Visible Poet: T. S. Eliot and Modernist Studies

There are no longer any individuals
or individual poems, only a future

more shattery than ever but still
nearer to us than the present.

Bob Perelman, "From the Front"

1. Invisibility

In his 1959 monograph The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot, Hugh Kenner wrote that "there has been no more instructive, more coherent, or more distinguished literary career in this century, all of it carried on in the full view of the public, with copious explanations at every stage; and the darkness did not comprehend it" (xii). Alluding to John 1:5, Kenner describes Eliot as one who, despite great publicity and explanation, still needs a little analytical daylight: unlike the Son of Man who declares himself the light of the world, the Eliot of 1959 still awaits the disciple to properly comprehend his word. However, Kenner has ambitions beyond the correction of a literary-critical discourse that—and the present essay, for one, is a perfect example—forgets the warp and weft of Eliot's language, "slips off into ideas, when it doesn't begin there," and remains resolutely "mesmerized by personality" (x). Kenner sets his sights on the "invisible" Eliot, the poetic don and the inviolable "Voice," "which is the persisting reality, the entranced self-expanding élan vital of which each word is a momentary modulation" (231).

The allusion to the Philamel stanzas of "A Game of Chess" (1922) is mine; indeed, I have rather taken "Voice" out of context. Kenner is not saying that Eliot's voice is the "persisting reality . . . of which each word is a momentary modulation," but that, for Eliot, "Voice" is the grounds of language and meaning itself: "the word, in Eliot's imagination, relates itself most immediately not to any object which it names, not to the dictionary or to a system of discourse, but to the Voice" (231). Yet Kenner's capitalized "Voice" is no simple thing. It is shaky epistemological bedrock, it is the foundation, too, of the early Eliot characters: Prufrock, Gerontion, and Tiresias, who come to us as a "Voice with no ascertainable past and no particularized present," as "pseudo-persons" that are really just "congeries of effects" (41). Kenner describes J. Alfred Prufrock as "a name plus a Voice . . . a possible zone of consciousness where these materials can maintain a vague congruity; no more than that; certainly not a person" (40). In this way, "Voice" both exceeds and connects related terms like meaning and personality. Kenner describes how the vagueness of Prufrock's character, "blurring into the highly literary tapestry of which he is an unemphatic feature," would be a "defect" in an Alfred Tennyson or Robert Browning (42). For Eliot, on the contrary, Prufrock's tendency to disappear into the furnishings is "the thoroughly deliberated focal point" (42) of a poetics that, though it originates from a sensibility all Eliot's own, was "brought to fruition" under the auspices of F. H. Bradley (43).

The critical novelty of Invisible Poet (written after Kenner abandoned an initial collaboration with Marshall McCluhan) lies, in part, in the way it lights with a Bradleyan torch the darkness that did not comprehend:

The study of Bradley . . . may be said to have done three things [for Eliot]. It solved his critical problem, providing him with a point of view towards history . . .; it freed him from the Laforguian posture of the ironist with his back to a wall, by affirming the artificiality of all personality, including the one we intimately suppose to be our true one; not only the faces we prepare but the "we" that prepares; and it released him from any notion that the art his temperament bade him practice was an eccentric art, evading for personal and temporary reasons a more orderly, more "normal" unfolding from statement to statement.

(55)

The ledger is pretty full. Bradley's philosophy satisfies the want of a "liberating view of history" and thus explains how Eliot's distinguished modernism charts a course between tradition and experiment (Kenner 56). It provides a view of poetry as an art beyond Baudelarian symbolism and communicative rationalism. Most importantly...