[MUSIC] T.S. Eliot also wrote about workers and the poor, but for very different reasons and to very different effects than William Carlos Williams. Beginning in early 1910, still in his early twenties, T.S. Eliot devoted a notebook to recording what he ambitiously called The Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot, afterward changing the title to Inventions of the March Hare. In 1917, Eliot would draw on these poems to compile Proofrock and other observations, his first published volume of verse. Intriguingly, among the first poems Eliot collected in that notebook, and, based on Eliot's dating, the first poems he composed and chose to preserve Are a series of poems set in the slums of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, that he wrote between late 1909 and 1911. As these and other poems from this period suggest, his efforts as a serious poet appear to coincide with his discovery of the urban poor. That phrase, The Slums of Cambridge, may sound off to contemporary ears, but Cambridge, Massachusetts circa 1909 Different notably from the Cambridge of today. Then as now, Harvard University dominated the part of the city next to the Charles River. But the remainder of Cambridge and its adjacent neighborhoods like Dorchester and Roxbury were considerably less leafy. These neighborhoods attracted factories and workers. Many of them immigrants who settled in and around Cambridge, close to the places where they worked. Inevitably, overcrowding and slums came with them. As an undergraduate at Harvard University from 1906 to 1909, Eliot trolled the immigrant and working class neighborhoods that ringed Cambridge proper, and he turned these slumming expeditions into poems. Although many of these slum poems would remain buried in Eliot's notebook for decades, Preludes, written in the period between October 1910 and November 1911, would later appear in Prufrock and Other Observations, and countless anthologies since. In the first of this four part poem Eliot describes what happens when you walk through the eerily empty streets of the slum. Notice how it contrasts singular and regular action. Things that happened once and things that happened or are happening often, multiply. >> Preludes, by T.S. Eliot. One, the winter evening settles down with smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt out ends of smoky days, and now a gusty shower wraps the grimy scraps of withered leaves about your feet, and newspapers from vacant lots. The showers beat on broken blinds and chimney pots, and at the corner of the street. A lonely cab horse steams and stamps. And then the lighting of the lamps. >> The opening line of the poem, for example describes a single winter evening settling down. Yet it settles down with the smell of multiple people, cooking multiple steaks in multiple passage ways. Similarly, the next line names a specific time of day, six o' clock, yet it, that time, represents the burnt out ends of all smoky days. It is not a time but the usual time. The following line, beginning and now, seems to describe an isolated incident of a gusty shower wrapping leaves and newspapers around your feet. Yet by the following line this same shower is now plural, showers, which beat habitually on multiple broken blinds and chimney pots. Similarly, the penultimate image, a lonely cab horse steams and stamps, seems to be singular, breaking the habitual action of showers that repeatedly beat. Yet the and then language of the final image makes the cab horse in every previous incident in the poem seem like one in a series of repeated, cheerlessly predictable events, so much so that it goes far towards robbing what should be a redemptive image, the lighting of the lamps, of its redemption. If the lamps must be lighted every night, they could not have done much and will not do much to dispel the darkness. In this first poem, Elliot depicts the slum as a static, repeating space. Where even incidences that seem to promise hope or development are instead revealed to be part of a recurring pattern. Sums do not change, they only repeat. The second section of preludes depicts a similar relationship between incident, things happening once and repetition, things happening habitually, Eliot writes. >> The morning comes to consciousness, of faint stale smells of beer. From the sawdust trampled street with all its muddy feet that press To early coffee stands. With the other masquerades that time resumes. One thinks of all the hands that are raising dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms. >> What starts out singular, the morning coming to consciousness quickly turns multiple. Or, rather, part of what the morning, and I would add the whole poem, comes to consciousness of is multiplicity. The smells of beer, notice the plural. And the many muddy feet pressing to many early coffee stands. Whereas the first section of preludes describes what habitually happens in the evening, the second section describes what habitually happens in the morning. Furthermore, just as at the outset of the poem, the morning comes to consciousness of multiplicity and the final image of this poem one thinks as well of multiplicity, of all the hands that are raising dingy shades in a thousand furnished rooms. And while that powerful image suggests the loneliness and enemy of those who live in a thousand furnished rooms much as the lonely cad horse concludes the previous section of the poem. That sense of loneliness seems to be overwhelmed by the aura of monotony. The habitual actions of an undifferentiated mass of slum dwellers, anonymous and interchangeable as their furniture. Resuming another anonymous and interchangeable day. Why would Eliot do this you might ask? Why would he depict the slum as a place of monotony of habit? I believe Elliot is trying to get himself and his readers to look at the slum and those who live there in a new way. Not with pity or sympathy, but with a cooler more objective attitude. In this view, poverty was not a problem to be solved but a poem to be written. You can see this impatience with sympathy and pity in the third and fourth poems of the prelude sequence, where Eliot describes the soul of a single discreet individual, who is capable of thoughts and regrets, and thus makes her different from the dismembered One dimensional slum dwellers of the first two poems. In the conclusion of the fourth poem, the speaker even confesses that he is moved by the notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing. Yet, the poem ends on this note. >> Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh. The worlds revolve like ancient women, gathering fuel in vacant lots. >> From a close up view of some infinitely gentile, infinitely suffering thing the poem pulls back to reveal worlds in motion, suffering multiplied. But also, as a result, made routine inevitable, and therefore unremarkable except perhaps when it is laughable. The laughter may seemed forced, but that may also be the point. The poem is trying a little desperately to turn a tragedy like poverty into a comedy. And while the equation that allows it to do so only emerges at the conclusion of the poem, that operation has operated throughout. Individual things and individuals as in the poem inspire pea. Or anything that repeats or anything that is repeated or both, does not. Such things in they're mere things in their very multiplicity and elasticity actively repulse sympathy. Think about it. One person dying in a car wreck is a tragedy, but the 100 or so people who die in a car wreck in the United States every day is a fact of life. Why would Eliot want to repulse sympathy? I suspect because he does not want sympathy to be the keynote of this poetry. Not because he is a hard-hearted person, but because sympathy's what you would expect when you read a poem about the poor and their neighborhoods. And Eliot wants to upset those expectations. He wants to strike a new different tone. Hence, I think the mood of sordidness and enemy in the poem. Which perhaps strikes him as more modern and more interesting, than conventional sympathy [MUSIC]
