Eliot on the Poetry of His Contemporaries
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Time Present The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society Number 85 Spring 2015 CONTENTS Eliot on the Poetry of His Contemporaries Essays: Eliot on the Poetry of His By Marjorie Perloff Contemporaries by Marjorie Perloff 1 Today, when the reviewing of new books of poetry is often little more than expanded blurb writing, singling out this or that volume from the Annie Dunn: An Eliot Society hundreds of slim collections that pour out from the small presses, it is the Pilgrimage greatest pleasure to read the hitherto uncollected book reviews by the young by Ronald Schuchard 2 T. S. Eliot, now available in Volume 1 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, ed. Jewel Spears Brooker and Ronald Schuchard. Written Eliot Society Call for Papers 3 primarily for The Egoist, but also for such other journals as The New Statesman, Reviews these reviews and reflections on contemporary poetry present Eliot at his brilliant, learned, funny, and iconoclastic best. Poetry and Its Others: News, Consider Eliot’s reaction, in a 1918 omnibus review for , to a Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of The Egoist Genres, by Jahan Ramazani lavishly produced poetry book by E. F. A. Geach and D. E. A. Wallace coyly Reviewed by T. Austin Graham 7 titled –Esques: The authors of –Esques trickle down a fine broad page in a pantoum, a Bequest from Eliot’s Library to roundel, a villanelle, occasionally pagan, mode of thirty years ago: Magdalene College, Cambridge Why then, O foolish Christ, Reviewed by M. E. J. Hughes 8 Didst thou keep tryst Out of Character: Modernism, With maudlin harlots wan Vitalism, Psychic Life, by Omri With glad things gone? Moses To which the obvious answer is, Why did you? Young poets ought to Reviewed by Corey Latta 12 be cheaply printed; such sumptuous pages deceive many innocent critics. (733) The Little Spaniel Theatre’s Enough said! Further down the page, Eliot glances at the young Alec Waugh’s Adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s Murder Resentment just long enough to note that “Mr. Waugh . would appear to in the Cathedral have been influenced by some older person who admired Rupert Brooke.” Reviewed by Hussain Azam 14 Not even Brooke himself but “some older person who admired” him! It can’t get much worse than that, can it? Public Sightings by David Chinitz 10 Eliot is not always so cutting. A review for The Egoist of the Georgian poet Harold Monro’s Strange Meetings (573) becomes a jumping off point Eliot News 11 for a discussion of the “trivial” versus the “accidental.” The latter, typical of American poets, is characterized by “an arrest at the object in view” without Letter to the Editor “betraying any reaction beyond that revealed in the choice and arrangement.” from David Moody 14 The trivial, associated in Eliot’s mind with English poetry, can be traced Abstracts 15 back to Wordsworth. The great Romantic poet, Eliot argues, cannot let “the object” live: when, for example, he writes, in the famous concluding line of Election Outcome 17 the Immortality Ode, of “the meanest flower that blows,” he is insisting that we take that flower (daffodil) seriously just because it is a flower. Of the two Eliot Society Membership 18 camps, Eliot seems to favor the “accidental,” for at least precise description of a given object allows for defamiliarization, “express[ing] the strangeness of . familiar objects” (576). continued on page 4 Published by the T. S. Eliot Society, a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary organization 5007 Waterman Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri 63108 ESSAYS Catholic Irish nursemaid.”1 Although we do not know Annie Dunn: the dates of Annie’s service as Eliot’s nanny, she was in An Eliot Society Pilgrimage place, if Eliot’s memory of his age is correct, no later than 1894. In August 1930, when an editor of a St. by Ronald Schuchard Louis paper asked Eliot to reminisce about his youth in the city, he replied: The charming photograph of schoolbound Tom Eliot looking mischievously at the camera under the The earliest personal influences I remember, watchful eyes of his nursemaid Annie Dunn first besides that of my parents, was an Irish appeared, without the caption by his brother Henry, in nursemaid named Annie Dunne [sic], to whom I was greatly attached; she used to take me to my Peter Ackroyd’s T. S. Eliot: A Life (1984). Beyond the first school, a Mrs. Lockwood’s, which was a little standard description of her as an Irish Catholic in way out beyond Vandeventer place. I find subsequent reprints, there seems to have been no that as one gets on in middle life the strength interest in further identification. When she began to of early associations, and the intensity of