Entering Eliot's Mind

...His intuitive sympathy for literature notwithstanding, Donoghue was initially headed toward a different career...

...Eliot (Yale, 313 pp., $26.95), despite the apparent decline in Eliot's reputation, his oeuvre remained the subject of scrupulous scholarly attention...

...The same loftiness too often characterizes critical writing today, but it is less apt to be employed for matters of taste than discussions of competing ideologies...

...Donoghue pointedly observes that Eliot was able to remain close to people whose ideas he disagreed with—an increasingly rare trait in intellectual circles...

...He started out studying lieder singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music...

...Eliot" (NL, December 9, 1963), professors and their students poured over Eliot's works with a fervor and microscopic attention usually reserved for the study of Holy Scripture...

...Donoghue rightly notes that Eliot often captures a dreamlike sense of elemental feelings uncensored by a logical or conventional ordering...

...or that a large number of ethnic Albanians should live in Serbia...

...Our understanding of his work was in fact strengthened first by the publication of the facsimile of the original annotated drafts of The Waste Land (1971), then by his juvenilia, Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909-1917 (1998), which includes the original version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock...

...Eliot himself subsequently refused to allow it to be reprinted...

...The highly polished lyrics discussing "universal" themes so typical of modernism were replaced by a conversational mode that was local, discursive, self-referential...

...William Empson, that militant atheist, argued that Eliot's attitudes about "free-thinking Jews" were in fact shaped by his repudiation of his Unitarian upbringing...

...sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back...

...A 1965 obituary by John Ciardi in the Saturday Review dismissed the Nobel Laureate as a rather minor poet compared with Robert Frost...

...Michael Hastings' [movie] Tom and Viv is an extreme version of it...

...I wanted every poem I read to be my singing school...

...Explaining himself to a friend, he wrote that his newfound faith "has brought me not happiness but a sense of something beyond happiness and therefore more terrifying than ordinary pain and misery...

...But the critic is not merely concerned with rediscovering the poetic roots of a writer who was, for too long, treated as an expounder of philosophical ideas...

...Few contemporary readers share Walt Whitman's enthusiasm for phrenology and similar pseudosciences—nor is it necessary to think the dead speak with us through Ouija boards to be a Merrill fan, or to become a Zen Buddhist to appreciate the work of WS...

...Donoghue's passionate readings make Eliot sound fresh, lyrical and exciting...

...The book's title is taken from "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" by Yeats...

...Prufrock is brooding over his insufficiency in mock-epic terms, but the terms don't remove his conviction of being inadequate...

...Donoghue sums up by adding, "I see him as a character in a novel by Dostoyevsky...

...On a happier day he would put one fragment beside another and stir some energy and reverberation between them...

...After its publication, he considered penning an account of his college years in Dublin...

...By making the book partly autobiographical, he has the grace to tell you what he believes, and why, without trying to sound like an impartial arbiter of literary values, or using the Olympian tone that was one of the modernist critics' most irritating traits...

...Merwin...

...Words Alone is also partly autobiographical, a portrait of a young critic whose life was changed when he became enthralled with Eliot's poems...

...We do not have to agree with his belief in order to respond to his poetry...

...For Eliot, religion was vaster and more profound than a code of morals—after all, secularism expounds ethics too...

...While Donoghue is building up his portrait of a character tormented by a sense of futility, one comes to understand why Eliot's perception of an uncomfortably powerful and hard-toplease God offers him a release from the prison of self and makes the universe meaningful...

...In school, he and his classmates mostly were taught "Yeatsian pathos [and] rollicking verse, preferably in anapestic tetrameters, easy to memorize...

...That was written in 1934, before most people could conceive that a Western country would actually try to exterminate Europe's Jews, whether observant or not...

...The attack was led by Harold Bloom with a crusader's zeal...

...Donoghue has the ability, though, to illuminate literary matters by recounting his own experiences...

...The high seriousness that characterized Eliot's neometaphysical school gave way to a barrage of frivolity...

...In the Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1948), Eliot described the "auditory imagination" as "a feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word...

...When he encountered Eliot's work, it opened up a new world...

...In The Waste Land fragments of speeches by a bewildering cast of voices are overheard...

...Donoghue himself dislikes many of Eliot's comments: especially his declaring in After Strange Gods that it is important for a Christian society to have a "unity of religious background...

...Much current academic disapproval of Eliot centers around his theological predilections— he was a convert to orthodox Christianity—along with allusions to Jews in both his essays and poetry that are now considered anti-Semitic...

...At a time when many students were being taught to misread The Waste Land as a lesson in Western civilization, Donoghue was responding to the incantatory and lyric qualities of its language...

...Eliot was, as he said of Samuel Johnson, "a poet for those who want poetry and not something else" such as "a day-dream or a metamorphosis of [the readers'] own feeble desires and lusts, or what they believe to be 'intensity' of passion...

...Understandably, that champion of the Romantic canon hadabone to pick with modernist ideals, but many other critics decided it was open season too...

...One can imagine how much Eliot, an aficionado of music-hall comedy, would have loved that comparison...

...We might well think ourselves present at the fall of the Tower of Babel—where the ability of human beings to fully communicate was lost— needing to clutch at what little meaning we can grasp...

...By the 1960s, the confessional school was bombarding readers with tales of breakdowns and divorces, disregarding the dictum that one's work should exclude the personal...

...Donoghue is convinced that his subject was "a man of exceptionally intense and dangerous feeling, [who] feared for his sanity, and had cause to fear for it...

...As a Catholic, Donoghue is fully aware that dismissing Christian belief is still considered intellectually respectable in the university community...

