The Waste Land (1922)

Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
What we call the twentieth century ended in 1915. Those artists who survived the collapse of civilization at that point completed the work they had planned before then, when they looked forward to a century of completely different character. Joyce wrote his Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, both implicit in the nineteenth-century idea of literature. Proust, aware that tanks were crawling like monsters out of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne over the poplar-lined road to Illiers, completed his account of the world which the war obliterated as the brimstone Sodom.

Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Books Book 10) (pp. 244-245). (Function). Kindle Edition.
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Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I'm interested in whether or not I actually agree with Eliot (and Pound), and if I'm even educated enough to agree or disagree with him.

Never having been given a classical education, can I know what I'm missing? Does that matter? Is it enough to lament that the knowledge and culture that survived from the ancient past (either due to its quality or some historical accident) has passed out of the ken of 99.9% of people, even of 'educated' people?

That knowledge was always the preserve of a tiny educated elite, anyway. Did it instil in them some sort of moral strength that the plebes and the philistines lack? Was BoJo just a really bad classicist?
 
Corpsey

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
When I (partly) read the Odyssey and the Iliad I struggled to understand exactly what made generations of men (who I admire) see them as the absolute acme of culture. Is it because I can't read them in Greek? Joyce couldn't read them in Greek. Have I been immunised to a cult of Greek worship? Or has my brain been fried by one too many episodes of Saved by the Bell?
 
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