T. S. Eliot and César Vallejo: Experiencing psychic convolutions during the Spanish Civil War and World War II
Résumé
Swiss practitioner Dr. Vittoz guided T. S. Eliot under psychotherapy as he was writing the last two sections of The Waste Land in late 1921. This treatment for his diagnosed neurasthenic condition involved some 'mindfulness' exercises, as commented by Gold (2000), Harris (2006), and Barnes (2022). Those critics address a practical cure concerning soul, brain & body balancing issues: a practice centered on "giving, sympathizing and controlling", evoked by the "Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata" enunciation in "What the Thunder Said". The positive outcome of these sessions continued to play a role in the assimilation of Eliot's mature poetry thereafter.
Similarly, when viewing César Vallejo (1892-1938) as Eliot's counterpart among the Latin-American avant-garde milieu, our focus will hinge on a quest for relief from the burden of existential instability, given how his later poetry employs a dialectic drawn from historical materialism to illustrate the turbulence of his Parisian life. Soon after his allegiance to the Second Spanish Republic, from 1931 until his death in 1938, Vallejo elaborated a deep-seated will to instill a renewed lyric consciousness across different societal spectra, as expressed in the posthumous España, aparta de mi este cáliz (1939). Here, he advocates for regeneration and healing of the oppressed.
An associative observation has been noted by Brown (2003): "it is these [moments when the confessional mode is intensely heightened by the inter-psychic sharing of uncanny encounters] which ground the philosophical complexity of the entire poetic sequence in psychotherapeutic felt experience". Therefore, it’s by coupling Vallejo's image of the "children of Spain" (EAC XV) with Eliot's "leaves [that] were full of children/ hidden excitedly" and the "children in the apple tree" ("Burnt Norton" & "Little Gidding"), that the opportunity arises to examine the therapeutical principles administered by their poetic creations, furtherly substantiated through children’s pictorial representations of the wartime period.