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Megan Quigley on T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")
602 Plays8 hours ago
"Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" I've been waiting to record this episode for a long time: Megan Quigley, my dear friend and colleague, joins the podcast to talk about T. S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
Megan Quigley is an associate professor of English at Villanova University, where she is also on the Irish Studies and Gender and Women's Studies faculties. She is the author of Modernist Fiction and Vagueness: Philosophy, Form, and Language (Cambridge UP, 2015) and the co-editor of Eliot Now (Bloomsbury, 2024). She is also the editor of two clusters of essays on #MeToo, Eliot, and modernism in Modernism/modernity Print+ (2019, 2020). Her essays have appeared in the James Joyce Quarterly, Modernism/modernity, Philosophy and Literature, Poetics Today, LARB, the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, nonsite, and the Cambridge Companion to European Modernism. She is a four-time lecturer and seminar leader at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School. Her current book project is called "The Love Song of Modernism" and is on modernism and fan fiction. She has two essays in progress on AI and literature and an essay forthcoming on "T. S. Eliot's Women" in A Companion to Eliot's Complete Prose.
As always, make sure you're following the podcast on your platform of choice, and, if you've been enjoying it, leave a rating and review. Please also share the podcast with your friends. More soon!
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Transcript
Introduction to Megan Quigley and T.S. Eliot
00:00:00
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.
00:00:12
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.
00:00:33
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.
00:00:51
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.
00:01:15
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.
00:01:48
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.
00:02:02
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.
00:02:22
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.
00:02:41
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.
00:03:06
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.
00:03:29
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.
00:03:41
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
Megan's Journey with T.S. Eliot and Modernism
00:04:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
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,
00:04:14
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.
00:04:55
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...
00:05:11
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.
00:05:31
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.
00:05:59
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.
00:06:12
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...
00:06:25
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.
00:06:43
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.
00:07:19
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,
00:07:30
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.
00:07:47
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.
00:08:17
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.
00:08:32
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.
00:08:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Megan Quigley, welcome to Close Readings, my humble podcast. How are you doing today?
00:08:53
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.
00:09:07
Emily Hale
i want to emphasize that. Maybe put it on my gravestone.
00:09:11
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, no, don't put it there.
00:09:13
Emily Hale
Enough, we've heard enough.
00:09:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right. No, we we will and I'll say unmute, Megan. Okay. ah
00:09:22
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.
00:09:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Megan. Yeah.
00:09:40
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.
00:09:47
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.
00:09:56
Emily Hale
I did, I did.
00:09:57
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.
00:10:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, you chose Eliot and, um, I,
Eliot's Life and Philosophical Influences
00:10:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
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.
00:10:28
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.
00:10:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Eliot and what that first encounter was like for you.
00:10:48
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.
00:11:03
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.
00:11:16
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.
00:11:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:11:30
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.
00:11:49
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,
00:12:08
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.
00:12:25
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,
00:12:37
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.
00:12:59
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.
00:13:23
Emily Hale
And I also thought it was pretty beautiful. And that's what sort of drew me in. Hmm.
00:13:26
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.
00:13:40
Emily Hale
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:13:45
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
00:13:55
Emily Hale
hu
00:13:55
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.
00:14:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:14:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
and
00:14:13
Emily Hale
That's right.
00:14:14
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:14:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. And then, um, and then Elliot has obviously returned, returned to you, I think even at the dissertation dissertation stage.
00:14:22
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:14:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:14:22
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.
00:14:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
And yeah.
00:14:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right. right
00:14:41
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
Analysis of 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
00:15:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
was and um where he fits into literary history. Obviously these are huge questions that one could answer,
00:15:09
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.
00:15:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
You said, oh, you thought he was an English poet.
00:15:23
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
00:15:24
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.
00:15:41
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.
00:15:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
And so it would be useful to hear something about all of that.
00:15:55
Emily Hale
ah Especially, sorry, especially for somebody like Elliot who said he wrote criticism to sort of create an audience for his poetry.
00:15:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, go ahead, please.
00:16:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right, so back let's back up.
00:16:04
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:16:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
St. Louis, maybe we can start there.
00:16:07
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:16:07
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?
00:16:16
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.
00:16:29
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.
00:16:47
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.
00:17:00
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.
00:17:31
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.
00:17:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
No, no way.
00:17:47
Emily Hale
Yeah, which given my work on Elliot, me too, is fascinating. But anyway, right?
00:17:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Apple doesn't fall far from the the grand great grand tree, I guess. Whatever.
00:17:55
Emily Hale
He later did, it he did apologize later.
00:17:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's funny.
00:17:59
Emily Hale
And then um they were Boston, fancy Boston family for a long time with the Alcotts and all sorts of people.
00:17:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right.
00:18:03
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.
00:18:13
Emily Hale
Louis.
00:18:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:18:14
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.
00:18:33
Emily Hale
They were sort of on the outskirts of the red light district, which all relates to Prufrock, right? um
00:18:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:18:39
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.
00:18:50
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.
00:19:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
his end role, right?
00:19:21
Emily Hale
Yes, exactly.
00:19:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:19:22
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,
00:19:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:19:43
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.
00:19:57
Emily Hale
Everyone thought he would become like the next William James. And he had that same Boston background.
00:19:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Hmm.
00:20:03
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.
00:20:19
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.
00:20:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Cambridge, of Massachusetts.
00:20:39
Emily Hale
No, sorry, over in England.
00:20:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, sorry.
00:20:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, okay.
00:20:41
Emily Hale
Met a young woman, Vivian, and um very quickly they got married.
00:20:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:20:46
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
00:20:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think the wasteland is the more significant outcome there in the movie, Tom and Viv.
