Reading on in the passage linked to below, it's arresting how
critics miss even the most fundamental action in Eliot's poems,
including in his earliest. Eliot's life may have been imperfect
(however ridiculous it may be for any of us to stand in that kind of
judgement on any other one of us), but the imperfections don't abate
when Gordon remarks of "Conversation Galante" that the young woman
in it "blocks the truth." It wouldn't be so egregious a critical
error were it not that the at the center of the poem's action it is
the young woman who at each turn prevents the young man from
ensnaring the truth for his own low purposes, allowing it, as it
were, to continue to roam free. The young woman does not block
knowledge; she foils the young man's attempts to misuse knowledge
and seduce her. It is, to quote one of Eliot's favorites,
elementary.
With so little facility for even a basic understanding of Eliot's
poetic way, it's not surprising that she and critics like her miss
and misrepresent so much in Eliot's life and art.
Ken A
On 11/17/2012 10:32 AM, Chokh Raj
wrote:
Just one instance of the alacrity,
the sensitivity and the pace with which Eliot's sensibility
responded to Laforgue's influence. Here's Lyndall Gordon's
insightful account:
p. 42 "At
once, on discovering Symons, Eliot ordered three volumes of
Laforgue from France. The Oeuvres completes must have arrived in the
spring of 1909, certainly in time for Eliot to read them over
the summer, and late in the autumn he began to pour out new
poems..."
http://books.google.com/books?id=Ndb_HDuycu0C&pg=PA42&lpg=PA42&dq#v=onepage&q&f=false