm
Kamran Javadizadeh: You're going to have to tell me about that. Yeah. is, i think, maybe usefully we can think of that as opposed to an orientation in which a person might feel like, I'm here in the present, this is the right and so i'm ah and so I am acting, I'm not planning for future action, I'm acting impulsively or decisively.
Kamran Javadizadeh: now this there will be time talk seems like a um a stance a a kind of orientation of indecision as he says right um yeah
Emily Hale: Yeah. Well, and to jump ahead again, i think the figure lurking over that is Hamlet, right? If Hamlet is the quintessential example of modern man who for a long time seems unable to do anything, right?
Emily Hale: Like just do something.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Emily Hale: If you want to avenge your father, go for it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Get on with it.
Emily Hale: Kill your uncle. Why are we standing around saying to be and not to be?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And I think this is another version of the Hamlet question of I'm indecisive.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: I can't decide what to do. He also said in a letter, no, Elliot can ever make up their mind about what to do. So there's this sense that that how how can we how can we decide?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Hale: and then And then again, that diminishment of before the taking of a toast and tea, like that's all that we're we're building up to.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right, right.
Emily Hale: This is no Hamlet question.
Kamran Javadizadeh: we're not we're not We're not sitting there thinking like, a man, I have some monumental decision to make, but it's just this sort of anxious person who can't do the bare minimum of a daily routine or a social convention or a polite social interaction or something like that.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Gosh, your incel thing is like really um hitting home with me and actually to move it away from like the sexualized angry young man, but just to how many of our students are experiencing. And now post-COVID, so much depression and inability to come to class or to like this, this has that sense too of a eternally putting off um and not being able to show and to be, um which again makes it feel like very modern poem at this moment.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And ah does that help to explain um the the way it sort of slips into the topic that we had introduced earlier of the question of the age of the speaker?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Because then we get, well, first of all, we get the refrain line again in the room, the women come and go talking to Michelangelo.
Emily Hale: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And then it we pick up on this business of there will be time again. And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare? And the same question again, do I dare?
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: Time to turn back and descend the stair. And then this, this first, to my view, kind of explicit self-consciousness about being old or getting old. Um, tie, uh, with a bald spot in the middle of my hair, parenthetically, they will say how his hair is growing thin.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Um, so, um So like on the one hand, he's saying like, put it off, put it off, I'm procrastinating.
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: But on the other hand, there's this sort of creeping anxiety that, well, if I live that way, by the time I do anything, I'll already have become an old man. Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Is he 44? Is he 20? it Is time gonna pass by while we sit here and think um and do nothing? and Except for then think something as big as the next line.
Emily Hale: Do I dare disturb the universe?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, talk about that line, right? So so first he asks, indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare and do I dare? Then there's the business of going down the stairs and his hair is growing thin and his necktie and all that.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And then he returns to it. Do I dare, line break, disturb the universe? Yeah. um Why would he think that he could do
Emily Hale: Yeah. And again, is it minimizing, like, is disturbing the universe just messing with the status quo? Are we in some sort of Henry James-like Boston society gathering? And to him, it will feel like disturbing the universe if he if he dares to to go upstairs and enter a room where women are coming and going.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm. Mm.
Emily Hale: Or does he really want to be thinking about disturbing the universe, whatever that might mean, and instead he's stuck here in this social conventions and wants to be thinking about what it would what it would mean for his life to matter.
Kamran Javadizadeh: oh
Kamran Javadizadeh: I remember um John Hollander once said, and I think in a class that I was in, said that, or maybe he said it in writing, and I'm just remembering it that way, um that ah any ah every poem has to justify its own breaking of the silence.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right? And that's interesting. who Agree or disagree, whatever. It's an interesting thought to have in mind, but like it's it one way I have of reading. This is like a poem at the beginning of a career.
Kamran Javadizadeh: where he's wondering like, all right, am I going to do this?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: You know, like you're standing at the edge of a swimming pool and thinking, man, I wish I jumped in five minutes ago because that by now I'd be used to it or whatever.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um But that to think if I say, I mean, I guess it must, Do I dare to disturb the universe? Maybe the the way to make sense of that is like um the universe is ongoing. I'm somehow alienated from it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: If I get in, I'm going to disturb it somehow.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And maybe I prefer to be out on the sidelines instead.
Emily Hale: and And not a participant.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Yeah. Mm
Emily Hale: um to Your John Hollander question makes me think about the fact that this is Eliot's, when it appeared in book form in 1917, first poem first book,
Kamran Javadizadeh: hmm.
Emily Hale: in his first book
Emily Hale: is this. So this is him disturbing the universe. Like this is his, like here I come, the opposite of a swan song.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Like I'm gonna disturb the universe with this verse that I'm creating and do I dare.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. And the book is called Prufrock and Other Observations, right?
Emily Hale: Exactly.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm.
