“In My End Is My Beginning”
The Second Coming of T. S. Eliot
Revised from the 1990 initial version 2007, 2010.
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By 1990, T. S. Eliot's centenary, five American literary generations made their marks since Eliot scandalized the reading world during the first wave of Modernism with his fractured and phantasmagoric verse, eventually winning it over. Yet so considerably had Eliot's influence over American poetry diminished thirty years after his death that poet and teacher Lisel Mueller observed that novice poets found it hard to picture "Eliot's supremacy during the forties and fifties, how his stature overshadowed everyone else's and how his critical ideas blanketed the literary scene in and out of academia."[1] Why? Because a number of American poets, who came of age in the 1950s and early 1960s, of Mueller's generation, the third to come after Eliot, yanked him off his throne as a necessary stratagem of their literary politics. Yet Eliot loyalists from this third generation, such as Donald Hall, with certain members of the fourth, anticipated in their centennial commemorations that younger generations of poets, rebelling against the narrow preoccupations of an outworn confessional mode, or the callow semiotic gamesmanship of its strongest academic competitor, would seek to recover a stronger sense of roots from Eliot's poetic, strongly infused with an extensive appreciation of world history.
Critic Paul Carroll, following Robert Bly, measures a generation in poetry briefer than the biological range of 20 to 33 years, since amongst up and coming poets new attitudes towards style, content, and tradition seem to emerge every 15 years.[2] A shared paradigm, which may or may not be immediately recognized as such, marks the new generation. Its embrace characterizes many of the most visible young poets, while many of their peers persevere with older paradigms and reject the new, which the innovators have usually adopted with great noise. Since considerable aesthetic differences occur from scene to scene, poet to poet, or even within individual poets at different junctures, hard and fast distinctions between innovators and traditionalists quickly weaken when we position specific figures within the constellation of their generation. Yet the observable trend remains that in learning their craft and discovering their sensibilities, the poets of a new generation share a literary situation that differs significantly from that of their immediate predecessors, if for no other reason than that the achievements and short-comings of those predecessors now come as givens instead of potentialities yet to be realized.
Admittedly, the use of the term "generation" is an inexact metaphor. Poets have more than one or two precursors and often expand their list of influences as they seek to supplement, attenuate or evade their first. To use Eliot himself as an example, his genealogy includes Laforge, Dante, Mallarmé, St. John of the Cross, Dryden and Donne. Eliot champions these poets in his criticism and imitates them in his verse, even at times, infamously, incorporating their lines verbatim at crucial points. But Eliot's lineage also includes disowned parents to whom Eliot (particularly in early career) refuses homage and even denigrates, namely Whitman, Tennyson, Poe, and Swinburne, whose echoes can be heard in Eliot's rhythms, textures and choice of imagery should anyone not misdirected by Eliot's critical pronouncements choose to listen for them.
Nor does literary genealogy simply branch from one generation to another. Some of Eliot's influences, including Laforge and Tennyson, did precede him just a generation before, yet others, perhaps Eliot's most informative, with whom perhaps he most consciously identifies, are more distant, Dante and even further. Studies that emphasize the "anxiety of influence,"[3] however valuable can also obscure how much the poets of a given generation, in coming to terms with the existing literary situation, learn from each other. Donald Hall writes in Remembering Poets that "I grew up as a poet, for better or worse, among other poets. I took most of my poetic education from brothers and sisters. I took least from father-teachers; although they were intelligent and critical, it was dangerous to take help from them (p. xiii)." This reticence to learn from the fathers supports Bloom's influence theory, of course, Hall sees the fathers being dangerous precisely because their influence is hard to avoid, but the point here is that the "anxiety of influence," with its dependence upon the parental metaphor, pays insufficient attention to sibling compacts and rivalries.
The third generation after Eliot, now in advanced age, engaged in an anti-academic insurgency whose scope compares well with that earlier revolution of Eliot's generation of Modernists. The New American poetry, as we may as well call it, since its exemplifying figures, ranging from Ginsberg to Levertov, Olson to Ashbery, appeared in Donald Allen's anthology of that name, both often extends some of Modernism's characteristic features (metrical experimentation, collage, disjunction, allusion to an alienated history or pre-history, plurality of voice) while it challenges Modernism's canon (Dante, Donne, et cetera) with its reappraisal of the Romantics and its resurrection of the radical, democratic spirit of Whitman. This reevaluation of aesthetic values reversed the pivotal role that Eliot's writing previously played during those years when his advertised appearance could fill a Mid-Western football stadium.[4] Donald Hall, like Lisel Mueller, speaks of how difficult it is (in the late 1970s) to evoke the authority Eliot commanded in the late 1940s, an authority no poet has since enjoyed. For Hall, "the Richard Wilburs, the Snyders, and the Ginsbergs" would not "wish the power that Eliot possessed or seemed to possess. It doesn't matter; no one can assume the center of that stage, as Eliot did: there is no longer such a stage."[5] Hall ruefully observes that for some of the palace fools, toppling the throne itself, regardless the occupant, was precisely the point, the demolition of the monarchy and not the dethroning of a particular monarch the goal.
