T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888–1922

14 A Glance Ahead: The Making of an American Poet

On New Year’s Eve, , Eliot wrote to his brother about his “problem of living a double or triple life,” and his hope that a successful Criterion would provide “a partial way out” (LTSE, ). The Criterion did prove successful and Eliot’s position at Faber and Faber did ease his financial burden, but in some sense Eliot would continue to lead multiple lives. To follow Eliot into what he called the beginning of his “adult life” and beyond would be to explore certain significant events and people across the decades. Those years are beyond the scope of this book; however, we might list some of the markers. Eliot’s editorship of the influential Criterion would end in , but in his role as editor at Faber and Faber, as Ackroyd has observed,“through his publication and support of certain judiciously chosen poets, he determined the shape of English poetry from the Thirties into the Sixties.”His new poets included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and, later, Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn (Ackroyd, –). The year  saw his baptism and confirmation into the Church of England and his embrace of English citizenship. He lectured throughout his life, most memorably in –, giving the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard and the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia,notable for Eliot’s reconnection with America and final separation from Vivien. The s also brought important publications, including “Ash-Wednesday,”Selected Essays, the verse dramas, The Rock, Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, and the Collected Poems –, with the first appearance of“Burnt Norton.”The s brought“East Coker,” [14] A Glance Ahead       () T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, ; () An American Poet Discovers His Americanness ,  “The Dry Salvages,”“Little Gidding”—bringing to completion Eliot’s other long poem, Four Quartets, his last serious poetic work.With Helen Gardner’s publication of the manuscript of the Quartets, we now know that Eliot consulted with his friend John Hayward, who played a role similar to Pound’s role with The Waste Land. Hayward, a cultivated man with a passionate interest in languages and literature, suffered from muscular dystrophy and was confined to a wheelchair at the time Eliot moved in with him in . A year later Eliot would learn of Vivien’s death. Hayward and Eliot’s domestic arrangement came to an abrupt end in January , when Eliot married his secretary,Valerie Fletcher. His second marriage brought him great happiness. He was to be honored with both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature in , a year when fifty thousand copies of his Selected Poems were published,as well as his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture. The Complete Poems and Plays in  and Collected Poems – gathered the work of his life. On September , , at the American embassy in London, an ailing Eliot accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian award:“Poet and critic, he has fused intelligence and imagination, tradition and innovation, bringing to the world a new sense of the possibilities in a revolutionary time.” Eliot died on January , . In  his plaque was placed in the Poet’s Corner, Westminster Abbey. In looking ahead to the many years that Eliot lived after the publication of The Waste Land in , we can trace the evolution of his views on several important subjects, two of which will be explored here. The first is his astonishing reversal regarding the great nineteenth-century American poet who preceded him and whose shadow extended deeply into the twentieth century:Walt Whitman. And, related to this change, a radical shift transpired in Eliot’s view of his nationality as a poet, as he came to the remarkable realization that he was, indeed, like Whitman, an American poet. . T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman Two poets, Whitman and Eliot: one the obverse of the other. Their most vital themes, sexuality and mysticism;Whitman arrived at the latter through exalted celebration of the former; Eliot arrived at the latter by suppression and rejection of the former. Both Whitman and Eliot are great poets, one the joyful singer of nineteenth -century hope, the other the doleful purveyor of twentieth-century despair. Readers who respond to one have often felt the necessity of condemning the other.But there are readers—myself among them—who respond T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet [414] to both these poets and see...