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T.S. Eliot reversed William Carlos Williams's maxim, “No ideas but in things.” For Eliot, there were no things but in ideas. To the slightly older Williams, an American who stayed home, Eliot's metaphysical concerns and dense allusiveness were anathema. However, Eliot came by them honestly. Before he settled in London, he'd been a student of philosophy, had attended Harvard, the Sorbonne and Oxford, and was heir to the Transcendentalism of his New England youth.
But Eliot was also a product of his time. The endlessly anthologized The Waste Land, first published in 1922, is not so much a Great Poem as it is a memorial to the dead of the First World War, for whom lilacs in spring are a mockery and “April is the cruellest month.” Quickened by his friend Ezra Pound's editorial pencil, this monument of modernism comes complete with a syncopated structure, abrupt changes of register, forays into anthropology, Vedantic importations and erudite, sometimes gnomic, footnotes. Among other things, it is also a vitriolic rebuke to the accidie, vulgarity and moral shambles of the postwar years.
To Eliot's time, distasteful to him in so many ways, may also be imputed the anti-Semitism, polite at best, that partly accounts for his poem Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar. Admirers have been at pains to explain away such lines in his work as, “The rats are underneath the piles./ The jew is underneath the lot.” The Anglo-Catholicism that Eliot adopted did much to curb such reflex prejudices. Without causing him to dismiss the quotidian, it made him examine his own restive soul.
Eliot's life bridged great divides: American and Englishman, poet and critic, a husband who had a long, unhappy first marriage and a short, happy second one. He had to reconcile oppositions within himself. Yet this apostle of impersonality, this three-piece-suited former banker, had a playful, rueful, even exhibitionistic side. Why else would he title a poem Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, and write a delightful book of comic verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, much later the basis for the hit musical Cats? It's hard not to detect in the ironically titled The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the signature poem of his first collection, a partial self-portrait in Prufrock himself, who bleakly announces, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” and anxiously asks, “Do I dare to eat a peach?”
The varied voices of the early poems were dress rehearsals for the verse drama of his last years, such as Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot recognized that a momentous shift in his work had occurred when he published the separate sections of his greatest work, Four Quartets, at the start of the 1940s. He had put aside the barbed satire and disgusted dyspepsia of his early work. He was no longer obsessed with straw-man financiers, hearty hedonists and red-peril Marxists. He had bigger business to transact.
Magnificently cadenced and modulated, Four Quartets is an extended mystical meditation on how timelessness intervenes in, inflects and contradicts the productions of time. In this enquiry, he joins the artists and sages who have been engaged in this perennial philosophy, the exploration of the ground of being. And, in this respect at least, Four Quartets harks back to “Shantih shantih shantih,” the closing words of The Waste Land, which he footnote-glosses as “a formal ending to an Upanishad. ‘The Peace which passeth understanding' is our equivalent to this word.”
Eliot the poet has to be rescued from thesis mongers and academic apologists, and liberated from the ballast of both an outsize critical reputation and his own Olympian criticism. His humanity has to be restored. After all, The Collected Poems is not just a seismograph of the interwar era, or a rendering of the high culture its author helped to create. It is the objective correlative of his nervous crises. The Collected Poems is like a large stony island that inexplicably looms in the mid-Atlantic. It is intimidating and unavoidable.
Fraser Sutherland has published 13 books, eight of them poetry
