eliot critical insights, ENGLISH
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On T. S. Eliot
John Paul Riquelme
Poet, critic, dramatist, editor, Nobel laureate—Thomas Stearns
Eliot (1888-1965) was an uncompromising, prolific author whose
writings in several genres held the attention of other writers and of a
wide audience during his lifetime. Eliot had more influence on his
“contemporaries and younger fellow writers than perhaps anyone else
of our time,” as Gustaf Hellström of the Swedish Academy remarked
in introducing Eliot when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1948.
1
Hellström also compared Eliot’s effect on literature to the revo-
lutionary impact of Sigmund Freud’s contribution to our understand-
ing of the mind. The public recognition that he achieved during his life-
time is hard for us to imagine now. When Eliot lectured or read from
his poetry while visiting the United States in the 1950s, the crowds
were so large that some of the events were held in sports stadiums filled
with thousands of people. The remarkable impression that Eliot pro-
duced was still strong when he died in 1965. It had arisen primarily
because his poetry was permanently revolutionary in character and
his essays insistently challenged and displaced dominant nineteenth-
century views on literature and literary history. The literary canon
changed, for example, after Eliot made a case for the modern relevance
of John Donne and other Metaphysical poets of the seventeenth cen-
tury.
The Waste Land
and “Tradition and the Individual Talent” may well
be the most widely reprinted and discussed longer poem and literary
essay of the twentieth century. When
The Waste Land
appeared in
1922, its revolutionary quality and its accomplished, memorable inten-
sity turned Eliot overnight from a poet appreciated by the avant-garde
into a writer widely recognized for his enigmatic, daunting, but also
unforgettable, poetry. The poem becomes even more strangely memo-
rable when we hear the unusual intonations that Eliot adopts on record-
ings.
The Waste Land
won a substantial cash prize from
The Dial
, the
On T. S. Eliot
3
journal that published it in the United States. Eliot’s fame persisted
when, over the next decades, he continued to write distinctive poetry
that was widely read and soon widely taught, and to publish influential
essays and verse dramas that drew audiences in London theatres. In ad-
dition, Eliot edited his own journal,
The Criterion
, for nearly twenty
years, until ceasing publication when he knew that World War II was
imminent. As an editor at Faber and Faber he had decisive influence on
the selection of contemporary writers to be brought out by this major
British publishing house. He helped, for instance, to keep Ezra Pound
in print at Faber.
Eliot’s poetry is experimental, intellectual, and not overtly personal.
The intellectuality of the verse comes in part from his knowledge of
philosophy. During his graduate studies at Harvard, Eliot wrote while
living in England an accomplished doctoral dissertation on the British
philosopher, F. H. Bradley, but he never returned to Harvard to defend
the thesis and receive the degree. The decision not to return reflected
the expense and danger of crossing the Atlantic during World War I,
but the choice was also a determined break with his family and with a
career in academic philosophy that awaited him in the United States.
Instead, he remained in England to pursue his vocation as a poet and
essayist. He admired Dante and Metaphysical poets as precursors
whose poems were not personal, that is, not primarily and explicitly
about the poet’s emotions and feelings. Eliot objected to the tradition
of British Romantic poetry, as it had developed by the early twentieth
century into a debased popular preference for the subjective and the ex-
pressive.
Eliot advocated poetry that included and invited thinking about
ideas, poetry that could overcome the dissociation of sensibility, the di-
vision of thought from feeling that he attributed to John Milton and
Milton’s Romantic descendants. His writing, however, is not poetry of
ideas, narrowly speaking—not logical, philosophical argument in the
form of discursive verse. Instead it is highly fragmented, elliptical,
enigmatic, and allusive, often including jarring juxtapositions of dif-
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Critical Insights
ferent kinds of language and experiences. It yokes opposites, some-
times aggressively, in a modern version of Metaphysical poetry. Rather
than being discursive and rational, Eliot’s writing can be gothic and
surreal, with many moments that seem a matter of chance, not of intel-
ligible intention, in a way that bears comparison with Edgar Allan Poe
and with Dada and its aftermath. Marcel Duchamp and René Magritte
were his contemporaries, and Salvador Dalí and Samuel Beckett were
only half a generation younger. They were his fellow travelers in pro-
ducing strange, challenging work that makes a lasting impression but
does not yield to easy explanations that emphasize the personal or the
rational.
What is permanently revolutionary about Eliot’s work? The diver-
sity and multiplicity of the writing, both in form and in language, pro-
vide a large part of the answer. Eliot gives us no stable place to stand in
responding to his career or to its individual parts. He was chameleonic
and kaleidoscopic, a shape changer who could publish articles in aca-
demic philosophical journals, turn the dramatic monologue into a
hardly recognizable fragmented modernist form, write self-less incan-
tatory verse, create drawing-room comedies for the British stage, write
children’s poems about cats, and produce a long poetic sequence late in
his career that is both musical and spiritual in its elaborate poetic trans-
lation of pre-Socratic philosophical fragments. It is not possible to rec-
oncile the multiplicity into a single human being who was the writer.
Eliot’s arguments about literature and the details of his poetic lan-
guage also resist reduction to single perspectives. His perspectives are
multiple and oscillating. Eliot’s meditation on creativity in “Tradition
and the Individual Talent” circles around the conundrum of the indi-
vidual and the inheritance from the past, a conundrum that cannot be
coherently simplified to either the person only or the historical only. It
ambiguously and complexly involves both. The famous comparison,
in “Prufrock”’s opening, of the evening to a patient anesthetized (we
know not how fully) on a table is a prime example of his poetic lan-
guage’s complex, ambiguous, multiply suggestive qualities. The odd
On T. S. Eliot
5
comparison can take us in many directions, including ones that raise
questions about the relation of nature to the human, about conscious-
ness, and about the way the speaker, concerning whom we know little,
thinks. Eliot’s poetic language regularly challenges the stability of
identity in his speakers and in us. His persistent dissolving of the
I
that
many of us assume to be stable makes the poetry perpetually enigmatic
and disconcerting. In
S/Z
Roland Barthes claims that literature always
prevents the question
Who speaks?
from ever being answered. Eliot
provides compelling evidence for this claim. If we do not know who or
what speaks, we also do not know who or what is being addressed. It is
ourselves who overwhelmingly come into unanswerable question in
the mirror of Eliot’s poetry.
After Eliot’s death, there was a backlash in the academy against his
work, and against literary modernism in general, as it was understood
then. Modernist writers, with the exception of a few, such as Virginia
Woolf and James Joyce, were demoted from the place of prominence
that they had held, but no one else as drastically as Eliot. Lightning al-
ways strikes the tallest tree on the mountain most frequently. The
strength of the belated negative reaction is a testament to Eliot’s impor-
tance during his lifetime and an indication of his continuing, long-term
significance. A new generation’s adjustment in views about writing
that have held sway for decades is normal. Eliot himself had partic-
ipated aggressively in his own generation’s rebuke of nineteenth-
century precursors. The vehemence of the reversal in views about Eliot
on the part of some scholars was, however, surprisingly strong. In the
1970s and 1980s, he was frequently assailed as reactionary (even fas-
cist), anti-feminist, and anti-Semitic. For a time, at major literary con-
ferences speakers sometimes included negative asides about Eliot even
when they were dealing with subjects that did not involve his work.
From the perspective of some who were affected by the social and sex-
ual liberation that developed in the late 1960s, Eliot was a dead white
European male to be exorcised, a conservative rather than a liberatory
force.
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Critical Insights
Since the late 1990s, modernist studies have burgeoned, and revised
descriptions of literary modernism have emerged along with changed
historical and intellectual insights that help provide provisional an-
swers to new questions. Within the revivified attention to a literary
modernism now more broadly defined than fifty years ago, Eliot is still
a central figure, still a large presence, but on a larger canvas. More than
half a century after Eliot’s death, we are in a better position than either
Eliot’s contemporaries or those who immediately followed them in
making meaningful, defensible sense of his remarkable writings.
Note
.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1948/eliot-speech.html
On T. S. Eliot
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