Those third generation poets who identified with Eliot's aesthetic learned key lessons from him, as we would expect, with Eliot, whether in person or through his writings, making a lasting impression on their imaginations. In an article on "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," James Merrill vividly describes the effect Eliot's technical acumen had on his consciousness as a poet in gestation:
I first read "Prufrock" at the age of sixteen. Back then, in 1942, Mr. Eliot was very much on the scene— and from his work came a sense of live menace and fascination: you felt that any rash expository impulse might cause it to strike back like a rattlesnake. Some of us old-timers feel that way still.[6]
For Merrill, Eliot's accomplishments cause the intimidation, not Eliot's reputation as the predominant English and American poet. After describing how skillfully Eliot begins "Prufrock" with a Dantean epigraph, Merrill exclaims, "That an Eliot not yet thirty commanded attention by a stroke at once so cool and so incontrovertible is part of what I mean by saying that even now I tremble when I open his books."[7]
Eliot was instrumental for Howard Moss, who writes, "[Eliot] first made me know that drama and music are not incompatible." Eliot's early poems, such as "Portrait of a Lady," along with "Prufrock," showed Moss how shifting tonalities and distinctive, effective phrasing can distinguish a poet's dramatized personæ from the poet himself.[8]
Eliot would later separate drama from the lyric poem. Moss sees this as evidence that Eliot grew dissatisfied with the way he had earlier merged them. Yet still, The Four Quartets dramatize the poet's voice, "as if a long tale were being told and we gather from the tone of the teller almost as much as we do from the words." Moss perceives that "the authority of [Eliot's] voice only grew more certain with the passage of time. Whatever uncertainties he felt never marred the execution of the poems."
Yet Eliot's third-generation admirers take care to distance themselves from impertinent, and even downright embarrassing aspects of Eliot's legacy. Moss's appreciation for Eliot's masterful range of voice does not extend to Eliot's political and social views. But even here Moss learns the lesson that "someone I disagreed with about almost everything else but literature still managed to win my admiration, respect, and even awe."
Similarly, respect for Eliot remains high even among the rebels of the third-generation, including such an arch-exemplar of the New American Poetic as the King of May himself, Allen Ginsberg. And just as Eliot dug roots into the studied extended metaphors of Donne and other Metaphysical poets, even such obscure figures as Aurelio Townsend (no known relation), Ginsberg modeled his juvenilia on Marvel's formal sensuality, and as poet/critic Alan Williamson has observed, Ginsberg's work shows considerable influence of Metaphysical conceit[9]. Nonetheless, it was William Blake, whom Eliot dismisses out of hand, whom Ginsberg embraced as his Father-deity, not Dante or one of Eliot's idols, up to the point where Ginsberg even experienced a visitation by the long-dead poet-seer. Ginsberg also sought out William Carlos Williams as a mentor more contemporary, adopting as his own Williams's pointedly counter-Eliotonic precept, "No ideas but in things." Williams, Eliot's coeval, was one of the very few distinctively modern poets of his generation who did not emigrate to Europe, choosing instead to deliberately develop his poetic around American idioms, and who wrote in his Autobiography that Eliot's influence undid all the innovations that Williams had hoped to introduce to the native aesthetic. Yet Ginsberg's own attitude towards Eliot's œuvre does not express an iconoclast's scorn for the ancien regime, and instead suggests a younger poet's reverence for an older artist who did things differently from the course set out for himself. Ginsberg quotes Eliot with approval in the poem, "Journal Night Thoughts":
Ah love is so sweet in the SpringtimeGinsberg also records in his actual journal a dream in which Eliot looks upon him "thru Rimbaud eyes" and allows Ginsberg to leaf through a manuscript of collected poems written on parchment made of lox![11] Eliot's formidable importance for Ginsberg comes across through the dreaming Ginsberg's apprehension that Eliot would be unreachable and of little help:
Omnia amor vincit
Eliot's voice clanging over the sky
on upper Broadway
"Only thru Time is Time conquered"
I am the answer: I will swallow my
vomit and be naked&mdash[10];
All thru the dream, the main thing, I had been anxious to talk about his poetry, at one point had thought but not voiced "you must be sick of thousands of people for 50 years pawing your mss. and inquiring who & what of these few famous poems," but he'd been silent & allowed me anything so I'd gotten a little nervous thumbing his book & hadn't been able to find the poems I wanted to inquire about.[12]
Ginsberg is not alone among poets of his generation who venerate Eliot even as they veer from him. Gary Snyder praises the way Eliot incorporates ancient Western myths, showing "considerable grasp of what they were about."[13] Eliot peers deep into the history of the culture, though "without maybe even consciously being aware of it….[14] Early reading of Eliot soon stimulated Snyder to examine the earliest roots of European culture.
What's really fun about Eliot is his intelligence and his highly selective and charming use of Occidental symbols which point you to a certain direction. I read From Ritual to Romance, and went on to read Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison, and it just kept pushing me back. It takes you all the way back to the cave at Trois Frères in France, ultimately.Through example Eliot taught Snyder the virtues of exact anthropological knowledge. Snyder thinks this "sense of the roots" entails an empathetic connection to history.
[Eliot] had the sense of the roots more deeply than Pound did, actually. Pound was never able to get back earlier than the Early Bronze Age. Olson at least gets to the Pleistocene.[15]
Other New American Poets, dissenting from a stifling poetics that Eliot's camp followers had championed, as they construe it, were not quite as sanguine in their appreciations of Eliot's legacy as Snyder and Ginsberg.
