#ts-eliot — Public Fediverse posts

45 years ago today, #AndrewLloydWebber's musical "Cats" (based on poetry by #TSEliot) directed by Trevor Nunn, opens at the New London Theatre in the West End, London; runs for 8,949 performances.

Happy #Caturday!

T.S. Eliot's 1939 collection of whimsical light poems, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, is entirely dedicated to felines and served as the basis for the musical Cats.

#poetry #poem #kitty #cat #cats #poet #eliot #tseliot #catsOfMastodon #books #reading #literature #bookstodon @bookstodon #books #books #booksky #booktok #bookwyrm #bookstagram #feline #today #cartoon #catsOfFediverse

The cruelest violences are often spoken in the language of care.

— Animo ✨
https://www.animoreflectiveintelligence.com

#middleeastwar #lebanon #i̇ran #tseliot #poetry #peace #straitsofhormuz #palestine

Some powers arrive speaking of order and leave only flame.

— Animo ✨
https://www.animoreflectiveintelligence.com

#middleeastwar #lebanon #i̇ran #tseliot #poetry

There are moments when terror arrives wearing a sacred outline.

— Animo ✨
https://www.animoreflectiveintelligence.com

#middleeastwar #lebanon #iran #tseliot #poetrycommunity

#TodayIFoundOut that the Heaviside layer, the name for heaven in the #Cats #musical, is an actual part of the earth's atmosphere. Remarkably, it is an ionized layer that reflects radio waves back down to the surface, allowing for long-distance radio broadcasts before satellites were a thing. It would have been big news in the 1930's when #TSEliot was writing his original cat poetry. Perhaps this is why the #JellicleCats believe this is where they will be sent back to earth and reincarnated?

Aprile è il mese più crudele; fa nascere
i lillà dalla terra addormentata, e mescola
memoria e desideri … https://cctm.website/t-s-eliot-aprile/

T. S. Eliot

da La Terra desolata, Einaudi, 1963

#aprile #tseliot #poesia #cctmwebsite #anoipiaceleggere #leggere

The title is taken from TS Eliot’s The Waste Land - and he took it from The Tempest by Shakespeare …

I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

(From The Waste Land)

#shakespeare #TSEliot #thewasteland #poetry #poem

“Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” –T.S. Eliot

We see you Virgil.

#ancienthistory #rome #greece #poetry #tseliot #humor #humour #theschoolofathens

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Kalifornia, echt amerikanisch.

#TSEliot #TheWasteLand #literature

"West End Girls" is a song by the English #synthpop duo #PetShopBoys. Written by #NeilTennant and #ChrisLowe, the song was released twice as a single. The lyric, concerned with class and the pressures of inner-city life in #London, is inspired partly by #TSEliot's poem #TheWasteLand (1922). The track was generally well received by contemporary music critics and has been frequently cited as a highlight in the duo's career.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_fcSzKVzxI

"I do not wish to wish these things". Doesn't this basically mean: I wish I was someone other than I am? Eliot seems to wish to efface his own soul so as not to go against what is expected of him

#tseliot #poetry #literature

The stairs the poet climbs in the 3rd Ash-Wednesday poem are a Purgatory: below he sees a devil in the fetid air, and above a window and a pastoral scene; "I am not worthy" he says, "but speak the word only."

I think we have more "dissembling" here. The poet feels bold enough to speak and yet feels unworthy. He is not telling us, or is not yet able to express, how he really feels about himself and his own creative powers.

#poetry #literature #tseliot

"... And I who am here dissembled / Proffer my deeds to oblivion..."

In the 2nd of Eliot's Ash-Wednesday poems again the theme of resignation after a deed is done; the deeds of mortals are offered up for judgement and then forgotten, just as mortals are to be forgotten once they are gone, after their bones are scattered. The immortality of the soul has nothing to do with the vanity of earthly existence; the human form, now finished with, can remain dissembled

#poetry #tseliot #literature

"Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow" (T. S. Eliot, from "The Hollow Men")

I'm not at all confident that I understand what Eliot meant by these lines, but it seems to me that this is a poem about being stuck in "the shadow;" the whole world becomes a shadow, a dark and grim place, when people have ceased to believe that their ideas can become reality, or that their actions can produce meaningful results.

#poetry #tseliot #literature

"The Fire Sermon" from T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is like a painting: bleak details of city life with the wide Thames flowing through the middle of it.

I don't know if anyone can relate but some poems just strike me more visually than others

#poetry #tseliot #literature #Books

"A Game of Chess" in T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" presents a world full of chatter and little more. The wind under the door and other people's business needn't occupy our attention and yet they do.

#poetry #tseliot #literature

"And I will show you something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / I will show you fear in a handful of dust." (T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land)

Because it's not the past that should trouble us, or the future that should frighten us; it is the present moment which slips through our fingers like sand

#poetry #tseliot #literature

How do cultural objects change who we are?

