Comparison contrast of debussy and to s eliot

Comparative, Comparability, Lyric, Sonnets

Excerpt coming from Essay:

T. H. Eliot and Paul Verlaine

The overdue nineteenth century Symbolist movement in materials was first identified as the primary beginning of twentieth century Modernism by Edmund Wilson, in his 1931 job Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Books of 1870-1930. Wilson’s analyze ranges broadly enough to pay the Modernist prose of Proust and Joyce as well as the experimental prose-poetry of Gertrude Stein, although he the particularly strong case for the origins of Modernist poetry in the Symbolists. Wilson, in defining Symbolist tendencies in poetry, is not uncritical in his analysis:

The Symbolists themselves, full of the idea of creating with beautifully constructed wording effects just like those of music, tended to think of these pictures as possessing an summary value like musical records and chords. But the words of our talk are not audio notation, and what the icons of Sym-bolism really were, were metaphors detached from other subjects for starters cannot, beyond a certain point, in poet-ry, merely get pleasure from color and sound for his or her own reason: one has to guess what the photographs are staying applied to. And

Symbolism may be defined as an attempt by properly studied means a complicated association of suggestions repre-

sented by a medley of metaphors to communicate unique personal feelings. (21-2).

There is maybe no better illustration of Wilson’s information of Symbolism in poetry (for better or for worse) than Paul Verlaine’s short lyric “Clair para Lune” from his series Fetes Galantes, where the “idea of producing with poetry effects like the ones from music” was sufficient to inspire a canonical keyboard work by Debussy. In attempting to assess Wilson’s thesis about the emergence of Modernism from Symbolism, although, the unavoidable comparison should be T. S i9000. Eliot’s “The Waste Area. ” I hope to show which the critique Pat makes about the limitations of musicality can be, to some degree, expected but refuted by Eliot’s great Modernist elegy.

To some extent, approaching Verlaine’s lyric in translation is bound to be unfair (although Eliot himself was sufficiently progressive in France to create several of his early words entirely in this language) – the following exacto translation scarcely captures the chiming rhymes of the first quatrains:

The soul is definitely the choicest of countries

Where charming maskers, disguised shepherdesses

Move playing their particular lutes and dancing, however gently

Miserable beneath great disguises.

Although they sing in a slight key

Of all-conquering like and sloppy fortune

That they seem to doubtfulness their own imagination

And their song melts away inside the light of the parish lantern

In the quiet moonlight, lovely and miserable

That makes the birds wish in the trees and shrubs, all

The tall water-jets sob with ecstasies

The slender water-jets rising coming from marble.

Shorn of the audio quality the poem provides in French, we can see here that Wilson’s comment anywhere else in Axel’s Castle that Symbolist poems resembles nothing at all so much because English Metaphysical poetry of the early seventeenth century was

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