Amiri Baraka lists Eliot as a bygone influence, perhaps primarily because Baraka "was taught that in freshman year at college," but Eliot could not seize the young Baraka's consciousness because, "after a while those kinds of purely literary models give way to models that we can use to draw parallels to our lives as well— unless we're just hopelessly bookish, hopelessly removed from reality."[16]
Baraka came to see Eliot much as the New Critics saw him, only for Baraka, this was not something to celebrate. When Baraka came of age, Eliot's traditionalism seemed part and parcel of the nation's retrogressive mood during the 1950s, which was…
…a period of deep reaction in this country, and I think not only politically— McCarthyism and the Cold War and the whole attempt by this country to eliminate the ideas that had come out in the 1930s, complete with purges and inquisitions of artists. But it seemed to me then a strait jacket was placed on American poetry— the whole rise of the Southern Agrarians, and the so-called New Critics, and textual analysis as opposed to understanding the social context out of which literature arises. That's what I was rebelling against, as a kind of a whole.[17]Baraka's aesthetic became anti-traditionalist, anti-formalist, and emphasized that the poem discovers its proper form in the improvisations of its making. Quoting himself from an earlier statement entitled How You Sound, Baraka tells William Packard that the "only recognizable tradition a poet need follow is himself…." For Baraka, the poetics that he and such peers as Creeley, Dahlburg, O'Hara, Koch, Ashbery, Corso, Snyder, and Whalen represent, "formed a kind of popular front against what we took to be dead academic poetry à la Eliot and the New Critics.[18] The insurgency was not itself homogeneous, since, "[l]ater on, it became more and more obvious that within that popular front against the academy, there were contradictions and great gaps as well…. We had sort of banded together loosely against what we thought was a deadening influence on American poetry.[19]
The backlash against the prevailing aesthetic was also implicated within the politics of race:
Certainly in the 1960s the whole Black poetry movement, though it seemed primarily political, its pronouncements on art had a definite aesthetic view. And I think that the whole question of the Afro-American poetry of the 1960s was related to the Beats and the projective verse in this way, that it also was in reaction against the academic ideas with the added weight that it also had a political difference with it.[20]
On the surface, it would seem that Beat poetry and the larger New American aesthetic just happened to offer congenial models to Baraka and his fellows, who sought a voice that would resonate truer to their experience than Eliot's prolix Modernism, so nostalgic for lost European traditions. Yet African-American patois, "telling it like it is" in rhythmically compelling terms, and African-American music, with its focus on improvised performance, call and response, poly-rhythms, and soulfulness, were already there, already roots of the new, implicitly multi-cultural aesthetic. Apart from appropriating Black jazz musician dialect and refashioning it into hipster speak,[21] and the occasional, though sparse, direct acknowledgment, such as Frank O'Hara's eulogy "When Lady Died,"[22] the other obvious affinities that the New American aesthetic holds with jazz and blues practice are compelling evidence that the new Black aesthetic was recognizing reflected images of its own legacy in the counter-aesthetic offered up by its Euro-American counterparts. And ironically, as Alan Williamson has observed, Eliot's introduction of anthropology into verse, denaturalizing Western culture as an inevitable "order of things," and counting it as one contextualized culture among others, along with Eliot's interest in eastern religions, may have primed the scene so a rejection of the Euro-centric could be possible.[23] Even so, three generations from Eliot, African-American poets felt that distancing themselves from the reigning styles was imperative if they were to self-define their identity in a manner freed from White definitions:
[the previous poetry] could also be perceived as exclusivistic, that is, largely dealing with whites, largely middle class, that is, the poetry establishment. And I think the aesthetics of the best poets of the '60s took a step further and made a poetry specifically germaine to what the Black poets wanted to do, based on the kind of national consciousness developed in that period. The whole poetry reading thing, the speech of the people, had definitely been raised by Olson and Ginsberg and the rest.[24]
Although Marge Piercy has made few direct references to Eliot in print, she paints an oppressive portrait of the time in which Eliot's dominance over poetry was unchallenged. In her autobiographical essay, "Through the Cracks: Growing up in the Fifties," Piercy describes how during her undergraduate career as a University of Michigan English major she
…felt the wrong shape, size, sex, volume level, class, and emotional coloration. I fought, always with a sense of shame, for I could never define what I felt was being throttled in me. And I wanted approval. I loved working in the dim, mustily fragrant stacks of the library, safe, busy. I loved the old clanking conveyor belt that delivered books up to the desk when requested…. It was ancient, noisy, did not work well, had a certain wrought iron charm, and impressed upon me the privilege of being in its presence at all: something of a makeshift image for my education.[25]Similar to how her co-eval, Baraka, felt he could not relate to much of his assigned reading list, Piercy, a woman and the offspring of working class Jews, felt the sting of her outsider status in the collegiate literary culture of the 1950s.
Everything that moved me at first contact (Whitman, Dickinson) turned out to be déclassé or irrelevant to the mainstream, the tradition. It was not, of course, a mainstream that had produced me, a tradition to which I was a natural heir. I would never be a gentleman.