...The demeanor he turned toward people was palpably a mask to conceal the feelings he lived in dread of...

...He read the work as if it were "music becoming speech...

...They display a more personal and passionate Eliot: someone struggling to capture not the essence of ideas, but emotions that lie on the edge of what can be expressed in words...

...Donoghue reminds the reader that, at least in his early work, Eliot "didn't start with a theme or something he wanted to say...

...Think of the lighthearted chatter of the New York school's verse, or the witty Cole Porter-style patter of James Merrill...

...Understandably, he responded to a writer who based some of his greatest poems on the structures of Beethoven string quartets, and named many of his early works after such musical forms as "prelude," "rhapsody," "caprice," or "suite...

...Although this section of Words Alone may strike some readers as defensive, in the present hostile climate an embattled tone is not surprising...

...the very dark night of the desert...

...It was inevitable that this reverent attention would eventually provoke an opposite reaction...

...Yet, as Denis Donoghue observes in Words Alone: The Poet T.S...

...Before long, condemnations once reserved for Ezra Pound's traitorous anti-Semitic broadcasts from wartime Italy were being redirected toward Eliot...

...He also argues that Eliot's detractors misread and caricature his intellectual positions...

...The Hollow Men" Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick now, here, now, always— Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after...

...In default of knowing what poetry was, I settled for having poems take possession of my mind as Schumann's 'Ich hab' in Traum geweinet' did...

...Both volumes contradict the image of the literary elder statesman revered by modernist critics...

...PERHAPS THE greatest strength of Words Alone lies in the critic's frankness about his own perspective...

...La Figlia che Piange" My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence never can retract By this, and this only, we have existed Winch is not to be found in our obituaries The Waste Land Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star...

...When you studied with some of them, as I did, this wasn't immediately clear because they eliminated the personal, making their judgments sound universal...

...By the 1970s, Eliot's reputation was in a free fall...

...For example, about the line from "Prufrock" that reads "And in short I was afraid," he says, '"In short' retains a touch of dignity, like Buster Keaton before he sinks, his body standing to attention, beneath the waves...

...English courses became guidebooks to the writers quoted in The Waste Land, or alluded to in Four Quartets...

...Donoghue contends that the intended meaning of this statement is akin to a contemporary assertion that "reasons of race and religion combine to make it undesirable that any large number of Palestinians should live in the predominantly Jewish state of Israel, or that a large number of Irish Catholic nationalists should live in the predominantly Protestant and loyalist Northern Ireland...

...Poets rebelled against Eliot even earlier...

...His poetry background was weak...

...That poem concludes: But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancingpast us whirled To the cracked tune that Chronos sings, Words alone are certain good...

...and reasons of race and religion combine to make any number of freethinking Jews undesirable...

...Some of Donoghue's judgments surprise and delight with analogies we might not have made, yet see as wonderfully apt...

...As forthe charges of anti-Semitism, the book's defense will doubtless fail to persuade those who passionately condemn attitudes that once seemed merely unenlightened...

...As Howard Nemerov remarked in an article in these pages called "Twenty-five Years with Mr...

...Donoghue quotes from the poet's letters to show how astute Empson's intuition was...

...Now that 'Prufrock' seems to be the only poem of Eliot's that young people in America read, I find that my students at New York University take it as an uncanny description of themselves, their distress, their fear of having already failed...

...Of late, a good deal has been written on their ideology of taste— their blindness to literary values other than their own...

...For instance, in discussing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" he notes that initially he understood the poem as being "about a man's dread of being no good...

...Dreams often evoke powerful emotions through a jumble of associations that our conscious thoughts would never put together...

...Ten years ago, Donoghue wrote Warrenpoint, a more conventional memoir of his lower-middle-class childhood in Ireland while attending a Christian Brothers school like the young James Joyce...

...By his own account, what came first was a fragment of a rhythm, a motif he felt impelled to stabilize in a few words...

...Bertrand Russell [who had an affair with Eliot's first wife, Vivien] seems to have started this piece of lore, and Virginia Woolf sent it abroad through Bloomsbury...

...On Poetry Entering Eliot's Mind By Phoebe Pettingell Throughout the many years of modernist domination in academia, several generations of literature majors grew up on a rigorous diet of T.S...

...an author writing about his own marriage and breakdown, not the decadence of Western civilization in the 20th century...

...Those words might suggest a few more—or might not—and the fragments would be set aside...

...I had far rather walk, as I do, in daily terror of eternity, than feel that this was only a children's game in which all the contestants would receive equally worthless prizes in the end...

...Growing up in Ireland, where there were no choices and one was lucky to get a job of any kind, I was likely to internalize the theme and to find Prufrock already defeated...

...Donoghue's book extends this interpretation: "For many years it was common to say that Eliot was a cold, bloodless person...

...I myself first read "Prufrock" before I was in my teens, and it took me half a lifetime to realize that the speaker's "middleaged" tone is ironic—that people in their mid-20s frequently think of themselves as jaded and growing old...

...Burnt Norton" Each of these verses can be paraphrased satisfactorily, yet they remain tantalizingly opaque...

...However, he realized that like many young people who fall in love with literature, the significant part of his life and interests in those years was devoted to reading rather than events or people...

...Best of all, Words A lone reminds us what it was like to discover poetry and be transformed by its song...

...Whatever the case, much as we may continue to wince at Eliot's remarks about Jews, it is unreasonable to classify him with Pound because of them...

...In other words, his work does not play on our feelings, but uses language to expose and exorcise his own by turning them into aloof lyrics that echo in our imaginations and tease us with their strangeness: Sometimes these cogitations still amaze The ti'oubled midnight and the noon's repose...