A dictionary of Marshall McLuhan’s quotations
Compiled by William Kuhns
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“Poetry can communicate before it is understood.”
T.S. Eliot
Quoted in “Symposium” (1973), p 1
Year: 1973
T. S Eliot from Prufrock on pursues the same comic vision of man as a servo-mechanism harnessed to his own image.
"The Poetry of Conscience", in Renascence; Summer 1962, p 216
Year: 1962
If thirty years ago Mr. T. S. Eliot could modestly suggest that the internal combustion engine had modified the general ear for speech and rhythm, it is now obvious that the entire learning process has been changed by allied development.
“The Later Innis" Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 60, No 3, Autumn (1953), p 388, reprinted in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 42
Year: 1953
These characteristics do not develop in the cultural milieu of electric sound and information, for the acoustic world, like the "auditory imagination" defined by T. S. Eliot, is not private or civilized but tribal and collective.
“The Future of the Book” (1972), in Understanding Me, 2003, pp 178-179
Year: 1972
Poetry and Song are major means by which speech is purified and strengthened, and poetry and music are extensions of speech, so it is not by chance that most of the English poetry and song of the twentieth century have come out of Ireland and the American south. T. S. Eliot would have been the first to insist upon his debt to W. B. Yeats and James Joyce.
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 18, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 123
Year: 1973
Mr. Eliot’s Coriolan poems traverse that same labyrinths of spatial organization represented by government in a technological age.
“James Joyce: Trivial and Quadrivial” Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol. 28, No 1, (1953) in The Interior Landscape (1969), p 31
Year: 1953
[T.S.] Eliot is careful to point to the corporate, spoken language as "speech," and dialect," and "tribal," because these features of language are much beyond the range of the written or printed word.
Liturgy And Media” in The Critic, Vol.31, No. 3, January-February (1973), p 20, reprinted in reprinted in The Medium and the Light: Reflections on Religion (1999), p 126
Year: 1973
Chapter:
Speech
Drawn to McLuhan #3
In fact, you'll find the great instructors in all media matters are these painters and poets of the later nineteenth century and people like James Joyce and Eliot and Pound and others. They spent their lives studying our senses as they go out technologically into the environment because they realized this had a profound effect on language.
The Medium Is the Message, 1960, in Understanding Me (2003), pp 94-95
Year: 1960
Eliot is specific ally saying here that the only way you can control any very complex anarchic situation is by parallel borders, a border or a frontier. It is a method already adumbrated by Mr. Yeats, and of the need for which I believe Mr. Yeats to have been the first contemporary to be conscious.
“The Marfleet Lectures”, March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 110
Year: 1967
It is also Mr. Eliot's method, since he is a man from Missouri who set up his cabin on the banks of the Thames in 1915 approximately, an example of premature brain drain.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 110
Year: 1967
Eliot went to England and made visible for the first time to the twentieth-century English the new world of French literary and artistic discovery. The environment of European art of the past decades had become so invisible to the English that it took this American to reveal it by his artistic activities.
“The Marfleet Lectures” , March 16-17 (1967), reprinted in Understanding Me (2003), p 111
Year: 1967
Ballet is not only a social mask, but as a method of organizing human energies it must avoid pictorial space in favor of frontal plane in order to maximize audience participation. See Eliot on poetic rhythm as social mask.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 183
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Space
However, the inclusiveness of the poem and the reader's deep involvement in it are made possible only by means of the mosaic pattern. Eliot has relinquished conventional visual and rational space in favor of the braille like world of touch and the auditory spaces of resonating allusion
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 235
Year: 1968
Eliot explores this paradox of pain as the space of deadness and aloneness in much of his poetry. In the first eighteen lines of The Waste Land he sees it both inside and out: "memory and desire," the rain and the beer garden, the mosaic of the totally unconnected events of the sleigh ride and the whodunit as nightly "distraction from distraction," the desperate flight that is contrary to nature: "I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter." The poem presents a disconnected space, psychically and socially, of anguished Peter Pans.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 235
Year: 1968
This is what T. S. Eliot calls "tradition" in his celebrated essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot's concept seemed quite revolutionary in 1917, but it was in fact a report of an immediate and present reality. Awareness of all-at-once history or tradition goes with a correlative awareness of the present as modifying the entire past.
Through the Vanishing Point with Harley Parker (1968), p 257
Year: 1968
Chapter:
Present [The]
Mr. Eliot is here pointing to the revolution in language and consciousness that occurs when we move from the plane of the simultaneous interplay of multiple factors and experiences.