From Forces of Destiny by Christopher Bollas pg 37-38:

And now and then we will be quite transformed by the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object meeting up at just the right time. One late afternoon in the summer of 1972, I heard a performance of one of Hindmith’s viola sonata in a small church in New England. It immediately served to process a feature of my idiom, and this occasion sponsored vivid and intense feelings and ideas which lifted me into the next moments of my life. Shall we ever have the means to analyse that? Why that particular work?

There are four aspects of this which I think it’s important to untangle:

• “the uncanny wedding of our idiom and an object”
• the timing of their meeting
• the experiences which are produced
• the capacity of those experiences to move us forward in our becoming who we are

The most powerful experiences of cultural objects come when these four aspects are in alignment. I stumbled across T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets at a particularly bleak time in my life and there was something I dimly perceived in my existence (“not known, because not looked for but heard, half-heard, in the stillness…”) which I could see more acutely after reading Little Gidding for the first time. That each moment could somehow be a home if only I could relate to it with sufficient care. That some moments bring higher, fuller experiences which I needed to be more disciplined in order to be able to receive. To see it made made it an object of reflection and exploration. It enabled me to elaborate myself in relation to it and find other objects to help me explore it. There was something latent in how I was trying to make sense of my existence (my idiom) which suddenly found expression through my engagement with the poem (my object). But that meeting came at a critical juncture, a ‘fateful moment’ to use the lingo of biographical sociology, which meant that it me on a new course.

I wonder however what a mundane sociology of these experiences would look like. One attuned to the scaffolding which makes such meetings possible. In my case I’d spent the previous year circling round Rilke with a sense I saw something in there which couldn’t reach in the same way. Or the blogging through which I tried to identify self-states which could be imbued with some reality by sharing with the Big Other before they came to elaborated in a way that felt coherent to me. Or even the whole problematic of presence underpinning how I received Little Gidding which rested on a whole gamut of therapeutic, spiritual and philosophical sources in a melange I don’t think I’d realised until now I’d been constructing for many years. The idiom has to be saturated with latent meaning that can burst out into a new expression at a moment of experienced fullness. It’s not created by the new object but rather facilitated by it.

You can’t choose cultural objects to solve a problem. Indeed if you’re relating to these objects to do something it will almost certainly blunt the possibility of resonance. There’s a subtle dialectic here in which a movement takes a more definitive form through these fateful encounters rather than being created by them. There’s a risk that, much as with explaining the lived life, we miss the subtle grounds for transformation if we get too preoccupied with the observable transformation itself. There was a grammar which pre-existed it within and through which change became possible. That’s where sociology can contribute something meaningful to the psychoanalysis of personal change through cultural objects.

#art #change #christopherBollas #culturalObjects #literature #music #TSEliot

"I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids / sprouting despondently at area gates." (T. S. Eliot, Morning at the Window)

Gates enclose while souls continue to grow; a picture of a world whose rigid boundaries are tragically incompatible with the flourishing of a human soul

#poetry #tseliot #Books

"The conscience of a blackened street / Impatient to assume the world." (T.S. Eliot, Preludes)

The way a street waits silently at night for the morning traffic; the way a writer is, by definition, silent when not writing, waiting for whatever next comes up to be assumed.

Eliot often struggled with his writing, doubting his abilities, so this image of a silent yet impatient street seems very apt

#poetry #Books #tseliot

Works by James “B.V.” Thomson – “The City of Dreadful Night” & “Satires & Profanities” – are available free online via @gutenberg_org

4/4

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/569

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Victorian #19thcentury #modernism #TSEliot

The wine of Love is music,
And the feast of Love is song:
And when Love sits down to the banquet,
Love sits long:

Sits long and ariseth drunken,
But not with the feast and the wine;
He reeleth with his own heart,
That great rich Vine.

—James “B.V.” Thomson, “The Wine of Love”

3/4

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50320/the-wine-of-love

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Victorian #19thcentury #modernism #TSEliot

An extract from a film by Ernest Schonfield of the poet Tom Leonard speaking extempore about writing the biography PLACES OF THE MIND (Cape, 1993), on the life & work of James “B.V.” Thomson

2/4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYq5YZbXjnM

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Victorian #19thcentury #modernism #TSEliot

The City is of Night; perchance of Death…

James “B.V.” Thomson (1834–1882) – poet, journalist, translator, anarchist, atheist – was born #OTD, 23 Nov, in Port Glasgow. Best known for his long poem THE CITY OF DREADFUL NIGHT, he influenced TS Eliot & is seen as a progenitor of Modernism

1/4

https://psychogeographicreview.com/the-city-of-dreadful-night/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Victorian #19thcentury #modernism #TSEliot

TS Eliot’s 20th-century nightmare | The Observer
https://observer.co.uk/culture/books/article/ts-eliots-20th-century-nightmare
#TheHollowMen
#TSEliot