Beware of people in turtlenecks, as they like to talk at length about narrow subjects.
My advice to you, at this point, is to shift away from Eliot, Pound, and The Wasteland as quickly as you can. While everyone enjoys a good yarn about poetry, broaching the topic leaves you open to two equally serious threats 1) everyone gets quite depressed thinking about how sad the poem is or 2) one of your co-conversationalists stands a decent chance of being an expert on it, or some related piece, and will take this as an excuse to discourse for the next hour. Either situation would be quite the buzzkill.
So how to pivot to something more salubrious for the general path of your conversational endeavors? Well, in order that you not create too distracting a schism between the conversation that was and that upon which you are about to embark, why don’t we stick within the realm of poetry, but shift forward a few years to the work of one Robert Penn Warren. Warren’s legacy is a bit different that of Eliot.
To start with, Warren was the US Poet Laureate from 1944-1945. Then, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958. He waited a couple of years and then won it again in 1979. If that was all there was to say about the man, it would be quite a lot – and I didn’t even mention the fact that he was a Rhodes Scholar and a Guggenheim Fellow. For all of his accomplishments in the world of poetry, Warren isn’t regularly remembered primarily as a poet. Rather than seeing that as a knock against his work (which some critics might say does not hold up in against the lens of history), it is likely a function of the unbelievable success of his masterpiece, a novel called All the King’s Men.
Different story about the King's men.
But how to bridge from one to the next? Let’s have a go: “TS Eliot may be one of my favorite poets, but I’ve got to give some serious respect to Robert Penn Warren. He’s the only person to ever win Pulitzer Prizes for both poetry and fiction. The crazy thing is, almost no one I know has even read his poetry. Maybe that means it doesn’t stand up against time, or just that All the King’s Men was so important as to eventually overshadow everything else he did. Still, that’s a strange legacy.”
That should about do it for now. Still talking literature, but a bit less of a downer.
