Saturday, February 04, 2006

Eliot's Audience?

This just in from Lizette:

I have some comments regarding Eliot's poems. For one thing, what is a loto (Burnt Norton, line 36)? The word's not even in my dictionary.

Reading these poems is even more of a research exercise than was reading Pound. Wading and slashing my way through thickets of allusions only snatches me, repeatedly, from the dream of the poem, from its milieu, message and story. While tracking down all of the fascinating facts proves interesting, the necessity of engaging in the wading carries the risk of derailing the reader. I have to wonder which persons Eliot considered to be his audience, his readers. We've all been raised in different placesin different decades, and with different canons. At times I get the impression that these poets (Pound, Eliot and their contemporaries) were writing solely for one another. More maddening still is when the book itself refers the reader to a cross reference on another page and poem (i.e., "See footnote 19 about the title of Part V.").

1 comment:

rodney k said...

Great comment thread! I love Lara's idea about the footnotes being a formal feature of the poem that mirrors its content--we're on a "journey without closure," to paraphrase Lara: we grapple in the footnotes the way the different voices in Eliot's poem, or snatches of voices, grapple for the Grail of a singular meaning or goal.

I wonder if the footnotes may be a way of acknowledging that there's no singular audience anymore, either. Eliot assumes you won't simply recognize his references, that they need to be explained. A fragmented readership, reading this fragmented mini-epic, trapped in a fragmented culture ... big Modern fun!