Christians Reading Classics
Christians Reading Classics
T.S. Eliot - The Hollow Men with Eric Hutchinson
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Nadya Williams and Eric Hutchinson delve into T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Hollow Men', exploring its themes, complexities, and the nature of classic literature. They discuss what defines a classic, the challenges of appreciating poetry today, and how to cultivate an appreciation for it. The conversation also touches on the role of poets in society and the importance of art and poetry in the human experience, concluding with reflections on the necessity of literature and the interconnectedness of past and present works.
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SPEAKER_03The modernist poet T. S. Elliott was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1888. In 1914, though, he moved to England for good. And then in 1925, just two years before he became a British citizen and renounced his American citizenship, he wrote the poem The Hollow Men. It is a critique of World War I, which left so many as hollow men. Divided into five parts, the poem is just 98 lines long, but it packs a punch. The first part goes as follows. We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men, leaning together, headpiece filled with straw. Alas, our dried voices when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in dry grass. Or wrapped feet over broken glass in our dry cellar. Shape without form, shade without color. Paralyzed force, gesture without motion. Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom remember us, if at all, not as lost, violent souls, but only as the whole men. I will skip now to the conclusion of the poem, which perhaps you have heard before, even if you might not have known that this is where it came from. So here are the final four verses. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper. Welcome to Christians Reading Classics, a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy. I am Nadia Williams, book's editor of Mirror Orthodoxy, and interim director of the Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Ashland University. And today I have the delight and privilege of speaking with Eric Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Classics at Hillsdale College. He is a prolific scholar, public writer, literary critic, translator, and poet. I have particularly enjoyed his creative translations of ancient poetry, rendering ancient poetry into lively modern poetic forms. To appreciate poetry for him is clearly to see it as something living, breathing, and beautiful, not just a mummified museum piece. So thank you for being here today.
SPEAKER_01Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.
SPEAKER_03So this season of the podcast focuses on literary classics with a significant anniversary this year. So like the hollow man just turned 100. But I want to open with a somewhat more abstract question before we get to it. And it's appropriate to ask a classicist this question. What makes something a classic? Like what is a classic? Is it enough that we're just reading it, say, a hundred years or three thousand years later?
SPEAKER_01That's a really good question. And it's one uh that I don't think I don't think one can necessarily give a definitive answer to that question. I mean it's been so there are uh there are a lot of different possible meanings um that could be in play when we talk about something being a classic. Um you know the word itself goes back to classical antiquity. Um and and I mean uh a a classus in origin is is w one of the classes into which the the body of the Roman citizenry uh was divided. Um and there's there's actually not a lot of uh of evidence for using it in the way that that we sometimes use it, which is in the sense of a writer of the first rank or of chief importance or something like that. Um if you if you look this up, you'll see that there's one example in the Attic Knights of Aulus Gellius where where this meaning is in play, particularly as it relates to usage, proper usage of language. Um but we do start to find that kind of meaning in in the Renaissance, so these the writers of the first rank of chief importance, um by which they mean uh the the the the sort of chief authors of pagan and christian antiquity. And so when you think of so another broad meaning for uh for the term is the Greek and Roman classics. That's what a classic is, the the the the writings of the Greeks and Romans. And of course, I'm obviously partial to uh to that sort of sense, but I but that is is a sort of stipulated definition in a way of of of what the term means because it can mean other things too. So Eliot himself has uh has um or gave a lecture called What is a classic? And he's and he and he sort of says, look, there are different ways of using this word. I don't mean everything that everyone means by it, and what I'm gonna say doesn't exclude all of these other possible meanings about it. And then he gives this uh gives this sort of disquisition about maturity, maturity of of of a civilization, maturity of language, um the and and then holds up Virgil as sort of the the classic of all Europe, you know, he calls him. Um and so he has something very particular in mind about sort of the the the full bloom of a civilization and language in uh in a poet. I think uh if if I wanted to give uh a a sort of gloss on what I think a classic is in a way that is not limited to um to works of uh of antiquity. But I I think functionally for me, a classic is uh something that can be reread with profit. So a classic is a poem or a book that you can continually return to um without exhausting what is in it. Um and and interestingly, to sort of tie this to to Elliot, in um in a review of Elliot's poetry that was published by Edmund Wilson in 1926, um he says of Elliot that he survives rereading better than almost any of his contemporaries, American or English. He survives rereading, and I think that's and I think that's true. Um, I mean you take a difficult poem like The Hollow Men, and you can read I don't know how many times I've read it, but you can um you can read it over and over and over and over again, um, and see things in it or get things out of it that you didn't any of the previous times that that you read it. And so by that standard, you know, Elliot himself wrote some things that that I think meet the threshold for what a classic is. And and so in that sense, you know, the one advantage potentially of of of a kind of broader definition like that is that you're able to to to bring in um uh important works from a variety of civilizational contexts, um d such that, you know, presumably every every literature and every culture has its own set of classics, that is of you know, chief works that can be uh returned to and and reread with profit. So that's what I would say about that.
SPEAKER_03I love that. And it's a definition that puts responsibility on us. The process of rereading, but also just uh I I'm intrigued by the concept of maturity of civilization. So and my wheels are spinning also, like as to uh the decline in reading, like all those apocalyptic headlines that we get right now. Um so if we're not a mature civilization, that does that mean we're losing the ability to appreciate the classics, and it's on us, like our fault.
