Old Possum Renewed

...The custom has its advantages...

...An announcement in Georgian on the (expressionless, unsmiling) public address system tells you that your luggage has gone to Riga rather than Heathrow...

...For Eliot this would ensure, as it has ensured, a meretricious art judged not on its objective merits but on the acceptability of its experiences, its "point of view...

...In the same series Paul Addison rescued Churchill from his detractors...

...Elsewhere he says, accurately enough: "I think Eliot writes acutely about sex—in all its variety...

...His conversion to the Church of England in 1927 continues to be seen in many quarters as an act of reactionary deviance...

...In the undeniable inconsistencies of Eliot's work, Raine sees not schizophrenia but honesty...

...Eliot was skeptical of emotions not because he felt them too little but because he felt them too much...

...He scoffs at what Eliot called "dissociation of sensibility," or his theory that, between Donne and Tennyson, thought and feeling parted company and never reunited...

...Ash Wednesday" argues precisely this position—the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life—and fails...

...And, indeed, it is in accordance with such subjective standards that Eliot's own art is now misjudged...

...In After Strange Gods (1933), Eliot described some of the characteristic fallacies of romantic art: "It is a cardinal point of faith in a romantic age to believe that there is something admirable in violent emotion for its own sake...

...The editors of Oxford's "Lives and Legacies" series should be commended for commissioning the poet and critic Craig Raine to revisit Eliot's work...

...Eliot never depreciated emotion per se...

...Poetry is not analogous to an announcement on a public address system...

...the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings...

...Were they not difficult, they would not be worth struggling towards...

...His attitude to religion was publicly uncompromising: he didn't want religion to make any compromise with the secular impulse...

...In another passage, he says that "Eliot's religious writings demonstrate the angularity and awkwardness, the unbiddable intransigence of sincere belief...

...This is true...

...Eliot rebelled against Arnold's influence by extolling what he considered the classical virtues of reason and objectivity against the romantic vices of emotionalism and subjectivity...

...At that moment, you won't get the joke...

...If Arthur Waugh wanted him exhibited as a literary delinquent whose antics should dissuade the young from preposterous experimentation, the custodians of the new political correctness continue to hold him up as an example of antiEdward Short is writing a book about John Henry Newman and his contemporaries...

...Its meaning extends beyond the whereabouts of luggage...

...Here is a thesis that elucidates the full range of Eliot's art...

...As a young man he might have famously asserted, "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion...

...From Prufrock (1917) to The Elder Statesman (1958), Eliot plumbed what Arnold called "the unregarded River of our Life...

...For Raine, "Eliot's theory is surely a myth—almost Wildean in its sacrifice of rigour to eclat...

...He has written a book that all Eliot fans and all Eliot foes will want to read...

...Understanding, like the knowledge it attempts to acquire, is a matter of degrees...

...there was nothing of the Vicar of Bray in Eliot...

...If the meaning of poetry could be communicated only after it was understood, our aesthetic experience should be radically impoverished...

...for the wisdom of the younger generation was found to be fostered more surely by a single example than by a world of homily and precept...

...Raine's sympathy for his subject is not unqualified...

...Raine's contribution will usher in a more balanced assessment of a man who hardly deserves the obloquy to which he has been subjected...

...As poet, critic, and publisher, he set the literary standards of his age as decisively as Samuel Johnson had set those of his...

...In "Religion and Literature" (1935), he is certain that modern literature is "simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life...

...Poetry that also happens to be difficult—Eliot's own poetry is a good example—must communicate before it is understood: Not, perhaps, most of its meaning, but enough to prompt the reader to reread, attend more closely, delve more deeply...

...There is no more honest catalogue of the sorrows of sex than "The Waste Land...

...Yet, from the 1920s until the '60s, Eliot's influence was immense...

...In excavating the buried life of T.S...

...In addition to being sloppy prosecutors, Julius and his friends are incompetent critics...

...But whereas Arnold saw only unfelt emotions in the "buried life," Eliot saw things "more distant than the stars and nearer than the eye...