Emily Hale: And dedicated to Jean Verdenal, which was his friend, 1910, 1911, living in the same boarding house, who died And he has a beautiful line where he says, i think of him, maybe it's sentimental of me to think, that's not exactly said the right way, but coming across at sunset, waving a group of lilacs, I believe. I want to make sure I got the flowers right.
Emily Hale: um and And then he he soon died in World War I. And Elliot thinks about him being mixed in with the mud at Gallipoli. And
Kamran Javadizadeh: Which is, which as you said, Elliot, I mean, it's another thing he's on the sidelines of.
Emily Hale: another thing he's on the sidelines of because of his,
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Right.
Emily Hale: And and he
Emily Hale: and I think i was just at Merton College, Oxford, where Elliot was in 1914, to see all the names of all of the young men who had died then,
Kamran Javadizadeh: right. Yeah.
Emily Hale: and that Elliot was on the sidelines of that and not able to participate when he wanted to. um You really feel the power of a kind of survivor's guilt, which might come across certainly in the wasteland, but even in this poem where he's on the outskirts, you feel that.
Emily Hale: um
Kamran Javadizadeh: so So Megan, can I ask you now, just ah maybe as a way of, um again, sort of moving through the poem in in a sort of strategic fashion, but also it's it's obviously so central and it's a topic that we've addressed a little bit, but i in other ways, i think been dancing around.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um I mean, I'm asking this question of the author of the forthcoming T.S. Eliot's Women um essay. How is this, like, what, what can we learn from the way this poem, um, describes women?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Are there particular places in the poem that you would want to look at in particular? I mean, we've talked about the refrain line, the, the Michelangelo stuff, but I think earlier you talked about arms that are bracelet, bracelet and white and bare those lines or the perfume from a dress or, I don't know any, anywhere else that you might want to, um, take us to,
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Emily Hale: Arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume and how should I begin? um Right there. is the part that was cut out.
Emily Hale: So is it okay if I if we talk for a second about Prufox provigilium? So
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Explain what it is, please.
Emily Hale: proviilium
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: so I think Lyndall Gordon was the first one to point this out, um, that, and then it, and when, uh, they published T.S. Eliot Inventions of the March Hare, which was the notebook, uh, version that Eliot had walked around with where this poem was.
Emily Hale: One of the things that Lyndall Gordon argues is that Prufrock in its entirety was written in the same scratchy pen, um, from Munich from 1911. So he except in the middle he had left four pages blank because he knew the poem was missing something.
Emily Hale: And then that part he later wrote. And I think it was again, Conrad Aiken who made him, who decided that he should definitely cut out that part. But that part,
Emily Hale: um these lines discuss the sort of speaker who we see in the poem who's debating what should I, should I go, should I not say, actually making a definitive statement in some way saying, shall I say I have gone and and then wanders around. um and then sees specifically um people falling out, like definitely images of prostitutes, ah falling out of corsets, um and then talks about, and I feel like this is a really crucial part that was cut out, and it's a thing that LaForge does too, capitalizes abstractions, but he says, will I see my madness chatter? And madness is capitalized. um
Emily Hale: And then that part, was cut out later and the only part of it that was retained are the lines i should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas
Kamran Javadizadeh: So those lines, very memorable lines, are from the much longer cut section called Prufrock's Perfigillium.
Emily Hale: yeah yeah which was um i want to make sure that that's right i have seen the dark i should have been yes um i have seen the world roll up
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: into a ball then suddenly dissolve and fall away. Those were cut too.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Emily Hale: So what does it mean that he cut out the lines that said, I have heard my madness chatter before day? um i feel as if that part fails to quite have the irony that that, so like,
Emily Hale: if If the other sections, shall you and i who's exactly is speaking, is it a dramatic monologue? This part, it's a consistent voice. Shall I say I have gone at dust through the narrow streets and seen the smoke of lonely men in shirt sleeves and women spilling out of corsets, standing in entries.
Emily Hale: um So the fact that the, and and to return to your question about sex, this part or women, this part seems much more clearly um a depiction.
Emily Hale: Well, it says, shout if this is what I finally want to say. I want to say, should i should i should I venture into these areas of town where, and one thing, where I can buy sex.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Where I can buy sexual experience. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Uh-huh.
Kamran Javadizadeh: All
Emily Hale: And, um,
Emily Hale: I'm trying to get the statistic right because it's so unbelievable how much syphilis there was Elliot's neighborhood growing up. It was syphilis rates of the turn of the century in St. Louis.
Emily Hale: Medical estimates of the rates of infection among American prostitutes were as high as 50% and that one out of every 20 men 1895 was
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: and turn in turn the century, St. Louis was affected with syphilis, which of course we know had really damaging effects.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: um And Eliot's father famously said he he wished like sex were a abolished or that all of some comment about syphilis being the the necessary response for people that have sex.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right
Kamran Javadizadeh: But, okay, so if if the, I mean, if if we're, if the poem itself is using this language of like a hundred decisions and revisions and all of that kind of thing, right?
