T. S. Eliot 1888-1965
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS WRITING T. S. Eliot 1888-1965 By Stanley Edgar Hyman The death of Thomas Stearns Eliot diminishes us considerably. In 1950, Eliot appeared on the cover of Time, having achieved that...
...Let me also wear/Such deliberate disguises/Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves," Eliot wrote in "The Hollow Men" in 1925, his time of greatest desperation and misery...
...It is the only immortality in which I can share his belief, and it is surely the only one worth having...
...The figure of Sweeney, apeneck and gross, is as much an aspect of his creator as is timid and fastidious Prufrock, and the two coexisted in Eliot very much as Bloom and Stephen coexisted in Joyce...
...I do not think that there has been any verse in English in our century better than its second movement, in which a lyric of profound tragic acceptance is followed by an Inferno encounter after a London air raid, or its fourth movement, a Pentecostal fire sermon...
...Little Gidding" is named after a 17th-century Anglican community in Huntingdonshire, now the site of a restored chapel where Eliot went to pray in 1937...
...This is not as I would wish it, necessarily, but it is no less true for that...
...Is Eliot a great poet...
...The critical doctrines, with their emphasis on escape from emotion and from "personal and private agonies," are too narrowly, as I point out in The Armed Vision, "the aesthetic of a suffering man.' One cannot have a high opinion of the plays, except for the splendid eloquence of the Chorus in Murder in the Cathedral...
...The ancestral involvement (key images come from The Bake named The Gouvernour, by Eliot's East Coker kinsman, Sir Thomas Elyot) releases a remarkable eloquence, as in the short fourth movement, from which I quote part of the first stanza: The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part...
...Eliot was a great poet, a poet of increasing mastery right through Four Quartets, and ultimately a great devotional poet...
...Journey of the Magi" (1927) among the Ariel Poems...
...The third movement is certainly a reconciliation with "one who died blind and quiet," who is at once Milton, Joyce, and all such regicides, dissenters, levellers, puritans, socialists, atheists, and free-thinking Jews...
...The other pervasive sense that the poetry gives of the concealed personality is its terrible suffering and guilt...
...and by its direct opposite in I John 4:20, "If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar...
...Prufrock has seen the mermaids "riding seaward on the waves...
...The central doctrine of Christianity for Eliot, we learn from Four Quartets (where it is the only dogma named), is Incarnation...
...The fructifying rain never comes in The Waste Land, but there is a beautiful freeing of the waters in the imagery of sailing near the end: Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands The same imagery of New England sailing as mastery and freedom, strongly nostalgic and erotic, reappears in Ash-Wednesday and "The Dry Salvages" in Four Quartets...
...Triumphal March" (1931) from the unfinished Coriolan—those are merely the first that come to mind...
...After 1930 the imagery of guilt predominates...
...In my view, Four Quartets is the finest of the three, and it increases in power and beauty as it progresses...
...Now Eliot's ashes, in accord with his wish, have been deposited in the church in East Coker...
...In 1958, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, Eliot modestly told V S. Pritchett, in an interview for the New York Times Book Review: "But my poetry is American...
...The two rival ways of Christianity, mystic and humanitarian, can best be characterized by the statement of St...
...It lacks a close personal involvement, as its title place, a Gloucestershire manor house that an 18thcentury owner set on fire, lacks personal associations for Eliot...
...They are among the glories of our age...
...Purely American...
...At all times there is a curious lovely image of remembered happiness, most fully expressed in lines from The Waste Land: "when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,/Your arms full, and your hair wet...
...I do not think that the criticism, with the possible exception of one essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," has the same permanence...
...it is St...
...Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer's art The wounded surgeon is Christ (in a metaphor adapted from a sermon by Bishop Andrewes...
...but where Christian humility follows naturally from Incarnation (man must humble himself as God did), what followed from it in Eliot's theology was transcendence rather than immanence...
...I don't think my criticism will...
...The criticism was invaluable in its time, as I argue in Poetry and Criticism, in changing the taste of our age and creating an audience for the "low seriousness" of Eliot's early poetry...
...His poetry is American, and it will last...
...To my taste, it is Eliot's masterwork...
...East Coker," named for the Somersetshire village where the Eliots lived before they emigrated to America, is enormously better...
