Go, go, go, said the bird

TS Eliot once wrote: “Humankind cannot bear very much reality television”. Nowhere is this more true than Uruguay. Ridiculous the waste sad time, indeed.

Comments

  1. It was T.S. Eliot himself who couldn't bear much reality, as his timid, almost unbearable poetry makes clear. Eliot was no prophet, but only a dour and lonely pessimist with a instinct for plagerism, and a taste for sophmoric equivocation. It is amazing to me that people still think of him as a great poet. Of course he wrote before television; I doubt if he could have comprehended the paradoxes in that news story you found from Uraquay.

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  2. I'm won't go as far as you in damning Eliot without greater consideration. But I'm not going to defend him either. Both would require re-reading all his poems, and that is something I'm unwilling to do.

    In order to source that quote I did read 'Burnt Norton' again, it was worse than the only previous time I didn't enjoy reading it many years ago. I don't know what his point is, all it makes me think of is congealed grease.


    Conversely (perversely?), I'm a great admirer of his criticism.

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  3. "Congealed grease" is an appropriate image to describe the feeling of sickness and constriction and the experience of slippery logic that must accompany all readers of Eliot's fakey Quartets. By the way, whatever ensued from your request to read "The Modern Epoch", which I dutifully passed along to that poem's author?

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  4. I've been planning on sending some well crafted comments on "The Modern Epoch", I just haven't had the time or the focus (there hasn't been much written here lately, either). But I plan on doing so, I was impressed by much of TME, and found certain parts of it brilliant.

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