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And this hemming and hawing, should I, shouldn't Do I dare to eat a peach? Maybe, no, I won't. Okay. um There is a, isn't there a way in which we can read the cutting of these lines as an enactment of that kind of
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: well, I'm going to consider the possibility of actually getting out there and doing it, quote unquote.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And then, no, I'm going to repress that from the poem. I'm going to kind of cancel that from the record from the official record. It's buried beneath the surface as though it were part of my unconscious rather than conscious experience, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah. And I did a little test with like a group of students that asked if it was better with that in or with it out.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: And it was 50, 50 half the students were like, finally, we know what's going on.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay.
Emily Hale: Like, what is this overwhelming question? Yay.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's maybe a good sort of Rorschach for how you know anxious or repressed the student is.
Emily Hale: um
Kamran Javadizadeh: Do they want it or do they what they do they prefer not to think about it? um That's interesting. um Yeah, okay. so um So, okay.
Kamran Javadizadeh: i have I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker. And in short, I was afraid.
Kamran Javadizadeh: and then And then we get this line that i I want to ask you about also, because I think it brings us back to the very interesting business of there will be time. And would it have been worth it after all? That kind of orients us with respect to time differently.
Emily Hale: who
Kamran Javadizadeh: That's not like here now, I think there will be a time in which I can do something. But rather it's like, all right, let's imagine that I have done it.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Would it have been worth it to do it?
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um in in some sense it seems like in this poem it's he's like both too early and too late you know yeah
Emily Hale: Yeah, and belated. Yeah. Thinking, what if I had already done it, what the what the ramifications would be to who I am. And that gets me back with Guido.
Kamran Javadizadeh: that but yeah
Emily Hale: Like, he did it, and that's why he's trapped in hell.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, and that brings us also to these interesting sort of back from the dead lines, Lazarus, right?
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah Would it have been worthwhile it to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball, another, right? That's the Marvell, I think, in part, allusion, to roll it towards some overwhelming question, to say, i am Lazarus, come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all, if one, settling a pillow by her head, should say,
Kamran Javadizadeh: That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all. um
Emily Hale: And when you read that loud, it almost sounds like nonsense poetry. That part to me did. That is not what I meant at all.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Does it? Uh-huh.
Emily Hale: That is not what I meant at all. It sounded like Dr. Seuss or something.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Uh-huh.
Emily Hale: Um... and And Lazarus there, there are two different Lazaruses that Elliot could be referring to. There's one in Luke and one in John, but they're both coming back from the dead with some sort of knowledge to which the only response is, no, that's not what I meant.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Emily Hale: Like, look, you're carrying the knowledge of what is in the afterlife and this woman doesn't even care. She's gonna...
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, so so, so Lazarus is sort of like a Cassandra or something, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: This person who has this kind of prophetic knowledge, but is ignored. Is that right? Do I have it right? Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yes. and And so there are a bunch of maybe stand-ins for the poet.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Uh, right.
Emily Hale: Lazarus, Hamlet, Dante, John the Baptist, the head on the platter, um which we hadn't gotten to yet, I'm afraid.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right, right. Yeah.
Emily Hale: But wait, where is the head on the platter? It's so good.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I think we, did we skip it?
Emily Hale: We skipped it? yeah ought Not, yes, though I have seen my head grown slightly bald. Oh, and the repetition of the fear of baldness at this moment of John the Baptist.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Again, it's a sort of diminution. Is that a word?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Diminition?
Emily Hale: Is that a word?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Diminition?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay, yeah.
Emily Hale: Of grand epic or desire coupled with
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: And I think that's why Eliot's known as like this great modern modernist with this minor small detail.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: And LeForge did that too.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: Like he talked about a hotel of eternity in one
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This business of that is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.
Emily Hale: SAT question. what did What did he want to say? What was Prufrag trying to say that was what what what What was his question or what was he trying to get across that these women keep not understanding?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, let's let's get there. Let's get there because this is one of, this i as for me is is is always one of my favorite parts of the poem. You know, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels, I thought, Megan, that's a good title for you to steal at some point, Elliot, after the novels or something, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: um After the teacups, after the skirts, the trail along the floor, and this and so much more. And then there's this kind of self-interruption where he's just so frustrated, right? It is impossible to say just what I mean.
Kamran Javadizadeh: and then I love the next line, right? But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen, um that little rhyming couplet.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So on the one hand, first we get this sort of frustration. I can't say what I mean. which I'd be curious to know whether that's an example of like modernist vagueness or something.
Emily Hale: It's impossible.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There's something I want to express. I can't put it into words. I'm frustrated about that. But then we got that there's this kind of fantasy, is it?