00:21:00
Emily Hale
ah the Tom and Viv movie.
00:21:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
But anyway, go on.
00:21:02
Emily Hale
um And where were we? oh he never went back.
00:21:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, he's in England.
00:21:08
Emily Hale
and
00:21:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
He marries. He becomes a poet, right?
00:21:10
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.
00:21:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:21:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:21:24
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.
00:21:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
At Faber and Faber.
00:21:43
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.
00:22:01
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
00:22:40
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.
00:22:51
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.
00:22:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
well
00:23:01
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.
00:23:12
Emily Hale
Yeah, yeah, became Anglo-Catholic. And his famous pronunciation was classicist, monarchist, and Anglo-Catholic.
00:23:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:23:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, and but then and then once she died, he eventually did remarry, right? He remarried as
Symbolism and Themes in 'Prufrock'
00:23:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
secretary, yeah?
00:23:26
Emily Hale
Well, that's complicated too, because she died in 1947, sort of suddenly.
00:23:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:23:32
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.
00:23:44
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
00:23:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. The woman he'd met in in America and left behind. Yeah.
00:23:59
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.
00:24:16
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.
00:24:31
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.
00:24:44
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.
00:25:04
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.
00:25:21
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.
00:25:37
Emily Hale
um And when he died, the rest of his life, sorry.
00:25:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, the rest of his life together. Yeah.
00:25:42
Emily Hale
and Good point.
00:25:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:25:43
Emily Hale
She had a lot more to live and give to his memory.
00:25:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right.
00:25:46
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.
00:25:57
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.
00:26:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:26:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:26:08
Emily Hale
And in part, thank you.
00:26:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Part of what your, your book Elliot now is about so, so beautifully.
00:26:12
Emily Hale
Yes. Thank you.
00:26:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:26:15
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.
00:26:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
You, but you wanted to say something else.
00:26:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:26:23
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.
00:26:31
Emily Hale
I don't think there were any dates, sorry.
00:26:33
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.
00:26:46
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?
00:26:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
years prior to that, I think 1910, 1911 is when he writes it.
00:27:01
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:27:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:27:02
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
00:27:03
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.
00:27:15
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.
00:27:29
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
00:27:35
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
00:27:48
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.
00:28:02
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.
00:28:29
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.
00:28:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:28:58
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.
00:29:10
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,
00:29:27
Emily Hale
be epic. That's but one suggestion.
00:29:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
00:29:30
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.
00:29:58
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.
00:30:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:30:04
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
00:30:15
Emily Hale
Yep.
00:30:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
that that that ah that maybe plays into the development of um the American new Criticism,
00:30:24
Emily Hale
yeah
00:30:24
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.
00:30:38
Emily Hale
hmm. Yeah.
00:30:41
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.
00:30:49
Emily Hale
yeah
00:30:52
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?
00:31:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Do you have something else you wanted to say to set set it up? Or you don't have to.
00:31:12
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...
00:31:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:31:29
Emily Hale
That was the beginning of modernism?
00:31:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah. I don't think he just said it to me. I, I,
00:31:35
Emily Hale
Was it just you and Frank Cremone hanging out, having a coffee? Yeah.
00:31:38
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.
00:31:59
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.
00:32:18
Emily Hale
Hmm.
00:32:19
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.
00:32:25
Emily Hale
yeah
00:32:38
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.
00:32:48
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:32:49
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?
00:32:55
Emily Hale
who
00:32:56
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?
00:33:03
Emily Hale
Yeah, very early.
00:33:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Just barely. Yeah. Yeah.
00:33:06
Emily Hale
And he'd been carrying around parts of it for a long time.
00:33:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
there
00:33:09
Emily Hale
And in fact, the Prince Hamlet part was a holdover from a lot earlier. So teens.
00:33:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
from like when he was in college or a teenager even.
00:33:15
Emily Hale
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
00:33:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
oh It was crazy.
00:33:16
Emily Hale
Yep. I know.
00:33:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
um The recording we're going to hear, I think you have told us is probably from 1955. fifty five
00:33:25
Emily Hale
Yeah, I think that's the one it is.
00:33:26
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.
00:33:44
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.
00:33:54
Emily Hale
Yeah, that's great.
00:33:54
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.
00:34:09
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.
00:34:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
So interesting enough. um All right. Here is T.S. Eliot reading the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
00:43:02
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?
00:43:17
Emily Hale
I wonder, listening to it, when you see the words on the page,
00:43:25
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.
00:43:42
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?
00:43:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:43:53
Emily Hale
um Does it sound robotic?
00:43:57
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.
00:44:23
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:44:30
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:44:33
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.
00:44:38
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
00:44:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah You know, one question I have is, he doesn't sound like he's American to me.
00:44:47
Emily Hale
It doesn't.
00:44:48
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.
00:44:56
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm. Hmm.
00:44:58
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.
00:45:14
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.
00:45:26
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.
00:45:35
Emily Hale
Wow. And I'm thinking of his line about whatever Auden is, I'm the opposite.
00:45:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
That.
00:45:43
Emily Hale
So he said that somewhere.
00:45:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, right.
00:45:44
Emily Hale
So like, if if Auden is now American, I must be English.
00:45:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
They traded.
00:45:48
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.
00:46:02
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.
00:46:03
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:46:08
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.
00:46:20
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.
00:46:21
Emily Hale
Yes.
00:46:30
Emily Hale
In the space of his voice and also
00:46:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:46:34
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.
00:46:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:46:48
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.
00:46:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
All
00:47:02
Emily Hale
and
00:47:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:47:03
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?
00:47:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, to give it to us, yeah.
00:47:16
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.
00:47:31
Emily Hale
And here he is in Barbados thinking about this.
