4. T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot
Born: 26 September 1888, St.
Louis, MO, USA
Died: 4 January 1965,
London, United Kingdom
Field: poetry
Most Influential Work: The
Waste Land (1922)
Won the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1948
5. “Tradition and the
Individual Talent,”
One of Eliot’s early essays, “Tradition and the Individual
Talent,” typifies his critical stance and concerns; it has been
called his most influential single essay. Divided into three
parts, appearing in The Egoist in September and December,
1919, the essay insists upon taking tradition into account
when formulating criticism—“aesthetic, not merely
historical criticism.”
Eliot asserts that no poet or artist has his or her complete
meaning in isolation but must be judged, for contrast and
comparison, among the dead. As Eliot sees it, the order of
art is complete before a new work of art is created, but
with that new creation all the prior works forming an
ideal order are modified, and the order itself is altered.
6. Eliot argues that the poet’s mind is a catalyst for all those writers who
come before him. His point is that the poet’s transforming mind stores up
feelings, phrases, and images until all the particles that can form a new
work of art come together to do so. The poet has not so much a
personality to express as a medium for the expression of complex
emotion that is separable from the poet’s own emotions.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) claimed that “Poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility” (“Preface to Lyrical Ballads”)
Eliot responded directly to this assertion when he said “Poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the
expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course,
only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to
want to escape from these things.”
This idea of the poet as not emotionally invested in his or her work is part
of what drove the idea of New Criticism: using the text and the text alone.
7. QHQs: T.S. Eliot
Q. According to Eliot, what is the role of the poet?
Q: Why does Eliot suggest that the progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality?
Q: What the heck is an “art emotion” and how does it differ from a
“personal” emotion?
Q: What is the definition of “significant emotion”?
Q: Why is TS Eliot so keen to explain the relationship between
tradition and talent?
Q: What did Eliot mean that tradition cannot be inherited and that it is
obtained by hard labor?
Q: How does the consciousness of the past or present effect the work of
art and how it is viewed?
8. Figurative Language: images, symbols,
metaphors, similes, alliteration, personification,
and hyperbole.
Tools of the new critic: paradox, irony,
ambiguity, and tension.
For the online class last Friday, I asked you to note figures of
speech in the poem “My Papa’s Waltz.” Yesterday, we looked at
the tools of the new critic.
9. Today, we will look at more poetic conventions
rhyme: a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words,
most often at the end of lines in poems and songs.
rhythm: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a
line.
meter: the number of feet in a line.
scansion: Describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the
lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and
unstressed syllables,
10. How to Scan a Poem
1. Read the poem aloud. As you read, listen for a natural emphasis in
the rhythm of the line. Count the number of syllables in each line,
and write that number at the end of the line. Do you see a pattern
in the number of syllables?
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
11. 2. As you read the poem aloud, try tapping your foot or pounding
your hand on a desk when you hear the accented syllables. This
will help you to hear the rhythm. The syllables you emphasize
will be those that you'll mark with a / (indicating a stressed
syllable). If you can't hear the rhythm try reading the lines to
someone and asking that person to mark the stressed syllables,
or, conversely, ask someone to read the poem and mark the
lines as you listen to them.
3. Read more than one line. Sometimes the first line of a poem may
have spondees or other types of feet that will throw off your
reading. Remember, you are looking for the predominant
metrical pattern of the piece.
4. Mark the stressed syllables first, and then go back
and mark the unstressed syllables. The mark for
these is a breve, which looks like a sideways
parenthesis mark or shallow "u."
12. 5. If you are not sure which
syllables should be stressed,
look for two- and three-
syllable words in a line and
pronounce them as you would
normally pronounce them.
These will help you to
determine the stressed
syllables in a line. For
example, you'd say aBOVE,
not Above, MURmuring, not
murMURing or murmurING.
6. Try breaking the words into
syllables so that you can see
them individually instead of
as part of a word.
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy
dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
13. iambic, trochaic, anapestic, dactylic?
7. Once you have marked the lines for stressed and unstressed
syllables, divide the lines according to the kinds of feet. (Use a
larger / slash mark or circle the feet.): unstressed STRESSED =
iambic (sounds like da-DUM: de-TROIT)
8. Once you're finished with that, determine the meter of the
poem:
iamb (unstressed-stressed u/)
trochee (stressed-unstressed /u)
anapest (unstressed-unstressed-stressed uu/)
dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed /uu)
spondee (stressed-stressed //)
pyrrhic (unstressed-unstressed uu).
14. Finishing up
9. Count the number of feet:
Monometer (one foot)
Dimeter (two feet)
Trimeter (three feet)
Tetrameter (four feet)
Pentameter (five feet)
Hexameter (six feet).
10. Put the type of foot together with the number of feet, and
you've identified the meter.
15. “My Papa’s Waltz
u / u u / /
The whiskey on your breath 6 syllables
u / u / / / u
Could make a small boy dizzy; 7 syllables
u u / u / /
But I hung on like death: 6 syllables
u / u u / / u
Such waltzing was not easy. 7 syllables
16. The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy
dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
.
Try to do the next stanza(s)
in your groups or alone
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
17. Try Summarizing the Form
Dominant foot: iamb (unstressed-stressed u/), trochee
(stressed-unstressed /u), anapest (unstressed-
unstressed-stressed uu/), dactyl (stressed-unstressed-
unstressed /uu), spondee (stressed-stressed //) or
pyrrhic (unstressed-unstressed uu).
Number of feet per line: Monometer (one foot), Dimeter (two
feet), Trimeter (three feet), Tetrameter (four feet), Pentameter (five
feet), or Hexameter (six feet).
Prevailing meter (dominant foot + number of feet per
line):
Structure: (kind of stanza): couplets, triplets, quatrain,
sestet
Rhyme scheme: aa bb cc or abab or none?
18. Summarizing the form
Dominant foot: iamb
Number of feet per line: three
Prevailing meter (dominant foot + number of feet per line):
iambic trimeter
Structure: quatrain
Rhyme scheme: abab (imperfect, partial, near or slant rhyme)
// cdc (imperfect) d // efef // ghgh
19. u / u u / /
The whiskey on your breath
6
u / u / / /u
Could make a small boy dizzy; 7
u / / u / /
But I hung on like death: 6
u / u u / /u
Such waltzing was not easy. 7
u / u / u /
We romped until the pans 6
/ u u / u /
Slid from the kitchen shelf; 6
u / u / u u
My mother’s countenance 6
u / u / u /
Could not unfrown itself. 6
u / u / u /
The hand that held my wrist 3
u / u u / / u
Was battered on one knuckle; 3.5
u / u / u /
At every step you missed 3
u / / / u / u
My right ear scraped a buckle 3.5
u / / u u /
You beat time on my head
u u / / / u /
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
u / u / u /
Then waltzed me off to bed
/ / u / u /
Still clinging to your shirt.
a
b
a
b
c
d
c
d
e
f
e
f
g
h
g
h
Four line stanzas are
called quatrains
Feet per lineSyllables per line
20. HOMEWORK
READ
• “There Is a Girl Inside”
• “The Fish”
• “A Black Rook in Rainy
Weather”
• “Memories of West Street and
Lepke”
Choose one poem to scan (meter
and rhyme) like we did in class
today,
POST # 6: summarize the form
(slide 17).