...John of the Cross, "Hence the soul cannot be possessed of the divine union, until it has divested itself of the love of created beings...
...Eliot's wife, a ballet dancer named Vivienne Haigh Haigh-Wood, whom he married in 1915, was in a nursing home from 1930 until her death in 1947...
...Eliot's major poems are The Waste Land (1922), Ash-Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1936-1942...
...WRITERS WRITING T. S. Eliot 1888-1965 By Stanley Edgar Hyman The death of Thomas Stearns Eliot diminishes us considerably...
...Yet the poetry strongly suggests that this frosty image was artificial, masking a passionate nature and great emotional turbulence...
...I hope my poetry will last...
...Eliot seems to have had a strong impulse toward Christian brotherhood, but to have been driven by his backward devils to place a higher value on the Christianity that denies the world...
...At every period of his life, until his interest switched to drama, Eliot wrote lyric poems of rare magnificence: "La Figlia che Piange" in Prufrock and Other Observations (1917...
...he asked, and promptly replied, "His own age would not call him so, and doubts that posterity will...
...In a moving tribute to Eliot in these pages (December 9, 1963), Howard Nemerov wrote: "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...
...Fifteen years later it is possible to say that Time was as wrong in 1950 as it had been in its first issue in 1923, when it reported rumors that The Waste Land was a hoax...
...the bowler and rolled umbrella of the City bank clerk, gentleman publisher, and connoisseur of Stilton...
...It was this that Yeats, to his detriment, could rarely bring himself to do...
...Stephen's...
...In 1950, Eliot appeared on the cover of Time, having achieved that dubious eminence as the result of his first Broadway hit, The Cocktail Party...
...Eliot's disguises have included the celebrated "four-piece suit" of which Virginia Woolf made fun...
...An imagery in the poetry that is always associated with gratification and release is the New England coast, where Eliot spent boyhood summers...
...The public voice was dour and ascetic, certainly...
...Beyond those, Eliot produced three ambitious "major" works, in some cases by combining lyrics previously published independently...
...Burnt Norton," the first, developed out of fragments discarded from Murder in the Cathedral during rehearsals...
...This otherworldly Christianity combined very well with a variety of most unattractive social and political views that Eliot held...
...I have attacked them in The Armed Vision and I shall not recapitulate that attack here...
...John of the Cross' terrifying sentence that precedes the fragments of Sweeney Agonistes...
...alas, away from him...
...Eliot was separated from her in 1933, and lived as a bachelor until he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, in 1957...
...Where one's heart went out to Joyce, and one's hat at least went off to Yeats, what could one offer the remote figure of T. S. Eliot, O. M., but a genteel nod...
...The light verse about cats, and such infrequent late verse as "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,' were never more than curiosities...
...Before his first marriage the imagery of loneliness is overwhelming in such poems as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock...
...Marina," which Elizabeth Drew calls "the only purely joyous poem Eliot has ever written," is also his most sea-drenched poem, transferring the recognition scene of Pericles to the Maine coast...
...The old man in "Gerontion" recalls "Gull against the wind, in the windy straits/of Belle Isle...
...Nemerov reminded us, in these pages, that Eliot enlarged our concept of poetry beyond the limits of an English country churchyard, but nevertheless returned us to one in the Quartets...
...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...
...In the accompanying story, an anonymous entrailreader took the long view...
...Ultimately it is the poetry that matters...
...The reason for beginning with these whimpers is that they may call up an appropriate bang...
...Sweeney Among the Nightingales" in Poems (1920...
...As early as 1927, with great perception, Francis Fergusson wrote of Eliot in The American Caravan as "romantic" and "passionate...
...The Dry Salvages," named after a group of rocks off Cape Ann, Massachusetts, develops with mounting authority after its magnificent beginning: "I do not know much about gods, but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god...
...the striped trousers proper to a Kensington churchwarden, a vestryman at fashionable St...
...Oscar Cargill is probably right in taking the end of the second movement of "Little Gidding" to constitute (however adequately) repentance of, and apology for, Eliot's racism...
...All that the rigors of space permit me to do with the complex miracles of language in the passage is call attention to them with Roman type...
Vol. 48 • February 1965 • No. 3