00:47:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:47:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:47:34
Emily Hale
in that that dry deadpan delivery, the rhythms of St.
00:47:39
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.
00:47:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
00:47:47
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,
00:48:02
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.
00:48:26
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.
00:48:53
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.
00:49:12
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?
00:49:25
Emily Hale
Hmm.
00:49:29
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:49:29
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.
00:49:48
Emily Hale
Yep.
00:49:51
Emily Hale
Mm hmm.
00:50:03
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?
00:50:11
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:50:19
Emily Hale
Hmm.
00:50:22
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.
00:50:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:50:36
Emily Hale
In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
00:50:38
Emily Hale
Oh, it sticks right in there. Or like the earworm.
00:50:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah.
00:50:41
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.
00:50:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:50:57
Emily Hale
So not, not particularly, um, formal poetry. And yet then Elliot wrote, but Ver Libra is fake.
00:51:09
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?
00:51:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
00:51:30
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.
00:51:41
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?
00:51:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Does he ever leave his room? That question.
00:51:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:51:51
Emily Hale
um
00:51:52
Emily Hale
So those are some ways that like bigger picture, I think about it.
00:51:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Great.
00:51:56
Emily Hale
And that's not really, not really formal per se.
00:52:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
But that's fine.
00:52:00
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:52:01
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.
00:52:11
Emily Hale
Okay.
00:52:14
Emily Hale
Yep.
00:52:14
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.
00:52:27
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.
00:52:38
Emily Hale
Um, maybe I'll take the name on first.
00:52:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:52:42
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.
00:52:59
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.
00:53:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:53:08
Emily Hale
um So the love song of T.
00:53:09
Kamran Javadizadeh
Sorry, we should we just let's say, I don't think we've said Thomas Stearns Elliott is the full name.
00:53:12
Emily Hale
Thomas Stearns, Elliot.
00:53:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
00:53:14
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.
00:53:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:53:23
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
00:53:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
00:53:35
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.
00:53:45
Emily Hale
In another anecdote, he said, I used to walk by it.
00:53:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:53:48
Emily Hale
And then, uh, Jamie Stare has shown that there are advertisements for it in his school magazine for proof rocks furniture.
00:53:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
amazing.
00:53:55
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,
00:54:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:54:05
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.
00:54:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:54:13
Emily Hale
Elliot thought it sounded, what did he write one time about it? Like euphemous, like it sounded pretty or something like that?
00:54:20
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.
00:54:30
Emily Hale
Hmm.
00:54:34
Emily Hale
Yeah, totally.
00:54:42
Emily Hale
No, that's really interesting because Bergson was also a huge influence on it.
00:54:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
and Yeah, go ahead. All
00:54:46
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.
00:54:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:54:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
and And tell us why Berkson would be irrelevant.
00:54:54
Emily Hale
Henri Bergson is a philosopher and um thought a lot about the relationship of time and
00:54:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:55:04
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
00:55:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah.
00:55:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
00:55:31
Emily Hale
Elliot thinking through existential crises and philosophical questions.
00:55:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
right. right. All right. That's great. Okay. That's cool. Okay. What about love song? I mean.
00:55:40
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.
00:55:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:55:52
Emily Hale
And is there a way that
00:55:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:55:55
Emily Hale
this is someone hoping to go visit someone um with whom they hope to have an encounter?
00:56:02
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.
00:56:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
or or maybe it's a song about my experience vis-a-vis love, right? Which isn't, which might be minimal.
00:56:22
Emily Hale
Yes.
00:56:28
Emily Hale
yeah
00:56:30
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
00:56:46
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.
00:56:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah okay the letter to Aiken right
00:57:00
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.
00:57:10
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.
00:57:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
00:57:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
00:57:33
Emily Hale
So that there's a very
00:57:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah. OK.
00:57:37
Emily Hale
If that's what the love song is. Oh no, it's a love song to Aiken about his fear of love.
00:57:44
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.
00:57:55
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:57:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
But this is like a love song from a ah sexually anxious person.
00:58:01
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:58:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
young slash old man, right?
00:58:03
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
00:58:04
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.
00:58:12
Emily Hale
Yeah.
00:58:17
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,
00:58:24
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.
00:58:32
Emily Hale
a perfectly good excuse.
00:58:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
00:58:34
Emily Hale
Yes.
00:58:35
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.
00:58:41
Emily Hale
Yep.
00:58:50
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.
00:59:07
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...
00:59:07
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
00:59:18
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.
00:59:32
Emily Hale
who
00:59:33
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?
00:59:43
Emily Hale
And
00:59:47
Emily Hale
yeah. And also Guido da Montefeltro, who's the one talking, is in hell because he gave false counsel.
00:59:57
Emily Hale
He advised someone badly. So he's sort of doubly bad. And and it's also not translated.
01:00:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:00:06
Emily Hale
So that's some of the ways that some sometimes people think Elliot's a terrible snob.
01:00:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:00:10
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.
01:00:27
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.
01:00:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, there's something very meta about it.
01:00:38
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:00:38
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.
01:00:47
Emily Hale
That's English? I thought that was if you wanted to buy a yacht.
01:00:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. I don't know.
01:00:50
Emily Hale
Like, if you ever say like, oh, how much would a boat cost?
01:00:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think of that all as kind of thing. Yeah.
01:00:53
Emily Hale
you're like, oh, you can't afford it.
01:00:54
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.
01:01:08
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.
01:01:14
Emily Hale
Yeah. and
01:01:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
And I'm dead too.
01:01:17
Emily Hale
And trapped here with me.
01:01:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah You're here with me.
01:01:19
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.
01:01:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, and there's a kind of intimacy though that we have down here in our damned state or something, right?
01:01:32
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:01:37
Emily Hale
We're going to share this. And it are the you and I then...
01:01:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:01:43
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
01:01:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:01:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:01:59
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.
01:02:12
Emily Hale
yeah
01:02:15
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.
01:02:32
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.
01:02:37
Emily Hale
Yeah. yeah
01:02:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
But the idea is like the heroic kind of register of that applies even to me and my stupid little life.
01:03:00
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:03:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
All right.
01:03:01
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.
01:03:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:03:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:03:16
Emily Hale
And kind of Joyce's Ulysses kind of way.
01:03:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
okay
01:03:19
Emily Hale
Like now we're realizing that our, maybe we're not writing Dante, but our crises still matter.
01:03:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:03:27
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.
01:03:35
Emily Hale
Exactly.
01:03:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:03:39
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.
01:03:39
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.
01:03:46
Emily Hale
Yeah. Yes, exactly.
01:03:49
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?
01:04:01
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:04:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Or not maybe not diminishment, maybe that maybe there's a different word for it.
01:04:03
Emily Hale
Yep.
01:04:06
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.
01:04:12
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:04:14
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.
01:04:38
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?
01:04:51
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.
01:05:03
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,
01:05:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
All
01:05:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
I'll eat a peach.
01:05:14
Emily Hale
eat a peach, right?
01:05:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:05:16
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.
01:05:42
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.
01:05:53
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.
01:06:06
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.
01:06:32
Emily Hale
Do you read that as like depressing, negative, the bot youre the the night is like a corpse?
01:06:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:06:37
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?
01:06:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, having never, you know, recreationally
01:06:48
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...
01:07:06
Emily Hale
Okay. Mm-hmm.
01:07:09
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.
01:07:18
Emily Hale
who
01:07:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, though, mm-hmm.
01:07:33
Emily Hale
But then in the poet tradition, like, oh my gosh, a sunset. What could be more beautiful, right?
01:07:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right.
01:07:40
Emily Hale
And then there is your diminishment to...
01:07:42
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.
01:07:45
Emily Hale
who
01:07:48
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?
01:07:48
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:07:51
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:07:56
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:07:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:07:57
Emily Hale
Yeah, the noun is wrong there.
01:07:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, I don't know.
01:07:59
Emily Hale
Evening.
01:07:59
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.
01:08:13
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:08:16
Emily Hale
Yep.
01:08:22
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.
01:08:31
Emily Hale
Yep.
01:08:35
Emily Hale
Yeah. And medical medical terminology somehow becoming
01:08:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Patient here as...
01:08:40
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.
01:08:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:08:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:08:52
Emily Hale
Like why are any of those things, things we wanna write about in poetry exactly?
01:08:55
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.
01:09:01
Emily Hale
Oh yes,
01:09:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
The patient is the person to whom things are done, right?
01:09:16
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:09:17
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.
01:09:29
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.
01:09:40
Emily Hale
yes
01:09:46
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.
01:09:48
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.
01:09:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, good. Yeah.
01:09:57
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.
01:09:58
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.
01:10:15
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?
01:10:27
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.
01:10:36
Emily Hale
Tour of the modern city.
01:10:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's what we're being invited to do.
01:10:38
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.
01:10:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm. Right.
01:10:48
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:10:48
Emily Hale
But actually that's probably St. Louis and it might be pollution.
01:10:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:10:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah. yeah.
01:10:52
Emily Hale
um that he's looking at.
01:10:53
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.
01:11:04
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.
01:11:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
01:11:20
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?
01:11:31
Emily Hale
Are they like upper class British women?
01:11:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, what do we think of them?
01:11:34
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.
01:11:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
With oyster shells, yeah.
01:11:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:11:53
Emily Hale
that probably a ah British speaker would say restaurant.
01:11:56
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.
01:12:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
But to English years, they sound American or something, right?
01:12:17
Emily Hale
Totally, yes.
01:12:17
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.
01:12:24
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:12:26
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.
01:12:32
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?
01:12:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, yeah, good.
01:12:40
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?
01:12:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:12:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Mm-hmm.
01:12:50
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
01:13:00
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.
01:13:20
Emily Hale
So sort of the, like, paralyzation of the patient, like you said.
01:13:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's something really interesting, right? In such close proximity to have the untranslated Dante there is epigraph.
01:13:34
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:13:37
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.
01:13:49
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:13:49
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?
01:13:57
Emily Hale
yeah
01:14:05
Emily Hale
yeah
01:14:12
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.
01:14:27
Emily Hale
yeah
01:14:28
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?
01:14:37
Emily Hale
Mm.
01:14:38
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.
01:14:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is there a sexual pun?
01:14:52
Emily Hale
That's funny. It feels more relentless to me.
01:14:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
I don't think so. Yeah.
01:14:55
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.
01:14:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh. Oh, that's interesting.
01:15:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's interesting.
01:15:03
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.
01:15:09
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.
01:15:16
Emily Hale
Meow. You should look at the Julian beater Peters um graphic novel version. Have you seen it?
01:15:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, I think so. But yeah, right.
01:15:23
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.
01:15:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
That's funny.
01:15:33
Emily Hale
And he also said he didn't want annotations and Christopher Ricks and Jim McHugh give that an ample amount of annotations.
01:15:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:15:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Wow. Listen, but he has only himself to blame on the annotations front.
01:15:42
Emily Hale
Exactly. Um,
01:15:43
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.
01:15:55
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh
01:15:55
Emily Hale
and It feels more um welcoming and kind as part of the love song than those women do.
01:16:00
Emily Hale
Like maybe he's maybe he's a cat person.
01:16:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
ah yeah.
01:16:02
Emily Hale
He just wants to, like Taylor Swift, hang out with his cat because
01:16:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, famously, right, Elliot is the author of Cats, right?
