T.S. Eliot & Salvador Espriu

Converging Poetic Imaginations

Dídac Llorens Cubedo

• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9788491341444
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Este libro estudia detalladamente las obras de dos poetas modernos prototípicos: T. S. Eliot y Salvador Espriu. Su imaginario es comparable, puesto que se proyectaba desde su experiencia y cosmovisión personal así como desde su profundo conocimiento de la tradición literaria. Ambos revelan los paralelismos entre los contextos históricos y culturales en los que se crearon sus poemas y ejemplifican su propósito como poetas a la hora de preservar la tradición formada por sus predecesores y a la hora de suscribirse de un modo significativo a ella. El estudio de Dídac Llorens Cubedo lleva al lector a través de un viaje desde el árido desierto o la sórdida ciudad moderna hasta la paz imprecisa de un jardín ideal, desde las restricciones de lo secular hasta el todo sin trabas e intemporal imaginado por Eliot y Espriu, dos gigantes de la poesía.

Chapter 1

Devastation and the Desert

There had never been more poverty in the country, neither had heathen men behaved worse than these did [...] Wherever one sowed, the earth would yield no corn, because the land had gone waste with the things they did, and people said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep.

The Peterborough Chronicle, 1137

We will begin at the imaginative setting most commonly identified with the poetic works of Salvador Espriu and T. S. Eliot. This cluster of images is characterised by devastation, its blueprint being the Biblical desert or wilderness. In Ecclesiastes, the Preacher predicts a hopeless future; his vision exemplifies what Northrop Frye calls ‘the demonic’ or ‘tragic,’ and both our poets identify aspects of their present reality in it.

Other sources that cannot be ignored, especially in considering Eliot’s The Waste Land, are the works of James Frazer and Jessie Weston. Espriu did not draw directly on these, but connections can be made thanks to the Catalan poet’s interest in ancient myth and the comprehensive nature of his poetic imagination, which operates in a similar way to Eliot’s. The analysis of fertility rites evidences the connections between the natural processes, the narratives of the lives of divinities and those of their worshippers. Weston further shows how all these imaginative patterns become ingrained in medieval literature; the stylised portrayal of spring—to which several of the poems examined in this chapter hark back, if only to sway from it—is a good example.

This outline of the poets’ imaginative background would be complete with a reference to the historical context in which their poems were produced. It is undeniable that the two World Wars determined the concerns of a significant part of twentieth century European literature; the same is true about Spain and its Civil War. Both Salvador Espriu and T. S. Eliot had a first-hand experience of war, but what share did the wars that they lived have in shaping what we could call the imagery of devastation and hopelessness?

WAR AND THE POETS

The contemporary reception of Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), its becoming an emblem of post-war desolation and its author’s rejection of far-reaching interpretations of the poem have been the object of scholarly discussion. Leaving the various readings of the poem and the poet’s intentions in writing it aside, it is clear that The Waste Land powerfully reflects a critical moment, be it individual, social, historical—one or all of these.

Alan Marshall refuses to consider Eliot’s WL the denunciation of a collective moral crisis. If we accept that the poem’s central theme is the death of a common set of values, it would be contradictory to assert that it aspired to capture the feelings of a unified community: ‘The writers of the twenties and thirties threatened to turn a poem which dealt, in an inevitably private way, with the disappearance of those common values which make a public language possible, into the very thing which Eliot felt no longer existed: a public language, common values’ (author’s emphasis).’¹

World War I (1914-1918) could be thought of as the concomitant or amplification of the crisis that Eliot was, if not denouncing in its social extent, at least suffering at an individual level. According to Marshall, the immediate post-war, in a nation overtaken by social division, turned out to be the optimal atmosphere for an enthusiastic reception of WL: ‘The country was more divided than it knew. And when The Waste Land appeared in 1922, among the young and educated at least it struck a chord’ (Marshall, p. 95).

The consequences of the war were not only a geographical and political reorganisation of the world, but also a generalised feeling of frustration that many readers detected in The Waste Land. The imagery of some sections can be readily related to the horror of World War I, and for later readers, it must have resonated with the developments of World War II (1939-1945), such as the introduction of air raids and the diasporas of refugees:

What is that sound high in the air

Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

(ll. 367-370)

These lines have been extracted from part 5 of WL, ‘What The Thunder Said.’ In his notes, Eliot explains that ‘the present decay of eastern Europe’ is one of the themes of this section and connects the lines just quoted to Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, written two years after the end of World War I. In a passage of this work, quoted by Eliot, Eastern Europe is compared to a drunkard walking along the edge of a precipice: ‘fährt betrunken im heiligen Wahn am Abgrund entlang und singt dazu’ (Eliot, Collected Poems, pp. 74-75; ‘drives drunkenly in spiritual frenzy along the edge of the abyss, sings drunkenly’).² Hesse’s imagery bears significant resemblance to that used by David Lloyd George, Prime Minister in wartime, to describe the scenario that led to the conflict. Niall Ferguson opens 1914: Why the World Went to War with Lloyd George’s famous line from his War Memoirs: ‘The nations slithered over the brim into the boiling cauldron of war.’³

There is also a striking imaginative coincidence with one of Salvador Espriu’s favourite allegories of the future awaiting modern men and women. In his poetry, a group of blind men, lead by someone as blind as them, is intended to represent the whole of human kind (Castellet, Iniciació, p. 110). In poem XLI of La pell de brau (1960), the blind walk on as hypnotised, like the Londoners portrayed by Eliot in WL and inspired by Dante’s neutrals in hell. Row after row, the blind fall over into the abyss of cruelty:

Els cecs avançaven, pel més orb guiats,

dret a les cingleres de la crueltat.

