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TS Eliot’s work is a maze of obscure references and allusions to his history and internal states. Yet he hated the notion of the reader as sleuth and did all he could to cover his tracks. The poetry, he felt, should be taken straight and he made the case that it was unnecessary for the reader, or the writer for that matter, to understand the sentence. The important thing was the sound and the music and the suggestive meanings expressed by the flow of the words. In fact, he equated easily accessible meaning to a bone thrown to a snarling dog, something that distracted the reader long enough to allow the hidden meaning to filter in.
I respect and understand his inclination. I think it is probably shared by many artists, who want their work seen on its own merits. Yet I confess to being an avid reader of Eliot analyses, spiritual, cultural, historical, and biographical. The poetry stands as complete and compelling. But knowing that Eliot visited Burnt Norton with Emily Hale, his first and longest, thwarted love, while not changing the meaning of the poem, adds, for me, a sense of the pain and heartbreak the poet may have been feeling.
I brought this same ambivalence to Graeme J. Taylor’s exploration of the work of painter Willem de Kooning. De Kooning’s paintings should be able to speak for themselves, and yet I was intrigued by this glimpse behind the curtain. The question for me is whether this probing into the artist’s psyche makes the experience of looking at his paintings more enjoyable, more profound.
The Slipping Glimpser is what de Kooning called himself in an interview when he spoke about his love of dreams. He was referring to the
way a dream slips suddenly toward the unconscious. One gets a glimpse and then it’s gone. He also described his art as a “slipping glimpse” and remembered prostitutes in Amsterdam giving just a glimpse of a bare breast, hoping this would encourage customers. De Kooning, then, paid careful attention to the internal sources of his rev