Today's poem:

The Love Song of St Sebastian
- by TS Eliot

https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/727879675947466752/the-love-song-of-st-sebastian?source=share

#poetry #TSEliot #SaintSebastian #love #murder #attraction #desire #sexuality

As part of my exploration of mid-century literature I have been reading W. H. Auden and I am struggling to pull anything substantial out of it. I appreciate the language and the imagery it evokes, but it seems, to me, to be too surrealistic to communicate any particular theme or even emotion. Is this a known characteristic of his early work? I’m reading him in chronological order.

I feel like I’m missing a key to how to read Auden before I can understand what he is trying to communicate. Do I need to be reading him while drunk or high? It’s like someone rapidly switch channels on a TV. A series of evocative images but seemingly unrelated to each other. I get strong TS Eliot vibes but without the culture references as guideposts.

Any suggestions?

#literature #whauden #poetry #literary #TSEliot

Moi intérieur
#citation #intérieur #moi #poésie #TSEliot

« Quel est ce moi intérieur, observateur silencieux,
Critique sévère et muet, qui nous épouvante ainsi
Et nous pousse à la futile agitation,
Puis, à la fin, nous juge encore plus sévèrement
Pour les erreurs où ses reproches nous ont jetés. »
– T.S. Eliot, dans Fabrice Midal, Foutez-vous la paix ! et commencez à vivre, Édito, 2017, p. 142

Today's poem is taken from

Burnt Norton (excerpt from the first of the Four Quartets)
- by TS Eliot

https://www.tumblr.com/ukdamo/722289728428376064/burnt-norton-excerpt-from-the-first-of-the-four?source=share

#poetry #TSEliot #possibility #time #life #circumstance #reality #entanglement #humanity #choice #integration #given #mystery #hope

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
-- T. S. Eliot (The Rock)

⬆ #Quotes #TSEliot #Information #Knowledge #Wisdom

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Triathlon #Runners #StPetersburg #Florida

“Distracted from distraction by distraction…”
#TSEliot
#poetry #modernity #socialmedia

@gastarbajterica I love how this is echoed in Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” with “wild strawberries” and the music that “flared” at a remembered concert.

#Poetry #TSEliot #ClareCavanagh #AdamZagajewski #FourQuartets #TryToPraiseTheMutilatedWorld #PoetryInTranslation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57095/try-to-praise-the-mutilated-world-56d23a3f28187

Semiotics, Semiosis, Sign Relations • Comment 4
• https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2021/08/23/semiotics-semiosis-sign-relations-comment-4/

ah, what do mathematicians know of life’s exigency?
proof is our rock and our soul necessity.
we don’t just make abstractions, we are abstractions.
it’s coffee and doughnuts all the way down …
no one disturbs our vain diagrams
till human voices wake us, and we drown.

🙞 also sprach 0*
— 23 august 2021

#Peirce #Logic #Semiotics #Semiosis #Sign Relations
#Mathematicians #Prufrock #TSEliot #Verse #ZeroAster

"And bats with baby faces in the violet light”

#JeremyNoelTod #TSEliot #AIArtGenerator #Bats #Dracula #Poetry

https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/everybodys-bat-walks

A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

~ T. S. Eliot, from “The Waste Land”

#TSEliot #TheWasteLand

T. S. Eliot’s given names were Tea and Spoon.

#TSEliot #poet #playwright

#TheGhostattheFeast #RobertKagan
#bookstodon #history #tsEliot #ezraPound #pastisprologue

"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good." — T. S. Eliot — — — #TSEliot #quote #quotes #system #perfect #perfection #good #goodness #selfcontrol #impossibility #govern

“I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”
#TSEliot

#TSEliot letters to Emily Hale were published on tseliot.com a week ago, and the International T. S. Eliot Society are organising a discussion of first impressions on zoom. Free of charge of any sort, but they are asking to register.

Excellent editing from John Haffenden with most and readable and user-friendly web design, to start with, and let's (try to) meet for more on Friday.

https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/tseliotsociety/

'The fat shaming of birds is a disturbing matter
It isn't just one of your holiday games'*.

Still, my first reaction on seeing this woodpecker was, 'Ah, there you are again!'

Strangely enough, it is the only visiting bird that seems to have a weight problem. Two other woodpeckers are also regulars (though I hadn't seen them in a while either) but they are quite slim.
Well, I can't just stop feeding all the birds because of one greedy woodpecker?

#TSEliot
#Woodpecker

*My apologies to Eliot.

"`I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.`"

#AIArt #poetry #TSEliot

The latest The text-langue Daily! https://paper.li/tanzmax/text-langue?edition_id=64239460-968a-11ed-967d-fa163e65ae25 Thanks to @parisreview@twitter.com @Chepsbadillo@twitter.com #artistoninstagram #tseliot

“The Fisher King, whose portrayal as an angler accounts for his title, is blighted by a wound that will not heal and, because of this injury, the land he rules wilts into a wasteland. Both he and the land will only become well when a knight asks the right question.”

T. S. Eliot and the Holy Grail

The Nobel Laureate drew on a centuries-old legend when he put the Fisher King in The Waste Land.

https://daily.jstor.org/t-s-eliot-and-the-holy-grail/ #TSEliot #TheWasteLand #Poetry #TheFisherKing #ArthurianLegend #Mythology

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

From “The Waste Land” by T. S. Eliot

#TSEliot #TheWasteLand