Twenty Five Years with Mr. Eliot
NEMEROV, HOWARD
ON POETRY Twenty-five Years with Mr. Eliot By Howard Nemerov Here once again is the old and new and familiar Book, like a new edition of the Bible, this time with Apocrypha in the form of a...
...Eliot, we have seen Karl Shapiro get into the arena and have a go...
...A mere quarter-century later I think of the lines as fairly competing to replace a couplet by Robert MontgomeryThe soul, aspiring, pants her source to mount...
...I accepted the guarantee of the learned that it was "metaphysical wit," and believed devoutly that such things could not be read by "inveterate visualisers," but secretly feared I must be one of those contemptible persons, for I kept seeing that patient as on a great billboard advertising some monstrous anemia of the spirit...
...Also that a part of this reverence, as experienced first by a very young man somewhat snobbishly inclined, was based on the difficulty of the poems, a trait in the intellectual realm corresponding to austerity in the spiritual, and that I no longer saw the poems as difficult...
...part of a grand, minutely articulated human enterprise...
...It goes with this that if I broke down on what may have been my 73rd "close reading" of the Four Quartets, it was my hopeless commentary that I giggled at more than the poems...
...though Mr...
...Eliot By Howard Nemerov Here once again is the old and new and familiar Book, like a new edition of the Bible, this time with Apocrypha in the form of a few occasional pieces, and, among the Ariel Poems, "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" (T...
...That comparison with the Bible will hold equally for its believers, its atheists, and its apostates...
...Meanwhile, I may have said enough in reminder of how much a very reckonable attempt both in poetry and thought has mattered to us...
...Eliot's work there arises, revealed to us by the relentless efforts of so many clerks and scribes, the general problem that might be thought of as the assault of language upon mind, whereby the muchmultiplied effort of our age to find "the meaning" of something leads out time and time again to where the ghostly meaninglessness of everything beckons to despair-for these journeys end only with the desert or the sea...
...RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN But there I am quoting that man again...
...For behind the particular problem of Mr...
...But that is another story...
...Except for the influence of his poetry, with its special sort of perplexities, it is likely that nothing so altogether unintentional as a "young poet" would ever have seen the inside of the Faculty Club...
...Eliot might reasonably protest that every last derivative poem of it has already been paid many times over...
...We ought not to value familiarity only for its proverbial power of breeding something else...
...sec "Difficulties of a Statesman...
...and Mr...
...both of them indistinguishably do the damage that later will be written down as history...
...For better or worse, there must be ever so many of us who would not have attempted poetic composition except for that example, that voice, and the somewhat dour and wry ascetic charm which it conferred upon the art...
...It may be that we attend now upon that strange process whereby a work loses its immediate necessity and becomes "a classic" for those who live afterward, and that again is another story...
...Eliot was our hero, and he did a great deal for us (by "us" I mean largely but not exclusively people about my own age, especially those who tried to write poetry...
...To persuade us out of our parochialism into this world, he invented a great tradition for poetry, so that even as beginners we might know ourselves not bounded by an English country churchyard (to which his Quartets nevertheless return), but entrants upon the fair field full of folk entire...
...You mustn't weep or get mad, Spinoza said, but try to understand...
...There on the first page of text stand the proud and guilty words of Guido da Montefeltro, probably better known in American colleges than anything else in the Comedy, even Lasciate ogni speranza...
...There came the time, too, that I started doing this in class and got no further than "perhaps" before starting to giggle, something I had not at all expected...
...It seemed better that the students should read the poems on their own and care for them, if necessary, ignorantly, than that they should learnedly dislike them under my direction...
...I speak particularly to poets and teachers, considered either separately or together...
...There came the time I began to teach, and triedhow hard I tried!-to understand the Four Quartets...
...Eliot's work has had both the advantage and the related disadvantage, all in a very few years, of the kind of attention even Shakespeare and the Bible might presently, after centuries, be exhausted by...
...Not only Karl Shapiro, of course, who is the most recent (as of last week, anyhow): For years and years, an annual young poet has been led to the altar with poison ivy on his brow and ritual fadimans on his feet, and a voice has intoned something about his being destined to "lead modern poetry out of the waste land...
...When I was a sophomore I wrote an "analysis" of that passage as it related to Prufrock, to Mr...
...Eliot, to me, and was given a C+ for being too ingenious...
...2) To be a hero is also to be a villain...
...For it is natural enough that if you use language you will sooner or later use it up...
...at least I was easily able to occupy an hour expounding upon the very first passage: "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future," etc...
...I said that for many years, beginning when I was a pupil, I had looked on these poems as on The Word, that the reverence I had felt for them was freely given, and that I no longer felt it...
...It remains for me to thank Mr...
...It is impolite, as well as a little ludicrous, to have to mention this in company...
...Eliot, something I have never done, for his book, and end by paraphrasing-something so many of us have found it so hard not to do -a remark of his: Of course we know more than he does, and he is what we know...
...S. Eliot, Collected Poems 19091962, Harcourt, Brace & World, $5.00...
...I hope so, anyhow...
...For one example only, without the glamor of The Waste Land how many, brethren, would have got up enough hit-or-miss Italian to read Dante...
...The students were very good about all this, but I don't know just what I could have done that would have been right...
...The class was a trifle upset, for however Mr...
...He gave us, by precept as well as by example, an idea of what the art of poetry was...
...they did not seem so when we began, but, on the contrary, appeared to open a world of exciting possibility...
...that "great deal" will be the subject of the few observations I have now to make...
...When I got through behaving badly I tried to explain, as much to myself as to my pupils, what had happened...
...And, if understanding is comprised in commentary, there came the time that I did understand the Four Quartets...
...The canons of his art, as expressed not only in poems but in criticism, may now seem narrow and rigid...
...But first it is useful to add a couple of definitions: 1) What a man does for you he also does to you...
...those for whom it is a sacred book, and those for whom it used to be, as well as those for whom it wasn't ever...
...To open it is to be at once in a realm of memories and misremembered commentaries...
...As streams meander level with their fountwhich is quoted in The Stuffed Owl with Macauley's judicious comment: "On the whole, the worst similitude in the world...
...Eliot may have disagreed with Arnold about poetry's replacing religion, his poems, and especially those Quartets, had for many years made a fair show of doing the replacing-certainly they had more religion in them than most sermons, as well as offering, some said, a wider choice of religions-and the normal classroom expectation was reverence all the way...
...but such as our living is, we have made it off him for years, those of us who teach or who have taught...
...We have heard it is natural, or at least necessary, or anyhow that it happens, for sons to rise and slay their daddies, even their spiritual daddies...
...Finally, that I did not see it as fit for me to introduce them to the poems, since I saw no reason to think my present opinion better than my earlier opinion only because I had it later...
...And in the poetry business, with particular reference to Mr...
...I could do this with diagrams, with illuminating reference to The Family Reunion, with descriptions of Eternal Return, and with the feeling that something had been accomplished when I got done...
...We shall omit the ubi sunt which ordinarily comes at this point in the service, and proceed to the acknowledgment of our indebtedness...
...As to those of the brethren who do not teach, have not taught, and never will teachthose frequent lectures they give against "the academic" sufficiently indicate a similar indebtedness, one stage removed...
...Indeed, though the first impression made by his work was one of diffuseness and great difficulty, its later function was to concentrate and simplify the readers' notions of what poetry attempted, as well as what it achieved...
...And so: Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table, . . . The figure always used to worry me...
...He set us an example of the art of poetry, which by its seriousness and ambition successfully pressed the claim of poetry itself to be taken seriously in the world...
Vol. 46 • December 1963 • No. 25
