| Time
Present: The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society |
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| T. S. Eliot was an inveterate recycler, composing poems out of bits culled from everything from Dante to Tin Pan Alley; reusing in later works scraps cut from his own poems and plays; and “constantly” republishing his essays (69, 217, 246, 276). As an editor, he turned The Criterion into a veritable recycling station, a “public forum in which he could experiment with the structural organization of his poems, assembling wholes from fragments that had previously been published separately” (288). Yet all these “decisions and revisions” result in an idiom that is distinctively Eliot’s own. Indeed, the tension between recycling and originality animates his entire career: it is, as Sanford Schwartz observes, the opposition between “tradition” and “the individual talent,” between Classicism and innovation, and between the inheritance of the past and the demands of the present (19-21). This tension also invigorates A Companion to T. S. Eliot, recently published by Blackwell and expertly edited by David E. Chinitz.
What makes A Companion so distinctive, compelling, and instructive is not so much its originality, but its ability to contextualize, distill, and synthesize Eliot in his time and in the century of criticism that followed in his wake. A Companion is a magnum opus of scholarly recycling. By “recycling,” I do not mean rehashing old arguments, nor am I referring to the familiar position of “scholars who … recycle conference papers with a bit of self-reproach—and the protection of a new title” (Ingram 116). Rather, by “re-cycling,” I mean a scholarly activity akin to Eliot’s own creative practice: the gathering, reclaiming, and recombining of ideas, contexts, and interpretations in order to create a new composite. Literary scholarship today tends to valorize the individual talent who overturns traditional paradigms. In A Companion, however, the emphasis is on tradition—not only Eliot’s place in it and definition of it, but also “tradition” in the sense of a shared body of literature and a community of interested readers. Instead of asserting startlingly original claims in highfalutin professional jargon, scholars here deliver sound arguments in clear, accessible language. The chapters offer fresh perspectives on well-mapped fields, the best of them succeeding not only in surveying the territory, but also forging new paths. They teach us something new about Eliot without laying waste to what has come before. The hefty Companion comprises thirty-seven chapters that span Eliot’s life, works, and critical legacy. It is divided into three parts. “Part I: Influences” offers chapters on personal, literary, religious, intellectual, cultural, and political forces that shaped his life and thought. “Part II: Works” offers guided tours through his poems, plays, and prose. “Part III: Contexts” examines his work in light of current debates about race, gender, politics, and religion, as well as his role as a publisher and editor in relation to his enduring cultural authority and vacillating reputation. The pithy, readable chapters average 10-12 pages, and each includes a helpful bibliography of “References and Further Reading.” Together, they provide a solid foundation in Eliot studies for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, teachers, and scholars. After reading the volume, I felt like I’d completed a comprehensive course on T. S. Eliot team-taught by the best professors in North America and the U. K. The volume begins with a strong start. Anthony Cuda offers a biographical overview of the poet’s life, linking Eliot’s personal experiences, intellectual growth, and poetic development without reductive conflations between art and life. Barry Faulk puts a new spin on the French Symbolists by linking them to the rise of the urban metropolis. Jewel Spears Brooker’s comprehensive overview of Western philosophy is framed by two exemplary chapters on less studied but no less formative influences on Eliot: Buddhism and popular culture. These chapters, by Christina Hauck and Chinitz respectively, are model essays for students and scholars alike: written in a clear, supple prose, they present compelling arguments, integrate rich primary and secondary source material, and open the door to further discussion. Marc Manganaro traces the influence of the emerging field of comparative evolutionary anthropology on Eliot’s own evolving theories about myth and culture, and Vincent Sherry links Eliot’s poetics of Decadence to the historical context of imperial decline. In addition to offering “a primer in the poetic of Decadence” and a European history lesson, Sherry delivers actual literary criticism, distinguishing between the strained “pratfall triple-syllable rhyme of ‘strangled you’ and ‘mangled you’,” and the more successful “sardonic comedy in the rhyming of ‘crumpets’ and ‘trumpets’” (94, 98).
