Definitely not waving HUM 3285: British and American Literature Spring 2011 Dr. Perdigao January 26, 2011

Notes on Drowning “Prufrock” “Not Waving but Drowning” “Musée des Beaux Arts” Notion of suffering, human condition Ideas about civilization, between Yeats, Eliot, Auden, extending beyond Ireland, England, America Insiders/outsiders Woodrow Wilson’s idea of a war to end all wars but inevitability of WWII Idea of politics, aesthetics, western civilization as a whole Immediacy of experience, impersonality

Falling eug.html

Stevie Smith ( ) Born in Hull, Yorkshire, lived north of London Father left to join North Sea Patrol, mother died when young, influence of aunt First novel Novel on Yellow Paper (1936); first book of poetry A Good Time Was Had by All (1937) Language play—colloquialism, slang, nonsense, didacticism (2373) Religious skeptic— “Our Bog is Dood”

Oxymorons “... despite the growing critical attention that Stevie ʼ s work is receiving, actually positing the ‘real’ Stevie and locating meanings and values in her writing has become more difficult simply because her stream-of-consciousness prose and her poetic embryos are so widely and so variously interpretable that exegetes clash and contradict. Stevie has been called an essentially public poet employing prosopopoeia to address her audience in several distinct voices including that of a child; an adolescent; a bitter, cynical woman; a theologian; and a philosopher. She has been called a stand-up comic and an ironist, a lyricist, a confessional writer, a closet dissident if that is not a contradiction in terms, a satirist, and a Christian apologist. She has been described as a lover of animals and a hater of children.... She has been called a masker and a revealer. In the ring ratings of twentieth-century poets, she has been judged a lightweight and a heavy. She has been proclaimed an airhead and an egghead. She has been accused of anti-Semitism and general misanthropy. She has been praised as one of the most musical poets of her generation, and she has been castigated for having a tin ear. She was clearly preoccupied with death, but she lived her life with enthusiasm, even glee. She imagined extravagantly. She was a queen of contradictions, and yet she bombards us with binaries. She was... well... Stevie.” (qtd in J. Edward Mallot’s “Not Drowning But Waving: Stevie Smith and the Language of the Lake” 171-2)

Voicing “The widely anthologized poem contains a number of elements familiar in Smith ʼ s other verse. The question of voice, silence, and the possibility of speech by the dead is enhanced by Smith ʼ s adoption of three separate personae: the drowned man trying — and still failing — to articulate his unhappiness, the singular writer/eyewitness who can hear the deceased ʼ s cry, and the group of acquaintances who still, to some extent, mistake a death scene for a meaningless wave.” (qtd in J. Edward Mallot’s “Not Drowning But Waving: Stevie Smith and the Language of the Lake” 173)

W. H. Auden ( ) Born in York, England; educated at Christ Church, Oxford Moved to U.S. in 1939, became an American citizen in 1946 “from T. S. Eliot he took a conversational and ironic tone, an acute inspection of cultural decay” (2421) Great Depression, Waste Land, draws on Freud and Marx; England as “nation of neurotic invalids, now as the victim of an antiquated economic system” (2421) Rejection of Yeats’ notion of poetry as transcendent, redemptive, the prophetic role of poetry