01:16:08
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.
01:16:25
Emily Hale
But it's a version of Cats, and it's great.
01:16:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay. Okay.
01:16:28
Emily Hale
um But it's, again, yeah, Elliot loved Cats, wrote poems to his friend's kids about cats.
01:16:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Cool.
01:16:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:16:35
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.
01:16:44
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...
01:16:46
Emily Hale
Hmm.
01:16:55
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
01:17:02
Emily Hale
Okay.
01:17:16
Emily Hale
okay
01:17:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
stanza or verse paragraph, by all means, please do so.
01:17:24
Emily Hale
okay
01:17:25
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.
01:17:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
um i'm I'm really curious about that, um about um
01:17:45
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.
01:18:07
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.
01:18:18
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:18:20
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.
01:18:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
right Like ah I don't want to do it yet because I can do it later.
01:18:31
Emily Hale
Oh, yeah.
01:18:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
There's something procrastinatory about that.
01:18:38
Emily Hale
Yeah, and the word time comes up eight times in that stanza.
01:18:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
There will be time.
01:18:41
Emily Hale
That's what I was looking at, like repeated over and over.
01:18:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, that's great. Yeah. Read, read, read the lines for us.
01:18:43
Emily Hale
There will be time.
01:18:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Remind us of the lines.
01:18:46
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.
01:18:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
And time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea.
01:18:59
Emily Hale
and
01:19:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:19:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Well,
01:19:08
Emily Hale
in my In my college notes on the side of this written in tiny little, I have the ennui of consciousness.
01:19:18
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
01:19:18
Emily Hale
that is That is what that time says. they Proof for up.
01:19:24
Emily Hale
um
01:19:29
Emily Hale
Can we drop some more bergson?
01:19:33
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.
01:19:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:19:45
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.
01:19:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:19:55
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.
01:20:11
Emily Hale
um I don't know if that's useful.
01:20:13
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.
01:20:22
Emily Hale
hmm
01:20:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
I don't know why murder and create.
01:20:27
Emily Hale
hmm hmm
01:20:28
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.
01:20:55
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
01:21:06
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?
01:21:19
Emily Hale
Like just do something.
01:21:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:21:20
Emily Hale
If you want to avenge your father, go for it.
01:21:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Get on with it.
01:21:23
Emily Hale
Kill your uncle. Why are we standing around saying to be and not to be?
01:21:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:21:27
Emily Hale
And I think this is another version of the Hamlet question of I'm indecisive.
01:21:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:21:33
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?
01:21:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:21:43
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.
01:21:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right, right.
01:21:51
Emily Hale
This is no Hamlet question.
01:21:51
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.
01:22:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:22:13
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.
01:22:30
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:22:42
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?
01:22:52
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.
01:22:55
Emily Hale
Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:22:59
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?
01:23:08
Emily Hale
who
01:23:10
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.
01:23:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, so, um So like on the one hand, he's saying like, put it off, put it off, I'm procrastinating.
01:23:33
Emily Hale
who
01:23:35
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.
01:23:45
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:23:47
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.
01:23:59
Emily Hale
Do I dare disturb the universe?
01:24:03
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.
Exploration of Eliot's Early Work and Themes
01:24:14
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
01:24:25
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.
01:24:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm.
01:24:50
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.
01:24:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
oh
01:25:07
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.
01:25:25
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.
01:25:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
where he's wondering like, all right, am I going to do this?
01:25:42
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:25:42
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.
01:25:50
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:25:52
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:25:53
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.
01:26:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
If I get in, I'm going to disturb it somehow.
01:26:11
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:26:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
And maybe I prefer to be out on the sidelines instead.
01:26:16
Emily Hale
and And not a participant.
01:26:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Yeah. Mm
01:26:19
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,
01:26:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
hmm.
01:26:33
Emily Hale
in his first book
01:26:37
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.
01:26:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:26:44
Emily Hale
Like I'm gonna disturb the universe with this verse that I'm creating and do I dare.
01:26:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:26:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. And the book is called Prufrock and Other Observations, right?
01:26:50
Emily Hale
Exactly.
01:26:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:26:52
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.
01:27:16
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
01:27:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Which is, which as you said, Elliot, I mean, it's another thing he's on the sidelines of.
01:27:29
Emily Hale
another thing he's on the sidelines of because of his,
01:27:32
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
01:27:33
Emily Hale
And and he
01:27:37
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,
01:27:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
right. Yeah.
01:27:52
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.
01:28:07
Emily Hale
um
01:28:08
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.
01:28:28
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?
01:28:43
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,
01:28:50
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:28:55
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:29:05
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.
01:29:16
Emily Hale
So is it okay if I if we talk for a second about Prufox provigilium? So
01:29:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Explain what it is, please.
01:29:21
Emily Hale
proviilium
01:29:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:29:22
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.
01:29:39
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.
01:29:56
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,
01:30:09
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
01:30:52
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
01:31:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
So those lines, very memorable lines, are from the much longer cut section called Prufrock's Perfigillium.
01:31:11
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
01:31:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:31:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.
01:31:24
Emily Hale
into a ball then suddenly dissolve and fall away. Those were cut too.
01:31:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:31:29
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,
01:31:47
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.
01:32:06
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.
01:32:21
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.
01:32:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Where I can buy sexual experience. Yeah.
01:32:34
Emily Hale
Uh-huh.
01:32:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
All
01:32:34
Emily Hale
And, um,
01:32:37
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.
01:32:52
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
01:32:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:33:01
Emily Hale
and turn in turn the century, St. Louis was affected with syphilis, which of course we know had really damaging effects.
01:33:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:33:06
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.