...Some have even suggested that between the subversive poet and the orthodox critic there was something almost schizophrenic...

...In A Little Learning, Evelyn Waugh remarked of his father's not altogether joking jest: "This was the function he predicted for the future idol of the academies...

...You are in Tblisi airport...

...Eliot's critics need to familiarize themselves with the dramatic monologue...

...This is why renunciation had such an appeal for him, and why, in so many of his poems, that appeal is met with prayer...

...As his Selected Essays (1951) show, he enjoyed going against the grain...

...He is right to see that what the postmodernist academy finds most objectionable about Eliot is the "fundamental polarity" he proposes between "a theological view of the world, in which every action is significant and carries moral consequence, and a humanist view of the world, in which every action is drained of significance because there is neither salvation nor damnation, neither a heaven nor a hell, only moral opinion...

...Yet even in that early essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), he was careful to qualify: "But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things...

...Regarding the charge of anti-Semitism leveled at Eliot by Anthony Julius, George Steiner, and Louis Menand, Raine demonstrates that it has been brought by malice...

...His readings of "The Waste Land" (1922), "The Hollow Men" (1925), and "Ash Wednesday" (1930) reacquaint us with a dazzling poet...

...time present and time past...

...If their reasoning were applied to other poets, the authors of "My Last Duchess" and "The Farmer's Bride" would have to be charged with very dark inclinations...

...This is why he called himself a T.S...

...Eliot's art, Raine uncovers the unfamiliar compound ghost of genius...

...It is possible to argue that, therefore, the poetry is truer to reality than Eliot's theoretical position...

...The poetry of Pope, Johnson, Clare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Browning, and even Tennyson makes mincemeat of such a theory...

...and perhaps most insistently, "the loud lament of the disconsolate chimera...

...it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality...

...But the difficulty of true religion was precisely what attracted Eliot...

...Raine is more frequently right than wrong...

...After all, not knowing a thing, finding it mystifying, is often as much a part of understanding as knowing a thing...

...Worse, "many people act upon the assumption that the mere accumulation of 'experiences,' including literary and intellectual experiences, as well as amorous and picaresque ones, is—like the accumulation of money—valuable in itself...

...Many have been baffled or repulsed by Eliot's spirituality...

...But without any understanding, no communication is possible...

...Arthur Waugh spoke for many of his generation when he wrote of the innovative poet: "It was a classic custom in the family hall, when a feast was at its height, to display a drunken slave among the sons of the household, to the end that they, being ashamed at the ignominious folly of his gesticulations, might determine never to be tempted into such a pitiable condition themselves...

...You don't speak Georgian...

...He does acute justice to the variety of its disappointments...

...Its requirements are intractable, absolute—and difficult to fulfill...

...Raine is a shrewd, learned, and entertaining critic...

...This is amusing but unpersuasive...

...Eliot by Craig Raine Oxford, 224 pp., $21 "classicist in literature...

...let me Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken, The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships...

...Raine has done an equally adroit job of rescuing Eliot...

...Semitism, misogyny, and fascism...

...We know that we do not know...

...Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar" (1920), for example, as Raine shows, "is not an anti-Semitic poem, but a poem about anti-Semitism...

...Poets and critics around the world put themselves to school to his exacting discriminations...

...It is also at the heart of his idea of the "objective correlative," his insistence, as Raine says, that "the emotion of a character should be bodied forth in the action"—as Lady Macbeth's guilt is bodied forth in her sleepwalking...

...He shows Eliot's work preoccupied first and last with the "buried life," a theme that Eliot borrowed from a poem by Matthew Arnold, whom Raine convincingly depicts as Eliot's "poetic father figure...

...Then, with the collapse of academic standards in the 1960s and the rise of postmodernism, Eliot fell out of favor...

...But this is a quibble...

...Most readers would agree...

...For example, in "Marina" (1930): This form, this face, this life Living to live in a world of time beyond me...

...motives late revealed...

...Raine is equally dismissive of Eliot's theory that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood": If you do not speak a language, you may communicate by bodily gesture—smiling or tearing your hair— because these gestures are understood...