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

Preface

The incubation period of T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet is some thirty years, beginning in the early s, and propelled by the publication of, and response to, my first book on Eliot, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons, in . Since that book is out of print, as a sort of prolegomena to a preface, I propose a brief summary of its genesis, reception , and continuing influence. A Backward Glance at Eliot’s Personal Waste Land In , when Eliot’s widow Valerie Eliot edited and published the manuscript version under the title T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, she placed as an epigraph Eliot’s own statement:“Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling” (WLF, ). Although the instinct of many readers was to discount this statement, and even to point to the vagueness of its origins (it was quoted by a professor in a lecture, and recorded by Eliot’s older brother, Henry), it is, in fact, quite in keeping with an entire series of such statements made by Eliot in public and for the record. In , in “Thoughts after Lambeth,” Eliot comments:“When I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention” (SE, ).When, in his  Paris Review interview, Eliot was pressed on this statement, he in effect reaffirmed it: “No, it wasn’t part of my conscious intention. I think that in Thoughts after [preface] Lambeth, I was speaking of intentions more in a negative than in a positive sense, to say what was not my intention. I wonder what an ‘intention’ means! One wants to get something off one’s chest. One doesn’t know quite what it is that one wants to get off the chest until one’s got it off.” It was later in this same interview that Eliot made this astonishing statement (when asked to compare his two long poems):“By the time of the Four Quartets, I couldn’t have written in the style of The Waste Land. In The Waste Land, I wasn’t even bothering whether I understood what I was saying. These things, however, become easier to people with time.You get used to having The Waste Land, or Ulysses, about” (INT, , ). In his  lecture,“Virgil and the Christian World,” Eliot made perhaps his most intriguing statement about The Waste Land without naming the poem:“A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation. He need not know what his poetry will come to mean to others; and a prophet need not understand the meaning of his prophetic utterance” (OPP, ). In all of these statements, direct and oblique, about The Waste Land, Eliot emphasized more and more the personal, private matter that went into the poem and his astonishment at the way the poem came to be read as a public statement about the modern world. In the last of the comments quoted above, he has perhaps put his feelings in their most complex language. Could it possibly be that Eliot believed he was expressing only his “private experience” in The Waste Land? That the lines of this most famous poem of the twentieth century were for the author “only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away”? Giving himself away? Giving what away? What was there to conceal? Presumably what nobody had, by the  lecture, discovered, or at least discovered and revealed. Could it be that the  essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” with its elaborate and tortured “impersonal theory” of poetry, had been a sophistic or sophisticated defense for someone wanting to write poetry...