POET AND PEDANT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 557, 24 February 1950, Page 13

POET AND PEDANT

THE ART OF T. S. ELIOT, by Helen Gardme; Cresset Press, London. English price,

(Reviewed by

James

Bertram

THIRTY years ago Mr. Eliot threw out a coy challenge: C’est a grands pas et en sueur Que vous suivrez a peine ma piste In the non-stop run of hare and hounds that followed he brilliantly outdistanced his commentators, and much honest sweat_ has _ been dropped on the Cambridge Backs and along campus trails from Washington to Maine. The field was further confused by the poet’s habit of appearing at intervals among the critics and issuing false directions. But the end of the chase, if not altogether unforeseen, was still a riddling kind of orthodoxyBecause one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it. Though his beliefs had crystallised into comparative stability, Mr. Eliot’s technique and poetic invention remained as mobile and startling as ever. His final fate (like that of another notable literary heretic of our time, André Gide) has been to become a classic in his own lifetime. , Today no English poet enjoys a comparable prestige, or has exercised so sure an appeal over three literary gen- erations. But canonisation took time, as those who have grown up with Mr. Eliot’s reputation will remember. In 1922, when The Criterion was being launched, Katherine Mansfield wrote to

a friend in Sydney: " I think Prufrock by far and away the most interesting and the best modern poem-it stays in the memory as a work of art." But many early admirers were baffled by the mood and liturgical style of Ash Wednesday and the poems of the ’thirties. Religious conversion was not then very chie, politics were the mode, and Mr. Eliot’s politics wore a forbiddingly authoritarian air. The publication of Collected Poems, 1909-1935 (including some short pieces firmly labelled "Minor" that gave the first surprising hint of Old Possum) was the signal for renewed attempts at assessment: one American critic, summing up on yet an- | other expatriate lost to Europe, announced simply, "Mr. T. S. Eliot, it é now clearly seen, is a Minor Poet." But the 1936 volume contained already Burnt Norton, the first of the quartets; and by the time the third of these, The Dry Salvages, had appeared, Dr. F. R. Leavis (a scratch man in the Eliot paper-chase) was firmly declaring: "It should by now be impossible to doubt that he is among the greatest poets of the English language." After the Nobel Prize came an O.M., and an almost embarrassing range of published tributes to mark his sixtieth birthday. But while the literary world was unanimous in its approval, it seemed that Mr. Eliot’s final quartets might yet have to ‘wait as long as Beethoven’s for general acceptance and comprehension. It is with the Four Quartets that Miss Helen Gardner begins and ends her fulllength study, and perhaps she is right in maintaining that here the poet speaks more directly and to a wider audience than in much of his earlier work (though all these terms must remain comparative). If Mr. Eliot has suffered in the past from the New Criticism he can hardly complain, for he is himself largely responsible for it-just as he is responsible for having changed, almost single-handed, the’ reading tastes of a couple of generations of students and teachers of English. But Miss Gardner’s is the sort of book for which Mr. Eliot, as well as all’ those to whom his work still presents considerable difficulties, can only be grateful: it is enthusiastic, sensitive, informed, readable, and really helpful. It opens with an analysis of Mr. Eliot’s original contribution to English versification, continues with a discussion of the music of the Quartets and the problem of communication, reviews in some detail Mr. Eliot’s poetry since "The-Waste Land, and concludes with a chapter on the content and meaning of the Quartets, seen against all that has gone before them as Mr. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece. ? ‘ The verditt? As we might expect from so discreet and self-effacing a critic, it is restrained and yet unequivocal. T. S. Eliot is presented as a visionary poet whose complete work has a symmetry that only the late appearance of the Quartets has enabled us wholly to grasp. "His unique distinction among English poets is the balance he has maintained between the claims of his vision and the claims of his art." Some may quarrel with that "unique," but few will disagree with Miss Gardner’s insistence that "he is neither a prophet nor a visionary primarily, but a poet, a great ‘maker.’" Finally, we are told, "there (continued on next page) ~

BOOKS (continued trom previous page) is a sense in which Mr. Eliot. can without impropriety be named with Dante": he has shared in his own time the same Divine Vision, and he, too, "has found a ‘dolce stil nuovo.’" All very well, the’ common reader may be inclined to protest-I am prepared to take my Dante with a commentary, because I know he’s worth it. But should we have to work quite so hard with a contemporary poet, and a poet in our own language? To which Mr. Eliot emight no doubt reply with André Gide (from his own very different conviction) "Comment ne _ parlerais-je pas difficilement? J’ai des choses nouvelles a dire." And if in the end some of the things do not appear so very new, there is a new beauty-most apparent in the sober splendour of the Quartets-in his manner of saying them,