SPEAKER_01I don't think we are in principle, because I don't think anybody is in principle um unable to uh to kind of tap into what uh what a great work of literature might have to offer. Um I do think pragmatically, it's more it there there may be chan not maybe, there are challenges certainly that are uh that are in place right now. Um and we maybe have to start start back a little bit further in the process and build up to uh to an appreciation of the kinds of things that we for which we normally use that label. Um but one of the great things though, on the other hand, about the type of literature that we refer to as uh as the classics, is that even though they repay uh you know repeated readings, as as as you know, I'm sure, that doesn't mean that there's no entry point even at a very at a very low level. Right? You can read a small child uh a um uh a paraphrase or retelling of stories from Homer, for example, and their imagination will be uh um kindled by that. Um even if they're even if they're not reading them themselves, if they're hearing them read to them, you know, even if it's not Homer himself, but a paraphrase of Homer, it doesn't that's not really necessarily all that significant in the sense that there are, I guess what I would say is is classical literature has a really high ceiling, but it also has a really, really low barrier to entry in a lot of ways. Um now, is it a real problem that you keep seeing these headlines that you know a lot of elite universities don't even require students to read entire books anymore and they get they come into college without having ever read a whole book. Now, if that's true, obviously that's terrifying, and that's a real problem. Um and it becomes harder and harder to fix it, I think, the older you get. Not impossible, but it does become more difficult. Um so those things are real, don't get me wrong, those are real and serious problems. But on the other hand, I think something like the growth of um of what we refer to as classical education in, you know, in the contemporary United States or great books type stuff, um, the the kind of success that people have found with that, which is more popular now than at any point in my lifetime, and certainly when I when I was in school. So I mean, I think I think there's yeah, there's bad news, but there's also good news that's a counterweight to that in some respects. Um the bigger problem there, I think, is that there's not a lot of middle ground, right? It's I think it's mostly one or the other right now, which long term I don't think is really sort of civilizationally sustainable. Um it's it's that's not good to have that kind of uh that sharp of a division, I don't think. On the other hand, I guess one response to that might be, well, it's always been like that. And so um, you know, in terms of it, it it's it's not as though um the norm has been for sort of widespread erudite education or something like that. So um so it's a it's obviously a crisis in certain respects, but it's not one that that should lead to uh to despair, I don't think.
SPEAKER_03Well, I appreciate that. So one um challenge, so speaking of like on the one hand, with classics, sometimes um it's difficult to appreciate them, but on the other hand, like there's a lower bar for entry. But it seems like people today are more used to reading prose than poetry. Like it's a lower bar to appreciate prose than poetry. So before we talk a little bit more about the hollow man, um as someone who reads poetry, translates poetry, and writes poetry, would you tell us like how do we train ourselves to read and appreciate poetry?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was thinking a little bit about this this question, and I'm glad you asked it and um and that you you had sent it to me previously so that I could think about it a little bit, because it's uh it's something that I sort of take uh for granted, and so it was useful to um make myself think about think about it a little bit, and how would I tell somebody I mean I do it in the classroom with Latin poets, but there's that doesn't really mean starting from scratch. I mean, these are students who have already been studying Latin and they've already had literature classes and that kind of thing, so um so that's not really having to start it from the ground up. And I think one thing that I would say is while while poetry can be very uh very complex, very sophisticated, very difficult, um, it doesn't have to be. And so I would, you know, if I were speaking to somebody who didn't really have a lot of familiarity um with poetry as opposed to prose, one thing that I might encourage them to think about is starting going back to something as simple as nursery rhymes, which most of us know at least some of from childhood. And and most people like them, you know, they sort of learn these by heart, they have a kind of fondness for them, even if they can't really articulate why that is. Um and you know, children like them from a very young age, but I think often parents do too, and they and they sort of have the same kind of enjoyment as as children do from nursery rhymes. And why is that? It's something about the musicality of language and the play of language, I think, that has an intrinsic that has an intrinsic pleasure to it. Um that that people enjoy. There's an analogy too. I mean, if you're speaking with an adult, you know, a lot of people find themselves drawn to or attracted to liturgical language, for example. Why is that? Um again, uh a large part of it is because it's it's in a sense, it's language made strange, um, because it has a kind of musical quality to it, um and uh and a a sort of aesthetic draw that um quotidian sort of you know daily speech um might not have. Um and I think even if you start uh start with something like that, you can kind of get people to see, okay, this is what this is what poetry is at at its most basic. It's musical language, um, which is why it's really important to read out loud, which I would also encourage people to do when they're when they're first starting with it. But you know, you get from that to uh to other types of poems that bear some resemblance to that. One of ours, you know, that we liked doing with a lot of our kids was this Robert Robert Lewis Stevenson poem, Bed in Summer. Um in winter I get up at night and dress by yellow candlelight, in summer, quite the other way, I have to go to bed by day, and so on and so forth. It has that that same kind of nursery rhyme. There's something about that that is similar, that the the the musicality of language, which even extends all the way into the hollow men. So the fifth part of the hollow men um is a kind of parody of nursery rhymes. You know, here we go around the prickly pear, prickly pear, prickly pear, right? So here we go round the mulberry bush. That the so there is a kind of straight line, I think, even from the the most basic sort of rhythmic and rhyming language all the way up to some of the most difficult uh poetry that's that's been written. Um so that's that's one thing that I would that I would say about that. Um you know, anything anything that involves that sort of oral in the sense of mouth and oral in the sense of ears, that that aspect to it is so important. Um and so I mentioned, you know, reading, reading out loud so that you can kind of catch the music of the language. Um another another good thing that people can do even from very early on is uh is memor find something that you like or that appeals to you that's short and commit it to memory. And you'll find yourself sort of reciting it over and over again, and you'll notice things that you hadn't noticed before. Um you'll you'll sort of pick up on things in in sound and sense that you hadn't that will give you some appreciation for um uh for uh for poetry as poetry. Um and this is why metrical poetry is is very useful because things that are in meter um and also also in rhyme, though need not be, but those are all aids to uh aids to memory. Um and one of the things, as I mentioned a second ago, one of the things that you do then is start to notice things that you hadn't noticed before. Okay, so that kind of moves us from form um in to content. Another thing that is that is really fun, I think, about poetry is the the um the way in which ideas are expressed uh sort of indirectly often, or through image, or through symbol or figure or what have you. So another another thing that I think can be really great for um appreciating poetry is talking about it with other people. Um so uh there's not really any great substitute for for reading something with somebody else and then talking about it, right? And you'll start to notice, oh, I never I'd never seen that that was in there before. I never noticed this or I never noticed that. And you realize that there's a uh there can often be a kind of compactness uh in a poem because of the discipline of writing. Again, I'm thinking of formal poetry in particular, but because of the difficulty of writing in form and meter, there's a kind of compression that you don't um always find in prose that takes some unfolding, unraveling. And when you do that together with other people, you'll find um that it's really fun, actually, uh and and and edifying. And so um those are, I mean, there's not really I don't think I said anything sort of totally coherent there, but those those are just fantastic, sort of scattered thoughts about about very basic ways that you can kind of cultivate an appreciation for um for uh poetry as poetry.
