The Victorian night is also making a comeback as there will be a Victorian theme to Nuneaton's 2019 Christmas light switch on event which takes place near George
Eliot's 200th birthday.
Members of the George
Eliot Fellowship have a series of special events planned to mark this occasion and this included planting a a bicentenary anniversary tree in the George
Eliot Memorial gardens later in the year.
And as a voice--not our own--strangely invades our mind, reading poetry thus emerges as an encounter with a mysterious other: this is the force of the word "echo," suggesting words that are heard and recognized again and again across
Eliot's oeuvre, but whose original source remains "not known." There is, in this reading, a distinction to be made in Four Quartets between recognition and understanding: guardedly registered in
Eliot's slippage from "heard" to "half-heard," it seems, is an admission that the moment in the orchard cannot fully be fully grasped by his audience, that their meanings extend beyond the recognizable words on the page.
The eye retains the images, The sluggish brain will not react Nor distils The dull precipitates of fact The emphatic mud of physical sense The claims of the visual seemed, here as elsewhere in
Eliot's early poetry, to provoke discomfort and mental blockage.
The very first line of the poem appals the reader: "April is the cruellest month" (
Eliot 1).
Away from his audience in a Harvard lecture theatre,
Eliot took a slightly different stance on "obscurity." Writing to a new friend, the Reverend Geoffrey Curtis, he observed:
Part two is dedicated to the significance of
Eliot's works in Southern Europe.
Dificil de conciliar com a tonalidade laconica das avaliacoes que alegam trabalhar a partir dos ensaios de
Eliot, entretanto, sao as formulacoes mais abertas e menos taxativas do poeta, presentes, entre outros, no proprio "Tradicao e talento individual": o escritor deve estar atento "para o obvio fato de que em arte nunca se aperfeicoa, mas de que o material da arte jamais e inteiramente o mesmo"; deve estar conscio "de que essa mudanca e um desenvolvimento que nada abandona en route, que nao aposenta nem Shakespeare nem Homero, nem os desenhos rupestres do artista magdaleniano" (
ELIOT, 1989: 41); ou ainda, "o objetivo do poeta nao e descobrir novas emocoes, mas utilizar as corriqueiras" (
ELIOT, 1989: 47).
Despite the crucial role that
Eliot's poetic work played in the later part of her writing career, few who read
Eliot today know of it.
Although Crawford has tracked down
Eliots sources, he presents his findings in a conversational way, as if the reader were in his seminar, and Crawford is sharing his research with colleagues, suggesting that Prufrock's surname may have been inspired by the Prufrock Furniture Company in St.
Eliot has previously been available in print, or (as in the present case) in edited digital form.