…Everything in art was taught as fitting somewhere in a vast hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being seemed still intact. Even the lawns were Christian. Human nature was a universal constant, each of us with her heart of darkness. …The defeat of Marxist literary criticism and theory meant rejection of the class struggle and somehow even of working-class experience as a viable theme. Yet class was a fact of my life, something I brooded over constantly in childhood every time I took the Joy Road or Tireman buses in Detroit and noted how if you went downtown there were even more blacks than in our neighborhood and housing got worse and worse, and if you went the other direction, there was more space, more trees, yards, single-family brick houses, parks. If I had come to college never having thought about poverty, born out of an egg the day before, going to college was a never-ending education in the finer distinctions of class insult and bias. It kept kicking me in the teeth.[26]
This climate, with its literary dogmas associated with Eliot's name, smothered Piercy. "I knew I was writing badly. I could not produce two lines without making five literary allusions, punning in Elizabethan English and dragging in some five-dollar word like chiaroscuro."[27]
Piercy also portrays a young poet facing such adversarial conditions in Braided Lives, a Bildungsroman (should you forgive me a five-dollar word), where Eliot and the New Critics appear as the authorities undergraduate poets quote while jousting over each other's work:
Mike separates us at once, arm around my waist tugging me back to a fierce argument about whether his work is prosy. One young man quotes Yvor Winters, one Hugh Kenner, one John Crowe Ransom, one plays it safe with Eliot. In a way Mike's poems are meant to irritate and thus their fury validates him. [Italics mine.][28]
Disaffection for the quasi-christianized milieu of the late Eliot era was not confined to working class, Jewish, female, apprentice poets. Major figures of the so-called New York School were male, middle-class, and Harvard educated, though not always gentile or Protestant. Like the New Critics, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, James Schulyer, and even Frank O'Hara possessed a high level of consciousness about tradition, but unlike Alan Tate et alia, they preferred the more secular lineages of the French and Russian avant-garde, including traditions of anti-traditions, such as Dada and its progeny, Sur-realism. These traditions, also Modernist, understand the poem as a found object, or as the lingering trace of the poet's action of composition, or as a matrix of indeterminate meaning, a matrix that guarantees no single, specific, and fixed paraphrase, but spawns entire litters of potential meanings. Such poetics do not contemplate the poem as a "well-wrought urn" or "the verbal icon."
In 1952, O'Hara described Eliot's influence as a "deadening and obscuring and precious effect."[29] Sometime during his graduate studies at Michigan, O'Hara parodied Eliot with a poem, "Mr O'Hara's Sunday Morning Service," that makes a point out of being a breezy, unchurched utterance that lets the entire weight of its significance scatter across its surface rather than nest like owls within musty symbolic belfries.
There is this to be said
for Sunday morning: that if
I have been very bad the night
before and wake up feeling
like a drab on a sunny day,
Dick will pop into my room
and invite me out to the
high abandoned airfield.
There, the sun will seem
properly chilly and the wind
will not compromise us
with any silly sentiment.[30]
Marjorie Perloff, in her study of O'Hara, tries to put his dismissal of Eliot into a historical perspective, arguing that it
…is important to note that the Eliot described by O'Hara is not at all the real poet, the self-doubting, struggling revolutionary of the early twenties. Rather, the Eliot venerated by the generation brought up on Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry was the magisterial Elder Statesman, no longer writing lyric poetry (Four Quartets was published in 1944) but making important public pronouncements about its nature and function."[31]
What Perloff says here applies also to Baraka, Piercy, and any number of Eliot-bashers of their generation (and their protéges in the next). For their disparagement of Eliot equals an attack on the same elitist Eisenhower-era values that buttressed Eliot's fame: appeal to tradition narrowly defined, the cult of civil religion, and the apotheosis of high culture, not just divorcing capital C from its folk roots, but raising it above the vapid consumerism of the post-War way of life (and by this maneuver, find the means to feel oneself above the scummy aesthetics of commercial existence, while acquiescing in its imperatives).
Along with James Breslin, Perloff sees William Carlos Williams' negative appraisal of Eliot reflecting the transformed taste Williams was discovering among the third generation's most innovative flank:
…Breslin points out, quite rightly I think, that Williams' well-known attack on The Waste Land in his Autobiography (a book O'Hara knew well) as the poem that "returned us to the classroom just at the moment when… we were at the point of escape… to the essence of a new art form" reflects Eliot's position at the time the statement was made (1951) rather than the time about which it was ostensibly made (1922).[32]What O'Hara disliked about the Eliot tradition was the same thing he disliked about Charles Olson, even though Olson preached Projective Verse and other subversions that preyed upon the New Critics' values: for Olson's was a poetic that was, as Perloff sums up O'Hara's sense of it, "too willed, too consciously 'significant.' Poetry need not have palpable design on us; the 'important utterance,' indeed, 'is not particularly desirable most of the time.'"[33]
O'Hara's poetic highlights, in blazing neon yellow, his desire to defamiliarize his urban world, one taken so easily for granted by the senses that its inhabitants miss the peculiar and even giddy nature of what stares them in the face. O'Hara's poems value action over contemplation. They displace mimesis as their preoccupation. They replace it with the perceptual process. Eliot admits that similar qualities occur in his own work, but desiring a refuge of timeless Truth from a sea surge of relativism, Eliot sees them as limitations, as undependable, changing phantoms, threatening the larger significance and security of eternity.
