Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Souls of the Devout
- 2 Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
- 3 A Gesture and a Pose: Homo Duplex
- 4 Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets? American Aesthetes
- 5 The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
- 6 Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
5 - The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The Souls of the Devout
- 2 Divisions and Precisions: Ambivalence and Ambiguity
- 3 A Gesture and a Pose: Homo Duplex
- 4 Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets? American Aesthetes
- 5 The Silhouette of Sweeney: Cultures and Conflict
- 6 Being Between Two Lives: Reading The Waste Land
- Afterword
- Notes
- Index
Summary
This town interests me and I see kind adventurous people; Mr. Eliot, the Unitarian minister, is the Saint of the West, and has a sumptuous church, and crowds to hear his really good sermons. But I believe no thinking or even reading man is here in the 95,000 souls. An abstractionist cannot live near the Mississippi River and the Iron Mountain. They have begun the Pacific Rail Road; and the Railroad from St. Anthony's Falls to New Orleans. Such projects cannot consist with much literature.
Emerson, writing to Lidian Emerson from St. Louis, 1852When we have fully discovered the scientific laws that govern life, we shall realise that the one person who has more illusions than the dreamer is the man of action. He, indeed, knows neither the origin of his deeds nor their results.
Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist”Writing to his brother in 1919, Eliot predicted the disapproving litany that greeted his quatrain poems then, and that has done so since. He considered “Burbank” and “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” among the best poems he had written. Calling these two poems “intensely serious,” Eliot nonetheless remarked that the ordinary London journalists considered him a wit or satirist, and speculated that Americans would regard him as “merely disgusting.” Both responses, one on each side of the Atlantic, miss the point: London dismisses Eliot as a light-weight, while Boston sniffs that its sensibilities have been bruised. “Merely disgusting” strikes just the studied note of victims trying to disguise satirically inflicted wounds.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The American T. S. EliotA Study of the Early Writings, pp. 154 - 184Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989