T.S. Eliot and the Ideology of ‘Four Quartets’ by John Xiros Cooper (review)

HUMANITIES 303 This is a contextual Norton was 304 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 ward, pepperingitliberallythroughout thebook, along withthe even more contentious abstraction 'the mandarinate,' which designates the 'contemporary power elite' - 'advisers, consultants, spokesmen, opinion-makers, clergymen, editors, intellectuals' - supposedly Eliot's intended audience for the poem. Eliot was concerned with 'defining the proper relation of the wise mandarin to politics' - how to maintain a detaclunent from the established order while living within it, how to achieve transcendence while remaining a servant of power. 'It will be the particular task of Four Quartets,' Cooper announces, 'to explain how this is accomplished': 'making a captive mandarinate accept the new dispensation' after the war is the poem's mission. That Eliot wrote the poem before and during the war, supposedly to serve the needs of the postwar mandarinate trapped by the cold war, is not a problem that particularly bothers the author. Having conceptualized Eliot's particular audience, Cooper proceeds to cast Four Quartets in its image, reading the 'public dimension' of the poem as the poem itself, equating its reception with the poet's intent. Post hoc ergo propter hoc..The poem disappears into Cooper's description of Eliot the 'ideologue' and the 'middle-aging mandarins' of 'Anglo-American bourgeois society.' The poem is read programmatically, as the stratagem of a poet who is himself a mandarin, an 'obedient servant of power,' whose overall purpose is 'to maintain the continuity of European culture' through a 'directive elite that would paternalistically superintend and co-ordinate civil society.' For Cooper, the poem exudes the ease of Eliot's lofty position of power, reflecting 'in its manner the comfort, even serenity, of not only the man who has arrived, but of the man who has been there for a while.' Four Quartets falls into place as rhetoric. Though its 'principal rhetorical stratagemis to maintain thatit is not rhetorical, that its zone ofprofoundest effect lies somewhere beyond lithe pathology of rhetoric,'" the poem's 'concealed designs' are easily exposed in the context of the contemporary mandarinate of which Eliot was a part. Cooper brings the poem to heel, conceptualizing it as a discipline in the poet's ideology. But is Four Quartets so handily subdued? What poem behaves as neatly and obediently as the dog Cooper leads abouton a leash? What poet would recognize the process of writing in these claims? And what reader experiences Four Quartets in this light? Have we all been duped for half a century by Eliot's carefully manipulated design and are the scales now fallen from our eyes? Is Cooper's Four Quartets 'the poem proper,' as one of his chapter titles announces? In his view, academic criticism has seen its task as rescuing the poem from the poet's reputation as a 'dogmatist.' Eliot's critics have taught us to focus on the poet's 'imler turmoil,' and as a result we have lost sight of 'his outward faces.' In his third chapter, 'Representing Four Quartets: The Canonizers at Work,' Cooper reviews what he terms this 'work of reclamation' by D.W. Harding, F.R. Leavis, Raymond Preston, and Helen Gardner. These early studies were all con- HUMANITIES 305 cemed to argue the poet's subjective state as 'free from any framing ideology'; and it was Gardner's book in 1950 which constituted what Cooper calls 'the decisive blow in the process of re-positioning the poem.' It was Gardner who aestheticized the poem and lifted it above dogma - an 'ingenious stroke,' Cooper argues, because she sensed this was the bestway to recommend it to readers who were schooled in the culture of modernism . For them, Four Quartets must be advanced 'as the rarest "art."1 Cooper reminds us that Eliot sanctioned Gardner's project and that Hayward was the go-between, 'ferrying the master's thoughts' to the grateful Gardner, whose task was to deliver 'the masterpiece, in the very terms Eliot himself would have most preferred, from the bustle and huff of partisan opinion.' So much for academic freedom and the autonomous critical voice. Cooper's language is everywhere heavy with insinuation, but nowhere does tmgenerous implication surface as blatantly as his concluding comment on Gardner. In...