Abstract:
It seems extremely curious, and utterly provocative that two of the most prominent and wildly acknowledged poets of the twentieth century, from very different cultures and social backgrounds, should have quite enticingly comparable responses to existential questions based on their personal and cultural histories. Both the famous Anglo-American poet and critic T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) and the prominent Palestinian poet and activist Mahmoud Darwish (1964-2008), in their different languages, cultural backgrounds and life circumstances, offer a type of poetics that seems almost completely absorbed and utterly fascinated by historical questions regarding their cultural past and intellectual views of it.
These questions are often recast in poetic forms as unique understandings of universal causes: the Palestinian cause in Darwish's poetics, and the existential cause in Eliot's. They seem to form the very conscious bases of these poets' symbolic universalizing of certain cultural values such as justice, and the value of life, through their aesthetic mastery over language, or so they seem to imply. It is those questions that this paper attempts to understand and re-define within the poetic formulations of each of these poet's particular aesthetics. In other words, this paper attempts to explore the aesthetic influence of history in Eliot's Wasteland (1922) and Darwish's Dice Player (2008) and The Poster (1975) in order to explore the extent to which the echoes of history, poetically understood in each of their aesthetics, actually re-vibrate through their distinctive universalizations of values of freedom and justice as implied by their work. As such, this paper will re-investigate the extent to which their differing poetic techniques enhance our understanding of each poet's cultural universality, rather than conventional particularity, enlarging, the hope is, our sense of each of those master poets' poetic-ness.