01:33:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
right
01:33:23
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?
01:33:31
Emily Hale
Hmm.
01:33:32
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
01:33:46
Emily Hale
Hmm.
01:33:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
well, I'm going to consider the possibility of actually getting out there and doing it, quote unquote.
01:33:55
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:33:59
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?
01:34:10
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:34:13
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.
01:34:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:34:18
Emily Hale
And it was 50, 50 half the students were like, finally, we know what's going on.
01:34:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
01:34:23
Emily Hale
Like, what is this overwhelming question? Yay.
01:34:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's maybe a good sort of Rorschach for how you know anxious or repressed the student is.
01:34:27
Emily Hale
um
01:34:33
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.
01:34:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
i have I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.
01:34:52
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:34:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
And I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker. And in short, I was afraid.
01:35:03
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.
01:35:15
Emily Hale
who
01:35:15
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.
01:35:25
Emily Hale
Yep.
01:35:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Would it have been worth it to do it?
01:35:26
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:35:28
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
01:35:34
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.
01:35:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
that but yeah
01:35:45
Emily Hale
Like, he did it, and that's why he's trapped in hell.
01:35:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, and that brings us also to these interesting sort of back from the dead lines, Lazarus, right?
01:35:53
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:35:55
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,
01:36:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
That is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all. um
01:36:20
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.
01:36:24
Kamran Javadizadeh
Does it? Uh-huh.
01:36:25
Emily Hale
That is not what I meant at all. It sounded like Dr. Seuss or something.
01:36:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh.
01:36:29
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.
01:36:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:36:48
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...
01:36:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, so so, so Lazarus is sort of like a Cassandra or something, right?
01:36:58
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:36:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
This person who has this kind of prophetic knowledge, but is ignored. Is that right? Do I have it right? Yeah.
01:37:05
Emily Hale
Yes. and And so there are a bunch of maybe stand-ins for the poet.
01:37:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh, right.
01:37:10
Emily Hale
Lazarus, Hamlet, Dante, John the Baptist, the head on the platter, um which we hadn't gotten to yet, I'm afraid.
01:37:16
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:37:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right, right. Yeah.
01:37:22
Emily Hale
But wait, where is the head on the platter? It's so good.
01:37:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think we, did we skip it?
01:37:27
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.
01:37:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:37:36
Emily Hale
Again, it's a sort of diminution. Is that a word?
01:37:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Diminition?
01:37:41
Emily Hale
Is that a word?
01:37:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Diminition?
01:37:43
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:37:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay,
01:37:43
Emily Hale
Of
Modernist Techniques and Literary References
01:37:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah.
01:37:45
Emily Hale
grand epic or desire coupled with
01:37:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:37:50
Emily Hale
And I think that's why Eliot's known as like this great modern modernist with this minor small detail.
01:37:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:37:56
Emily Hale
And LeForge did that too.
01:37:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:37:58
Emily Hale
Like he talked about a hotel of eternity in one
01:38:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. This business of that is not what I meant at all. That is not it at all.
01:38:13
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?
01:38:24
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?
01:38:44
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.
01:38:57
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.
01:39:08
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.
01:39:19
Emily Hale
It's impossible.
01:39:19
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?
01:39:31
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,
01:39:40
Emily Hale
hmm.
01:39:42
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:39:43
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?
01:39:46
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:39:49
Emily Hale
hmm.
01:39:51
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.
01:40:03
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:40:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
And I love the, but as if, be that as if moment is really interesting to me.
01:40:18
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:40:19
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.
01:40:23
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.
01:40:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
01:40:32
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.
01:40:59
Emily Hale
That is impossible to say what just what I mean, but look, you can see it
01:41:03
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.
01:41:23
Emily Hale
And that would make the word patterns really important.
01:41:26
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. say Say more about patterns. Yeah.
01:41:30
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.
01:41:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:41:48
Emily Hale
through form.
01:41:48
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
01:42:04
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:42:13
Emily Hale
Mm hmm.
01:42:17
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.
01:42:25
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?
01:42:37
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:42:43
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?
01:42:56
Emily Hale
Then why did I bother?
01:42:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Why did I bother?
01:42:58
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:42:59
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Yeah.
01:42:59
Emily Hale
Let's just, I'm just gonna stay in my room.
01:43:02
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.
01:43:21
Kamran Javadizadeh
And, and this poet said to me,
01:43:22
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:43:24
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.
01:43:30
Emily Hale
Oh.
01:43:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
um or they failed you know it's not It's not the...
01:43:34
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:43:37
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.
01:43:40
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:43:44
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right?
01:43:44
Emily Hale
Mm hmm.
01:43:44
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.
01:43:55
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.
01:44:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
right.
01:44:08
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.
01:44:21
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:44:24
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.
01:44:32
Emily Hale
Amazing. Yep.
01:44:35
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?
01:44:44
Emily Hale
Yep. who
01:44:45
Kamran Javadizadeh
Which is, You know, what if Hamlet but Rosencrantz, right?
01:44:49
Emily Hale
yep
01:44:50
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...
01:45:01
Emily Hale
ah Oh, wow. Meticulous.
01:45:03
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, right.
01:45:03
Emily Hale
I heard that too. Sort of like restaurant.
01:45:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
that Oh, that's funny. I was thinking he's thinking of himself as like um part of the servant class, right?
01:45:12
Emily Hale
Fussy. Yep.
01:45:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
He's like a butler. Right?
01:45:17
Emily Hale
Polonius, no?
01:45:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, maybe. Right.
01:45:19
Emily Hale
Deferential.
01:45:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Right.
01:45:21
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.
01:45:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Advising the prince. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
01:45:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, that's interesting.
01:45:32
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.
01:45:45
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.
