T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature

233 Pages·2013·1.019 MB·English

by  Steven Matthews

T.S. ELIOT AND EARLY MODERN LITERATURE
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T.S. Eliot and Early
Modern Literature
S TEVEN M ATTHEWS
1
1

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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following, for various conversations across a number of years
which have infl ected the ideas in this book: Helen Farish, Matthew Feldman, Kath-
erine Firth, Nancy K. Gish, Hugh Haughton, Alan Marshall, Gail Marshall, Nigel
Messenger, Catherine Morley, Fiona Sampson, Ashley Taggart, John Whale.
Library staff at the following libraries have been extremely helpful: Bodleian
Library, University of Oxford; Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Houghton
Library, University of Harvard; King’s College, University of Cambridge.
I am grateful to the British Academy, for a travel grant which enabled the visit
to Harvard. Oxford Brookes University supported the completion of the book
with a period of study leave.
Andrew McNeillie was a wonderfully enthusiastic encourager of the project at
the outset; more recently I have benefi ted from the support and insight of Jacque-
line Baker at Oxford University Press. Th e editorial work of Richard Mason has
been invaluable to this book.
Th e book has also been improved considerably from careful and generous
reading by Elleke Boehmer, Alex Goody, and Tiff any Stern.
Some portions of Chapter Two originally appeared as pages in ‘Calculated Indif-
ference: T.S. Eliot’s Debt to J.M. Robertson’, A merican Modernism: Cultural Transac-
tions , edited by Catherine Morley and Alex Goody (Cambridge Scholars, 2009).
Th is book is dedicated to Elleke, and to those Skying boys, Th omas and Sam.
Steven Matthews
June 2012
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Contents
Note to the Reader ix
Abbreviations Used in References to Works by Eliot x
Introduction 1
Eliot’s education in the Early Modern 8
Th e ‘Renaissance’ in criticism, Pater, and the ‘historical sense’ 10
Eliot Studies, allusiveness, and a diff erent methodology 16
Th e structure of this book 20
1. ‘Without a Harmonising Medium’: Eliot in 1919, and
Contemporary Criticism of Early Modern Drama 24
1919: Th e Extension Lectures on ‘Elizabethan Literature’ 24
Source materials 28
Early Modern Literature and the nation 31
Th e nature of Early Modern drama 34
Rhetoric and realism in drama 37
2. ‘I Am Not All Heere’: Donne, Marlowe, ‘Disintegration’,
and the Development of Dramatic Lyricism by Eliot 42
Donne, personality, and impersonality 42
Donne and the emergent poetry of modernity 46
Drama and the lyric 50
Allusion and ‘disintegration’ 53
3. ‘Signs Never Come Amiss’: Early Modern Voices in Eliot’s
Collected Poetry to Poems, 1920 62
Early Modern echoes in Eliot’s Harvard poems 62
Th e quatrain poems 66
‘Gerontion’ 73
4. ‘Ideas, and the Sensibility of Th ought’: Th e Quest for a
Metaphysical Poetry, 1920–2 81
Dead voices and new combinations 81
‘Wit’: a metaphysical method 88
Metaphysical conceits and poetic ‘obscurity’ 93
5. Cryptograms: Th e Waste Land , Sweeney Agonistes , and
‘Th e Hollow Men’ 97
‘Th e Death of the Duchess’ and Th e Waste Land 97
Th e Waste Land and ‘Elegy’ 1 07
viii Contents
Aftermaths of Th e Waste Land 1 12
Sweeney Agonistes and ‘Th e Hollow Men’ 115
6. ‘Th e Pattern Behind the Pattern’: A sh-Wednesday , the
Ariel Poems, and ‘Coriolan’ 126
Th e Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 126
Conceits, stoicism, and George Chapman 130
Lancelot Andrewes and A sh-Wednesday 139
‘Marina’ 145
‘Coriolan’ 152
7. T owards a New Dramatic Articulation: Th e Rock
and Murder in the Cathedral 159
Th e Early Modern and textual ‘pattern’ 159
Th e Rock 167
Early Modern stagecraft, characterization, and Eliot’s dramas 1 72
Murder in the Cathedral 1 78
8. ‘ A Fusion, in Sympathy or Antipathy’: Four Quartets
and the Late Plays 184
Th e Family Reunion through its drafts 1 84
Four Quartets 1 89
Th e Cocktail Party 196
Th e Confi dential Clerk and Th e Elder Statesman 2 02
Bibliography 2 09
Index 2 19
Note to the Reader
Across this book the designation of that earlier literary period, with which Eliot’s
work is perceived to be in dialogue, can be confusing. Eliot used the term ‘Eliza-
bethan’, in a lecture course in 1918–9 as elsewhere, to designate a period of litera-
ture produced roughly between 1565 and 1625—in other words from the
Elizabethan through the Jacobean age. In doing so, he was to an extent following
contemporary critical practice. Elsewhere again, however, he called the same period
the ‘Renaissance’, deploying a term now considered appropriate only for Italian
literature and artworks of a slightly earlier period. Th is same time was also called,
by some critics contemporary with Eliot, ‘Th e Age of Shakespeare’.
Th is book will use the designation ‘Early Modern’, according to recent scholarly
practice, broadly to cover the period of Eliot’s fascination. It reserves ‘Elizabethan’
and ‘Renaissance’ only for relevant titles and quotations from sources relevant to
Eliot, or from his own work.
Where possible, this book cites editions of Early Modern poetry, prose, and
drama that the bibliographical sources given in the text prove to be the ones Eliot
owned, or with which he was familiar. In a few cases it has been impossible to
identify those editions, and, as indicated, quotation is, in those cases, given from
standard current texts. Th is means that readers will experience the important Early
Modern sources for Eliot in a mixture of old spelling and standardized modern
English versions. Since this book aims to provide the early twentieth-century con-
text for Eliot’s understanding of what the Early Modern period could be made to
mean, only rarely does it allude to more recent scholarship and criticism of Early
Modern works.