On Poetry

On Ash Wednesday, Bradley J. Birzer wrote about ‘T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday’. He begins the essay by recounting a story:

Stephen Spender, one of Eliot’s friends, remembers a student asking Eliot, after a group of Roman Catholics had studied the poem with Father Martin D’Arcy, “please, sir, what do you mean by the line; ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree’”? To which Eliot somewhat frustratingly replied, “I mean, ‘Lady, three white leopard sat under a juniper tree.’”

My first experience with Eliot was the exact opposite. When I read ‘The Waste Land’ for the first time as a teenager it was a critical edition with a formattable apparatus. Something like what is offered on the website ‘Exploring The Waste Land’. When I asked a question like, “What did Eliot mean by that line?”, the editor answered in the footnotes. Exhaustively.

I loved every minute of it. As I look back, I wonder if that was the beginning of my trouble with poetry.

I never really caught the bug.

I continue to enjoy Eliot, a smattering of imagists (H.D. and William Carlos Williams), an odd e.e. cummings bit, and am currently trying to wade into Rabindranath Tagore. Ezra Pound, Eliot’s greatest editor, looms large over each of these poets and I’ve spent time reading him with appreciation if not comprehension.

Everything else, outside the great epic poetry of East and West, fails to hold my interest. I do not know why.

I know I’m missing out.