"My Argument With T.S. Eliot"

Excerpt from A New World: Essays

Sometimes our only way to respond to certain material is to start talking back to it. That's the basis of my argument with T.S. Eliot. I have found myself so offended by certain elements in Eliot's poetry and criticism that my own work, at times, has taken on the form of a rebuttal. Certainly my long poem sequence, Report on the Second Half of the Twentieth Century, is being written as something of a refutation of The Waste Land. This is somewhat presumptuous I know, but if one is going to Write then why not go for the whole enchilada? As someone who was born into the underclasses of North American society, it's hard for me to feel comfortable with a writer whose favorite Shakespearean tragedy is Coriolanus. Eliot's disdain for "the mob" is everywhere apparent, and his aristocratic sensibility offends my own liberal cosmology. One truly has to wonder about a society that would accept an Eliot as its artistic spokesman, even if for only a quarter of a century or so. I guess I should explain that when I was an impressionable college undergraduate, Eliot was "it" when it came to English language poetry. The greatness of his poetry was asserted within the academy and the philo- sophical underpinnings of his work were never called into question. All of my professors parrotted Eliot's view that the work of art was impersonal, autonomous, and totally set apart from the life of the poet. The intelligentsias were doing a brisk trade in poetic masks. Perhaps that in some way explains the intensely personal nature of my own work. As a young writer, I felt that I wanted to put the living breathing human being back into poetry. The human touch isn’t totally missing form Eliot’s work; it’s just that he’s constantly claiming that his emotions and ideas are cultural truths. Perhaps these days we’re finally finished with the notion that you can separate the artist from the art- work, or that personal beliefs and political views don’t have any impact upon aesthetics.    

Bangor, Maine 

Born in New York, Ken Norris now teaches at the University of Maine and summers in Montreal, where he remains active in the literary community. He has published several critically acclaimed books of poetry, including Vegetables (1975), The Perfect Accident (1978), To Sleep, To Love (1982), Whirlwinds (1983) and The Better Part of Heaven (1984). His critical work, The Little Magazine in Canada, appeared in 1984. To date, Norris is the author of over twenty-three volumes of poetry and prose, as well as the editor of over five anthologies, including Cross Cut (with Peter van Toorn, Véhicule Press), and Canadian Poetry Now: 20 Poets of the ‘80’s (Anansi).  In 1993, The Muses’ Company released Full Sun, featuring Norris’s selected poems and containing an introduction by poet Bruce Whiteman.

Links

Talonbooks Profile

The Way Life Should Be (Reviews)

Report on the Second Half of the 20th Century: Books 16-22 (Reviews)

Excerpt from Norris' essay on the Véhicule Poets