Dear Marcia,

Well, it matters first because it is a directly biographical line that he put in
the poem despite his claim that poetry was not about the person.  And in
his later years he acknowledged that he was releasing a great deal of stuff
when he wrote TWL.  It matters in a more important way, I think, because
the specific ways he experienced what got labeled "neurasthenia" but
was, in early poems more like hysteria (in the then clinical sense) are also
present in TWL.   I gave a paper on this in IMH last year at the Modern
Studies Association, and I am working on it in TWL now.  So the general
point is that I think there is an aesthetics of hysteria at work in the poem
that is not the same as what Koestenbaum wrote about in the poem as a
collaboration on hysteria with Pound.  It is too long to explain, but my
point is that Eliot represents very recognizable states of psychological
distress on the page.  That does not necessarily mean they are his own,
but all the descriptions of his life I have read suggest he knew from
experience what he was representing.  I do not think it accidental that so
many poems include hysteria, not least "Hysteria."  But epilepsy was
classed as hysteria in psychology at the time, so in "Sweeney Erect" the
worry about hysteria in the house is a literal comment on the epileptic on
the bed.

I think, then, the "Margate sands"  line is part of a representation of the
kind of anxiety and disturbance the poem reiteratively reveals.
Nancy



Date sent:              Sat, 28 Sep 2002 11:42:46 -0400
Send reply to:          "T. S. Eliot Discussion forum." <[log in to unmask]>
From:                   Marcia Karp <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Using biography
To:                     [log in to unmask]

Nancy:

> But it does matter, for
> example, that "on Margate sands/ I can connect nothing with nothing" was
> written when he had just been to Margate and was having a breakdown.

In terms of the poem, how does it matter?

Marcia