Kamran Javadizadeh: But is the idea like, oh, there's something I want to say that I can't quite say. I wish that some technology existed that were like a magic lantern,
Emily Hale: hmm.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right or like the movies, you know you said X-ray earlier, which is interesting, but you know I've always thought like cinema, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um That could somehow see into me these ineffable feelings I'm feeling and project them onto the screen, sort of do that work, that hard work of articulation or expression for me, if I could be seen through and projected somehow.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And I love the, but as if, be that as if moment is really interesting to me.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So I don't know, what do what do you want to say about the magic lantern stuff or about any of what I just said? I don't know.
Emily Hale: No, I agree with it. And also that that could be an instruction for how to read this poem. but The poem is in some ways the nerves in patterns on a screen.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Right.
Emily Hale: So whereas if people first heard it, thought it was the ravings of a madman. But is is there some way these fragments, well now we're sort wasted, these fragments are short against my ruin, but is there some way these patterns, these in the room the women come and go talking to Michelangelo, that is not what I meant at all, that is not it at all. Something about these couplets or rhymes that are the patterns of the nerves, and that is what he's trying to say.
Emily Hale: That is impossible to say what just what I mean, but look, you can see it
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. I haven't quite said it. I haven't said it in so many words, but somehow the the cumulative record that is this poem is an in all but words expression of my nerves.
Emily Hale: And that would make the word patterns really important.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. say Say more about patterns. Yeah.
Emily Hale: So then that would be line breaks or rhyme schemes or allusions to other literary texts. Like those are the patterns that show maybe what is meant.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: through form.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. The sort of schema of poetry. That's really interesting. Line breaks, illusions, rhyme, refrain, all of that kind of um stuff that sits in the background of the um of what would seem like the the kind of prose paraphrase version of the poem right the poetry of the poem is the the patterns of the poem
Emily Hale: Yes.
Emily Hale: Mm hmm.
Emily Hale: the patterns and and that's how we need to read it. We can't be trying to find exactly the meaning, anything that's said.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I'm going back from that image of the the magic lantern throwing the nerves and patterns on a screen to the business of the evening spread out against the sky is another kind of projection or pinning onto a kind of surface that's meant for display, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or the pinning to the wall. But... As if a magic lantern threw the nerves and patterns on a screen, would it have been worthwhile if if one said you know, like, all right, if I do all of this and you still don't get me, is it worth it?
Emily Hale: Then why did I bother?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Why did I bother?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Yeah.
Emily Hale: Let's just, I'm just gonna stay in my room.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, I had, i mean, I won't say who it is, but I had a conversation with a poet recently, you know, and and we what the the kind of topic we were that we were discussing was like, um you know, this business of, okay, but if you know, are there moments in your poems that you think of is like genuinely ambiguous that you don't know, you don't quite know what they mean.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And, and this poet said to me,
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I don't know. I generally know what I mean. And if a reader doesn't know what I mean, I think I've failed.
Emily Hale: Oh.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um or they failed you know it's not It's not the...
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's not the way we've been taught to read, I think, through Eliot, at least in large part, right which is this whole business of impersonality.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right?
Emily Hale: Mm hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: that um that leads us into things like the new criticism and the the intentional fallacy or whatever, right? It doesn't matter what I mean to say. What matters is what is the record of what I have said.
Emily Hale: And that's why starting this conversation with listening to Eliot is challenging too, because then you have intention again, like we get to hear maybe the intention of the poet and just is that a different way to read it than just reading the words, just seeing the patterns.
Kamran Javadizadeh: right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. We get into this final movement of the poem, and I know it must pain you because we've skipped over so many great lines and great moments, but this business of the, like, of which I think you said were some of the earliest lines written, the no, I'm not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I think the first time I read this poem was in high school and we read it and we read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead and Hamlet, you know, all sort of all together.
Emily Hale: Amazing. Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And in a way, I mean, it's sort of, I'm being anachronistic here, but it's like Elliot is imagining, he's he's imagining, he's sort of making the same joke that Stoppard makes in that play, right?
Emily Hale: Yep. who
Kamran Javadizadeh: Which is, You know, what if Hamlet but Rosencrantz, right?
Emily Hale: yep
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or whatever, right? um He's an easy tool, which is such a funny phrase to me, a self-insult. And I was hearing in his voice the politic, cautious, and meticulous in the...
Emily Hale: ah Oh, wow. Meticulous.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, right.
Emily Hale: I heard that too. Sort of like restaurant.
Kamran Javadizadeh: that Oh, that's funny. I was thinking he's thinking of himself as like um part of the servant class, right?
Emily Hale: Fussy. Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: He's like a butler. Right?
Emily Hale: Polonius, no?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, maybe. Right.
Emily Hale: Deferential.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Right.