And so each ventureO'Hara does not reckon the poet responsible to "discipline" emotion, but to perceive it freshly. O'Hara's creed is something like, "Don't be bored, don't be lazy, don't be trivial, and don't be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death."[35] And while Eliot would probably not disagree with the general, literal content of this motto, O'Hara's staccato phrasing of it advertises new religion. Almost any O'Hara poem exhibits his turn away from Eliot, as in Aus Einem April:
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion…[34]
We dust the walls.
And of course we are weeping larks
falling all over the heavens with our shoulders clasped
in someone's armpits, so tightly! and our throats are full.[36]
O'Hara died young, run over on the beach, victim of "the slightest loss of attention," dead almost a quarter century before Eliot's centenial, when the improvisational aesthetics of an O'Hara or a Baraka had long become institutionalized tenets of poetry workshops. Due to economic necessities, many self-styled, anti-academic rebels accepted positions on college campuses. What principles of the once so daring "New American" aesthetic did not filter successfully into the mainstream now occupied niches in isolation from it, mutually comfortable for both. Slam, anyone? And Eliot seemed long flown from his mountain crag. Donald Hall assumes a wistful tone in describing how, "Eliot's own announcement of a secure minority, which once exhibited modesty's charm, comes to seem a disputed boast."[37]
Hall sees in the American poetry of the late 1980s a revolution in the fortunes of Williams and Wallace Stevens, another coeval Williams shared with Eliot. In Remembering Poets, Hall refers to the public quarrels between Eliot and Williams that seemed replicated by their respective descendants in the 1950s and 1960s. He also notes the "competitive aversion and subtle backbiting sheathed in politeness" that Eliot and Stevens exhibited whenever he asked the one about the other.[38] During William's lifetime, Eliot's predominance seemed fixed, but by the 1980s
William Carlos Williams' revenge is sweet— or, rather, the revenge of Eliot's less public enemy Wallace Stevens, because it is Stevens' reputation that has replaced Eliot's. Now we study phenomenology rather than Anglicianism and quote Hartford à la français instead of a London⁄Missouri patois.[39]Hall argues that this reflects the culture's devaluation of history. Stevens is popular because Stevens is
ahistorical, nowhere more clearly than when he hints at historicism as in "Sunday Morning." On the other hand, Eliot's eventually Christian mysticism, his out–of–time travel which percieves the simultaneous coexistence of all cultures and events, is an experience possible only to the historical imagination.[40]
But Hall awaits a second coming of Eliot, inaugurated, perhaps, by future poets feeling a lack resulting from the 1980s' anti-historicist zeitgeist, for should they "return to Eliot as a source, they will find in his work everything necessary to the great tradition. In his learning combined with imagination, he provides the double model of maker and seer."[41] Similarly, Hall feels that once aesthetic taste becomes less obsessed with surfaces and more concerned with depth, young poets will find that Eliot has already sounded the waters. "In The Waste Land, [Eliot] resolved (with Ezra Pound's help) an extraordinary manyness or diversity, deeply historical and deeply psychic. Neither Stevens nor Williams nor Frost ever attempted such diversity in a single poem….[42]
Lisel Mueller sees Eliot's work constituting "a basic ur-text of modern poetry," ranking alongside Shakespeare and the Bible. "Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" have
been absorbed, however dimly and sketchily, into the memory, the common pool of image and phrase in the minds of three generations…. We have absorbed his voice, its cool surface and dense texture, its shocking juxtapositions and daring leaps, as if they had always been ours.[43]Like Hall, Mueller links Williams' ascension and Whitman's resurgence to the devaluation of Eliot's reputation. Born in Germany and growing up bilingual, Mueller wonders whether this drop in esteem for Eliot betrays a certain provincialism in recent American letters, asking, "why a native voice which had absorbed and brillantly recombined certain foreign influences should be less 'American' than other voices, why placing our lives within the larger context of world history should be any kind of disqualification…[44]
Mueller complains that her students "are not attracted to a poet who keeps his distance, who deals in masks and irony. They are annoyed by what they consider namedropping, by being forced to look things up." Mueller blames this on the victory of the post-confessional aesthetic: "We live in an anti-intellectual, antihistorical moment, a moment that celebrates personality and values sincerity above all. The naked poets have passed through and left their mark."[45]
Yet might it not be too much to blame this phenomenon, five generations removed from Eliot, solely on the return of Romanticism in third-generation aesthetics? Ginsberg championed Voznesensky and sought the blessing of Céline. O'Hara sang odes to Mandelstam and Mayakovski. Lowell published a collection of "Imitations" of classical and foreign-born poets. Plath, married and divorced from a British subject, was no stranger to European influences. And if Ashbery, just as self-effacing and misdirective in his verse about his personal life as Eliot, has become any easier to read it is because he has long tutored us to read him. Does not the insular sociological milieu of many affluent American students suffice just by itself to explain why they are unwilling to emulate Eliot or even unable to appreciate him? Even amongst aspiring writers, the easy electronic amusements of pop culture often prevail against the subtler enticements of reading whose rigor is totally foreign to their experience, French, German, and Sanscrit allusions or not. Unless they happened to have been raised Fundamentalist and tutored in some of the problems of reading an ancient text before escaping to literary obsessions.