SPEAKER_03I love that. And a lot of it is sending us back to kind of like pre-modern ways of appreciating books, like even for people who couldn't read. Of course, you heard poetry, like you heard other people reciting things and you learned them by heart yourself. And that's um I love that the idea of poetry as more relational that to appreciate it, you actually need other people, which is so like helpful to remember in our disconnected modern America, where it's like the surgeon general is warning that loneliness is an epidemic that's killing people.
SPEAKER_01That's yeah. And it it is kind of incredible actually how how real of a phenomenon this is. I can't tell you how many times, you know. So with students, something that I've read, I don't know how many times, and I think I got a pretty good handle on this. And so I'm gonna go in and you know kind of discuss this with um with students who haven't read it 50 times, and and um, and so you know, one might assume, okay, I'm definitely gonna know a lot more than they do about this. I'm really gonna have a good handle on this. Um and I think there's some respects in which that's true. But what's really uh astounding is almost without fail, and I'm not exaggerating, almost without fail, a student will will notice things, will observe things that I had not and probably would not have, potentially, no matter how many times I continued sort of going back to this thing. Um and so uh very often no matter how much you toil over something alone, on your own, reading, rereading, there are there are things about it that you're probably really only gonna discover or be attentive to through the aid of s of somebody else. And and uh obviously I think there's a much more uh uh uh large scale, you know, point about the what kinds of creatures human beings are that is sort of implicit in uh what is actually an empirical observation, right? But that tells us something uh you know meaningful about w what kinds of creatures we are.
SPEAKER_03I love that. And we are creatures who love music, sounds, rhymes.
SPEAKER_01Right. In in a way that's like in it why? I mean, why should that be the case? You know, that that's not necessarily intuitive, but it seems again, experientially, that seems absolutely to be true.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I'm thinking about my kids, like everyone, you know, babies love rhymes, like long before they understand anything. But it's like I mean, but yeah, and they giggle, but they laugh. It's like why? How did you know it was funny?
SPEAKER_01Right. Right. Almost like we almost like it's innate, you know.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it is fascinating to observe that. Well, it's um of course this particular poem, The Hollow Men, is not going to make anyone giggle, but it is a beautiful poem and it is a significant one. So walk us through it. Like what should readers pay attention to in this poem?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this is this is a difficult, um a difficult poem um to analyze because it r I mean I think it in a lot of respects it resists uh analysis. Uh where is it? I'm looking for um I thought I had written hang on. There's a there's actually a comment that Elliot that Elliot makes about this that I want to read uh if I can if I can find it quickly. Um so this in 19, he said this in 1953. Uh it the Hollow Men does not seem to me, in fact, a poem which can be explained. What is important is not what the author thought he was doing, put in other terms, but simply what you get out of it yourself. That's what that's what Elliot says about it. But I the part I want to focus on is um is that he says that he doesn't doesn't think that it is a poem which can be explained. In other words, it's not um it's not a sort of um linear argument that that he's making. I'm not sure that there really is even an implicit argument necessarily in the poem, which is not to say that it lacks ideas, but it but it might uh because I don't think it I don't think it lacks ideas, but it is not making a sort of it it's not reducible to a syllogism, if that makes sense, I guess. So the poem certainly has a mood, and uh the mood is um is one of despair, as Elliot himself acknowledged. And I think it works uh via the association of a set of images and repeated words and phrases that um that basically do the work of presenting that mood through through image, um, essentially. So this is a poem I think that you have to that you have to read over and over and over again. And incidentally, it's one of the actually one of the first um serious poems I I have a memory of encountering. Um I I think when I was a senior in high school, and I had this great English teacher in 12th grade named Mrs. Stefan, and I think she she gave it to us in class, and I've been racking my brain to try to remember um uh why. Um and I had initially thought, well, maybe she gave this to us because um we were reading The Great Gatsby, and that which was published in the same year, and this is supposed to give us some kind of sort of you know gloss on the the 1920s, but I don't actually think that's right because I'm pretty sure we read that in 10th grade, which I think is when we usually usually read it. So I have not been able to come up with the idea why she might have why she might have given this to us, but I have a vague sense that that or something like it happened. So I encountered this poem in high school, and actually one of the I think the first maybe serious book of poetry that I bought at the uh at the now vanished uh borders books in Ann Arbor. So people who are from Michigan will remember this and will lament with me that it is not there anymore. Um, but was a the the selected poems of of T. S. Elliott. And so all that to say, um this is a a poem that's sort of been on my mind for a long time, for a lot of years, um, without necessarily really understanding it. I definitely didn't understand it when I first read it. Although, going back to what we were talking about earlier, there was something about the language that I found very magnetic, um, even though uh, again, I didn't know what it meant. And I'm not sure that I still do know what it means, if it means one specific thing um at all. Um that was a long tangent to say. I think that there are uh there are these images. So if you look for words that get repeated