T. S. ELIOT: A VOICE DESCANTING Also by Shyamal Bagchee T. S. ELIOT ANNUAL No.1 (editor) PERSPECTIVES ON O'NEILL: New Essays T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting Centenary Essays Edited by SHYAMAL BAGCHEE University of Alberta Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-10106-1 ISBN 978-1-349-10104-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-10104-7 Editorial matter and selection© Shyamal Bagchee 1990 ©The Macmillan Press Ltd 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1990 978-0-333-46100-6 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data T. S. Eliot: A Voice Descanting: centenary essays I edited by Shyamal Bagchee. p. em. ISBN 978-0-312-03697-3 1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Steams), 1888-19~riticism and interpretation. I. Bagchee, Shyamal. PS3509.L43Z87245 1990 821'. 912-dc20 89-38413 CIP Contents List of Plates Vll Notes on the Contributors viii Editor's Note xi Four Quartets: Four Paintings by David Finn xiii 1. 'Preludes' as Prelude: In Defence of Eliot as Symboliste Charles Altieri 1 2. The Waste Land: A Drama of Images Armin Paul Frank 28 3. 'It is impossible to say just what I mean': The Waste Land as Transcendent Meaning Russell Elliott Murphy 51 4. Circles of Progress in T. S. Eliot's Poetry: Ash-Wednesday as a Model Lois A. Cuddy 68 5. Eliot, Pound and 'Burnt Norton' Keith Alldritt 100 6. Knowing Reality: A Reading of Four Quartets Patrick Grant 109 7. 'What is the wind doing?': Winds and Their Functions in Eliot's Poetry Marianne Thormiihlen 122 8. Eliot and the Ghost of Poe Grover Smith 149 9. Reflections on T. S. Eliot's Vers Libre Peter Egri 164 v vi Contents 10. 'Scene Again' Robin Grove 177 11. Eliot and the Mutations of Objectivity Richard Shusterman 195 12. T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis G. Singh 226 13. Eliot and the Poetics of 'Unpleasantness' Shyamal Bagchee 255 14. Eliot's Significance as a Critic: Then and Now John Needham 271 Index 290 List of Plates 1. 'Through the first gate I Into our first world 0 0 .' 'Burnt Norton' 20 'Old men ought to be explorers 0 0 0' 'East Coker' 30 'The Sea is the land's edge also, 0 0 0' 'The Dry Salvages' 40 'At the source of the longest river 0 0 0' 'Little Gidding' vii Notes on the Contributors Keith Alldritt is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Among his publications are Eliot's 'Four Quartets': Poetry as Chamber Music, An Essay in Literary History, as well as books on Orwell and Lawrence. Professor Alldritt is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (UK). Charles Altieri, Professor of English at the University of Washing­ ton, is a distinguished scholar of Modern and postmodern litera­ ture. His numerous articles and books include Self & Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry and Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding. Lois A. Cuddy is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. She has published a number of essays on Eliot and has completed a book on his poetry. Peter Egri is Professor of English, American and Comparative Literature at the University of Budapest. Among his many books are James Joyce and Thomas Mann: Avantgardism and Modernity and Chekhov and O'Neill. His critical essays have appeared in Canadian, American, French and Hungarian journals. David Finn lives in New York. He has published a book of paintings inspired by Yeats's Byzantium poems. Black Swan Books of Connecticut is to produce an edition of Mr Finn's sensitive collection of 108 paintings based on Four Quartets. The four plates included here are from that series of paintings. Armin Paul Frank of Gottingen University has written extensively on Eliot, K. Burke, aesthetics and criticism, American and British literature, media and translation, and is Founding Director of the Gottingen Research Center in Literary Translation. Patrick Grant is Professor of English at the University of Victoria. Among his seven major books are Images and Ideas in Literature of the English Renaissance, Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief and Literature and the Discovery of Method in the English Renaissance. In viii Notes on the Contributors lX addition, he has published numerous essays in journals such as JEGP, ELH, RLS, MLQ, UTQ and the Shakespeare Quarterly. Robin Grove is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Melbourne. Grove is a frequent contributor to The Critical Review (Canberra) and has written essays on Pope, Jane Austen, Shake­ speare and Andrew Marvell. Russell Elliott Murphy is Editor of the Yeats Eliot Review and an Associate Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has published articles on both Eliot and Yeats and has just completed a book-length study of the latter. John Needham teaches English at