Yet the "naked poets" had a case to make against Eliot, and Louise Glück, from the fourth generation, who, like Hall and Mueller also seeks Eliot's rehabilitation, nonetheless remains well-positioned to recite it. "Among the major literary figures of the early twentieth century, T. S. Eliot seems to be, in aesthetic terms, the easiest target. The charges against him, cumulatively, make him out to be the enemy of the life force."[46]
Glück attributes this perception of Eliot to his other-worldly religiosity and its clash with baby-boomer social earnestness. "It is possible that Eliot's particular spirituality, his intense wish to be divested of temporal facts, may seem to contemporary readers not simply irresponsible but immoral: an indulgence of privilege and omen of our collective ruin." [47]
Eliot's pedantry also seems off-putting. "What characterizes the life force appears to be improvisation, variety, frankness, vigor, personality, some version of the common touch, some sense of communal affiliation.… The opposite of the life force is the classroom."[48] Glück says that Williams "had a moral commitment to the actual, which meant the visible, whereas it was Eliot's compulsion to question that world.… If Williams thought of the real as that which was capable of being registered by the senses, Eliot, in his deepest being, equated the real with the permanent." While it is impossible to tell whether Williams would appreciate how his aversions have become "institutionalized," Glück finds Williams being taught "eagerly," in the classroom, whereas the poetry profession now teaches Eliot, if at all, "with animosity or pity."
As Glück sizes it up, Williams values energy and speaks to other beings in incessant motion. Williams focuses on the present moment and "living and dead are the critical distinctions" Williams makes. But Eliot holds other values, preferring to distinguish the single right from the multitude of wrongs, fixating upon choice where Williams celebrates variety. Although Eliot does not declaim as his Romantic and Victorian precursors so often did, he yet strikes a highly personalized, variously inflected voice, as much like natural speech in its delivery as occurs in Williams. Yet it is also the case that in viewing time against the perspective of Eternity Eliot finds each decision "vulnerable to some absolute, external judgment."
[Which] explains, in part, the fastidious hesitations: when the compulsion of speech is to find and say the truth, which is single because inclusive, all utterance must be tormented by doubt. The capacity of such a mind for suffering has to be enormous.[49]As heir to both competing factions of the third generation and admirer of both Eliot and Williams, Glück can see both exemplars as contributing something the other lacks. Eliot's poems offer an emotional intensity missing in Williams, something like the pulling asunder of soul from spirit, even though Glück feels there is something "adolescent" about this emotion's lack of change over Eliot's œuvre. "To read Eliot, for me, is to feel the presence of the abyss." Eliot's emotional obsession both motivates his religious feeling and then derives from it. "What has driven these poems from the first is terror and the need of the un-understandable other. When the terror becomes unbearable, the other becomes god."[50]
Amy Clampitt observes that "The Waste Land" marks a "gulf" between the poetry before and after it. Clampitt is a figure who transitions between the third and fourth generations, being the same chronological age as many figures in the third but belonging to the fourth in terms of literary productivity, beginning her publishing life the same time as Glück and other fourth generation poets, facing the same literary situation. Clampitt points out, for example, that no one can return to Coleridge's diction. The gulf also results from the different texture Eliot achieved in the poem's voice.
Walk along the corridor of any hospital, or along almost any city thoroughfare, and you overhear people talking— not to themselves, as one might have once put it, but to a succession of unseen interlocutors. It is of such interior exchanges, we now discover, that our mental life is all too frequently composed. Far from functioning as autonomous units, we are more like the scrambled segments of an enormous psychic jigsaw puzzle.… It was T. S. Eliot more than any other, if I'm not mistaken, who showed us the means of rendering this altered texture— who, one might say, first mapped the territory, if a map could be envisioned that combined the edginess of a chessboard with the random shifts of a kaleidoscope and the awful precision of a seismograph.[51]
Clampitt notes that Eliot's original working title for "The Waste Land" was taken from Dicken's novel, Our Mutual Friend, where one character says of another, "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices." The fecund multiplicity of the voice that meets us in "The Waste Land" marks a shift in poetry with long-term consequences:
So, displacing the bard's single, self-revealing voice, in "The Waste Land" we have the ventriloquial Sloppy of an entire culture: the long-winded nattering, its frozen standoffs and suppressed rejoinders, its dredged-up snatches of remembered diction with the connectives worn away, the voices seeping in, unidentified, random, expressive of— well, of precisely what, a generation of interpreters has been trying to spell out, and we still don't know.[52]
Clampitt finds Eliot's introduction of the counterpunctual multiple voice as mixed blessing. Shoving aside the declamatory mode makes it unfashionable for a poet to speak with a full, unitary, and vatic voice, as per Coleridge or Wordsworth. The poet must infer his or her meaning indirectly, through symbol and incantation, never to seem to speak directly to the matter, never, as Clampitt phrases it, to insist. When the later Eliot seems to slip into this mode, "O Lady! in this wan and heartless mood, To other thoughts by yonder throstle woo'd,"Clampitt thinks Eliot finds the prohibition against declamation confining,
Only there was Eliot himself addressing a Lady— he even addressed the Deity, and appeared to mean it personally.… Was he entitled? Certain arbiters thought not: such was the force of the notion of poetic decorum that had taken hold, and that was (if I am correct) preëminently his doing, however unintended. From the diffidence of J. Alfred Prufrock he had come around unmistakably to wanting, like Wordsworth, to fill a room. Could he do it? Could it be done? Or are we all condemned to go on twittering in the hedges, hoping somebody will be kind enough to pause and listen? [53]
Although as Alan Williamson points out [54], Eliot's exclamation comes from Coleridge, so his outburst is not altogether spontaneous and lacking irony, Clampitt identifies a salient matter. This agnosticism about the ability to speak out as a unified voice, occasionally sounding an outright denial of its possibility, is one of Eliot's insufficiently recognized legacies to the more radical branches of Postmodern poetics: as seen in the shifting or indeterminate pronoun references of an Ashbery, or in a premise shared by most of the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets[55], that language has a life of its own somewhat distinct from the poet "who is being used" in Eliot's phrase, but not quite in the way the mystic-minded Eliot imagined. While drawing attention to Eliot's enduring influence of the modalities of voice in Post-Victorian poetry, Clampitt speculates that a fresh look into Eliot might fruitfully suggest what else poets might fashion from Eliot's multi-vocal precedent, or at least how to reconsider and press beyond it.