Emily Hale: um This also, this part, i think both Harriet Monroe, who was editor, right, at Poetry Magazine, and Ezra Pound wanted him to cut this part.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Advising the prince. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, that's interesting.
Emily Hale: Nobody liked the Hamlet part. What the heck? It does make it a little bit more adolescent in some ways. But that ah and what I mean by adolescent is like, look, I'm going to really obviously now show that this is a poem about indecision, maybe.
Emily Hale: But I think it's also maybe why people really love it Like, no, I was no Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Emily Hale: I think Prince also wasn't in the earlier versions. I don't know if you care, but I think that's sort of interesting.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, that's interesting. No, I am not Hamlet.
Emily Hale: No, I'm no Hamlet. Yeah. What does the Prince add?
Kamran Javadizadeh: ah Prince is interesting. Maybe to distinguish from King Ham. I don't know. um Okay. What about the lines? I grow old. the the The lines I think to myself every every birthday I have.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I grow old. I grow old. I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. I think I have seen that second line glossed in totally different ways.
Emily Hale: Hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Like I have seen it... said that he's worried about the bottom of his trousers getting wet and because he's, he's growing old and he's becoming a kind of finicky old man or something.
Emily Hale: Okay.
Emily Hale: Or he's like gotten too thin.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Because they say your arms and will they say
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or something.
Emily Hale: so then your pants wouldn't stay up as well. So you've got to roll them up
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or read the lines glossed as like, in because I grow old, I grow old, he's going to do something which is part of like youthful fashion, which is to roll up the box.
Emily Hale: up. Oh, malarkey.
Kamran Javadizadeh: That doesn't sound right, right? Okay, okay, good.
Emily Hale: He's clearly worried about getting wet and he's fussy.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, I like that. He's worried about getting wet, yeah. so i Shall I part my hair behind? I'm not sure what that means, actually. I can't picture that exactly, part my hair behind.
Emily Hale: I think i I've read two different things on that one, either that he was trying to be more stylish, and here again, elliot and i think, like, Elliot and Predis, like, trying to fit in to the social status quo, whatever whatever quo that is.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Uh-huh.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: So shall I part my hair behind? Or another way I saw that glossed was to cover the bald spot.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, right, right, right.
Emily Hale: So is it is it fashionable or is it another fear of age?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Do I dare to eat a peach? Why? Because my teeth are so decrepit and I'm so old that I might, or because the juices will get all over my face. I don't want to get wet.
Emily Hale: I just want you to keep having to talk about this because it's going to make me laugh. Why else might it be?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Is it some kind of sexual anxiety that he's having?
Emily Hale: Yes, it is.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yes. So what about a peach exactly?
Kamran Javadizadeh: I don't know, Megan. I don't know.
Emily Hale: I once saw a glossed as he's Darren Peach on a fellow. was like, that's just wrong.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Uh-huh.
Emily Hale: I'm sorry. And that's know he's not worried about telling secrets. ah Peach was also another word for a prostitute.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay.
Emily Hale: Mm hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There's a great, um, there's a great moment in a Keats letter where he talks about eating a nectarine and he says like, good God, how fine, you know, and he's, and he says, um, he says, I shall breed or something, you know, like Keats is, you know, understanding it to be this total indulgence and kind of sensuality.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Oh my gosh, can we go both get a peach for the end of this?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Uh, Yeah, well, I did too.
Emily Hale: I actually have some, it's spring.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And they were kind of disappointingly, I don't know, peaches are magic, right?
Emily Hale: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Sometimes you leave it on the counter and it's just perfect and you slice and you know this is going to be the tastiest thing I've ever had.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And then sometimes it doesn't work out that way. um I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So back to this business of song and and its relationship to poetry, love song.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's a kind of music from which, I mean, um maybe I do not think they will sing to me is that's where like the incel-y sort of stuff, I'm really feeling it there too, but.
Emily Hale: Oh, that's funny to me. That feels more, well, maybe it's the same thing, but like modern poetry is no longer this kind of high elevated lyric art.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Hmm.
Emily Hale: where I'm not, I'm not waiting for mermaids.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right, like Frost's oven bird, right.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: The question that he asks in All But Words is what to make of a diminished thing.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Right. Yeah, okay, so the mermaid singing each to each, I've heard that. Maybe if we want to lean into this kind of little literary historical analog, I'm somebody who's been raised on poetry from the before times, and it
Emily Hale: His mom wanted to be a poet as well.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay, and in those times it sounded like the song of mermaids, but I'm too late for that.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I don't think they're going to sing to me.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So instead I'm doing this kind of performance, of this sort of ironic performance of being on the outside and the periphery of the song, not being able to get quite in.
Kamran Javadizadeh: looking at the mermaids, they these these these haunting final lines of the poem. Megan, do you want to read the the last, the lines that follow that? I do not think they will sing to me to the end of the poem, the last, I guess, six lines of the poem.
