T S ELIOT

Annotations:

• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176735 

1. "April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain"
2. "There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: “Stetson! / “You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! / “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, / “Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? / “Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?"
3. Unreal City, / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,/ A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.
4. “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; / “They called me the hyacinth girl.” / —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence. / Oed’ und leer das Meer.

1. "Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralysed force, gesture without motion"
2. "In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms / In this last of meeting places / We grope together / And avoid speech"

1. myth "is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history."
2. "Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art, toward that order and form which Mr. Aldington so earnestly desires."

1. tradition involves "the historical sense". the historical sense involves "a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence...this historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timelessness and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity."
2. "what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it."
3. the poet "must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same"
4. "the mind of Europe - the mind of his own country"
5. "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past...he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career."
6. "the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written"
7. "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material."
8. "it is not the "greatness," the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts."
9. "the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways."
10. "There are many people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when there is expression of *significant* emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet."