T. S. Eliot

227 Pages·1978·22.908 MB·English

by  Bernard Bergonzi (auth.)

T. S. Eliot
MASTERS OF WORLD LITERATURE
PUBLISHED:
GEORGE ELIOT by Walter Allen
COLERIDGE by Walter Jackson Bate
T. S. ELIOT by Bernard Bergonzi
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS by Bernard Bergonzi
MATTHEW ARNOLD by Douglas Bush
JANE AUSTEN by Douglas Bush
JOHN KEATS by Douglas Bush
JOHN MILTON by Douglas Bush
IBSEN by Harold Clunnan
JONATHAN SWIFT by Nigel Dennis
DANTE by Francis-Fergusson
STENDHAL by Wallace Fowlie
THOMAS HARDY by Irving Howe
HONORE BALZAC by E. J. Oliver
GOLDSMITH by Ricardo Quintana
TENNYSON by Christopher Ricks
THE BRONTES by Tom Winnifrith
IN PREPARATION:
PROUST by William Barrett
FLAUBERT by Jacques Barzun
SAMUEL JOHNSON by James L. Clifford
EUGENE O'NEILL by Harold Clunnan
EMILY DICKINSON by J. V. Cunningham
YEATS by Douglas N. Archibald
JOYCE by Leon Edel
CONRAD by Elizabeth Hardwick
EMERSON by Alfred Kazin
SHAKESPEARE by Frank Kennode
POE by Dwight Macdonald
CHEKHOV by Howard Moss
FIELDING by Midge Podhoretz
HENRY JAMES by Richard Poirier
MELVILLE by Harold Rosenberg
WHITMAN by Theodore Weiss
MASTERS OF WORLD LITERATURE SERIES
LOUIS KRONENBERGER, GENERAL EDITOR
T. S. Eliot
++++++4++• •••+ ••+ +++• •+ ••+ ••••+ +• •••••••••••••••
Bernard Bergonzi
Second Edition
1M[
The quotations from The Complete
Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot
are reproduced by kind permission
of Faber & Faber Ltd.
© The Macmillan Company, New York, 1972, 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, without permission
First published in the United States 1972
First published in the United Kingdom 1972
Second edition 1978
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong
Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bergonzi, Bernard
T. ·S. Eliot - 2nd ed. - (Masters of
world literature series)
1. Eliot, Thomas Stearns - Criticism and
interpretation
I. Title II. Series
821'.9'12 PS509.L43Z
ISBN 978-0-333-24259-9 ISBN 978-1-349-15945-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15945-1
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FOR
Benet, Clarissa, and Lucy
Contents
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ix
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION xiii
I St. Louis, Harvard, Paris, 1888-1914 1
II London Reputation, 1915-1920 28
III Poet and Editor, 1921-1927 70
IV Religion, Politics, and Drama, 1928-1939 110
V Wartime and the Nobel Prize, 1940--1948 150
VI Comedies and Second Marriage, 1949-1965 174
Appendix: The Waste Land Manuscripts 193
A SELECf BIBUOGRAPHY 199
INDEX 205
Preface to the Second Edition
T
HIS BOOK was written at a time when Eliot's reputation ap
peared to be in decline. Since his death in 1965 he had been
condemned as a snob and a reactionary; some English critics were
inclined to reopen early battles concerning The Waste Land,
alleging that it was not a unified poem, perhaps not a poem at all;
while American critics were increasingly convinced that the
modern poets who mattered were Pound and Williams and
Stevens rather than Eliot. This climate of opinion gave my book
a slightly defensive tone that now seems unnecessary. For since
1972, when the first edition appeared, interest in Eliot has revived
remarkably; disagreements about his poetry continue to be felt
and expressed, but there now seems to be a general conviction
that Eliot is important and is likely to remain so. Some of this new
interest is biographical. Eliot forbade any life of himself to be
written; such injunctions are always provocative and likely to be
ignored, and there is an inevitable desire to bring together what
Eliot wanted to keep apart, the man who suffers and the mind
which creates. Several biographical studies have already appeared
notwithstanding the lack of official support and such ludicrous inci
dental obstacles as the fact that Eliot's correspondence with a life
long woman friend, Emily Hale, is deposited in Princeton University
Library but according to the terms of her bequest may not be read
by anyone until 2020. "Impersonality", which so long looked like
a central Eliotian doctrine, has been quietly abandoned by many
x T. S. ELIOT
critics; Eliot's dismissive assertion-reported at several removes,
and without documentary backing-that The Waste Land was
"just a piece of rhythmical grumbling", has been seized on eagerly.
When I wrote this book the idea that The Waste Land had a
deeply personal dimension and was not only an "impersonal"