a lot in this poem, the adjective dry, which is very important in Elliot's poetry all through this early period, he calls things dry very often. Um the word broken, which is used several times in the poem, it describes a column, it decides a stone, it describes a jaw in this kind of arresting phrase, the broken jaw of our lost kingdoms. Um he talks about stars several times, uh fading star um in this in this valley of dying stars. So that's another image that is prominent in the poem. Um eyes, eyes that are used in in different ways is is a repeated image. Wind. Uh and um it we so these are the you know, these are some of the images that are uh that are present throughout the poem. So one thing that you can do is read through the poem and read through it several times and try to track the way that the images are used, right? And and try to get at some sense of okay, what is evoked in me, the reader? What do I think Elliot is trying to uh evoke by the repeated use of these images? Um how does he use these images to create a mood of despair, which is not a word, by the way, that he uses in the poem. Um he he he himself said uh later in his life, 1958, he said, I don't often read the Hollow Men when I give readings. It's not bad, but I think its mood is rather too despairing. So that's true, but he doesn't actually use that. So he doesn't use that word in the poem. So how does he communicate it? And he can the answer is that he communicates it through this series of images that he manipulates or modifies, turns in different ways. So somehow through image, he's able to get across to us the idea of bleakness. Um, the in in in another spot. Somebody wanted to anthologize this poem and wanted to categorize it under the heading of social disease. Um and he gave per he gave permission for the poem to be included in this anthology, but um uh but didn't think that social disease was actually the right category for this poem. Um and he said, I think that spiritual disease would be the proper heading, but I noticed that you have no such category. This is what that's what he told the editor. So he thinks it's a poem of spiritual disease. Um and that brings me to the next thing that might be useful when reading reading The Hollow Men. So, in addition to sort of tracking these images that he uses to uh to present a picture, a kind of mental picture sense of of spiritual disease. And that's and that's this one of the things that makes Elliot, I think, both um uh difficult and rewarding to read is the highly elusive nature of uh of his poetry, particularly in things like the Wasteland and the Hollowmen. And it makes a lot of sense to read the wasteland and the Holloman closely together, I think. So he's highly, highly referential, elusive, fragmentary, um, and he makes so he's making use of a huge variety of different sources. And many of these are things that um that the reader may not be familiar with, uh, and certainly not initially familiar with. So, you know, there's scholarship, commentaries, things like that that are really useful in in kind of orienting you to this. But one of the things that in in addition to tracking the imagery, I think that can kind of open the poem up is getting some sense of um of some of the sources of the poem. Not because not because, oh, once I know what the sources are, I've kind of got them figured out and so I could I can pin him down on exactly what he means, but because it does open up the sorts of things that he's thinking about and that he's in conversation with in the way that he's reusing or repurposing images, phrases, things like that from older works. Um, and so uh let me, if it's okay, let me just give you what three of those what of those sources are that can help for um for reading this poem. Um so one of the things that this poem is um it we can use the technical term um uh katabasis for, which as you as a classicist will know. So this is this goes back to the journey to the underworld of Odysseus in book 11 of the Odyssey, the journey of Aeneas to the underworld in um in book six of the Aeneid, um, and then in in later sources after that. And I would say of ancient sources, it's Virgil that's that's most important here. And so in part uh in part four, we have this phrase about uh about these these um the the we, he says, who are gathered on this beach of the Tumid River, um, which seems to be the sticks, probably the river sticks, the river to cross over into the underworld. Um and he acknowledged that that that was uh that that was probably right in uh in a comment to um to a reader uh later on. Let me see if I can. I think I have it here. Um uh well maybe I don't know, I won't take up um too much time, but let me just see if I can uh find it really quickly. All this stuff is somewhat disorganized. Oh yeah, so here it is. So this is from um from 1943. Um I certainly had the sticks in mind, and perhaps with a rather more antique than Dantesque association, I'll come back to that. Um, but it is not intended to be a very precise reference. But there's something about the underworld and the river to the underworld here. Um and by the way, a lot of these um a lot of these comments come from or are and are gathered in um a really helpful commentary on Elliott's poetry that was uh published not too long ago um by um Christopher Ricks, who is a really important scholar of of T.S. Eliot, and and Jim uh McHugh, I guess is how um how one would pronounce it. Um anyway, kind of got off track there. So Virgil, this journey to the underworld, okay, and and we know that um we know that Virgil is a is a kind of lodestar for uh for Elliot. Um and Book Six of the Aeneid, of course, is when is when Aeneas goes into the underworld so that he can um so that he can find his and and and speak with with his father Anchises. He's you know he sees all these disembodied souls, some of them are in pain. He gets he sort of sees this parade of the future greatness of Rome, the greatness of Rome's future history, all these all these kinds of things. Well, so the the virg the the journey of Aeneas to the underworld then of course becomes the inspiration and the chief model for Dante's journey in the in the comedia, where he uses where he uses Virgil as his guide. Um and so we have Virgil in that comment that I read just a minute ago, you know, that he had uh a rather more antique than Dantesque association in mind. Nevertheless, there is Dante in The Hollow Men as as well. If you look at the third canto of the inferno, before uh before Dante crosses over into hell, um there's this whole group of uh of what are called the neutrals, right? Who were neither good nor bad, but just sort of indifferent. And they chase this banner around that's you know in the wind, always with with a lack of fulfillment. Um these are the hollow men. These are the people who had no commitment either to good or to evil, really. They they were the apathetic, the um the uh those who just sort of went through life passive, who let passively, who let life happen to them, who didn't uh who didn't really act or do anything, whether for good or for evil. Um so that's a source of this poem.