T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell the Poetic

T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell

The poetic styles of T.S. Eliot and Amy Lowell are so dissimilar, that it comes as something of a shock to realize how much the two poets had in common. Each came from a prominent Boston family, and was related to a President of Harvard University -- Eliot was a distant relation to Harvard's President Eliot, and attended Harvard as an undergraduate: Amy Lowell's brother would become President of Harvard in the year that T.S. Eliot graduated. Meanwhile the poetic careers of both Eliot and Lowell were influenced by Ezra Pound: Pound famously edited Eliot's "Waste Land," which is dedicated to him. But Pound had earlier been an artistic ally of Amy Lowell, and they had together been part of a loose poetic movement around the time of the First World War called "Imagism" -- their quarrel over the direction this movement would take is, according to Christopher Beach, the primary reason why we do not associate Amy Lowell with T.S. Eliot, despite their similar backgrounds:

Pound accused Lowell of stealing the movement from him and of watering down the term "Imagist" by including poets whose work failed to adhere to the movement's principles. From that point on, Pound and Lowell were to remain literary enemies. While Pound scornfully derided Lowell's brand of poetry as "Amygism," Lowell refused to support either the journals with which Pound was involved or the writers with whom he was associated, including such important modernists as James Joyce and Eliot. (Beach 77).

In Beach's telling, Lowell belonged to a slightly older generation than both Pound and Eliot, and "lack[ed] Pound's desire to remain on the cutting edge of literary vanguardism at all costs" (Beach 77). This explains the dissimilarity in styles, but a century after these literary quarrels, it is possible to examine Lowell and Eliot and see a certain affinity in their poems, which might possibly have attracted the collaborative attentions of a great enthusiast like Pound at different points in time. By examining the treatment of love -- both human and divine -- in each of these poets, we can see how Lowell and Eliot frequently use different poetic means to achieve similar effects. Both Lowell and Eliot were trying to live up to Ezra Pound's injunction that poets should "make it new": the ways in which they each individually handle two of the most familiar poetic subjects, love and religion, can show us that they achieved their originality in different ways.

Amy Lowell's poetry is quite obviously intended to break with formalism. Jacob Korg notes that her articles and lectures were intended "to forward the Imagist cause in America by lecturing on 'the new poetry', and defending vers libre or 'cadenced verse'." (Korg 134). It may strike a contemporary reader as surprising that a new poetic movement in America at the time of World War One would think it necessary to "defend vers libre," or free verse: to a certain extent, Lowell's movement was successful insofar as nowadays "vers libre," or unrhymed poetry with varying line lengths, is the generalized cliche for what poets are imagined to do, rather than formal rhymed poetry like sonnets. It seems particularly surprising given that the most famous American poet of the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman, wrote almost exclusively in vers libre. But to some extent, Walt Whitman may be the very reason why Amy Lowell thought that free verse required defending: Whitman may have been original, and could not have been anything other than American, but he was not precisely respectable. This is not to say that Amy Lowell's poetry is not intended, on some level, to be shocking in the way that all great art can be shocking -- but her way of approaching novelty is not the Whitmanic mode of the "barbaric yawp." As a way of examining the modern (or even shocking) element in Lowell's verse, we may examine her 1919 poem "Madonna of the Evening Flowers": it is written in vers libre, but of lines that are as terse and restrained as Whitman's are overstuffed, and it is separated out into three verse paragraphs. The first paragraph paints a scene using minimalist detail. And it is worth noting that, in light of the poem's title, we are likely to read it as a religious poem. The "Madonna" is the customary name given to the Virgin Mary in Renaissance art, and the "evening flowers" suggest a possible religious service (or religious garden-imagery, whether Eden or Gethsemane) but as Lowell's poem begins, the poem itself sits at some remove from the title:

All day long I have been working,

Now I am tired.

I call: "Where are you?"?

But there is only the oak tree rustling in the wind.

The house is very quiet,

The sun shines in on your books,

On your scissors and thimble just put down,

But you are not there.

Suddenly I am lonely:

Where are you?