“Liturgy and the Microphone”, (1974), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 108
Year: 1974
Quite early, Eliot made a great impact by the careful use of jazz and film form. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock gets much of its power from an interpenetration of film form and jazz idiom.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge, p 53
Year: 1964
Chapter:
Jazz
But most of the difficulties which the ordinary person encounters with the poetry of Pound and Eliot disappear if it is viewed as a historical newsreel of persons, myths, ideas, and events with thematic musical score built in.
“Sight, Sound And the Fury,” Commonweal, April 9, 1954, Vol. 60, No. 1, p 9
Year: 1954
Chapter:
Pound, Ezra
Baudelaire, said Mr. Eliot , "taught us how to raise the imagery of common life to first intensity”.
Understanding Media, (1964), MIT/Routledge, p 55
Year: 1964
Pervading this uniform Euclidean world of familiar space-and-time, [Lewis] Carroll drove a fantasia of discontinuous space-and-time that anticipated Kafka, Joyce, and Eliot .
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 162
Year: 1964
Literary people eagerly accepted these bridges, and Joyce got Chaplin into Ulysses as Bloom, just as Eliot got jazz into the rhythms of his early poems.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 278
Year: 1964
Do not T.S. Eliot's famous lines about the typist of the jazz age capture the entire pathos of the age of Chaplin and the ragtime blues?
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 279
Year: 1964
“Did you look up Tom Eliot when you were in London?” Ezra Pound asked McLuhan.
“Oh, I would never have dreamed of imposing on the famous poet.”
“Oh come on now,” said Pound. “You know very well that Eliot is the one who’d have been intimidated.”
“What Did You Say, Professor?” (1962), p 26
Year: 1962
Your thoughts about new environments created by our electric means of moving at the speed of light may find some echoes in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot. It is a poem which is entirely concerned with acoustic or simultaneous space.
Letter to Gerald Mason Feigen, Jan. 23, 1974, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan, p 488
Year: 1974
Jacques Maritain once remarked to me that: “Eliot knows so much philosophy and theology that I do not see how he can write poetry at all.” But Eliot found no conflict in these interests.
“T.S. Eliot,” 1965, p 244
Year: 1965
By offering an incomplete image or process, Poe involved his readers in the creative process in a way that Baudelaire, Valéry, T . S. Eliot , and many others have admired and followed.
Understanding Media, 1964, MIT/Routledge edition, p 323-324
Year: 1964
Eliot made a paradoxical discovery: if you want to involve the audience in the action of a play you have to speak poetry.
“Meaning of TV to Children” (1965), p 35
Year: 1965
In Prufrock there is a metamorphosis almost every two or three lines. Eliot had just discovered the gimmick and was going flat out. The technique of the arrest is to give not the thing, but the effect of the thing. This is the fascination of child behaviour and child art. The child experiences the world in very low definition.
Letter to Eric McLuhan, December 28, 1970, in Letters of Marshall McLuhan (1987), p 417
Year: 1970
In Four Quartets Eliot mentions the words "slip, slide, perish, decay. “Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place" ("Burnt Norton" V). Eliot has something quite special to say about this mask of language, this mask of putting on the reader.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 215
Year: 1973
When Eliot says that he puts Mark Twain equal or even with Dryden and Swift, he indicated that Dryden and Swift had updated the English language in the 1700s by getting rid of rhetoric and getting rid of ornament and using a bare colloquial statement.
“Art as Survival in the Electric Age” (1973), in Understanding Me, 2003, p 215
Year: 1973
MCMANUS: So there are some parallels? MCLUHAN: Well, sure, the habit of discontinuous and multileveled perception, but it goes partly also with in my interest in Joyce, Pound, Eliot, because they are also multi-faceted people and very right-hemisphere people.
“Violence as a quest for identity” (Mike McManus TVO Interview), 1977, in Understanding Me, 2003, p 273
Year: 1977
The reader of Eliot's verse or prose soon becomes "aware that he is listening to a voice, like music, speaking out of silence."
T. S. Eliot: A Symposium (Book Review), in Renascence. 1960, p 157
Year: 1960
Poe saw plainly that the anticipation of effect was the only way to achieve organic control for the creative process. T. S. Eliot, like Baudelaire and Valéry, gives his entire sanction to Poe's discovery.
The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, (1962), p 276-277
Year: 1962
Eliot and Pound used the typewriter for a great variety of central effects in their poems. And with them, too, the typewriter was an oral and mimetic instrument that gave them the colloquial freedom of the world of jazz and ragtime.
