Ash-Wednesday “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” - T. S. Eliot
Ash-Wednesday
“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.” - T. S. Eliot
Possible Sources for Ash-Wednesday
Dante’s Purgatorio and Inferno
Dante’s Vita Nuova
The Bible
Sacrifice of the Mass/ Catholic liturgy
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Cavalcanti’s Love Poetry (“Perch’ io non spero)
St. John of the Cross
Henri de Regnier’s “L’Escalier”
Lancelot Andrewes
Buddhist folk tales
Shakespeare’s sonnets
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Pilgrim’s Progress
Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”
The Haunted Woman by David Lindsay
Baudelaire
Grimm’s fairy tales
Richard Lovelace
George Herbert
Neo-Platonism
Lucretius
“The Three Ravens” (popular medieval ballad)
popular song “All aboard for Natchez, Cairo, and St. Louis”
Bernadette’s Lady of the Grotto
“The allusions do not seem to reinforce an otherwise approachable meaning but instead seem essential to the structure, not immediately perceivable, of the poem.”
- James Longenbach
Eliot’s Poetic Theory:“Tradition and the Individual
Talent” “… if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the
best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”
“… the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.”
“What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
“… the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of ‘personality,’ not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say,’ but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feeling are at liberty to enter into new combinations.”
“Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”
“The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.”
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree
In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety
On my legs my heart my liver and that which had
been contained
In the hollow round of my skull. And God said
Shall these bones live?…
“Agents of purgation”?
Or
Symbols of consuming sin?
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.
At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jagged, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an aged shark.
At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the fig’s fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.
Lady of silences
Calm and distressed
Torn and most whole
Rose of memory
Rose of forgetfulness
Exhausted and life-giving
Worried reposeful
The single Rose
Is now the Garden
Where all loves end
Terminate torment
Of love unsatisfied
The greater torment
Of love satisfied
End of the endless
Journey to no end
Conclusion of all that
Is inconclusible
Speech without word and
Word of no speech
Grace to the Mother
For the Garden
Where all love ends.
Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee.
Other Theories Applied to Ash-Wednesday
New Criticism: Hunter to Leavell (1984-85) Post-Structuralism/ Deconstruction: Ferguson
(1979), Bell (1988) Feminism: Daumer (1998) is ONLY one Psychoanalytic: Daumer, Brown (2003) Reader-Response: Meyer (2002), Brown Biographical: Daumer, Palka (2005), Worthen (2009) Genre Studies: Cotter (2002) Cultural Studies: Meyer