T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet

188 Pages·1989·20.449 MB·English

by  Gareth Reeves (auth.)

T. S. ELIOT: A VIRGILIAN POET
T. S. ELIOT
A VIRGILIAN POET
Gareth Reeves
Lecturer in English
University of Durham
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20223-2 ISBN 978-1-349-20221-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20221-8
© Gareth Reeves, 1989
Sof'tcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
ISBN 978-0-312-02474-1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reeves, Gareth, 1947-
T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet/Gareth Reeves.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-312-02474-1
1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965--Knowledge
Literature. 2. Virgil-Influence-Eliot. 3. English poetry-
Latin influences. 4. Classicism-Great Britain. 5. Rome in literature.
I. Title.
PS3509.L43Z8243 1989
821'.912-dc19 88-23373
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Virgilian Hauntings:
'La Figlia Che Piange' and 'Dans Ie Restaurant' 11
2 The Waste Land and the Aeneid 28
3 Virgilian Limbo:
'The Hollow Men', Ash-Wednesday and 'Coriolan' 59
4 Empire and the Agrarian Ideal 96
5 Virgil and Four Quartets 117
Afterword 158
Notes 163
Index 175
v
Acknowledgements
A special debt of gratitude is due to Donald Davie, George Dekker
and Albert Gelpi, llnder whose guidance this book began as a
doctoral dissertation for Stanford University. Their generosity with
advice, encouragement and time has been unstinting.
I am grateful to the University of Durham for granting the
Research Leave that enabled me to convert the dissertation into a
book. My thanks go to colleagues for helpful discussion of my
manuscript and of Eliot's poetry: to Michael O'Neill especially for
invaluable criticism at various stages of revision, to Raman Selden
for advice on Chapter 2, to Geoffrey Ivy for commenting on an
early draft of the book, and to David Crane for sharing his insights
into Four Quartets. Grateful thanks, too, go to Hugh Shankland for
increasing my understanding of Dante.
I am greatly indebted to Mandy Green for her expert and
painstaking editorial work on the manuscript. I would also like to
thank Shirley Anstay for typing it so skilfully.
The first two sections of Chapter 1 appeared as an article in New
Comparison. Chapter 2 is a revised version of an article that appeared
in The Modern Language Review, 82 Guly 1987). Chapter 4 is a revised
version of an article that appeared in Agenda, 23 (Autumn-Winter
1985/86). I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permission
to reprint this material.
Acknowledgement is made for permission to quote from Eliot's
works, as follows:
Excerpts from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright
1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright © 1963,
1964 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Excerpts from Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1943 by
T. S. Eliot, renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot, reprinted by
permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., and Faber and
Faber, Ltd.
Excerpt from The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the
Original Drafts by T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot, copyright ©
1971 by Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., Mrs Valerie Eliot and Faber and Faber, Ltd.
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Excerpts from 'Dante' in Selected Essays by T. S. Eliot, copyright
1950 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., renewed 1978 by Esme
Valerie Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Excerpt from Chapter II in The Idea of a Christian Society by T. S.
Eliot, copyright 1939 by T. S. Eliot, renewed 1967 by Esme Valerie
Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.,
and Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Excerpts from 'What is a Classic?' and 'Virgil and the Christian
World' from On Poetry and Poets by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1943,
1945, 1951, 1954, 1956, 1957 by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission
of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and Faber and Faber, Ltd.
Extracts from The Criterion are reprinted with the permission of
Mrs Valerie Eliot and Faber and Faber, Ltd.
* * *
Citations of Virgil's works and of accompanying translations are
from the Loeb Classical Library edition, translated by H. Rushton
Fairclough, revised edition, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard U. P. and Heinemann, 1934-5).
Citations of the Divina Commedia and of accompanying trans
lations are from the Temple Classics edition, edited by Hermann
Oelsner and others, 3 vols (London: J. M. Dent, 1899-1901).
Int rodu ction
This book is not simply an account of Virgil's influence on T. S.
Eliot; it is about the extent to which Eliot is a Virgilian poet. The
claim that his poetry is Virgilian has been made before, notably by
W. F. Jackson Knight as long ago as 1944, in Roman Vergil. Few
critics have followed up the suggestion, although a considerable
amount has been written on Eliot's ideas about Virgil, especially
as these inform his thinking on literary tradition and religion.
Thus Frank Kermode, reviewing On Poetry and Poets in 1958,
wrote that Eliot 'is of the classics; not our Dante, perhaps, so much
as our Virgil; his qualities the Virgilian gravity, Virgil's labor, pietas,
his sense of destiny.'I This encomium is based on an account, not
of Eliot's poetry, but of his cultural, religious and literary ideas
seen in their entirety as the product of a profound historical sense,
and as demonstrated in Eliot's essays 'What is a Classic?' (1944)
and 'Virgil and the Christian World' (1951). As Kermode explains,
central to these essays is 'Virgil's association with Dante as Mr
Eliot sees it': 'This association haunts Mr Eliot, and it is a sort of key
to his historical imagination'. Eliot makes Virgil 'an indispensable
unifying agent', and it was Dante who 'taught him this, who