Emily Hale: Sure. i have Yeah. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black.
Emily Hale: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by seagirls wreaths with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown. Wait, did I say waves blown black?
Emily Hale: You know, that's that's another like Dr. Sh... That's actually hard to read.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: and And when I was listening to him read it, I wanted to see if combing the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm. No, I think, I think, I think, i I was listening for that.
Emily Hale: Did I say it right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: I think he said it right. I think you said it right too.
Emily Hale: Okay.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Anyway, that's interesting.
Emily Hale: Okay.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, that is a moment where it is hard to read. Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: It's excessively rhymey.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay. I've seen them riding seaward on the waves, combing The white, it's it's weird too, because like you're seeing the, me if you're sort of trying to follow along in the in the magic lantern situation of the mind, as it were, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: You're picturing these mermaids, probably you're picturing their hair, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But they're combing the white hair of the, which is interestingly, maybe also with respect to age too, you know, white hair is of the waves.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So that's metaphorical hair now.
Emily Hale: Mm hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: And the combing is also metaphorical, presumably, right?
Emily Hale: Yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Blown back. I'm almost, now I'm matt imagining also like the, I know this is maybe 10 years early, but the last sentences of Gatsby, you know, of the born back by the waves.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So the sort of kind of backward motion, right?
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm. who
Kamran Javadizadeh: The waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black. So color is drained. The seascape is is reduced to this kind of black and white.
Emily Hale: Am I allowed to say that maybe, or maybe this is, I'm going to get in trouble for this. I kind of find this part bad, but maybe intentionally so.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh.
Emily Hale: Like, I find it, I've seen them riding seaward on the waves.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. Bad how then?
Emily Hale: Beautiful. Combing the white hair of the waves blown back. When the wind what blows the water, white and black. Like, to me, there feels like a kind of panicked, I'm going to create a beautiful picture.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh.
Emily Hale: um But there's too much when the wind, when is this moment? but When is the wind blowing the water white and black?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: And why do we need to know that if they're not singing to you? Like a kind of grasping maybe of some sort of beautiful lyric tradition that that if only I could paint this picture for you right now of these way of these mermaids.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: But the details don't quite work for me. Like I don't, I can't quite see it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Wait. Yeah, it's hard to see. It's very hard to see. i think um now I think you're allowed, of course, Megan, you're allowed to say whatever you want. I always see at the end of that, I mean, I definitely see the kind of grasping for the kind of big note, beautiful lyric note to end the poem on. In the last three lines, we have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea girls.
Kamran Javadizadeh: There is this sort of, um
Emily Hale: C, girls reads with word.
Kamran Javadizadeh: deliberately self repetition that's happening here by sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown that last line is i don't think you're allowed to say that's a bad last line that's a great last line i want to come to it but but before we get there i mean i just want to say like the one illusion i've always heard there the thing that i picture there is that moment in the prelude where um
Emily Hale: Yes.
Emily Hale: That's amazing.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Wordsworth has the dream of the Arab and there's the caves, you know, and there's the, the book, the, the thing that I wish we had a good friend, Eric Lindstrom here to help me out, but the book that gets buried and then, and then, and then he wakes up and there's this kind of terror that the water's coming in and um that, that image.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But um anyway, back to this poem by sea girls wreathed with seaweed, red and brown, Till human voices wake us. Human voices is interesting, right?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Human, what, as opposed to the mermaid voices that we've been listening to?
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: So is the, yeah, say more.
Emily Hale: And ah is the is are the human voices...
Emily Hale: Why do we drown when the human voices wake us? You would almost think that the drowning would occur, right? we we We get to escape this image we we because we're no longer in this sea imagery, which we've come up with.
Emily Hale: Instead now, we're the human voices have taken us out of this image. And so then why are we drowning now?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Oh, well, yeah. Well, maybe it's like one of those things where, you know, I'm dreaming of such and such and I wake up and I find that the reason I was dreaming of it because there was something in my actual life that was, does what I'm saying make sense?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah,
Emily Hale: It does, but it's terrible. No, i don't i don't want that. Like when you put your camper's hand into a thing of water and then they dream about peeing.
Kamran Javadizadeh: any peas? i never did that.
Emily Hale: don't want this image. That's not what I'm thinking.
Kamran Javadizadeh: No, no.
Emily Hale: I mean more like the human voices, like the drowning there. Okay, so what it who is drowning then that we had this sort of, if if we if we if we say that beautiful image was achieved.
Emily Hale: And I want to say it's like grasping at being achieved. I don't say it's not there, but the sea girls or read the sea red and brown and let's think about women and me too and all of that, why women are the muse, but okay, fine.
Kamran Javadizadeh: who
Emily Hale: We'll give them the sea girls. We'll give them this imagery. Sea red and brown till human voices wake us and we drown. So then drowning is actually being back at that terrible party with coffee and tea and there is no beauty anymore.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, I don't know. Maybe one way to take it is
Kamran Javadizadeh: you know There's been all this anxiety about do I dare to eat the peach and do I dare to do this and that.