Massey University, New Zea­ land. A specialist on modern literature and criticism, Dr Needham has previously published a study of I. A. Richards, The Completest Mode. Richard Shusterman, formerly of the University of the Negev, now teaches Philosophy at Temple University, Philadelphia. Professor Shusterman has published widely on Eliot, aesthetics and critical theory. His books include The Object of Literary Criticism and T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Literary Criticism. G. Singh is Professor and Head of the Department of Italian at The Queen's University, Belfast. He has published very extensively in the fields of literary modernism, criticism and aesthetics. He is, moreover, a poet whose work has been translated into many languages. Among his numerous books are A Critical Study of Eugenio Montale's Poetry, Prose and Criticism and F. R. Leavis: The Critic as Anti-Philosopher. Grover Smith, the distinguished Eliot scholar, is Professor of English at Duke University. Among his publications are the authoritative edition of Aldous Huxley's letters, The Waste Land, and the indispensable T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Marianne Thormahlen teaches English at the University of Lund. She has published essays on T. S. Eliot's poetry as well as two books: Eliot's Animals and 'The Waste Land': A Fragmentary Wholeness. * * * X Notes on the Contributors Shyamal Bagchee teaches English, American and Canadian litera­ ture at the University of Alberta. Editor of the T. 5. Eliot Annual (Macmillan) and Founding Editor of the Yeats Eliot Review, he has published essays on Toumeur, Henry King, Wordsworth, Thoreau, Melville, Yeats, Eliot, Yvor Winters, Tagore, Derek Walcott and others in Canadian, British and American journals. Editor's Note It is probably not an exaggeration to say that the image of literary modernism that has prominently prevailed in the postmodern consciousness has been ominously spectral rather than, say, benignly old-fashioned. Because ghostly images assume propor­ tions that are neither comforting nor ignorable, the spectre of modernism we have conjured up has been for the most part threatening and unappeasable. There is obviously something of the Bloomian slaying of precursors in much of the recent revaluation of the canon of twentieth-century literature. It is also true that of all modernist writers no one has been more clearly identified as a threat to contemporary sensibility than T. S. Eliot. The postmodern revision of literary history has justifiably reco­ vered for us several 'lost' writers of tremendous power and imagination who were previously given only minor, decorative or even cult status. In this context one thinks of, say, Gertrude Stein. Others, like William Carlos Williams, have become deservedly more central to our understanding of the literature of this century than they were before. Yet others, once regarded mainly as major modernist authors- like James Joyce- continue to be revealed to us not only as precursors but also as high priests of postmodernism. For a considerable period, Eliot's position, both as poet and critic, seemed to remain fixed in an unambiguous and unalterable adversary role. I say 'seemed' because in this case in an important way the appearance was particularly deceptive. Postmodern revaluations have usually been marked by an impulse toward self-examination and reflexivity - perhaps its most significant difference from previous epochal and periodic revisions and retellings of history - giving most of its important pronouncements an in-built dynamic potential. This dynamism of contemporary criticism does not, of course, preclude veerings and hesitations. So, the apparently immutable attitude toward Eliot, too, has often concealed intricate and important readjustments of perspective. While this is not the place to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the processes of postmodernism and of its subtle but vital nature, it is relevant to point out the discrepancy that exists between the supposed durability of the adversary position of Eliot in the contemporary xi xii Editor's Note estimate of literary history and the gradually emerging tentati­ veness of that assigned role. I hope the essays in this volume will testify to the continuing pertinence of Eliot's works to our critical climate. These essays were written with an awareness of the centenary of Eliot's birth. However, that awareness did not determine to an equal extent the direction or pitch of each piece contained in this book. Certainly, some of the critics included here review or assess their selected areas of Eliot studies, and this is most appropriate. Mostly, however, the authors have written without any overt concern about the possible relationship between their projects and the centennial.