Understanding Media (1964), MIT/Routledge edition, p 262
Year: 1964
The ways upward and downward are the same. Both of these arc spoken from the world of acoustic space in which there is no private identity, nor any upside-down. Yet they sound paradoxical to a literate or visually oriented person. Nobody could have been more literate than Eliot, and yet nobody could have had more empathy, for the non-visual world of the preliterate. Probably, by comparison with the intense literacy of the print-accustomed man.
“Empedocles and T.S. Eliot”, in Studies in the Humanities, No. 15, Philosophy (1973), p xii
Year: 1973
Mr. T. S. Eliot, writing to the three thousand people who comprehend, according to his own computation, the total culture of the West, describes the poet's mind as "being a more finely perfected medium in which special or very varied feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.”
“G. K. Chesterton: A Practical Mystic” (1938), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 10
Year: 1938
Artists — people like Pound, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis (Mr. Eliot is a little more prudent, but he meant the same things as these others did), and Yeats, of course — began to insist that if society was to be saved in even an elementary way it would only be by putting artists in charge.
“Communication Media: Makers of the Modern World” (1959), in The Medium and the Light (1999), p 37
Year: 1959
Such a duality of attitudes suggested to T. S. Eliot that past, present, and future exist as one thing: time considered as sequential (left hemisphere) is figure and time considered as simultaneous (right hemisphere) is ground.
The Global Village, with Bruce Powers (1989), p 10
Year: 1989
Chapter:
Present [The]
Perhaps one reason why T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was so revolutionary was that Eliot considered the totality of language and culture as a unified ground to which the individual talent had to relate. One of the basic assumptions of normal science is the left-brain need for measurement and quantification of effects.
The Global Village with Bruce Powers (1989), p 21
Year: 1989
These characteristics do not develop in the cultural milieu of electric sound and information, for the acoustic world, like the auditory imagination" defined by T. S. Eliot, is not private nor civilized but tribal and collective.
“Do Books Matter?” (1973), in On the Nature of Media (2016), p 213
Year: 1973
Then comes a typical cry from Eliot. He has an uncanny capacity to hang all the terror of eternity on a common phrase or word.
Letter to Elsie, Herbert, and Maurice McLuhan, December 6, 1934, in Letters, 1987, p 42
Year: 1934
T.S. Eliot has a line which seems to indicate awareness of the discarnate state of electronic man: "We all go into the silent funeral; nobody's funeral, for there is nobody to bury.”
Letter to Clare Boothe Luce, April 5, 1979, in Letters, 1987, p 543
Year: 1979
Chapter:
Discarnate
Assimil-like phrase books for studying foreign languages were also everyday resources for James Joyce (who taught in the Berlitz School of Languages). His Wake raises the verbal stereotype to archetypal awareness as does Eliot's Sweeney's "I've gotta use words when I talk to you."
From Cliche to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 8
Year: 1970
Shakespeare's global cliché about the world as a stage was caught up by T. S. Eliot in "O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—It's so elegant So intelligent."
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 10
Year: 1970
In Eliot's The Waste Land the city becomes a wilderness, and this is not so much figurative as literal. The accommodation of the citizens of The Waste Land to their service environment had robotized them: "I had not thought death had undone so many."
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 78
Year: 1970
The interplay among masks of energy awakens our awareness of the earliest antecedents. This is the theme of "Tradition and the Individual Talent" by T. S. Eliot—that the advent of new form affects all earlier forms.”
From Cliché to Archetype with Wilfred Watson (1970), p 99
Year: 1970
When Mallarmé and Eliot and Pound and Joyce designate the poetic task as cleansing and renewal of speech and language, they point to an enterprise of even greater scope than that undertaken by Heracles. Language is be-fouled and messed up by millions of people each day.
From Cliché to Archetype, with Wilfred Watson, 1970, p 115
Year: 1970
Mr. Eliot is quite explicit about myth as a structure of parallels without connectives. Mythic form is necessarily double. Its double-ness is a matter not of matching but of making, not of the mirror and reflection but of the lamp and illumination.
From Cliché to Archetype, with Wilfred Watson, 1970, p 141
Year: 1970
Chapter:
Myth, Mythic
“McLuhan quoted a line from Eliot in mincing Eliotic voice to illustrate a McLuhan concept of English poetry that he called ‘a sensory bias of levelness, evenness… ‘The English used linearity in the equitone way to keep the mob back. It’s a strategy of self-defence.’”
Grace Glueck in the New York Times (date to come), reviewing the museum seminar headlined by Marshall McLuhan and Harley Parker at the City Museum of New York, October, 1967; from William Buxton’s Introduction, The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine, Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals, edited by William Buxton, published U. of Alberta Press, 2026, p 12
Year: 1967
Chapters:
English Language | Speech