Emily Hale: Yeah. Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um Maybe as a kind of extended way of... watching but not participating or kind of skirting around the periphery of the scene.
Kamran Javadizadeh: The poem is imagining different ways of having something like that experience. and Maybe it's like being etherized and having some kind of quasi experience, some sort of ravings of a madman or whatever kind of experience.
Emily Hale: Yep.
Kamran Javadizadeh: but this This sort of romantic image begins in every sense, maybe sure capital R, lowercase r, romantic image of the mermaids and all of that is another way of sort of extending this fantasy without actually having to enter into it.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: This idea of being woken up at the end, that it's a horrifying line to me.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's always made the kind of hair stand up on the back of my neck because it's like,
Emily Hale: It is.
Kamran Javadizadeh: You're only going to be able to extend that conceit so far. And then once it breaks and the dream, you wake up from the dream, then you're in it. You know, then life is going to overwhelm you, whether it's sexuality or the life you actually have to live.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: The drowning here maybe is, i mean, with, within the metaphor, the drowning was literal
Emily Hale: The end of the poem.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: woken up from the dream, the drowning has become metaphorical somehow, maybe, right? Like, do you know what I mean? Like, in the dream, I'm in the sea.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I wake up from the dream because human voices have woken me and I'm on dry land, but I'm going to drown in some other absolute sense.
Emily Hale: Yes.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I'm going to, i don't know what, die or or get subsumed or lose this kind of precious alienation that I've carved out from, you know, I'm thinking of also of like Bradley and the soap bubbles and all that kind of business that I'm going to be um consumed by my interaction with some other person.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: And it's why I think You know I said earlier that there are so many versions of this poem in sort of fan culture, but I think the notion that you want to keep living in this fantasy, even if there was anxiety still in the fantasy, um but that reality is going to drown you, man, is is one that we can all sort of understand.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was thinking too, you know, that that that line um comes back too in the poet George Oppen, who has a ah poem called Till Other Voices Wake Us, so that ends, Till Other Voices Wake Us or We Drown.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um
Emily Hale: Is it also perfect iambic pentameter? I'm trying to do it on my hand right now. Till human voices wake us and drown.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Till Human Voices Wake Us.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, Till Human Voices Wake. Yeah, pretty perfect. Yeah. And, um, and, and we end with that kind of rhyming couplet too. Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Um, I hear you tapping it out.
Emily Hale: I am tapping it out.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Um, you know, or you think about the end of this poem in relation to the end of the wasteland too, or of this, this, um, this kind of, um,
Emily Hale: Yeah. Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: um condition of sterility and dryness, but then also this kind of vision of a flood or of being overwhelmed.
Emily Hale: yeah
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or I think of that image, photograph of Elliot, like holding his hand out, like trying to hold the world at bay somehow.
Emily Hale: yeah It's also interesting that this is of course a pre-war poem. And as you're saying, there's so many continuities to the wasteland.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Mm-hmm.
Emily Hale: And one of the things being like we've been lied to, which makes sense after World War I. And we saw the ways that belief, there's like the great book, The Great War in Modern Memory, but like that belief in all ah progress had led to these young men being sort of taken off to slaughter.
Emily Hale: um And that we see that in the wasteland with the way high culture is a lie
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: But we can see that already in Prufrock, the sense that he is already alienated.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: He's already feeling, he can't find a place in this modern world. And even in the kind of beauty he's alienated from that and and and reality is a kind of drowning.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, drowning Yeah, that's great. me and And drowning, I love that. Drowning, I mean, horrifying as it is, but drowning is like, um you know, your airways, your lungs fill up with water, right?
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: You can't breathe. there maybe There's this interesting thing there too, where like, till human voices wake us. So so other people's airways produce the sound which drowns us.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Maybe it's maybe ah this is also a kind of feeling of, um you know, what if we take this reading of the poem where he's thinking like, how should I begin? How should I begin my career? How should I begin as a poet?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Especially when, I mean, though he hadn't written it yet, Tradition Individual Town, I'm thinking of that kind of idea.
Emily Hale: hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Those are the ideas in that essay that he would write where there's this overwhelming sense of the kind of belatedness of this tradition that's behind us. behind him that is making it hard for him to speak, where he thinks that if he speaks, he's going to necessarily disturb the universe. right um This kind of...
Emily Hale: And also Hamlet and his problems, which we'd write in 1919, where that was, that i mean, the audacity of it, but that Hamlet was Shakespeare's failure because there wasn't an objective correlative.
Kamran Javadizadeh: he Yes, good, yeah.
Emily Hale: Like we couldn't understand why Hamlet wouldn't act and that the emotion exceeded anything that happened in the play itself, which we could again, read the poem that way too.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right.
