Does T. S. Eliot Still Matter?: A Liberties Seminar with Morten Høi Jensen
In this eight session course Morten Høi Jensen will teach T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism.
Sessions will be held on Sundays from 2:00 – 4:00 PM EST on Zoom. The first session will be Sunday, September 13.
The course is open to Liberties subscribers only. For those who are interested and are not subscribers, the fee for the entire seminar is $50 (which will come with a subscription) and can be purchased here.
For much of the previous century, T. S. Eliot was the supreme poet-critic of the Anglophone world, celebrated not only for his modernist masterpiece The Waste Land (1922) but also for the critical essays that helped lay the foundation for the New Criticism movement of the 1940s. Cynthia Ozick called this “the Age of Eliot.” Today, sixty years after Eliot’s death, it is worth considering his sanctified status as both a poet and critic anew. In close readings of some of Eliot’s best-known work, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Portrait of a Lady” to The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men,” we will rediscover its radical formal assumptions and the way it captured for modern poetry new areas of human experience. In readings of Eliot’s essays, including but not limited to “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Hamlet and His Problems,” and “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” we will revisit the “literary period that resembled an eternity” — Ozick again — when Eliot was the absolute ruler of modern criticism. Throughout the course, we will also consider the controversies that have since stuck to Eliot’s reputation, including charges of antisemitism and reactionary conservatism.
Each session will last two hours; weekly readings and engagement in discussion of the texts will be expected of participants. The course will take place on the following dates: September 13, September 20, September 27, October 4, October 11, October 18, October 25, and November 8.
The texts are available for purchase in print on Liberties' Bookshop store here. Any edition of Eliot's Collected Poems will suffice.