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_01We think about the end of part one. Those who have crossed with direct eyes to death's other kingdom, remember us if at all. They might not even remember us. Remember us, we, the speakers of this poem, whoever they are, not as lost, violent souls. The kind of people who end up in in hell for real, right? They don't remember us as lost, violent souls, but only as the hollow men, the stuffed men. Okay, so I think that's an intertext or a source text for this poem. And then the third big one I would mention is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There are so there are two epigraphs for the hollow men, and one of them is Mr. Kurtz He Dead. Okay, which so so the death scene of of the chief villain of Heart of Darkness. Um, and incidentally, you'll see people mention this a lot. Heart of Darkness was very much on Elliot's mind at the time that he wrote The Hollow Men. So he had wanted to use uh Heart of Darkness for one of the epigraphs for the Wasteland a few years before, and Ezra Pound um convinced him not to. But he was clearly thinking along those lines in the wasteland as well. And what is uh what is Mr. Kurtz? I mean, he's certainly not a hollow man or a stuffed man in the sense that Elliot is is criticizing. Um he's not good, but at least he's not uh neutral, at least he's not indifferent. So there's a kind of contrast um between the character of the epigraph and the people who are being described in the poem. And this is reinforced by the second epigraph of uh that stands at the beginning of the Hollow Men, a penny for the old guy. And guy here is a reference to Guy Fawkes, the person who wanted to blow up Parliament in uh in the 16th century. Um, again, a figure who sort of epitomizes evil, but is anything but neutral. Okay. And so I think the two, you know, the two epigraphs that we get here are both figures who stand in contrast to the kind of vacuity in the poem. This is not this does not mean Elliot is saying um we should all, you know, be evil and go out and blow things up, but he's uh he is using it, I think, as a critique of of uh the kind of malaise that he sees in the world around him, again, what he refers to as um as a spiritual disease. Now, the really interesting thing, I think, it when we think of these three source texts for the poem is that okay, you have Virgil and you can read Virgil and appreciate Virgil on his own, which Eliot certainly did, but of course you can also read Virgil through Dante, and Eliot did that too. So we have Virgil, and then we have Virgil as received and reformulated by Dante. Well, okay, you can um you can read and appreciate Dante on uh on his own, you can read and appreciate Virgil on his own, but then you can also see Virgil through uh Virgil through Dante. Well, then we come to Conrad and Heart of Darkness, which again you can read and appreciate Heart of Darkness on um on its own, but Heart of Darkness is arguably also a reception of Dante and Virgil. So you can read Virgil through Dante through Conrad. And there's and these three works, I think, you know, Book Six of the Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and people have also argued for the presence of the Purgatorio and Paradiso in in the Holoman as well. But in any event, um, these three works, Book Six of the Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, actually do go together really well in a lot of ways. I mean, you want to think about tradition, literary tradition sort of writ large, that's not exclusive to the ancient world, but that does have its roots in the ancient world. This is a really good sort of trifecta, I think, to put together in this way. And um, and I think it's possible to say, you know, yes, Eliot reads Virgil on his own, but he also reads Virgil through Dante, but he also reads Virgil through Dante through Conrad, right? And these are three things that can be appreciated separately, but also in concert with each other or together. Um, and if you were to read the Hollow Men and then go back and take a look at, you know, uh Book Six of the Aeneid or Canto Three of the Inferno or some passages from Heart of Darkness, or better yet, just sit down and read the whole thing. Um, then come back to the Hollow Men again, and you're gonna go, probably, whoa, here's more stuff that I didn't that I didn't see was in there before. Um, even though the poem itself is so compressed, I mean, as you mentioned, 90 some lines, but it's so highly elusive and and and so fragmentary that I don't think it's possible necessarily to nail down the way in which each one of these references works. And I'm not sure that we're supposed to do that for this poem, but they are very evocative. And I think that's what you know, Elliot is using them for the evocation of a mood that we are then supposed to, as readers, to um to reflect upon, I think. Um so he's evoking a mood, but this doesn't make the poem reducible, I don't think, to feeling. So we just sort of like, oh good, I get a a feeling from it and then I'm done. You're supposed to think about it. I think you're supposed to reflect on it, even if that doesn't mean that there is one specific way to sort of correlate all of these images with each other, if if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_03I love that. Um now I'm uh suddenly understanding why when I first read uh Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a high schooler, it like to me as a Latin student, it just popped because I read it actually the same year that I was reading Virgil in Latin for the first time.
