- The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism
A new book from Leon Surette, one of Canada’s most distinguished interpreters of modernism, will always provoke interest, and his most recent, on Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot, repays the anticipation. It is a sophisticated and richly detailed reading of the works of the two poets with a view to exploring their relationship to humanism. Much has already been written about Eliot and humanism, mainly because Eliot spent a good deal of time attacking it in his prose. Less has been said about Stevens and humanism because he did not bother to say very much about it. As Professor Surette admits, Stevens’s prose “is not preoccupied with Humanism as Eliot’s is” (5). The book argues that the anti-humanist Eliot had a short humanist period and that the humanist Stevens was perhaps no such thing. I’m not sure these revelations are going to startle very many of his readers. In a time when Eliot studies seem obsessed with his [End Page 210] sexuality, his anti-Semitism, and his flirtations with fascism, his fifteen minutes as a humanist probably won’t raise many eyebrows. Neither will the contention that Stevens’s humanism may not be as deeply embraced as many scholars seem to believe.
The book’s several strengths begin with the author’s nuanced readings of works by the two poets. Although there has already been a great deal of critical attention lavished on Eliot and Stevens, Professor Surette casts new light on familiar texts. Drawing on his wide knowledge of intellectual history, he explicates well the philosophical and religious undercurrents of Stevens’s thought, allowing him to construe his theme in ways that many will find convincing or at least plausible. Strong also is his use of life materials, letters for example, in bringing out fresh dimensions of meaning in difficult poems. His examination of the relation of Eliot’s “Gerontion” to The Waste Land (131–51) is especially intriguing, bringing to light new connections and source materials. Stevens’s great lyric Idea of Order at Key West” is also vividly contextualized in debates about humanism in the 1930s (chapter 5).
For all the book’s many virtues, there are, however, aspects that one might call weaknesses but which are probably unavoidable given Professor Surette’s approach. I refer, for example, to the problem of definition. What exactly does Professor Surette mean by a capitalized Humanism? The author does admit that it can mean a number of different things in different times and places and he does tell us what he does not mean by it, but at the end of the day his use of the term remains a little foggy. He admits that, unlike Jeffery Perl’s sense of humanism as a constituent element of modernism, his use is “more restricted” and “more modest” (46). A few lines later, he writes that he makes “no effort to place Eliot and Stevens in the context of metahistorical movements and tendencies,” and instead he seeks “to reconstruct their struggles to find their way in a world of conflicting opinion and belief played out against a background of accelerating scientific discovery and technological change.” This is a little difficult to understand on two counts. The book has very little to say about “accelerating scientific discovery and technological change,” so one can only assume that the phrase is being used in that clichéd sense typical of think pieces in newspapers, undergraduate essays, and the conversation of non-scientists.
Secondly, what exactly is a metahistorical movement or tendency? The bundle of ideas and social practices that descends from the civic humanism of the Italian city states in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to Christian Humanists like Erasmus and Thomas More in the sixteenth, [End Page 211] to the humanism of the Enlightenment and to its many nineteenth- and twentieth-century variants (46) is not, in truth, fundamentally “metahistorical” as these ideas and practices were...