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Thursday, December 15, 2005

Countdown To Armageddon

Posted by on December 15 at 12:20 PM

For poem # 2, I shall post a very small portion of T.S. Eliot’s wonderful Four Quartets, a work that comes very close to the condition of music. Eliot is oddly our Baudelaire.

It seems, as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence— Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past. The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being, Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination— We had the experience but missed the meaning, And approach to the meaning restores the experience In a different form, beyond any meaning We can assign to happiness. I have said before That the past experience revived in the meaning Is not the experience of one life only But of many generations—not forgetting Something that is probably quite ineffable: The backward look behind the assurance Of recorded history, the backward half-look Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror. Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony (Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding, Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things, Is not in question) are likewise permanent With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better In the agony of others, nearly experienced, Involving ourselves, than in our own. For our own past is covered by the currents of action, But the torment of others remains an experience Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.



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Mr. Mudede, while you skim the table of contents of the 1955 Norton Anthology of American Literature for more Harold Bloomage to bore us with, the Poets of your city are preparing for the first real battle in your so called "war on poetry." The war you thoughtlessly declared and now must FIGHT! Tug of War! (Flip flap! I slap my glove across your face AGAIN and repeat: Poets vs. Journalists! Tug of War!) Respond! Charles "Modernism 101" Mudede!

Mr. Mudede, while you skim the table of contents of the 1955 Norton Anthology of American Literature for more Harold Bloomage to bore us with, the Poets of your city are preparing for the first real battle in your so called "war on poetry." The war you thoughtlessly declared and now must FIGHT! Tug of War! (Flip flap! I slap my glove across your face AGAIN and repeat: Poets vs. Journalists! Tug of War!) Respond! Charles "Modernism 101" Mudede!

A post so righteous it needed to be sent twice…

like history repeating itself, the first letter is tragic, the second comic.

You're right, of course, Eliot is like Baudelaire. Only more constipated.

Nice Hegel joke, btw.

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