meditation on history and culture, still seemed a little novel. By
now it has become taken for granted. One of the editors of the
Oxford Anthology of English Literature compares The Waste
Land to In Memoriam, remarking that both are "poems of re
pressed passions, presumably of a man for a man ... Both poems
are violently personal, eccentric, High Romantic at the core ..."
Recently a whole book has been written on the assumption that
The Waste Land is a homosexual elegy or lament. The belief that
Eliot was a homosexual has gained some currency, though with
little basis in fact, apart from speculations about the dedication
and Dantean epigraph to Prufrock and Other Observations, for
Jean Verdenal, "Mort aux Dardanelles." Sexual anxiety and dis
gust and longing recur in Eliot's poetry, but it is evident that they
are provoked by women rather than by men. Of the recent books
with a biographical emphasis the best is certainly Lyndall
Gordon's Eliot's Early Years, which is balanced and sensitive and
scholarly, even though limited in its critical insights.
There have been quite other reasons for new and generally
favourable appraisals of Eliot. The last few years have seen a
widening of vision in English criticism, a growing interest in
comparative literature and a European perspective, in contrast to
the insularity and limited aims of the fifties and early sixties. The
vogue of Structuralism has led back to Symbolism, which was
Eliot's own starting-point, and he is now more clearly seen as a
master of European modernism, a deeply challenging and inno
vating writer whose implications are still not fully absorbed. This
is the position of Gabriel Josipovici, who in a recent essay, "'But
Time Will Not Relent': Modem Literature and the Experience of
Time," associates Eliot with Proust and Kafka and Beckett.
Josipovici writes, "the power of Eliot's early poetry stems from
its embodiment of a sense of awakening, and that awakening is
always frightening, since humankind cannot bear very much
reality." For this critic The Waste Land is still radically modem,
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xi
the embodiment of a new consciousness and a non-linear appre
hension of time, even though it offers a standing temptation to
critics to reduce it to familiar terms, to assimilate it to a literary
mainstream ("High Romantic at the core"); or else to see it "as a
mirror or symptom of apocalypse, thus proving the continuing
validity of Nietzsche's dictum that man would rather take the
void for his purpose than be devoid of purpose." Josipovici's read
ing is one that I incline to myself, and I think it provides fruitful
ways of understanding Eliot. There is a somewhat similar ap
proach in Michael Edwards's Eliot/Language, a small book from
a small press, the Aquila Publishing Co. (situated on the Isle of
Skye), which contains some original and acute criticism of Eliot,
set out in aphorisms and brief pensees. Edwards reads Eliot as a
Symbolist poet, who had to wrestle with the peculiarly intractable
problem of writing a Christian-Symbolist poetry, of redeeming
language in a fallen world.
In the first edition I was unable to say very much about the
manuscripts of The Waste Land, which had been discovered in
1968 in the New York Public Library; such references as I made
were on the basis of articles by Donald Gallup. Mrs. Valerie
Eliot's edition was in preparation, but I was not able to see it
before it was published late in 1971, when my book had gone to
press. I wrote an extended review in Encounter in 1972, which
was later included in my book The Turn of a Century: Essays on
Victorian and Modern English Literature. It now appears as the
Appendix to this edition, in what looks like its natural resting
place. Apart from this making good of an obvious lack, I have not
felt impelled to make changes in the text, even though there are
things I would now phrase differently. I have, however, deleted
a line from "Gerontion" at the end of the last chapter, as I have
come to feel that its contextual implications were inappropriate.
If I have changed my thinking about Eliot since 1972 it is more
in emphasis than in taking new directions. I still find the Quartets
difficult to come to terms with-more difficult than The Waste
Land, despite the greater limpidity of language-but now I
admire more of it than I did a few years ago, though I still be
lieve that the poem works as a series of fragments rather than a
wholly achieved unity.