Com deturaríem passos vacil·lants,

quan els pensa lliures de caure en el mal

la blancor parada d’aquest fix esguard?

Mentre rodolaven esgarips d’esglai,

una nova fila camina palpant

l’eterna tenebra que l’engolirà.⁴

Let us return to ‘What the Thunder Said,’ partly inspired by the Biblical journey to Emmaus. In Luke’s gospel (also in Mark 16. 12-13), two of his disciples do not acknowledge the resurrected Jesus as he joins them on their way to Emmaus (Luke 23: 13-16). The unnoticed Jesus can be associated with the mysterious figure, ‘wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded’ (WTS, l. 364), that two of the voices in Eliot’s poem see intermittently, as they walk ‘up the white road’ (WTS, l. 363). The two disciples in the Emmaus narration only realise who the man is when he repeats the ritual of the Last Supper. Later, Jesus appears to the Apostles, but initially they doubt whether the vision is real (Luke 24: 36-37).

The journey to Emmaus raises the question of the frailty of faith. The disciples did not believe one another’s news of having seen their Master alive, they were too confused to recognise him and believed his presence a hallucination. All this could be considered the objective correlative showing that faith weakens in adverse circumstances—in this case, the disciples’ faith in the prophets’ and Christ’s own predictions of his death and resurrection. The feelings of the disciples are paralleled to those of the disoriented post-war European citizens. Surrounded by chaos, they are too blind to detect any possibilities for redemption; they lack any strong beliefs to hold on to.

In WL, we learn through different voices about the effects of war at a domestic level as well. The famous pub scene in ‘The Fire Sermon’ shows how a war or post-war environment can alter people’s relationships, how husband and wife can estrange each other, sharing only everyday squalor and perfunctory sex:

When Lil’s husband got demobbed, I said—

I didn’t mince up my words, I said to her myself,

HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

Now Albert’s coming back, make yourself a bit smart.

He’ll want to know what you done with that money he gave you

To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there.

You have them all out, Lil, and get a nice set,

He said, I swear, I can’t bear to look at you.

And no more can’t I, I said, and think of poor Albert,

He’s been in the army four years, he wants a good time,

And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.

Oh is there, she said. Something o’that, I said.

Then I’ll know who to thank, she said, and gave me a straight look. (ll. 139-151)

In some poems in Espriu’s Les cançons d’Ariadna (first published in 1949), the war is to blame for the destruction of love, but, unlike the story of Lil and Albert, Espriu’s love stories in this book are ironically touched by conventional romanticism. The poem ‘Veient Rosie a la finestra,’ subtitled ‘Dos anys i un dia abans de l’Era Atòmica. Cançó d’un soldat negre’ is possibly the only poem by Espriu set in the United States, during War World II. A troop of black soldiers is parading in Harlem, before going to war in Japan. There is no patriotic fervour in these soldiers; they are in fear instead:

Soldats a peu, en moto, en autocar,

van a la guerra sense cap passió,

units tan sols per un mateix dolor.

These lines are from the first stanza, mostly written in the third person. In the other two stanzas, we hear the voice of a soldier, lamenting the fact that he has to leave his girlfriend Rosie, aware that he might not see her again:

Oh noia meva, somni, quina por

de perdre’t, ara que ja t’he trobat!

[...]

Em sento trist i miro el meu destí,

advers i amarg, contrari a la il·lusió.

És ben tancat tot l’esdevenidor.

Però si caic, al llarg d’aquest camí,

pensaré en Rosie, fins l’últim dia, Rosie!

In the poem following ‘Veient Rosie,’ ‘La princesa del Iang-Tsé,’ the Chinese princess, infatuated with a warrior, waits for him to come back from the front, but he never returns and she dies of sadness.

The two poems discussed, unusual because of their settings, attest to the centrality of the subject-matter of war in Espriu’s work—specifically, war as the cause of truncated love. In another poem from CA, ‘Rars ecos pels tombants,’ the lively flow of joyful recollections (the child’s relationship with an aunt Maria, the stories she told him, his fantasies) is suddenly blocked by the ghost of war. In the summer, the flight of swifts (falcies), with their scythe-shaped wings can be regarded an omen of death:

Però s’enllordava

el net cel d’estiu,

falcies de l’odi

movien brogit:

lleu focs cremarien

el nostre país.

It would hardly be an exaggeration to refer to Espriu’s poetic work as an antiwar manifesto. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) changed his life, abruptly putting an end to his happy childhood and adolescence, shattering his youthful projects of personal and intellectual fulfilment. He had set his heart on finishing his degree in history as an egyptologist. In fact, he had applied for a grant to do so in France but, as he explains in a television interview, the outbreak of war prevented him from carrying out his plans.⁵ The war frustated Espriu’s career as a student, which he had pursued brilliantly and enjoyed to the utmost up to that point: ‘He did not return to the university until after Franco’s death, when he was awarded an honorary degree. He earned his living by working in a notary public’s office. He flatly refused to engage in any public activity or to write in Spanish, the only language permitted at the time […] He had decided that his world had been destroyed by the war which had just begun. He deliberately sought out the kingdom of death, the negation of the life which lay before him.’⁶

If we take these biographical circumstances into account, adding to them that the war ended with a fascist victory and that forty years of political repression ensued, the elegiac tone of Espriu’s poetry is explained and justified. Franco’s victory aggravated the political and cu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Devastation and the Desert
• Chapter 2: A Glimpse of the Garden
• Chapter 3: Cities and Souls
• Chapter 4: Time and Beyond
• Conclusion
• Works Cited and Consulted
• Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans