{Literary Circles [continued (3)]}[28th November 1988]

[Redbook6:42)][19881128:2046c]{Literary Circles [continued (3)]}[28th November 1988]

19881128.2046

[continued]

What stood out of this diagram* before I cluttered it up with the criticism and other essays, were several significant points:

• The formal conversion comes at the almost exact mid-point of his life, corresponding in C[ircles] A[nalysis] to the mid-life Crisis of Death and Rebirth.

• The poems which seem to be favoured by critics** come at the Outer Circle G~ or ‘literary’ degree.

• The Waste Land, on Grail themes, comes near the end of this same area, which is the primary Grail area.***

• The Waste Land is also the last (and greatest) outbreak of the self-conscious literary erudition of the early poems.****

• From the Waste Land to Ash Wednesday, all the poems for which I have dates – that is, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men,# The Journey of the Magi, A Song for Simeon, Animula, Marina, and Ash Wednesday – are mystical poems of personal exploration and experience of the Transformation Point at R~ (Outer and Inner), which is exactly where they are located; and they are filled with appropriate images of death, water, symbolic females, resurrection or rebirth, (or children), turning, God, etc..

• Eliot’s views on the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ after the Metaphysical poets seem (I have not checked this) to have been expressed over the same period, or the early part of it, ie near to the Unity at C.

• #*The Four Quartets are mystical poems of guidance to others following the mystical poems of exploration, and cover the J~ quarter[-]circle (Counsel is the gift here).

• The plays are all (except the last) lower semicircle. (See earlier placing of arts, ie drama, near J~/-A~?)#** The best known are nearest to G~ (where Literature is supposed to be).

• The bulk of expository work (as I take them [sic] to be) of essays etc is also on the left semi-circle and shortly afterwards. This is slightly surprising if they were analytical. But

(a) their primary purpose may have been to give guidance rather than [to] advance scholarship; and

(b) by the time of the right inner semicircle, Eliot was getting old.

• The Christian essays etc. are (naturally) on the Inner Left semicircle.

*[See last previous entry]

**(which also included the antisemitism quoted in [the] T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] <881129>

[See [Redbook6:36A(/40A)][19881122:0000]{T.S Eliot and Anti-Semitism}[22nd November 1988]]

***[See eg [Redbook3:223][19870502:1855]{The Grail Quest*}[2nd May 1987];

&/but? [Redbook5:49-50][19880312:2005c]{The Grail Quest Circle}[12th March 1988]&f; ]

****After The Waste Land the style becomes much simpler and draws from older as well as ‘modernist’ patterns.

#NB The subtitle of The Hollow Men: ‘Mistah Kurtz – he dead’. ( – Conrad?)

[Yes – Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899) (which was the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam-set film ‘Apocalypse Now’ , (1979), among many other works.]

#*Here also Eliot explores the change in his use of poetic language.

#**[Not quite, but close – see [Redbook5:27-28][19880302:1842b]{The Letter and the Spirit [continued (4)]ff}[2nd March 1988]], esp [Redbook5:28-29][19880302:1842d]{The Letter and the Spirit [continued (6)]}[2nd March 1988]]

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