On Eliot

In his introduction to a selection of Wordsworth’s poems he edited in 1971, R.S. Thomas, the Welsh poet-priest, writes:

“We have become accustomed to a dichotomy between the life and work of artists. To what extent this is aggravated by modern conditions, I am not sure. Daily life grows ever more artificial and superficial.”

Thomas champions Wordsworth’s life and works as a resounding refutation of this conventional wisdom. I’ve been thinking of Thomas’ words while reading and enjoying T.S. Eliot, by Craig Raine, the latest addition to the Lives and Legacies series published by Oxford University Press. Raine is an unapologetic admirer of Eliot and his work, in an era when it’s hard to conceive of a poet less likely to be admired by most contemporary arbiters of taste. His religion, his respect for tradition, his essentially classical defense of “impersonality,” and even his reputed sex life, make him the subject of smirking, self-righteous derision. Raine will have none of it:

“Given that the main events of Eliot's life are so sensational, even lurid, it may seem odd that the central focus of his oeuvre should concentrate on the life not fully lived, `buried,’ avoided, side-stepped. It is conceivable, though, that these dramatic decisions in Eliot's life were provoked by the fear of not living fully - of opting for insurance rather than risk…. This contradiction - between the risks Eliot took in his own life and his dominant theme of debilitating caution - makes it difficult to equate biographical events with the poetry.”

Later in his Wordsworth introduction, Thomas says, “Wordsworth is with Tennyson, perhaps, the supreme poet of atmosphere.” I would nominate Eliot for that title. His poems, especially the early ones, first attracted me in my early teens, long before I knew anything of Eliot’s life, because of their atmosphere, the characteristic mingling of desolation and shabby-genteel seediness, as in the second of his “Preludes”:

“The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimneypots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.”

Thirty years later, in “Little Gidding,” the third of his Four Quartets, his masterpiece, Eliot writes:

“In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.”

Eliot is a serious poet who writes of serious things, an unimaginable project in an age which takes frivolous poets like John Ashbery seriously. I’ve only just started reading Raine’s book, but I can already recommend it as a serious and reliable introduction to a great poet. Raine writes:

“There aren't any easy equations. Gerontion is a character in a dramatic monologue, not a transparent disguise for the poet.

“In the end, we are left with the poetry. It speaks to any attentive reader.”