National Poetry Month: T. S. Eliot

Here is Eliot, looking rather Prufrockian, to nab an adjective coined out of one of his most famous poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." That poem imagines an older, balding man arguing with himself, attempting to justify his own social anxieties. The poem is one of his easier poems to get around, and his density had made many readers fail to attempt understanding him.

It is worth known Eliot's work, if only because it is omnipresent. As Eliot himself said, "good artists borrow, great artists steal," and without stealing something from Eliot, we'd be a much poorer world. Can we imagine Watchmen or "Desolation Row" without The Wasteland, or The Great Gatsby without The Hollow Men? If we want to get technical, can we have "Too Much of Nothing" without Eliot's two brides, Valerie and Vivian?

Certainly, as the references to "Desolation Row" and "Too Much of Nothing" attest, Dylan was heavily influenced by Eliot. In the first attempt I made at writing a scholarly article, I researched charges that Eliot was anti-semitic, which I'd thought he was, and then wrote in defense of "Gerontion." In the poem the reader is presented with a Jewish landlord, referred to in the poem in the opening lines as "the jew." Due to Dylan's "Dear Landlord," I immediately thought of the Jewish landlord as Jesus and the building as the world. I read the poem as religious allegory, and the choice to not capitalize "jew" as more of a comment on how Eliot viewed Jesus' place in culture at the time than on the Jewish culture.