01:45:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:45:50
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.
01:45:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, that's interesting. No, I am not Hamlet.
01:45:55
Emily Hale
No, I'm no Hamlet. Yeah. What does the Prince add?
01:45:57
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.
01:46:11
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.
01:46:22
Emily Hale
Hmm.
01:46:22
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.
01:46:29
Emily Hale
Okay.
01:46:35
Emily Hale
Or he's like gotten too thin.
01:46:36
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:46:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
Or something.
01:46:37
Emily Hale
Because they say your arms and will they say
01:46:40
Emily Hale
so then your pants wouldn't stay up as well. So you've got to roll them up
01:46:42
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.
01:46:53
Emily Hale
up. Oh, malarkey.
01:46:53
Kamran Javadizadeh
That doesn't sound right, right? Okay, okay, good.
01:46:56
Emily Hale
He's clearly worried about getting wet and he's fussy.
01:46:59
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.
01:47:08
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.
01:47:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh.
01:47:18
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:47:23
Emily Hale
So shall I part my hair behind? Or another way I saw that glossed was to cover the bald spot.
01:47:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh, right, right, right.
01:47:28
Emily Hale
So is it is it fashionable or is it another fear of age?
01:47:32
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.
01:47:41
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?
01:47:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Is it some kind of sexual anxiety that he's having?
01:47:48
Emily Hale
Yes, it is.
01:47:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
01:47:49
Emily Hale
Yes. So what about a peach exactly?
01:47:52
Kamran Javadizadeh
I don't know, Megan. I don't know.
01:47:54
Emily Hale
I once saw a glossed as he's Darren Peach on a fellow. was like, that's just wrong.
01:47:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh-huh.
01:48:00
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.
01:48:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
01:48:06
Emily Hale
Mm hmm.
01:48:06
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.
01:48:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:48:27
Emily Hale
Oh my gosh, can we go both get a peach for the end of this?
01:48:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Uh, Yeah, well, I did too.
01:48:30
Emily Hale
I actually have some, it's spring.
01:48:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
And they were kind of disappointingly, I don't know, peaches are magic, right?
01:48:33
Emily Hale
Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.
01:48:35
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.
01:48:35
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:48:42
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.
01:48:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
So back to this business of song and and its relationship to poetry, love song.
01:49:00
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:49:04
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.
01:49:14
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.
01:49:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Hmm.
01:49:23
Emily Hale
where I'm not, I'm not waiting for mermaids.
01:49:25
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right, right, like Frost's oven bird, right.
01:49:27
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:49:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
The question that he asks in All But Words is what to make of a diminished thing.
01:49:32
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:49:32
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
01:49:49
Emily Hale
His mom wanted to be a poet as well.
01:49:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay, and in those times it sounded like the song of mermaids, but I'm too late for that.
01:49:51
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:49:58
Kamran Javadizadeh
I don't think they're going to sing to me.
01:49:59
Emily Hale
Yep.
01:50:00
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.
01:50:14
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.
01:50:27
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.
01:50:42
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?
01:50:55
Emily Hale
You know, that's that's another like Dr. Sh... That's actually hard to read.
01:50:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
01:50:58
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.
01:51:05
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm. No, I think, I think, I think, i I was listening for that.
01:51:09
Emily Hale
Did I say it right?
01:51:10
Kamran Javadizadeh
I think he said it right. I think you said it right too.
01:51:12
Emily Hale
Okay.
01:51:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Anyway, that's interesting.
01:51:13
Emily Hale
Okay.
01:51:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, that is a moment where it is hard to read. Mm-hmm.
01:51:17
Emily Hale
It's excessively rhymey.
01:51:21
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?
01:51:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
You're picturing these mermaids, probably you're picturing their hair, right?
01:51:39
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:51:43
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:51:45
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.
01:51:51
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:51:54
Kamran Javadizadeh
So that's metaphorical hair now.
01:51:56
Emily Hale
Mm hmm.
01:51:57
Kamran Javadizadeh
And the combing is also metaphorical, presumably, right?
01:51:59
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:52:00
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.
01:52:14
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:52:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
So the sort of kind of backward motion, right?
01:52:14
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm. who
01:52:17
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.
01:52:33
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.
01:52:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh.
01:52:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. Bad how then?
01:52:41
Emily Hale
Like, I find it, I've seen them riding seaward on the waves.
01:52:46
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.
01:53:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Oh.
01:53:01
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?
01:53:07
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:53:08
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.
01:53:14
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
01:53:21
Emily Hale
But the details don't quite work for me. Like I don't, I can't quite see it.
01:53:24
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.
01:53:47
Kamran Javadizadeh
There is this sort of, um
01:53:48
Emily Hale
C, girls reads with word.
01:53:49
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
01:53:51
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:54:04
Emily Hale
That's amazing.
01:54:15
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.
01:54:24
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:54:34
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?
01:54:46
Kamran Javadizadeh
Human, what, as opposed to the mermaid voices that we've been listening to?
01:54:48
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:54:51
Kamran Javadizadeh
So is the, yeah, say more.
01:54:51
Emily Hale
And ah is the is are the human voices...
01:54:57
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.
01:55:12
Emily Hale
Instead now, we're the human voices have taken us out of this image. And so then why are we drowning now?
01:55:15
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?
01:55:31
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah,
01:55:31
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.
01:55:37
Kamran Javadizadeh
any peas? i never did that.
01:55:39
Emily Hale
don't want this image. That's not what I'm thinking.
01:55:40
Kamran Javadizadeh
No, no.
01:55:41
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.
01:55:58
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.
01:56:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
who
01:56:07
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.
01:56:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, I don't know. Maybe one way to take it is
01:56:27
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.