SPEAKER_01So I mean Oh wow. Yeah, that's that is um that that's a really sort of great conjunction. Um and and it's a it's a good reminder of uh the I think the truly universal nature of uh of classical literature, I mean, and here I'm speaking specifically of Greek and Roman uh literature. The real classical literature, right? Yes, right. Um obviously there are particularities in it, but there are things that that and a lot of things that transcend a particular time and place um in the Aeneid. So is is something like the Aeneid uh very closely bound to first century BC Roman history, the Augustan regime, et cetera, et cetera? Yes, of course. And I don't I mean it doesn't make any sense to even try to argue against that, but does that mean that there's nothing uh that transcends time and place, nothing that's sort of universal or human, humane in Virgil's Aeneid? Absolutely not. And I think if you you you realize that when you see it in something like Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an early 20th century novella by a Polish guy for whom English was his second language, you know, writing about uh the the interior of Africa. I mean, the the themes are are universal. Um and and I think you can see that by being able to and and the Holomen is a good instance of this, because you can track themes from ancient Rome through medieval Italy to early 20th century uh England and America. And it's not arbitrary, and it's not just made up, you know, like it's actually verifiable. Like you can it's it's verifiable through the use of language and motif and image uh and and theme. And and so I think that's I think that's uh well, I mean, if nothing else, it's it's neat, I guess.
SPEAKER_03It is. But it's also a reminder of just like um I love that you're taking it apart for us and showing us kind of like the inner workings of a poem. And it's also um a revelation of like how do poets work. And really, it sounds like in the case of T. S. Elliott and perhaps. Particular to be a good poet requires reading a ton.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think so. Certainly for the kind of poetry that um that he was writing. But I would I I would make the point more generalizable too, I think. Um if you try to imagine something that is written entirely in a vacuum without reference to anything that comes before it, I think it's fair to say that we would find it uninterpretable in in I mean not not if we're saying like, you know, C spot run or something, but even that, I mean, that's a reference to a literary tradition right there. Um so if if we're thinking in terms of of literature, it's hard for me to imagine um something that comes out of a vacuum because there aren't any writers that come out of a vacuum. And there's almost nobody who writes something without having read something first. And so to in my opinion, almost all literature, maybe not all, I guess there could be exceptions, so I'll qualify, I'll hedge. Almost all literature is is part of some bigger conversation. Um and that's true, even if what that means is I'm trying to reject all previous literary tradition, you know, through like the dissolution of form or through um a refusal to uh you know narrate in a linear way or something like that. None of this occurs in a vacuum and can't be interpreted in a vacuum. So if you pick up something that is sort of self-consciously trying to dissolve form, but um but read it totally in isolation, it will be incoherent and will make no sense. Now, it might be kind of incoherent anyway, but the incoherence will kind of make a kind of sense if you realize that it is in reaction to previous sort of modes of of writing and styles of writing. In other words, that it's a kind of self-conscious rejection of certain stylistic traditions or narrative tendencies or whatever. Now, you may still come away with it thinking, I hate that, I don't like that, I think that's stupid, I don't think that makes any sense, I don't think that that's you know coherent and I don't enjoy it. Okay, you could think all of those things, but you'll at least understand something of the of what the person is trying to do. Same thing applies in the visual arts, right? You might not like you know modernist or abstract art, but it's at least important to realize, okay, here's what these people think that they're doing, and here's why they're doing it, and this is a a reaction. The rejection of form is itself dependent on on a tradition, that namely a tradition of form. And so it even to understand that, you have to understand something of the tradition that it's coming out of or is a reaction to. That's a really extreme example. And on a much lower scale, then of course, um, most literature is is referential, in my opinion, in some form or another. All these texts depend on previous texts, previous authors, um whom by whom they've been inspired, influenced, who they're in compet with whom they're in competition, whom they're trying to outdo or emulate, you know, all these kinds of things. There are a whole, there's a hundred different forms or more that that kind of thing could take. But the important thing is that it's really, really difficult to appreciate what they're up to without knowing the kinds, at least some of the kinds of things that they've read and that they were thinking about. And in Elliot's case, this applies to an extreme degree because he was um such a reader and a close reader, and and uh such a subtle eluder or referrer that um that a lot of his poetry is just impenetrable without having some sense of that. Sometimes even once you know what some of those things are, aspects of it are going to remain impenetrable anyway, I think, or very um obscure, ambiguous, you know. Um but you'll at least have a a a better sense, if not a perfect sense, of what it is that he's you know, the the vein that he's working in, I think. So, yes, to be uh to be a a writer means to be a reader, primarily because to be a writer means to use language, but we all of us learn how to use language from other people. Nobody even learns to talk without that. So at the most at the most fundamental level, um to be a writer means to be an imitator. Now, that doesn't mean a slavish imitator, you know, or a sort of making hitting hitting control C on, you know, and then just control V and pasting in what other people have done. But um there is an inescapable uh facet of imitation, I would argue, that is involved with all writing and especially all uh formal writing. But but I would expand again, I would expand it beyond that because we don't even learn how to make articulate sounds without reference to other speakers of this of the same language that we use. So I don't I don't think it does any good to, I mean, you can't, I don't I don't think that can be gainsaid. And so we might as well just go, okay, yes, that's what uh that's how language and literature works. So given that that's the case, you know, uh I guess we should pay some attention to reading and not just to writing.
