Dear Nikolay,

1.  What Eliot thought was not his responsibility was what the reader made
of his poems.  His responsibility was to make the poem, and he took that
responsibility about as seriously  as anyone could.
2.  "The Rock" was commissioned, as a book of words for a pageant play to
raise funds for building new churches in London suburbs. (Only the choruses
went into his Collected Poems.)   There wouldn't have been much money in it
for him, and there's every reason to suppose he had other reasons for
writing it--reasons to do with his being a poet and a Christian.

3.  You would have to be simply crass to suppose "Ash-Wednesday" any sort of
joke if you had actually read it.

4.   Eliot did say of "The Waste Land" (in a private letter or
conversation?), "To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly
insignificant grouse against life".  Note that "to me".  He also wrote (in a
published essay) that what alone constitutes life for a poet was to
"transmute his personal and private agonies...into something universal and
impersonal" ("Shakespeare & the Stoicism of Seneca").

5. "Murder in the Cathedral" deals with the assassination of Thomas a Becket
in 1170.  It was written in 1935.  Best read it and then decide how far it
is "medieval", how far "modern".

6.  "everything a failure":  wherever this might come from it certainly was
not Eliot's view of his own work.  See his late essay "To Criticize the
Critic".

7.  "Because one has only learnt to get the better of words / For the thing
one no longer has to say" ("East Coker" V)--to be read, of course, in its
full context.

8.  That is perhaps not what he meant, in "Prufrock".

Perhaps you should write in your review only what you can verify?
Half-memories can be so garbled!

David Moody

----- Original Message -----
From: "Nikolay Nikiforov" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2000 7:40 AM
Subject: Eliot


> I'm  writing  review  of  the Russian translation of Eliot, &there are
> some quotations I miss.
> As  far  as  I  remember Eliot refused to take any responsibility  for
> any of his  poems.
> 'Rocks' was 'stuff written for
> money', Ash-Wednesday -- 'some joke', 'Waste Land' --'private struggle',
> 'Murder  in  the  Cathedral' -- 'some medieval drama' and everything a
> failure, a failure, a failure...
> because one no longer has to say...
> That is not what I meant...
>
> What porridge had John Keats?
>
> Well, forget the problems TSE had with his porridge (a hard problems),
> but   won't   someone  send  me (privately) exact quotations? It seems
> Eliot's list wouldn't be best place for this question.
>