LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

POETRY

 The same poetry of disgust, of withdrawn pleasure in life (which culminates in The Waste Land) is illustrated by the poem in French LA LUNE DE MIEL. Two young people spend their honeymoon travelling about Europe in summer. They are described at night, while being bitten by ‘two hundred’ bugs, scratching themselves furiously, with swollen legs and a smell about them that strongly reminds of a bitch. They are surrounded by the art of France and Italy, by cathedrals and Byzantine forms, but Eliot speaks mostly of their ‘misery’. They look for cheap restaurants, their main care is not to spend too much money. Thus, presenting love stories from which love is absent, Eliot builds a story, but withdraws the meaning. This narrative with suppressed meaning is the first stage of a process which, before long, will lead to the suppression of the narrative itself. After The Waste Land, the narrative becomes more abstract, rather symbolical (in Ash-Wednesday), and is left out altogether in the Four Quartets.