I go about searching. (Lowell 1352)

What is noteworthy about this opening verse-paragraph is the way in which Lowell depicts a noticeable absence. The speaker of the poem calls out "Where are you?" But any reference to the person being called is absent: instead there is a quiet response from nature itself. (Oaks are famously sturdy, so the idea of an oak tree "rustling in the wind" is somehow surprising.) But then we get evidence of the "you" being addressed by the speaker: "the sun shines in on your books," which suggests that the books are lying open (rather than sitting on shelves), and the "scissors and thimble just put down" indicate that the speaker seems to have missed the presence of another person. In other words, the poem takes its time to register the absence: only in the eighth line do we learn "you are not there," after registering the evidence that someone had been there not long before. This prompts a miniature, domestic quest: "I go about searching." But it is nevertheless worth emphasizing that, after the hint of religion in the opening line, it is not impossible to continue reading this entire first section as though it were about both a religious search and also a domestic search. When the second paragraph begins, this tension between the religious element and the romantic element of the poem is exploited in a surprising way:

Then I see you,

Standing under a spire of pale blue larkspur,

With a basket of roses on your arm.

You are cool, like silver,

And you smile.

I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes. (Lowell 1352)

The surprise here is that, in a poem comprised of such simple diction and images and with such short lines, the paragraph break feels like a rupture. The dramatic tension in the first verse-paragraph as to whether this might be a religious poem is immediately resolved: "I see you," and we presumably understand this to be a real person. But the description of the "you" that follows is noteworthy in two ways. First, there is no gendered language here: only the "basket of roses on your arm" indicates that the "you" must be identified as the "Madonna of the Evening Flowers," and is therefore female. Instead, the figure is described as being almost like a religious artifact: "cool, like silver." But the "smile" of this mysterious woman has a distinctly religious effect upon the speaker's mind: "I think the Canterbury bells are playing little tunes." But it is only the details of the poem -- the "basket of roses," the "thimble" -- that indicate that this is a woman being described. And there is nothing in the language to indicate that the speaker of the poem is a woman, even though the writer may be. But the final verse-paragraph marks the connection between speaker and the "Madonna" addressed as "you":

You tell me that the peonies need spraying,

That the columbines have overrun all bounds,

That the pyrus japonica should be cut back and rounded.

You tell me these things.

But I look at you, heart of silver,

White heart-flame of polished silver,

Burning beneath the blue steeples of the larkspur.

And I long to kneel instantly at your feet,

While all about us peal the loud, sweet 'Te Deums' of the Canterbury bells. (Lowell 1352)

What is most interesting here is the way that love poetry and religious poetry seem to meet. The factual horticultural detail of the types of "Evening Flowers" listed here immediately gets lost in a religious blur: the "silver" of the second verse-paragraph now returns as a "heart of silver, / White heart-flame of polished silver" which suggests religious iconography. (The "Sacred Heart" of religious imagery is frequently depicted in a way that looks like what Lowell describes.) And instantly the peaks of larkspur transform metaphorically into "blue steeples," and the final two lines of the poem break out into outright religious language, used to describe human love: "I long to kneel instantly at your feet," as in prayer, while the imaginary bells are now singing a direct religious address to God ("Te Deums").

On the surface, T.S. Eliot's approach to love poetry could not be more different than the approach taken by Lowell. There is nothing comic or satirical about Lowell's description here: if the details were different, it might be a poem about a lonely person walking out of an empty house to see a statue of the Virgin Mary, and having a purely religious experience. Whereas Eliot's comedy is signaled with the unusual title "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Critic Christopher Ricks has described well the way that Eliot's title is shocking and funny at the same time:

The tax returns of J. Alfred Prufrock, fine, but a love song does not harmonize with the rotund name, with how he has chosen to think of himself, to sound himself…no one, not even the most pompous self-regarder, could ever introduce himself as, or be addressed as, J. Alfred Prufrock. He has adopted a form for his name which is powerfully appropriate to a certain kind of page but not to the voice, and which is therefore for ever inimical to the thought of love's intimacy. "I'm in love." "Who's the lucky man?" "J. Alfred Prufrock." Inconceivable. (Ricks 2-3)

What Ricks manages to capture is the paradox within that very title: it announces itself as a "Love Song" yet the very name "J. Alfred Prufrock" -- never used within the text of the poem -- seems determined to point out some silliness. It also adds an element of satiric distance that Lowell's poem lacks, because the title warns us not to identify "J. Alfred Prufrock" with T.S. Eliot. Lowell's poem leaves it uncertain as to whether we should identify the speaker with Amy Lowell (a fact to which we will return), but it is clear that Eliot is behaving like a dramatist, able to inhabit or distance himself from the speaker of the monologue.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster shells… (Eliot 1577)

