This is not to say that poetry is to be considered a textual version of nature photography or the rhymed equivalent of audio descriptions intended for the blind. But the relationship between nature and poetry is fundamental and elemental. (“Nature,” writes critic Northrop Frye, “is the inner content of art, not the outer pattern.”) When Milton describes the corpses of rebellious angels—“Thick as autumn leaves.” autumn scattered across the stream/In Vallombrosa” – he is borrowing an image from Dante, Virgil, and Homer, all of which use defoliation as an example for the collapse of bodies. Even after losing his sight, Milton’s world, like that of his predecessors, is a world full of such images. It is a vivid natural world with hints of transcendence that can be evoked, personified, and filtered through one’s subjective experience.
But modern life, no longer fascinated by science and mediated by technology, has made that kind of relationship with the natural world impossible, even if we are botanists. or hikers. Inability to see nature in this way — as the abode of unseen forces, filled with summoned and transformed images, as opposed to an indistinguishable mass of resources to exploit or conserve — we can hardly find such things. images in the work of Homer or Virgil, and it is even less likely that we would create those images ourselves.
But surely, you object, we can write poems about things other than flowers, bees, and wild goat’s milk, poems that differ not only from the established idioms of the classical Greek works and Latin but also from the basic imaginary procedures common to all written poems. before the last century. We can write poetry, if not about the transcendent order perceived in the universe, then about our own insecurities; we can even draw images of ourselves from the scraps of consumer civilization – an empty plastic bottle, an iPhone with a cracked screen.
Of course we yes has been doing this for over a century now, thanks in large part to Eliot. His poetic revolution began in 1915 with the famous opening of “J. Alfred Prufrock’s Love Song”:
Let’s go you and me / When the afternoon stretches across the sky / Like a patient on the table
For an Eliot detractor like CS Lewis, this grotesque analogy – comparing the evening sky to the anesthetized human body – was a shattering moment, a throwback of an entire age-old tradition. poetic expression and imagery, as well as the underlying reverence that underlies both.
But that, of course, is the point. In breaking his predecessors (notice how the nine-syllable lines that “The Waste Land” opens the iambic parameter hint, teasingly reminds the reader of the lost legacy the author is mourning) and then sends all of European literature – and not just Europe – into one type In a mixed mix, Eliot is conveying the fragmentation of the human experience, an experience that contemporaries like Lewis lamented but could never grasp.
With his quasi-cinematic montage, Eliot has created a work unique in English poetry for its ability to simultaneously expose both the author’s personal anxieties and the sense of horror being captured by the machine. culture has covered an entire civilization. Side by side cars, typewriters, phonographs, popular lyrics and modern slang allude to Jacobean playwrights and semi-parody forays into the more recognizable “poetic” language , Eliot created an idiom expressing the disappearance of the premodern worldview.
Eliot was successful – so successful that he remade English poetry entirely, or what has been considered poetry ever since, in his image. Cropped syntax, jagged lines, fixation on mundane, even trivial actions and objects, wry, world-tired narrative voice: This is the default list of most of the movies. poems written in the last half century, including poems written by poets who may not have read a line of Eliot.