understood the true relation of the pagan to the Christian culture,
the pagan to the Christian poet'. 2 Kermode's The Classic (1975)
elaborates on this perspective, and I shall discuss his argument in
the course of this study. But Eliot wrote his two essays on Virgil
comparatively late in his career; they should not be allowed to
casta retrospective light over Eliot's poetry, especially that written
before his espousal of Anglo-Catholicism.
As the Virgilian allusions in the poetry testify - and a fair number
have been noted by commentators - Virgil was a strong presence
for Eliot from at least as early as 'La Figlia Che Piange'. But what
does this presence signify? What does it mean to call Eliot a
Virgilian poet? Is it helpful to claim that Eliot possessed a Virgilian
temperament? Is there a way of writing poetry, especially in the
present century, that is demonstrably Virgilian?
1
2 T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet
I
Jackson Knight's sense of Eliot as a Virgilian poet is in some
respects illuminating; in others it is crucially obscuring. According
to Jackson Knight's brother, G. Wilson Knight, Eliot was respon
sible for getting Roman Vergil accepted for publication by Faber and
Faber, and he and Jackson Knight evidently found in each other a
sympathetic spirit.3 Roman Vergil makes the essential point that
Virgil and Eliot are both derivative poets. Jackson Knight's account
of this aspect of Virgil's poetry shows that he was schooled in the
lessons of Tradition and the Individual Talent', which at one point
he summarises, concluding that its theory 'reveals that derivation
is rather essential to the arts than accidental and unfortunate'. 4
Not content with the literary dimension of 'derivation', however,
he risks obscurantism by arguing that 'former poetry' is often only
'the apparent source' of Virgil's 'suggestive, penumbral', 'naturally
more associative' kind of poetry. Jackson Knight invariably moves
into rhetoric: 'poetry is normally generated from the storage,
in William James' "deep well of unconscious cerebration", of
impressions ... This process ... is the method of all genius, and
specially belongs to the suggestive kind of poetry.'s
The assumption behind this approach also underlies Wilson
Knight's contention that his 'brother's literary temperament had
much in common with Eliot's': '''Tradition'' was a key-concept for
Eliot, and my brother's view of great poetry, and in particular
Virgil's, saw its greatness as the re-working, re-harmonizing, and
culmination of vast stores from the mythology, folklore, and
literature of the past. This was also Eliot's method.'6 That is not
the cue from 'tradition' I shall take. It is, however, the line of
inquiry critics interested in archetypal analogues would pursue:
Jackson Knight's own Cumaean Gates: A Reference of the Sixth Aeneid
to the Initiation Pattern is, as Wilson Knight explains, 'largely
concerned with anthropology and ritual; and with other origins
within the subconscious, the link being Jung's concept of racial
memory'.7 In this book Jackson Knight points to Eliot's familiarity
with ritualistic quest pattern - a pattern archetypally present in
much primitive and modern literature, including the Aeneid. But
to pursue this line of enquiry would not demonstrate that Eliot is
a Virgilian poet, though it might show that both poets are part
of 'the mind of Europe'.s This consideration has not, however,
prevented me from occasionally seeing links between Eliotesque
Introduction 3
'memory and desire' and Virgilian ritualistic descent and ascent,
where these are warranted by contact with the Aeneid.
There are times when Jackson Knight suggests a more precise
sense of what the epithet Virgilian might imply for Eliot's type of
poetry. Claiming that Eliot's poetic 'method' 'is often ... almost
exactly the same as Vergil' s', he describes it as 'audially-delivered
construction', 'precisely defined' by Eliot himself, from whose
essay on Kipling he quotes: 'the poem may begin to shape itself in
fragments of musical rhythm, and its structure will first appear in
terms of something analogous to musical form; and such poets
find it expedient to occupy their conscious mind with the craftman's
problems, leaving the deeper meaning to emerge, if there, from a
lower level . . . always remembering that . . . the music of verse
is inseparable from the meanings and associations of words.'91t is
beyond Jackson Knight's purpose to relate these remarks to Eliot's
poetic practice, except to dwell on the realms of the unconscious
implicit in that phrase 'lower level'. But a valuable principle can be
adduced from these definitions of 'audially-delivered construction'
and 'musical form': the fact that both Virgil and Eliot are derivative
poets is significant not in itself, but for what, in their cases, the
derivative practice is symptomatic of: a temperament and sensibility
that depend on the 'suggestive' and 'associative'. Derivative prac
tice does not signify the same thing in all poets: Pound's, for
instance, can be said to be didactic rather than suggestive, the past
not as echo-chamber, but as example, consciously drawn upon:
literary, political, cultural. The poetry championed by Jackson
Knight, with Eliot for support, creates 'structures', patterns of
words, that intimate meanings beyond the normal confines of
language. But to stress that the derivative nature of Eliot's poetry
is bound up with what makes it Virgilian brings into sharper focus
otherwise unhelpfully impressionistic labels such as 'suggestive'
and 'penumbral'.
That said, Eliot's poetry is Virgilian in an even more precise way,
as E. J. Stormon, S. J., in an essay on 'Virgil and the Modern Poet',
helps to indicate. He claims, in the words of Jackson Knight (citing
Stormon's essay), that 'the interest in time and its problems ... is
strong in both poets'.10 Stormon's ideas about poetry, like Jackson
Knight's, pay homage to Eliot:
The mature poet often comes to look upon the past of his race
as something not less important than his own past, and he is