early reappear in Eliot’s uncollected prose in 1927, however, impressions, becomes more evident; and many little things, long forgotten, recur [such as the] occasions on which my nurse took me with her to the little Catholic Church which then stood on the corner of Locust Street and Jefferson Avenue, when she went to make her devotions.2 In his recent article on “T. S. Eliot as a Schoolboy,” Society member Jayme Stayer quotes a source describing Mrs. Lockwood’s school as “‘a kindergarten- primary school’ for boys the age of seven or eight.’”3 Henry’s surmise that he took the photograph ca. 1895 is probably correct: seven-year-old Eliot (not looking eight), with he and Annie both in jackets, was likely being escorted to Mrs. Lockwood’s in the autumn for the first of three years there. And it seems likely that Annie remained in charge of her ward at least until he was enrolled in the Smith Academy in the autumn of 1898. Whatever the actual chronology and range, the evidence suggests that Annie Dunn’s catechistical ESSAY 1 T. S. Eliot, “Why Mr. Russell Is a Christian,” Criterion, 6 (August 1927), 177–79; in Dickey, Formicelli, and Schucha- rd, eds., The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition, Vol. 3, forthcoming on Project Muse from Johns Hopkins with continuous hints of an unusually strong personal University Press and Faber and Faber. bond and spiritual influence, the editors of The Complete 2 Eliot’s letter of 8 August to Marquis W. Childs was pub- Prose of T. S. Eliot knew that a full portrait was imperative. lished in John G. Neihardt, “Of Making Many Books,” St. In August 1927, two months after his conversion as an Louis Globe-Democrat (October 15, 1930), 3B; in Complete Anglo-Catholic, Eliot stated in his review of Bertrand Prose Vol. 3. The Eliot home was at 2635 Locust Street. Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian that Russell’s 3 Jayme Stayer, “T. S. Eliot as a Schoolboy: The Lockwood arguments “are all quite familiar. I remember that his School, Smith Academy, and Milton Academy,” Twentieth- argument of the First Cause (as put to J. Stuart Mill by Century Literature, 59.4 (2013), 623. Mrs. Ellen Lockwood James Mill) was put to me at the age of six by a devoutly (1855–98), a friend of Eliot’s mother, Charlotte, operated the private primary school for boys at 3841 Delmar Avenue Photo of Eliot and Annie Dunn, © Estate of T. S. Eliot, Henry Ware Eliot until her death in December 1898. Collection of T. S. Eliot, 1881–1994 (Ms Am 2560), Houghton Library continued on page 5 Time Present 2 Spring 2015 ELIOT SOCIETY CALL FOR PAPERS The 36th Annual Meeting of the T. S. Eliot Society St. Louis, September 25–27, 2015 The Society invites proposals for papers to be of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) before joining the Penn presented at our annual meeting in St. Louis. Clearly faculty in 2008. He has been a fellow of the American organized proposals of about 300 words, on any topic Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment reasonably related to Eliot, along with brief biographical for the Humanities, and the Center for Advanced Studies sketches, should be emailed by June 13, 2014, to at the University of Illinois. [email protected], with the subject heading “conference proposal.” Papers given by graduate students and scholars Peer Seminar: “Prufrock” One receiving their doctoral degrees no more than two years Hundred Years Later before the date of the meeting will be considered for the Fathman Young Scholar Award. Those eligible for the “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” first appeared award should mention this fact in their submission. The in print 100 years ago, in Poetry magazine, June 1915. Our Fathman Award, which includes a monetary prize, will 2015 peer seminar with Cassandra Laity will recognize be announced at the final session of the meeting. this centennial with a focus on “Prufrock” then and now. Eliot Society members who would like to chair a Possible topics for discussion might include: panel are invited to inform the President of their interest, • how did Eliot come to write this poem? (influences either with or independently of a paper proposal. historical, artistic, cultural, etc.) • how does it intersect with ideas, experiences, and Memorial Lecturer: Jed Esty developments of the early twentieth century, or of our time? (philosophy, religion, urbanization, Jed Esty is Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at material culture, medical and technological the University of Pennsylvania. His 2015 Eliot Society advances, feminism, gender, sexuality, the body, lecture will be drawn from a new project entitled Ages disability, ecology, etc.) of Innocence: Culture and Literature from Pax Britannica to • how does the poem relate to the milieu of little the American Century.