The birthday today of T.S.Eliot.
See Ginsberg on T.S. Eliot – here
What an influence he once wielded and how drastically it’s been eroded – has been eroded for some time now. Roger Kimball writing, as far back as 1999, in the conservative journal, The New Criterion, was able to pronounce:
“Mistah Eliot—he dead. This is the message that the natives are sending back about T. S. Eliot. From our vantage point at the end of the millennium… the extraordinary literary and critical authority that Eliot once commanded is almost incomprehensible.. Eliot no longer occupies the exalted place he once did… One gets the impression that, especially for younger observers, the entire world that Eliot’s sometime authority animated is irrecoverably strange and distant. It is difficult to say what is more remarkable: the potency of Eliot’s influence at its peak or the suddenness of its eclipse”.
Indeed, Eliot once meant a great deal – the young Eliot as a modernist hero and the later Eliot as a bete-noire reactionary – “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic (sic) in religion”, as he famously declared.
In the past century, in Allen’s century, Eliot mattered
Allen, writing to Jack Kerouac, circa late May 1956
“I sent copies of Howl to T.S.Eliot, (Ezra) Pound, (William) Faulkner, (Mark) Van Doren, Meyer Schapiro, (Richard) Eberhart, (Lionel) Trilling, till they were exhausted (the copies). I wonder what T.S.Eliot will do. I wrote them each about you too. Funny letters to each. Imagine to T.S.Eliot”
Ryan Weideman‘s taxi-cab picture of Allen. We had previously featured it here
The photographer himself presents a more detailed account of it
From the series in The Guardian – “My Best Shot“:
“I drove a cab in New York for three decades. Riding around, I would meet poets, drag queens and other people who were inspiring. It made me feel good. I started taking their portraits, sometimes with me in the picture. I had several cameras and would often have my strobe hooked on to my visor with a rubber band.
This particular evening, in 1990, I had been informed by a friend that there was a book event going on so I went to take a look. It was jam-packed inside. I spotted Allen Ginsberg, so I went over and talked to him a little. He was pretty intense, kind of stressed, so I had to lay back a little but I asked him if he could write an introduction to my book In My Taxi. But he had too much going on.
I stopped at the Bowery to let him out and he was looking at the meter where I have this tape coming out of it, for receipts. He said: “Hand me that tape.” So I tore it off and handed it to him. He’s looking down. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I’m not gonna rush him. A little more time with Allen. Turns out he was writing this poem about me, which I still have.
When I had Ginsberg in my cab, I photographed him alone too, but the idea was mainly for me to be there as well. I wanted to really romance that picture, put my feelings there. I called it Allen Ginsberg, offering me up a fortune cookie.
I went out, got in my cab and started driving off, but then I thought: “Hey, I think I’ll cruise back.” People were coming out of the building and I spotted Allen. I guess he recognised me. I was a pain in the ass to him, probably. Anyway he came over and got into my cab – a great, real, joyful moment.”
“A Poet-Buffoon”? – I don’t think so – “A poet-buffoon, that is, on the American scale. a figure of swashbuckling vulnerability, ridiculous and unstoppable, friend to the dispossessed, personal frequenter of the edge of things, orating and chanting and moaning in ecstasy and getting himself arrested” – Okay
James Parker looks in the archives of The Atlantic at some of the old articles on Allen
& David Meltzer on Allen Ginsberg – Simon Warner‘s ever-invaluable Rock and The Beat Generation revisits an old essay and an old appraisal of our poet – see here