In "T. S. Eliot: A Memoir," Robert Pinsky writes how first exposure to Eliot's criticism meant entering a foreign and wonderously rarefied country:
Elegant, unassuming, firm, energized by the freedom of the amateur and forged by the knowledge of the artist, with a manner so fine and fluent that it seemed to rise up into separate atoms that irradiated to create a whole world, where large numbers of people shared the mind of Europe and mused about such questions as 'What is Classic' or "What is Minor Poetry,' a world strikingly unlike New Brunswick, New Jersey, where I went to college; the essays of T. S. Eliot, through that world-conjuring perfume of their manner more than through their content, had hypnotic authority for me in those days.[56]
Not unlike others, Pinsky found that the essays, half-understood at first acquaintance, debilitated his own poetry. Much like Piercy, Pinsky "blundered around quite a lot trying to write with objective correlatives and the mind of Europe in them." Yet unlike a Piercy, a Baraka, or an O'Hara, seeking to rid themselves of Eliot's direct or indirect influence, Pinsky came to distinguish between Eliot the artist and Eliot the monument: "This is not the fault of Eliot the writer; I had apprenticed myself unconsciously to a persona." The work of certain second and third generation poets, Dudley Fitts, Alan Dugan, and Ginsberg, gave Pinsky perspectives which mitigated Eliot's allure. Yet Pinsky credits Eliot, along with Pound, with preparing him to maximize later influences by teaching him what it means to read poetry.[57]
Eliot's fusing sacred to profane still galvanizes Pinsky's sense of what third and fourth generation poetry has accomplished and later poetry should achieve:
The modern poetry that means the most seems to create essential energy from that fusion of disparity. Ginsberg, for example, could hardly address Moloch, or evoke the gyzym of consciousness in Turkish baths.…
Because [Eliot] identified and penetrated this dualism in the rhythms and noises and smells and surfaces of modern life, without simplifying what he saw into false ideas of squalor or perfection, Eliot remains entirely essential for us.[58]Because Eliot invented means to transubstantiate the Holy into the worldly, Pinksy, like Moss, a bit older poet, is willing to "forgive [Eliot] his mean side, his religio-authoritarian claptrap, the plushy grandiosity of 'Ash Wednesday,' the tetrameter anti-Semitism, the genteel trivialities of the late plays."
∗ ∗ ∗
The silhouette of Eliot the man now appears from the other side of the silk screen of the objective correlative. Poets working since the late 1970s now know details of Eliot's troubled life, thanks to research by Peter Ackroyd[59], Ronald Bush[60], and most preëminently, by Lyndall Gordon.[61] This new information prompted Hall and Mueller, at least, to hope that Eliot's worth would be reappraised by the fifth generation of poets after him, the generation shaping their sensibilities at the time of Eliot's hundredth birthday. Although formed themselves ignorant of Eliot's personal sufferings, Hall and Mueller since deepened their comprehension of him, at a mature stage of their careers, a time when, by reason of age and experience, they had developed a strong sense of how a career shapes itself around a life.
Hall draws from the new biographical revelations a sense of how the negative presence of Eliot's troubled first wife transformed Eliot into a major poet from his beginnings as an important minor one:
Vivien Eliot was blessing and curse. Muse and death's head. She gave and she took away. She was insightful, clever, witty, vivacious, depressed, nervous and mad. Eliot was— as they say in popular songs— crazy about her. Why so? It is dangerous to write poetry, as most poets believe. We may well be punished, as Prometheus was punished for his impious gift.… Some people court their own punishment by falling in love with it or by marrying it.…
Why did Eliot, in particular, need to marry a death-muse? Eliot's mother was a poet. Because of the sounds of poetry, and its infantile associations, poetry is often the Mother. To marry the Mother is at the same time wholly forbidden and wholly desirable. It is clear from Eliot's poems that impotence, or at any rate a sense of sexual incompetence and coldness, obsessed him during his marriage to Vivien.… Eliot married Vivien in order to be impotent, to suffer, and to write poems. When he separated from her, he chose a monastic grief.[62]Agree with Hall's hypothesis or not, once given the real dirt on Eliot's life, which Eliot so elided in the poems and essays, a third-generation poet, such as Hall, would be both able and motivated to reassess Eliot's depersonalized posture, which Eliot's criticism seemed to translate into absolute directive, a norm that many of Hall's more iconoclastic peers reacted against so explosively: "I suggest that Eliot's doctrine of impersonality was the purest camouflage, whether he was aware of subterfuge or not."[63] The new biographies prod Hall to realize how Eliot's poems written before his first marriage are "young, literary, clever, without psychic depth or intellectual profundity," and the biographies reveal "The Waste Land" to be "as personal as confessional poetry," and "the twentieth century's monument to the nervous breakdown." "Ash Wednesday" presents a "loss of hope, which allowed hope to be born," and the Four Quartets "relate to the earlier poems like the more rarified 'Paradiso' to the painful 'Inferno.'
Similarly, Lisel Mueller speculates whether the biographical studies, exposing the "private, troubled self underneath the public poems," might swing the pendulum back towards Eliot:
The reticent Mr. Eliot would not have appreciated winning an audience by such means, but I am glad for any back door that will bring people again to our great poet, the one who understood our century better than anyone else. How his characters continue to live! Prufrock is one of our colleagues. The typist's meaningless encounters are abetted and ritualized by singles bars. The chess-playing woman has switched to television and her house is equipped with a burglar alarm system. Like Tiresias, Eliot foresuffered all that we are suffering, the continuing unravelling of history in our time.[64]Whether recasting Eliot as a closet confessionalist has truly revived his significance for the fifth generation of poets, alienated from any history that extends back farther than our own births, facing ecological and economic collapse and cultural dislocation on a scale so unprecedented it numbs the mind, lies outside the scope of this essay. I hear echoes of Eliot in the metaphysical earnestness of fourth generation Jorie Graham, an influential teacher, but not in the smirking standup routines of popular Billy Collins. Among fifth generation poets, Chris Ransick, Eric Paul Schaeffer, and W. Joe Hoppe are nothing if not anti-Eliot poets, heirs of the anti-academic aesthetic (even though they all hold graduate degrees). Sara Backer, wittier than Eliot, exhibits some of Eliot's ironic layering of point of view, but I hear so little of Eliot in her otherwise that she could have well learned this from other Modernists or their third or fourth generation descendants. Yet Jordan Jones voices an Eliot-like protest against the ravages visited upon place by rootless and ruthless modernizing forces, and in poems such as his lyric interpretation of Ezekiel's wheels within wheels he follows Eliot's precedent of reimaging a Biblical story in modernist terms.[65] A fifth generation poet myself, to the minor extent that I still compose verse, there are few ideas in "Tradition and the Individual Talent,"[66] with which I disagree, even though I would turn on their heads some of Eliot's critical evaluations made in his other essays. I assume that my own multi-vocal stance— recuperative of precursor texts, haunted by its belatedness, wistful for a prophetic platform, though at its best recognizing that prophecy is impossible— probably stems from Eliot before it ever did from Pessoa, although my metaphysics are naturalist, my politics ill-defined, and my idiom owes more to Ashbery and Yeats, with inflections from Lowell and Ginsberg. Although I leave for another to study whether poetics circa 2007 and beyond finds Eliot's historicism very compelling, my first guess would deny it. Among my peers I am unusually bookish, theoretical, and Formalist; and as far as I know, Jones might be a different sort of outlier.
Furthermore, the conservative mood of the Bush presidency manufactures its heritage more out of its passing ideological fantasies instead of any real sense of history, and its leading intellectuals often praise "creative destruction," identifying themselves more with Henry Ford, who believed history is bunk, than with Eliot's reactionary royalism and traditionalist Anglicanism— which was so idiosyncratic to the American context, even in his own day, that Eliot had to find proper soul mates in Europe. Of course few poets ever identify with the reigning political mode without criticizing it, should they identify with it at all. The misuse of history in the political discourse might spur a renewed reverence for actual history in contemplative discourse. And the Modernist historicisms of Eliot and Pound, with their respective longings for social and cultural possibilities long dormant, lying misplaced in the heritage of the distant past, have informed visions of the cultural left at least once, in Snyder's anthropological eco-tribalism and Ginsberg's Buddhist anarchism. They could do so again. Let not vapid dichotomies of left and right, made so reflexively and ritualistically, hinder our appreciation of what the patrician anti-Semite Eliot and his buddy, the raving admirer of Mussolini, have given us, once we forsake the labels and see, with some creativity, what there is to see.
The biographical research into Eliot, broke open by Gordon, which demonstrates that the dicta of Eliot the cultural mandarin were embroiled in the travails, frustrations, and personal quirks of the man, lets us appreciate how unimpeded Eliot's poetry is by Eliot's ideas, and this lets us see how the third generation revolt against Eliot is more a poets' revolt against overly prescriptive tutors than against Eliot's poetry itself, a revolt rooted in the imperatives of the writing process: for poets make breakthroughs not through witless obedience to institutionalized aesthetic formulæ, which they themselves did not formulate, but through writing themselves out of their quandaries, whether those are bequeathed to them by their predecessors or earned on their own.