01:56:30
Emily Hale
Yeah. Yeah.
01:56:32
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.
01:56:48
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.
01:56:59
Emily Hale
Yep.
01:57:01
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.
01:57:09
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:57:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
This idea of being woken up at the end, that it's a horrifying line to me.
01:57:22
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:57:28
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's always made the kind of hair stand up on the back of my neck because it's like,
01:57:28
Emily Hale
It is.
01:57:33
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.
01:57:43
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:57:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
The drowning here maybe is, i mean, with, within the metaphor, the drowning was literal
01:57:52
Emily Hale
The end of the poem.
01:57:57
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
01:57:59
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.
01:58:05
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:58:09
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.
01:58:15
Emily Hale
Yes.
01:58:16
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
Conclusion: Eliot's Legacy and Personal Interpretation
01:58:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
and all that kind of business that I'm going to be um consumed by my interaction with some other person.
01:58:29
Emily Hale
Yeah.
01:58:40
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.
01:59:12
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.
01:59:29
Kamran Javadizadeh
um
01:59:30
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.
01:59:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Till Human Voices Wake Us.
01:59:39
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.
01:59:50
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um, I hear you tapping it out.
01:59:55
Emily Hale
I am tapping it out.
01:59:57
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,
02:00:00
Emily Hale
Yeah. Yeah.
02:00:12
Kamran Javadizadeh
um condition of sterility and dryness, but then also this kind of vision of a flood or of being overwhelmed.
02:00:22
Emily Hale
yeah
02:00:23
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.
02:00:29
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.
02:00:34
Kamran Javadizadeh
Mm-hmm.
02:00:37
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.
02:00:56
Emily Hale
um And that we see that in the wasteland with the way high culture is a lie
02:00:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
02:01:01
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
02:01:01
Emily Hale
But we can see that already in Prufrock, the sense that he is already alienated.
02:01:04
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
02:01:08
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.
02:01:18
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?
02:01:28
Emily Hale
Yeah.
02:01:30
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
02:01:31
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.
02:01:43
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
02:01:43
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?
02:01:56
Kamran Javadizadeh
Especially when, I mean, though he hadn't written it yet, Tradition Individual Town, I'm thinking of that kind of idea.
02:02:00
Emily Hale
hmm.
02:02:01
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...
02:02:18
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.
02:02:20
Kamran Javadizadeh
he Yes, good, yeah.
02:02:31
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.
02:02:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right.
02:02:39
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.
02:02:39
Kamran Javadizadeh
Right. Right.
02:02:45
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.
02:02:57
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.
02:03:01
Emily Hale
Yeah.
02:03:08
Emily Hale
Mm-hmm.
02:03:08
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's going to kill me. Yeah. um
02:03:12
Emily Hale
And to write. Like, this is the one poem.
02:03:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah, right.
02:03:14
Emily Hale
and he And then afterwards he did, he in fact called it, it he was worried it was a swan song.
02:03:15
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
02:03:20
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.
02:03:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. you But you think he did.
02:03:31
Emily Hale
Oh yeah, I'm i'm a wasteland.
02:03:33
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. um
02:03:36
Emily Hale
Try doing that in one podcast.
02:03:38
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.
02:03:42
Emily Hale
Oh no, did we?
02:03:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
So here we are.
02:03:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
It's fantastic. No, it's great.
02:03:43
Emily Hale
is that a problem?
02:03:45
Emily Hale
oh we could keep talking for, I hope i hope that, um yeah, it was no Prince Hamlin, nor was meant be.
02:03:48
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?
02:04:00
Kamran Javadizadeh
Or do you think we've gone too far?
02:04:01
Emily Hale
I think, I can't even imagine making someone listen to that right now.
02:04:02
Kamran Javadizadeh
You're scowling at me. Yeah.
02:04:06
Emily Hale
um
02:04:06
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
02:04:07
Emily Hale
I think they should go read it themselves and not hear the voice. No human voices.
02:04:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
02:04:13
Emily Hale
Just read it on the page as if the nerves in pattern on a screen.
02:04:13
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
02:04:17
Emily Hale
So read it um in your own head.
02:04:19
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
02:04:20
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.
02:04:27
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?
02:04:43
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...
02:04:55
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
02:05:08
Emily Hale
Yeah.
02:05:20
Emily Hale
Well, how about the footnotes to the wasteland? How could it be more?
02:05:22
Kamran Javadizadeh
yeah
02:05:23
Emily Hale
Or these epigraphs, which you can't you can't read.
02:05:23
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. You can't read that out loud. yeah
02:05:26
Emily Hale
When do you read the footnote?
02:05:27
Kamran Javadizadeh
who
02:05:29
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.
02:05:35
Kamran Javadizadeh
Okay.
02:05:38
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah. All right.
02:05:40
Emily Hale
Okay, modernist collage, newspapers.
02:05:42
Kamran Javadizadeh
Megan Quigley.
02:05:45
Emily Hale
Freud, I'll just keep shouting words at you. Thank you for having me.
02:05:49
Kamran Javadizadeh
Well, yeah, it's...
02:05:50
Emily Hale
Elliot now, read it.
02:05:52
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.
02:06:10
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.
02:06:16
Emily Hale
We're just smiling at each other.
02:06:17
Kamran Javadizadeh
i'
02:06:18
Emily Hale
so that's yeah doing it with friends.
02:06:18
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.
02:06:32
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.
02:06:41
Emily Hale
oh
02:06:41
Kamran Javadizadeh
Um,
02:06:42
Emily Hale
Before we go, can you talk about why eating a peach is maybe sexualized one more time?
02:06:43
Kamran Javadizadeh
Yeah.
02:06:46
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.
02:06:59
Emily Hale
Thank you.