SPEAKER_03I love that. Well, so um this is a natural transition to talk a little bit about your own work, uh, because you teach, you study and teach ancient poetry as a scholar, but you also translate ancient poetry and you write poetry, some of it inspired by ancient poetry. So um I was wondering if you could like kind of let us into your mind for a minute and tell us like um basically like who are poets, why do we need them? And like how do you how do you do these things with words?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um That's a that's a good question. Um I don't even think I mean I don't even think I would call myself a poet, although I'm a person who writes poetry, who enjoys writing uh writing poetry you know, in addition to in it in addition to other things, but it is something that that I find very gratifying. And so I mean there's a there's certainly a a a selfish aspect to this, and I think probably a lot of people who write would admit, if they're being honest, that that is at least uh they're that that at least is part of what's going on. I mean, we do it because we like it, and if we didn't, we probably wouldn't do it, or we would do less of it, or we wouldn't do it as well. Um so and I think, you know, I think it's better to just be honest about that. Um you know, a large part of why I do it, and I think probably why a lot of other people do it, is because I like it. And um and it is uh and it is enjoyable. Now, is is that in itself an intrinsic justification for anything any person might want to do? No, I don't think so. I think so. I think there are other ends to writing besides the the um the enjoyment of it. It's you know, I don't think it ought to be sort of in entirely self-oriented and selfish. You know, you hope to bring every every person who writes, I think at the end of the day, hopes to have readers, hopes to have somebody reading, and you hope to do something for them by putting this thing out in the world that didn't exist before. Um, you know, you hope to bring them some kind of edification or illumination or uh joy or um or uh opportunity for reflection. Um, you know, you are attempting to speak, I think, not just to yourself, but to other people. So I think that relational aspect of it is real and is is a reason why we shouldn't conceive of the writer's task in a completely um you know self-serving or self-oriented way. Um, I mean, as you know, a a poet uh at at the most fundamental level is a person who makes things. So you're making things that uh that didn't exist before. Um and one of the things I think about that that is attractive about poetry is that there's a sense in which it's um utterly useless. It you you you can't feed yourself with it. I mean, I guess if you're really good at it, you can maybe make enough money from it to feed yourself with it. Um but I don't think there are many people doing that. Um but you can't, you know, it it doesn't build a house, it doesn't uh it doesn't raise a child, it doesn't feed you or um any of these sort of basic needs that we have. Um and uh and so there's a a sense in which even the very activity of doing it is a um is a rejection of utilitarianism. On the other hand, though, and at a higher level, I would say that poetry is um incredibly useful and even and even necessary. So I said a minute ago that it was useless in one sense, and that's using our normal, I think, kind of functional definition of what it means for something to be useful. It means useful to our bodies, um, useful for uh my sort of material functioning, um, my material comfort, well-being, you know, having uh a full belly and a good night's sleep, that kind of thing. But that's actually if if you if you reduce a human being to that, you're lying about what um about what a human being is. And so there's another sense in which poetry is very useful because human beings are actually the union of a body and a soul or a mind. And that part of us is at least as essential, that spiritual or uh or or or um meant, I think spiritual is a better word. That spiritual part of us is at least, at the very least, as important as the the material or physical or bodily part of us, which means that it has demands, it has needs, um that must be attended to. Really, if we're thinking of a person as as a whole person and not just as a body, that person has needs that must be attended to just as insistently, um, even if not as immediately recognizable as the demands of uh of the body. And poetry is one of those things, it's not the only thing, but is one of those things that speaks, I think, to that aspect of ourselves. I think music is another one. I mean, so I d I don't think there's just one thing that does this. Um, and one of the really, really fascinating things about this is that all of these things that I think are important to our to to the human spirit and are spiritual in that sense, in that stipulated sense, uh are things that come to us still through physical means. So poetry is sound. Um it's the sound of a human uh voice uh striking your ears and then going through all the you know things that have to happen in your brain for you to to understand it. Or even if you're reading it on a page, it's it's image physical, right? It has shape, color, texture. Um music is physical. Right? We don't we don't have without physicality, there is no music, um, at least as we experience it right now. And so we get to the the the the spirit very often through the physical, but one of the things that is really important about things like poetry and music is that they're not merely physical, even if they use a physical medium um to to speak to something that is, in my opinion, immaterial. So that I'm not sure I exactly answered answered your question, but I do think this is one of the reasons why uh things like poetry, literature, music, art, all these kinds of things, you know, matter, and they don't just matter in um simply in a hedonistic way. I mean, I don't think we again I don't think we should be dishonest about this again, to repeat something that I said earlier. A lot of us do these things because we like them and we find pleasure in them and we enjoy them. And it's okay to admit that, I think. It's okay to say, I I like music and I listen to it because I enjoy listening to it. So I don't think we have to say, oh, we can't actually consider that as as a motive. But I would say that there's also more. There's more to it than that. Um and and the thing that is more about it is uh is really important to what it means to be um to be uh human. It it doesn't it doesn't make us sort of less or not human to you know to not spend time with or meditate upon these things. But but I think if if we don't, and this can take a lot of different forms, but if we don't, we are neglecting a certain aspect of what it actually does mean to be human, and in that sense are uh are sort of forfeiting um an aspect of ourselves that is that is really essential. And this happens, uh I'll I'll this will be the last thing I guess I'll say about it. This happens a lot um often through uh or these habits develop in the first instance, not necessarily through uh one's own conscious choice. In other words, if we look around and see lots and lots of people who you know don't have any appreciation for you know poetry or music or whatever, um I think the first response shouldn't be to say, uh, those trolls, those you know, those idiots, those barbarians, they don't care