Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
TS Eliot: the poet who conquered the world, 50 years on
TS Eliot, once a subversive outsider, became the most celebrated poet of the 20th century – a world poet, who changed the way we think. Yet, fifty years after his death, we are still making new discoveries about him
TS Eliot on Love Beach, New Providence Island, while on his honeymoon in the Bahamas with his second wife, Valerie, in 1957. Photograph: Getty Images
Robert Crawford
It’s 2015, the year of the Bullshit Centenary. One hundred years ago a young immigrant poet submitted his poem “The Triumph of Bullshit” for publication in a London avant‑garde magazine. The editor’s letter explaining his rejection of the work makes clear he decided to “stick to my naif determination to have no ‘Words ending in -Uck, -Unt and –Ugger’.” Probably the word “bullshit” was imported from the poet’s native US; but so far no one has found “bullshit” in print as a single word before 1915. The young immigrant poet thought the rejection of his poem disappointingly puritanical. He was finding it hard to get his verse into print. Four years earlier, at the age of 22, he had completed his first masterpiece. Though he had shown it to a few friends in the US and had read it aloud to fellow students in England, in January 1915 it remained unpublished. At least one editor considered it borderline insane; another was “unable to make head or tail” of it. Its title was “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”. This year also marks the centenary of the first publication of TS Eliot’s most famous early poem. Prufrock’s “Love Song” first appeared in the US, tucked away towards the back of a small magazine, probably because the editor did not greatly care for it. Two years passed before this disconcerting poem was published in Eliot’s first book, but today most critics realise that it announces the arrival in verse of English-language literary modernism. More
It’s 2015, the year of the Bullshit Centenary. One hundred years ago a young immigrant poet submitted his poem “The Triumph of Bullshit” for publication in a London avant‑garde magazine. The editor’s letter explaining his rejection of the work makes clear he decided to “stick to my naif determination to have no ‘Words ending in -Uck, -Unt and –Ugger’.” Probably the word “bullshit” was imported from the poet’s native US; but so far no one has found “bullshit” in print as a single word before 1915.
No comments:
Post a Comment