I Am Goliath Strong Eliot's poems are the literary equivalent of an old wooden barrel—weathered, creaky and worn. This is not an excuse for laziness or a reason for dismissing Eliot's poems as outmoded. Instead, we should be grateful for the way he challenges conventional ways of reading poetry. In Eliot's time, poets were not expected to look for meaning or to express themselves in a form that they hadn't carefully prepared for. The language was fixed, poetic diction was used sparingly, and poems were expected to follow a form that was strictly defined by the tradition and the rules. But in the 1950s, when a new generation of poets took up Eliot's challenges, they produced poetry that was freer, more playful and far more likely to break convention. It's true that the early "Poems Written in Early Spring" look very traditional, but even in this early work, Eliot is breaking convention. At first it seems strange that he introduces "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" before the poems themselves. Most poets would present their poems in a logical order. But Eliot wrote in poetic forms that were meant to be surprising and disorienting. Both the Preludes and the Rhapsody start out with a rhymed quatrain (a four-line stanza that rhymes in pairs), and then they both break convention by changing verse forms. It is as though they were saying, "Look how strange we can be. Let's see what you think." Eliot is being true to his subject matter, by painting his landscapes in a very unconventional manner, but he's also setting himself up for surprising and memorable images and wordplay. We begin to see that while Eliot's poetry may appear traditional at first glance, he is looking at the world through a very contemporary sensibility. He sets the stage for his poems, and he does it in a very modern manner. I'd like to conclude by giving you some advice. Eliot's advice is that poetry should be written spontaneously and should not try to do too much. What do we need to do this? To answer that question, we need to look at the way poets make their work. They take time and they wait for things to come together. They allow it to be a craft, and not a science. They are patient and their aim is to surprise their reader. The poet who writes about the night, the sky, or the birds is speaking with a voice that transcends time and space. Eliot: "This is the real beginning of poetry, when it is made out of the breath and tissues of the body." His poems are an act of faith. They are the result of love for his subject matter and of his confidence in what his reader will find there. ### FIVE THINGS THAT MAKE ROBERT LOWELL UNIQUE 1 He writes about the things that he sees and touches. His poems are rich with associations and references to the things in his environment. 2 His poems are an investigation into human behavior and human nature. 3 He is not a systematic thinker. He wants to surprise his reader. 4 The best of his poems are not personal at all. "A Cask of Amontillado" is not a love poem about Fortuna, the Roman goddess of the goddess of fortune, "Ode to Psyche" is about the search for beauty and "Musée des Beaux Arts" is not about an old man, but a visual tour of an art museum. His poems are about nature and the weather, about his travels and his feelings about people, about objects and ideas. 5 There's a touch of magical realism in his writing. #### WORKS CITED IN THE NOTES Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1963. Lowell, Robert. Collected Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1945. — (F. W. Dupee). A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass: A Critical Study of the Work of Robert Lowell. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1953. — (ed.). The Complete Poems of Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. — (ed.). Poetry in the Lowell Tradition. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967. — (ed.). Letters of Robert Lowell. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1977. — (ed.). The Dolphin, The History of the Imagination in the Poetry of Robert Lowell. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1965. — The Collected Critical Writings of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1975. — Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1965. ## ABOUT THE AUTHOR Liz Smith is the author of New York for Rent, Rude Awakenings, and Liz Smith's New York. Her columns on Broadway theatre and on the famous people she has met are a regular feature in the New York Post and other national publications. Smith is the Broadway Theatre Critic for New York and was voted Best Critic in the West by BroadwayWorld.com. Her stories have appeared in Ladies Home Journal, McCall's, and other national magazines. ## EDITOR'S NOTE In a note written on a scrap of paper and appended to the manuscript of "Fever 103," Eliot's biographer tells us that the poem began as a letter to a friend that was a "fragmentary sketch" for "an imaginary autobiography or autobiographical novel." Eliot died before the manuscript was finished. We have added some words from Eliot's letters to give the tone and feel of the piece as it was conceived in the 1920s. This is the kind of thing we wanted to include to give the reader an impression of what this poem was originally intended to be. We tried to remain faithful to the original text and to preserve some of the "conceptual density" that exists in the original. As a result of these textual changes, some words and phrases have been changed. "Cobwebs of the Brain" has been changed to "Cobwebs of the Brain," "Sweat beads," "sweat beads" has been changed to "sweat beads," "feathery head" has been changed to "feathered head," "shredded" to "scratched," "windrowed skull" to "windrowed skull," "pale white face" to "pale white forehead," "face" to "forehead." To give a sense of how the poem was originally presented, we have added a number of italics and capitals to make the text resemble the original manuscript. This seems to be the form the poem was intended to have when Eliot first published it. We were also able to add two paragraphs by Eliot that are missing from the manuscript. These sections were published by Cid Corman in the fall of 2008 in The Massachusetts Review. As with Eliot's poem, we tried to keep these editorial changes as unobtrusive as possible, so that the reader would remain aware of the changes but not distracted by them. #### NOTES Eliot had been in an open marriage with an alcoholic for many years, and he had lost a child before he was out of his twenties. He had not told his children that his first wife was a "whore." (All of these details come from Eliot's biographer.) ## The Difference in the Form of the Poem ### Robert Lowell's Version of the First Edition Here it is the month of May in the year nineteen hundred and nineteen. A man was writing to a friend. Or rather, a woman, because at this time Robert Lowell was in correspondence with a woman friend—a woman who had lived with him for a time in England, and who could not marry him because she was married to someone else, and who ended up divorcing that other person and becoming Lowell's wife. It was in these circumstances that she wrote the following letter. Later, in his life as a poet, Lowell would claim that he kept the letter he received from her on his nightstand when he went to sleep. Of course, since he had read and reread it many times before, it might have been more appropriately located on his bedside table, which was in his bedroom. Here is the letter in its entirety: This is the first day of May, nineteen hundred and nineteen. And I feel like the first person I have seen in a long time. The world seems old, but not very real. Yesterday I received a letter from Harriet—an invitation to her wedding. [A]s you might guess, he's a nice person with a good sense of humor and intelligence to spare. We've known each other for nearly six years. He has taught me a great deal and I know it's mutual. He's a real friend, warm and affectionate, intelligent and quick, very much a man of his time, and he is