To the reader's eye, this seems to mimic precisely the sort of free verse that Lowell writes in "The Madonna of the Evening Flowers." But instead we have irregular rhymes to fit the irregular rhythm: the shocking image of the third line (which suggests someone lying on an operating table about to be cut open) also shocks the ear by not finding a rhyme, although the rest of these lines rhyme with each other like couplets in doggerel verse. But there is also the shock of places described: these are not pleasant domestic spaces that can be seen as almost religiously exalted (like the house and garden in Lowell's poem), these are "cheap hotels" and "sawdust restaurants." Rather than dragging the "Love Song" up toward a religious hymn, the way that Lowell does, Eliot seems to be dragging this "Love Song" down into the degradation of modern city life. But we are also required to feel a disjunction between the very name of "J. Alfred Prufrock" -- which suggests solid bourgeois propriety, of the sort that might own a house and garden like the ones Lowell describes -- and these raffish downmarket locales invoked in the opening It would appear that Prufrock envisions an escape from the suffocating politeness of his own social class, summed up in the deadpan quasi-refrain repeated twice in the poem's opening: "In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo." (Eliot 1577). The speaker of the poem is looking for an escape from suffocating domesticity, where women talk about the refined religious art of the Renaissance: he seems to have sought out the waterfront district to escape the world depicted in Amy Lowell's "The Madonna of the Evening Flowers."

We tend to assume a "love song" is always easier for a spontaneous emotional personality to sing out, rather than a person with a name like J. Alfred Prufrock. And it becomes clear that Prufrock (like Eliot) is a well educated person -- we get numerous allusions to Classical poetry of Hesiod ("the works and days of hands"), Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ("the voices dying with a dying fall"), and the New Testament ("I am Lazarus, come from the dead.") (Eliot 1578-9). In contrast with Lowell's sustained focus on a simple visual images presented selectively, like an impressionist painting, Eliot's nonstop allusiveness makes the poem feel like a collage. Instead of the build-up of small images to create a larger picture, as in Lowell, we get a build-up of fragmentary scenes which only suggest a larger plot that is never disclosed: the women who talk of Michelangelo drift through the poem with no relation to a particular story beyond what Prufrock expresses. If one of them is the woman imagined to say "That is not what I meant at all!" Prufrock does not tell us that. They are not named. But of course the lack of a larger dramatic plot is part of Prufrock's own self-awareness, and perhaps the source of his erotic frustration: "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be," suggesting not only that Prufrock is not a hero burdened with an awful destiny, but also that none of these women is an Ophelia who might die for love of him.

But when Prufrock seems later in the poem to have focused his mind on a specific woman, there are no instructions on how to connect her to the earlier women. The reader is invited to imagine any possible connections, while knowing that a man named "J. Alfred Prufrock" is probably more accustomed to thinking about women than actually taking action:

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it at all." (Eliot 1578).

We never learn if Prufrock is contemplating marriage to one, or if they are his sisters, or if they are women he has not got the courage to introduce himself to -- and this is precisely Eliot's point. The scraps of story and quotation from other works of literature both call attention to the collage-like nature of the poem. The mind of Prufrock reflects the texture of twentieth-century life.

Yet the near-comic aspect of Eliot's approach here will come to a surprising climax, as Prufrock manages to have a near-religious near-erotic musical experience, similar in some ways to the one at the conclusion of Lowell's "Madonna of the Evening Flowers":

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me. (Eliot 1579).

The mermaids of mythology would sing to lure sailors to leap overboard, to be with the beautiful siren, and thus die. If the vision of Amy Lowell's speaker in "The Madonna of the Evening Flowers" seems to end in prayer and hymns, Prufrock's vision seems to end in a sort of self-destruction. The grand romance of mythical mermaids, singing purely to attract the attention of a man, is completely out of place with the world of "coffee-spoons" and polite chatter and "perfume from a dress / That makes [Prufrock] digress." But they are as out of place in Prufrock's world as Prufrock's own unruly romantic feelings are.