Emily Hale: Like the emotion of this seems to exceed and we don't, he hasn't even said what he needed, but we can sense that he's drowning.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right. Right.
Kamran Javadizadeh: But yeah, but you're right. so So one reason not to leave your room is so that, you know, you know you need a room of your own, right? Like that you want you want the quiet to be able to have your own thoughts.
Kamran Javadizadeh: and the and the And it seems like if I get woken up from this dream, I'm going to be overwhelmed by these other voices and I'm going to lose my own ability to speak and and to breathe for that matter.
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Mm-hmm.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's going to kill me. Yeah. um
Emily Hale: And to write. Like, this is the one poem.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, right.
Emily Hale: and he And then afterwards he did, he in fact called it, it he was worried it was a swan song.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: So that's sort of a beautiful, like last final song image. And he was worried he would never be able to write anything as good again.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. you But you think he did.
Emily Hale: Oh yeah, I'm i'm a wasteland.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. um
Emily Hale: Try doing that in one podcast.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, next time, Megan, we've gone long already. we wait I don't know if you've noticed. We hit the two hour mark.
Emily Hale: Oh no, did we?
Kamran Javadizadeh: So here we are.
Emily Hale: is that a problem?
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's fantastic. No, it's great.
Emily Hale: oh we could keep talking for, I hope i hope that, um yeah, it was no Prince Hamlin, nor was meant be.
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's great. No, this is wonderful. You you did perfectly well. um do Do you want to read the poem out loud, the whole thing?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Or do you think we've gone too far?
Emily Hale: I think, I can't even imagine making someone listen to that right now.
Kamran Javadizadeh: You're scowling at me. Yeah.
Emily Hale: um
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay.
Emily Hale: I think they should go read it themselves and not hear the voice. No human voices.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Just read it on the page as if the nerves in pattern on a screen.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: So read it um in your own head.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Don't utter it. um and And see if human voices wake you and you drown, like how how it is to see it on the page instead.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Right, right. What is it like to hear the poem read out loud, to to listen to people talk about it, and then to find your own very quiet space and to and to let the words play in the kind of magic lantern theater of the inside of your head?
Emily Hale: Exactly. And the Wasteland, I feel very strongly that way too. Like you look at the fragments, like you should be able to to see it and not necessarily have it heard, even though it's different. He did the police in different voices, it was called, but how does it...
Kamran Javadizadeh: It's so funny because you know poetry people are always talking about like, well, to really do the poem, you have to hear it out loud. You have to read it out loud. And maybe one of the things we're observing here is there's this side of Eliot, Brathwaite's point of view, notwithstanding here it just for the moment, that um where there is this kind of separate experience that he's inculcating or inviting you into that is really a kind of textual experience rather than
Emily Hale: Yeah.
Emily Hale: Well, how about the footnotes to the wasteland? How could it be more?
Kamran Javadizadeh: yeah
Emily Hale: Or these epigraphs, which you can't you can't read.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. You can't read that out loud. yeah
Emily Hale: When do you read the footnote?
Kamran Javadizadeh: who
Emily Hale: Tiresias, though, a character, not not really a character, but a mere spectator. Like, when would you put that into the poem? And I'm definitely somebody who reads it with the footnotes and thinks they're important.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Okay.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah. All right.
Emily Hale: Okay, modernist collage, newspapers.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Megan Quigley.
Emily Hale: Freud, I'll just keep shouting words at you. Thank you for having me.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Well, yeah, it's...
Emily Hale: Elliot now, read it.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah, please. Yeah, everybody do. Go, go order. I'll give a link, order Megan's co-edited collection, Elliot now, which she's also a contributor to and, and it's just fantastic. Read all of Megan's work, read Elliot.
Kamran Javadizadeh: He's such an important poet. I hope this has been a fun episode for you all. It's been a total pleasure for me.
Emily Hale: We're just smiling at each other.
Kamran Javadizadeh: i'
Emily Hale: so that's yeah doing it with friends.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I know Megan, I, I hope you don't, I hope you don't regret, you know, would it have been worth it? Um, after all, ah I hope you think it has been, um listeners. I hope you think it it's been worth it to listen to us.
Kamran Javadizadeh: Uh, I'll have more episodes coming for you soon. Make sure to share the podcast with your friends and lovers and enemies and, you know, would be lovers and friends and enemies.
Emily Hale: oh
Kamran Javadizadeh: Um,
Emily Hale: Before we go, can you talk about why eating a peach is maybe sexualized one more time?
Kamran Javadizadeh: Yeah.
Kamran Javadizadeh: I'm done with that. Go listen to the Allman Brothers. though They will explain it to you. um And um yeah, that's it for us today. um I'll talk to you soon. In the meantime, be well, everyone.
Emily Hale: Thank you.