about anything that's actually important. Our first response should be to say, um, that was probably a failure of education. This is one of the reasons that so, in other words, this is one of the reasons that I think having a good and sound education is really, really important because while those things are important to uh are significant to what we are as human beings, um they and and our appreciation of them is in a certain sense innate, going back to what we were talking about earlier with in terms of, you know, even basic love of like rhyme and and language and that sort of thing. Um, at a higher level, they have to be cultivated and trained, right? It's it's as it's a sort of discipline into which one is initiated. And this is why having a sort of sound education that that opens this world up to you and teaches you some appreciation for these things is really, really important that shows you how, even when you're not in school, right, when you're busy with lots of other things, that reminds you that, hey, there is this part of yourself that you uh that you need to attend to. And a good teacher, right, a good teacher of literature, of music or whatever is going to show you how to do that. And when we look around and see lots of people who who maybe don't care about these things, I mean, sure, do they bear some responsibility? Of course, we all bear you know responsibility for for what we are and what we do and all of that. But we can also look at this, you know, sympathetically in in terms of saying they also may have never been shown what this is supposed to look like, right? They may have had an education that was totally functional or that really did treat them as merely material beings, um, who don't have any any higher purpose than to have a full belly and a good night's sleep and a lot of money or something like that. Um, and that really is that's a civilizational failure. Um, and uh and and it's a civilizational failure with to sort of tie this all back together with personal consequences. And so I think, you know, for those of us who do in enjoy like these sorts of things, it's also a good reminder that, hey, we need to pass those on to other people uh too. And we don't just get to kind of hoard them for ourselves um because it actually is is um meaningful and essential to uh to others as well. So um we can we can have an enjoyment and should have an enjoyment of these things with and also with an eye toward our neighbor as well, I think.
SPEAKER_03I love that. You just gave us like this whole manifesto, the anthropology of poetry and just art more broadly. Like, why do we need this as human persons? I like that. That's um, and I think it is um it is a really great point what you made about utilitarianism from a utilitarian standpoint. Like, yeah, nobody needs art. And yet, from the earliest times, like even from before we have writing, you look at what cavemen were doing. What were they doing? Art, like gorgeous art on wall paint, like wall paintings. Right.
SPEAKER_01Like why would, yeah, and you're right, like from a from a utilitarian point of view, why it makes no sense.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, like why does your cave need art?
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03And yet that's what absolutely.
SPEAKER_01So even again, um uh something that we were talking about um earlier earlier in the discussion, that it's really funny that a lot of these things that we think are you know theoretically true or that we can arrive at by sort of philosophical means, theological means, they're also kind of empirically verifiable. Like, well, this is just what people do, so why why is that the case? Right? And then you start, you know, that should tell you something significant as well.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, like part of being human, part of being a person made in the image of God is the appreciation of beauty in all its own.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it must apparently, because it seems that that's what people have have done from as early as we have any record of people.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's striking. Well, so as we conclude, I have one final question for you. Okay What classic book do you wish you had written and why?
SPEAKER_01So I'll be brief on this. Um the one thing I was thinking about this, and it it it wasn't a book that I came up with, but it was a poem. Um and uh the the poem is um W. H. Auden's The Shield, uh Shield of Achilles, which I think is the greatest poem that I'm aware of of the 20th century. So um, yeah, if I were gonna say, oh, I've do I think I could write a poem like that? No, I actually don't think I could write a poem like that, but do I kind of wish that I had? Yeah, um, I do sort of wish that I had, because it is an encapsulation actually of a lot of the things that we've been talking about. So it's really, I mean, it's it is uh a reception of the ephrasis, which um, I mean, so for the benefit of our listeners in case that's an unfamiliar term, an echrasis is is just a verbal description of a visual object. Um and the first one that we have is the shield of Achilles in book 18 of Homer's Iliad. Um and so what Auden does is sort of rewrite the shield of Achilles in the context of mechanized uh uh uh warfare that has human casualties on an almost uh unbelievable scale in the Second World War, in the context of totalitarianism and and and everything. Um and so he rewrites Homer's Shield of Achilles in the context of uh of the problems of the middle of the 20th century in uh uh in Europe. And so I sort of got off track, but it kind of encapsulates a lot of the things that I love and that I think are really, really fascinating. So the ancient world, but the the reception of the ancient world in um in a contemporary context, not as a kind of fossil um or as a museum piece, but as a living and active uh presence that still um that still speaks to us, even by way of contradiction. Um and uh so one of the things that Auden is doing is is is writing in contradiction to Homer in certain respects in that poem. Um and then it and what he makes is uh I think one of the most effective pieces of writing that I'm that I'm familiar with. And if if you haven't read this before, I would really encourage you to do so. You guys, you you can find it online, it's easily available. Um but it is it's it's just incredible, um, both at the level of sort of verbal art and at the level of concept and um and uh and moral critique, um d sympathetic uh moral critique. It's it's I guess what what I would say is it's just uh incredibly humane in in the best sense of of that term. And it really makes you reflect on um you know what kind of beings are we? What kind of beings should we be? What kind of beings can we become in in a bad sense? Um and and and how does that make us less less than what we are actually supposed to um supposed to be. And it's just it's a it's an absolutely incredible. I keep saying this, but that's I I think that's my favorite poem, maybe ever, certainly of the of the 20th century. And so if I had to say one that's like, oh man, that was that was uh I wish I'd done that. I guess that would be the one.
SPEAKER_03Well, thank you, Eric. This was uh I'm so grateful for you taking the time for this conversation.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you. Uh thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.