[lit-ideas] Re: T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 10:12:18 -0800
Donal,
Quite right. In my case I encountered Eliot’s poetry long before I knew
anything about him. I was very impressed by it. Perhaps Eliot had Fascistic
tendencies. I read a biography and the first half of the first volume of his
letters years ago but don’t recall them. He was an aristocratic prig and an
unpleasant personality. He whined a lot. In a review in the London Times of
the second volume of his letters, the reviewer dealt with the whining by saying
he really was sick and so was his wife. Furthermore, the reviewer adds, people
who cared about him really did want to know.
The question of whether you should reject or at least demote a person’s work
when one learns his life has serious flaws is an interesting one. It has been
dealt with almost continually in Western thinking. For example, Origen was a
very important “church father” but he was also a very independent thinker and
many of his ideas were later declared heretical, universal salvation for
example. The Church couldn’t reject him entirely. Many of the doctrines that
the Church still holds came from Origen. But Church leaders became wary in
dealing with his works.
One of the major controversies in the early Church was whether one could
denounce Christianity, under duress, and later (after the coercive force was
removed) recant the denouncement. An early school (whose name escapes me) said
that such people were eternally lost, but the Church eventually came around to
the view that this denouncing under duress could not be an “unforgiveable sin”
for had not Peter denounced Christ three times without losing his salvation?
And what of all the French as well as Germans who denounced Liberal Democracy
in order to “get along” during the period of Fascist domination? This wasn’t
something settled in Church Council, but it was in that tradition. The main
“secular council” was the Nuremberg trial. Certain individuals, the coercers,
were considered to have committed unforgiveable sins and executed. But those
coerced were for the most part accepted back into non-Fascist societies as
members in good standing. They were forgiven.
The question I was attempting to approach was first of all, what
Heidegger had in mind when he asked “what are poets for in a destitute time?”
This essay of his was based on a lecture he delivered in 1946 on the 20th
anniversary of Rilke’s death. I doubt that Heidegger could have answered his
own question in any definitive way. He says in his lecture that Rilke was less
of a poet than Holderlin; so only Holderlin is the sort of poet he has in mind
as far as I know. I have the Penguin Classics edition entitled “Selected Poems
and Fragments,” and can see, a bit, why Heidegger appreciated him, but just
because Holderlin was Heidegger’s “Poet in a Destitute Time” doesn’t mean we
are stuck with his example.
The Waste Land was the first poem that came to my mind when I searched for an
Anglo-American “Poem” for a time of destitution. If instead of all the
“critics” who wanted to tell us what Eliot’s symbols and references were we had
historians explaining this poem, then we would see, I believe, that it was of a
piece with the destitute times in England and Europe in which Eliot lived.
Eliot didn’t go on being a poet for a destitute time, I don’t believe, but he
was when he wrote The Waste Land.
Another Poem that comes to mind is Paradise Lost. Surely Milton lived
in a destitute time, and was the poet for it. What better subject for such a
time than the loss of paradise? Milton’s critics both in the (Protestant)
church and out of it are critical of Milton’s heretical beliefs – some of which
appear in his poem if we look in the right spots – and these “spots” are easier
to find, if I recall correctly, than Fascist ideas in Being and Time.
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: Donal McEvoy
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: T. S. Eliot, a Heideggerian Poet?
And one more (profound) thing...
"Never trust the artist, trust the tale."
That Eliot, Pound [and ,yes, Yeats] had 'fascist tendencies' is something to be
accounted for, not used as any kind of important knock-down of their output;
or, if a knock-down, then only of those utopian dreams that may partly underpin
their aesthetics. [Knock-down as, in perhaps P's most famous "quote", "To seek
heaven on earth only brings hell." But Popper was too much an aesthete hinself,
even if a somewhat puritannical one, to argue - as it were, in reverse-mirror
of totalitarians' demand that art serve the politics - that, in a world where
perfectionist political aims were a disaster and need to be replaced by
fallibilist ones, art should abandon concern with any claims of
'perfectionism'. Such a claim would never easily follow to anyone who deeply
appreciates art].
Popper's OSE was the first book of his I read (by lucky accident, as it had
Marx in the title, and I was studying Marx, so I took a look) and in its attack
on totalitarianism he identifies a large part of its appeal is in its
underlying 'perfectionism' or, we might say with negative connotations,
utopianism. If this is anything like the simple but profound point I take it to
be, it is no surprise perhaps that the
perfection-seeking aesthete is sometimes drawn to some kind of 'perfectionist'
political dream; indeed that some kind of such dream - whether obviously
political or not - underlies their art and its practice. [We might say desire
for democracy and liberty as impulses behind Beethoven and, say, his
_Fidelio_, are also a kind of aesthetic dream; and not be surprised by the
story of Beethoven being pro- then anti- Napoleon; of course, this dream is
better - but it is only an accident of history that Beethoven's music is also
of the greatest: the devil might have better tunes].
These comments were perhaps encapsulated in Mill's observation that, to
paraphrase, it is blind to think aesthetics is the criterion of ethics.
Donal
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