Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.
This image alludes to the rich history of the landscapes of England, with its rural hunts and farming traditions, and by doing so compares the difference between the strength of European culture and modernism to the fragility of America’s insular reflective background.
Where the land offers very little sign of life, ‘Miss Nancy Ellicott’ is full of vigour, and by using a double meaning of the verb ‘smoked’ Eliot offers up the image that she is not only displaying modern trends but is actually burning with life in her attempt to display modernist ideals. The poem also describes in stanza two how she ‘danced all the modern dances’, and it is in this description that a slight bitterness and un-easiness at her actions is evident from the poet persona. By using ‘all’ Eliot is hinting that her actions are artificial as if she is following a trend rather than understanding its meaning. This lack of understanding is mirrored by the ‘aunts’ who were:
…not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
By describing the ‘aunts’ lack of emotion or insight Eliot hints at their ignorance of modernism, which promoted the link between the environment and the consciousness. The women in this poem seem to adopt or accept modern symbols without any thought as to what they represent, and this can be seen as another slant on the obtuseness of American culture, that is so immersed in attempting to discover its own identity that it loses sight of time. The fact that they are all women also follows the ‘misogyny in most of the Prufrock poems’ that helps to establish the character and voice of the poet persona.
The final stanza of the poem fragments and shifts again away from the observations of Cousin Nancy to an image of two busts that ‘kept watch’ over the previous symbolic exertions of modernism. The first bust is of ‘Matthew’ (Arnold) and the second ‘Waldo’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson). Both these figures represent canonical ancestors of Eliot and ‘Waldo’ also represents the implementation of Transcendentalism in New England. The description of them both upon ‘glazed shelves’ hints at a secondary meaning of them having a faraway, blank or distant look about them. This interpretation can be seen as another attack on America’s ignorance of the inevitability of modernism and change, in place of pre-occupation and self-discovery. The two busts also represent immovable inanimate objects which highlights Eliot’s modernist opinion of American culture. The final line of the poem describes them as ‘The army of unalterable law’ which alludes to the poem ‘Lucifer in Starlight’ by George Meredith. In this poem Meredith describes how Lucifer observes the army of unalterable stars that surround Heaven, making an impregnable fortress against him and therefore reminding him of his impotent and subservient status in the face of the power of God. By comparing the two busts with these stars Eliot hints that their unwillingness to be moved or changed renders them redundant as they stare blankly at the inevitable progress that Cousin Nancy represents. To Eliot they typify American culture, and highlight why his frustrations as a modernist thinker led him into an intellectual migration to Europe.
In the analysis of Cousin Nancy it is clear to see Eliot’s reasons behind his migration to America. As a modernist thinker he felt frustrated by the restrictions that American culture held, and was attracted by the progressive attitudes to literature that Europe offered. The analysis of the poem mentions the modernist techniques that were implemented in his writing of Cousin Nancy, such as: symbolism, allusion, poet persona, fragmentary thoughts, syntax and environment and consciousness and discussed how they influenced the meaning of the poem. By a further identification of these techniques in relation to The Boston Evening Transcript it will become clear how Eliot’s poetry was shaped by European modernism. In the earlier analysis the focus was on the meaning behind the poem representing Eliot’s European tendencies. In the next analysis the style of writing will be analysed in order to highlight the same point.
This poem follows a similar vein in meaning with its relatively obvious attack on the restricted culture of America compared to Europe. The symbolic description of the readers being compared to ‘ripe corn’ that sway in the wind, which follows the style of European Imagist writing, offers up a similar impression to the aunts in Cousin Nancy and the busts on the ‘glazen shelves’ that seem content in their passive ignorance of what is not affecting their insular existence. The ‘nod good-bye to La Rochefoucauld’ also hints at an affinity to European culture, just as the ‘The Boston Evening Transcript’ represents a feeling of tiredness towards the limits of American culture. The poet persona is part of the poem, representing those whose ‘appetites of life’ are not completely distinguished. This is a contrast to the omniscient persona of Cousin Nancy, but both poems use the poet persona or voice of the poem as an observer of the restrictions of American culture; and both allude to fragmentary memories of the vast openness and progress of European culture. Eliot’s use of the poet persona ‘unifies the thematic and formal qualities’ of his work, it adds coherence to poetry that has no formal rhyme scheme or stanza form (quoted in Brown and Gupta, p.231), and makes the fragmented imagery read like a train of thought or in modernist terms a ‘stream of consciousness’. This connection and coherence created by the poet persona in juxtaposition with the fragmented syntax highlights Eliot’s absorption of the European modernist ideas of Henri Bergson that influenced his Prufrock poems. Bergson’s theories on the continuing link between past, present and future, and how consciousness is governed by perception and memories of our environment that fragment and intermingle, and propel us forward towards our future have an obvious influence on Eliot’s style. The poet persona creates Bergson’s time link continuum for the fragmented images of perception and memory and leads the poem forward; and this style rather than the traditional way of writing poetry using a rhyme scheme, specific stanza form and distinguishable syntax highlights Eliot’s modernist ideals, and alongside its meaning identifies his intellectual migration to Europe.
Both poems use allusions to other works of literature to emphasise their drawing away from American culture and embracing European modernism. The ‘nod’ to ‘La Rochefoucauld’ is an obvious example in The Boston Evening Transcript as his work took the view of ‘undercutting attitudinizing and hypocrisy’ (quoted in Brown and Gupta, p.245). This forthright concise style was not in keeping with Romantic or Transcendentalist forms that were still dominating American attitudes and so Eliot’s allusion or ‘nod’ to La Rochefoucauld’s work can be seen as highlighting the pain that the poet persona goes through by ‘turning away from a venerable European cultural milieu towards a dull American existence.’ (quoted in Brown and Gupta, p.245). This image is comparable to the use of the busts in Cousin Nancy as again Eliot uses the technique of allusion to compare Meredith’s impregnable stars to the attitudes of American writers.
Eliot’s style of writing also offers up an allusion to European and more specifically French modernist ideas with its comparisons to the work of Laforgue. This allusion takes on the symbolic ideas already discussed that highlight a disillusionment of American culture from the point of view of a modernist persona but also in the way the poetry is written. Laforgue symbolised Eliot’s use of condensed syntax and free verse, and this point underlines just how far removed Eliot’s intellectualism became from America. The influences of Laforgue, Bergson and European modernism in general allowed Eliot to bring together a ‘synthesis of observation, aesthetic expression and philosophical understanding’ to his poetry (quoted in Brown and Gupta, p.263). The subject matter of the two poems discussed and the European influenced style in which they were written identifies that Eliot’s work and views on modernism were significantly shaped by his migration from America to Europe.
Bibliography
Brown, R.D. and Gupta, S. (eds) (2005) Aestheticism and Modernism: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1900-1960, London: Routledge in association with The Open University.
Eliot, T.S. (2001) Prufrock and Other Observations, Faber and Faber Ltd
Gupta, S and Johnson, D. (eds) (2005) A Twentieth-Century Literature Reader: Texts and Debates, London: Routledge in association with The Open University.
Heath, D. and Boreham, J. (2002) Introducing Romanticism, Totem Books.