Subject
Pale Fire and Eliot's Wasteland (fwd)
Date
Body
The strongest connection between "The Wasteland" and Pale Fire may be
that those footnotes beg to be parodied, as indeed they have been many
times. Eliot himself said "Most parodies of one's own work strike one as
very poor. In fact one is apt to think one could parody oneself much
better. (As a matter of fact some critics have said that I have done
so.)" His own favorite was Henry Reed's "Chard Whitlow" ("As we get
older we do not get any younger...") which captures the peculiar diction
of Eliot's longer poems very well.
As Modernism's post-mortem proceeds and we're able to evaluate it more
objectively it does seem to be the case that Anglo-American modernism in
particular lacked a sense of humor and leaned a little too far toward
pretentiousness and obscurantism. Footnotes and bits of Greek and
Sanskrit -- what in the world was he thinking of??? I'm not sure if
this is what Nabokov found objectionable about Eliot's poetry but it may
well have been part of it.
Mary Bellino
iambe@javanet.com
that those footnotes beg to be parodied, as indeed they have been many
times. Eliot himself said "Most parodies of one's own work strike one as
very poor. In fact one is apt to think one could parody oneself much
better. (As a matter of fact some critics have said that I have done
so.)" His own favorite was Henry Reed's "Chard Whitlow" ("As we get
older we do not get any younger...") which captures the peculiar diction
of Eliot's longer poems very well.
As Modernism's post-mortem proceeds and we're able to evaluate it more
objectively it does seem to be the case that Anglo-American modernism in
particular lacked a sense of humor and leaned a little too far toward
pretentiousness and obscurantism. Footnotes and bits of Greek and
Sanskrit -- what in the world was he thinking of??? I'm not sure if
this is what Nabokov found objectionable about Eliot's poetry but it may
well have been part of it.
Mary Bellino
iambe@javanet.com