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The chapters in Part II survey Eliot’s works in chronological
order. Jayme Stayer launches the section with a discussion of Eliot’s
juvenilia, which he organizes around three ontological problems that
preoccupy the young poet. Like Sherry, Stayer does not shy away from
identifying weaknesses in Eliot’s early verse and he likewise
exhibits his own delight in language, as when he sums up Eliot’s
accomplishments in a masterful list: “the telling allusions, hallucinatory
squalor, transcendent intimations, muted suffering, electric fear, and
bilious ennui all of its spoken, sung, or growled in virtuosic registers
of irony, obliquity, deadpan, and directness” (118). As in Part
I, the best of the chapters in this section cover familiar territory
but introduce a fresh perspective, as when Jeffrey Perl uses Eliot’s
pervasive ambivalence to complicate the traditional division of his
career into two phases; when Sarah Bay-Cheng introduces games and play
to a discussion of the Cats poems; and when Leonard Diepeveen wittily
deflects attention from Eliot’s canonical early essays to his
eclectic range of journalism, counting “at least 24 essays which
turn to [the topic of how to write criticism properly], or 23 more essays
than use the term ‘objective correlative’” (266).
Yet though Diepeveen widens the playing field, he manages to reach all
the bases: not only the objective correlative, but also difficulty,
tradition, and impersonality. Section II provides instructive typologies
and glosses to help readers organize and make sense of Eliot’s
diverse writings: Francis Dickey groups the poems in Prufrock and
Other Observations around particular signatures and motifs, Randy
Malamud identifies common features of the 1930s plays along with succinct
summaries of each, and John Xiros Cooper defines key but often misunderstood
terms such as “culture” and “society” (287).
Because these chapters provide objective overviews of Eliot’s
writings, a few seem a bit bland or diffuse, but undergraduates who
struggle to comprehend Eliot may appreciate them most. My students certainly
did, though they also wished for discussions of topics such as “irony”
and “rhyme,” which, though touched on, don’t merit
a chapter of their own or even entries in the index. (Despite these
omissions, the index is actually very thorough and user-friendly.)
For this reason, I found “Part III: Contexts” to offer more dynamic readings and persuasive analyses. Cyrena Pondrom, Bryan Cheyette, and Patrick Query confront the controversies of gender, race, and sexuality head on, identifying various factions and presenting taxonomies of Eliot’s women, racial types, and sexual orientations. Cheyette does an especially fine job guiding readers through Eliot’s life and poems before introducing the critical arguments, thereby training readers to participate as informed players in the unfolding debate. Kevin Dettmar takes on the even more sensitive and taboo topic of Eliot’s religious faith, providing a serious secular appreciation of what he calls “some of the most significant religious poetry in English of the era” (374). Ann Ardis draws attention to the historical and material contexts of modernism in its various incarnations; weaving together an astonishing array of critical voices, her essay represents the spirited colloquy of the “New Modernisms” today. Part III also presents fine scholarship on Eliot’s editing, publishing, and New Critical legacy, with excellent chapters by Jason Harding, John Timberman Newcomb, and Gail McDonald that make potentially dry topics accessible and interesting. They provide clear narratives of complex territory, but also lead to some surprising wrinkles and contradictions, as when Harding argues that “by the late 1920s, … the Criterion was undoubtedly in retreat from experimental modernism” (297), while, in the next chapter, Newcomb asserts that Eliot’s position at Faber & Faber, which he assumed in 1925, “allowed him to shape the formation of international high modernism over the next four decades” (409). This discrepancy regarding Eliot’s relation to high modernism is not a weakness in A Companion, but a sign that its typologies, genealogies, and glosses do not box Eliot in, but provide stepping-stones for continued research. A Companion to T. S. Eliot is a necessity for any college or university library and a worthwhile investment for your personal library. You will use it and reuse it, and you’ll encourage your students to do the same. If Eliot’s criticism influenced so much of what came after him, let’s hope this volume influences literary scholarship as it’s practiced today, inspiring us to teach instead of dazzle, to value quality over quantity, and to “reduce, reuse, and recycle” in order to produce a more sustaining and sustainable body of criticism. Suzanne W. Churchill Work Cited
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