ENIGMATIC MAN

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 253, 17 June 1932, Page 8

ENIGMATIC MAN

T S ELIOT GOES HOME RETURN TO UNIVERSITY AFTER ABSENCE OF TWO DECADES. MAN OF WIDE INFLUENCE. The announcement of Mr. T . S. Eliot's appointment to the professorship of poetry at Harvard has provoked little comment. Perhaps it lacked the necessary element of surprise; perhaps interest in Mr. Eliot has deelined; 01* it may be (and this seems more likely) that the world •of letters is still inclined to cautious reticence in the face of a writer who has been at once its mentor and its "enfant terrible," says a writer in the "Manchester Guardian." Two decades have pas?=ed sinee he left the University to which he now returns in academic state. During that period he has Europeanised and Anglicised himself as only Americans can. But, as very few Americans before him, he has given as well as taken in the prices. Of the "school" of Eliot there is little to he said. His overt imitators have been chiefly undergraduate versifiers whoso merits, if they have any, are potential. Their number and their youth are significant only because they show one aspect of his power. His tone and rhythm are infectious, and belong to the age.. More interesting, however, is his part in liberating poetry from the fast-hardening conventions of Romanticism. This does not mean that he is in revolt against tradition. It means, rather, that he has a keener feeling for the past and feels more of it than most of his eontemporaries. It is precisely because be sees European culture as a whole, of which the ai-t to-day must be aware and in which it must incorporate itself, that he refuses to submit to the exclusive dominance of the immediately preceding generations. In the essay on "Tradition and Individual Talent," in "The Sacred j Wood," he defines this position: "Tradition cannot be inherited," he says, "and if you wan it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves in the first place-, the historical sense, which we may call indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his' twcnty-fifth year; and the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer, and within it the whole of the literature of his own country, has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order." Strange Synthesis. Armed with immense and catholic erudition, he set out to apply this theory in his own poems. The result is a synthesis of allusion, quotlfion, and original composition which makes heroie demands on the reader. In sixty lines of "The Waste Land" we find ourselves referred to "The Vicar of Wakefield," "The Tempest," the "Gotterdammerung," Froude's "Elizabeth," the "Purgatorio," and St. Augustine's "Confessions." It is impossible to make a proper approach to the poem with out a textual knowledge of the "Purgatorio," and a study of a hook on the Grail legend which would not ordinarily be read by anyone but a specialist. It is not to be supposed that any great proportion of Mr. Eliot's readers is equipped to work this complicated apparatus of allusion. "Indeed, it might fairly be asked how, in an age not remarkable for learning, any influence could be claimed for a poet so potentously learned? The answer lies partly in the fact that among his dcrivative themes there is one — that of the English Renaissance — to which the present generation is fully prepared to respond. Mr. Eliot does not merely echo Marlowe and Webster and Donne, he tries to relieve their artistic experience. He uses their idiom and verbal technique as part or his own medium, rather as Coleridge "worked" phrases of Milton in "Kubla Khan." To ears weary with rhythms that are nineteenth-century verse imperfectly remembered, this style of writing is to the utmost degree refreshing. Its effect has been to purgo the air of Tennysonian ochoes, and fill it with the resurrected voice of Donne. This modification of the attitude of poetry towards the past has been accompanied by a change in its treatment of the present. And here again Mr. Eliot's is a vital influence. In tho English poetry of the period immediately preceding the war there is a note of strain, due to a certain mal-

adjustment between the diction of verse and the diction of life. In the work of such a poet as Mr. Masefield the striving for the vitality of colloquial speech is evident. But Mr. Masefield does not quite attain his objeet, because he has his eye not on the typical speech of urban twentieth-century England, but on a racy nautical jargon as far removed from everyday reality as the song of the Sirens. Of His Generation. Mr. Eliot, .on the. other hand, f aces the problem squarely. He finds himself in a world that is essentially urban, mechanised, industrial; a world of motor cars and gutters; coffee cups, and toothbrushes. He sees through it and beyond it, but he writes "with his own generation in his bones." Into his vdcabulary, so largely archaic and derivative, he therefore introduces current words and phrases that on one has ever thought of putting into poetry before. The city theme in "The Waste Land" is pure "reporting." The public house conversation at the end of part two might be the transcript of a verbatim shorthand note. With perfect aplomb he recounts that — ITnder the brown fog of a winter noon Mr. Kugenides, the Smyrna merohant, Unshaven, with a poeket ful of currants, C.i.f. London, documents at sight, Asked me in demotic Frcnc.h To luncheon at the Cannot Street Hotel, Followed hy a week-end at the Metropole. It is impossible to estimate the value of such a passage when taken from its context, but it serves to show what Mr. Eliot has done to poetic diction. He has broken it up, thrown it into a state of flux. Where the previous poetry of the century avoids the "unpoetic" word, or blurts it out with conscious audacity, he lets it fall naturally, almost conversationally. The effect is often shoclcing, but not objectionably so, and those whom it outrages would do well to remember how bitterly Coleridge was reproved for allowing the Ancient Mariner to refer only to the "buckets on the deck." In fact, the parallel between the historical significance of "Lyrical Ballads" and Mr. Eliot's poetry might be further pursued. Each was produced when the conventions of a century of great literature lay heavy on English poetry; each sinned against convention by the use of actual speech, and each was damned by a large section of the critics. A short analysis must necessarily leave important issues untouched. What of Mr. Eliot's obseurity, his deliberate avoidance of a connected argument, his fragmentary method? What of his more recent pre-occupa-tioh with religion, his royalism, his Catholicism? These are large questions, and perhaps they will ,one day be answered "ex cathedra" from Harvard. Meanwhile we. can only congratulate a great University on having gathered to itself one of the most influential, if enigmatic, of its sons. • -.v.,; ' i . 1, - t,-,-