Four Quartets: Fred Chappell's Midquest and T.S. Eliot

FEATURED AUTHOR—FRED CHAPPELL Four Quartets: Fred Chappell's Midquest and T.S. Eliot_______________________ Scott R. Christianson Fred Chappell's four-volume book called Midquest has received a fair amount of attention since its publication in 1981. Poet, fiction writer, and scholar/critic Robert Morgan praised the book in an early review, pointing out that in Bloodfire, the book's second volume, "the central metaphor, the middle of life, becomes clear" (Good Measure, p. 97). That "middle of life" idea derives from Dante and The Divine Comedy, which Dabney Stuart early said was a "pervasive" presence in Midquest (Chappell Reader, p. xvi). John Lang, in his brilliant essay, "Points of Kinship: Community and Allusion in Fred Chappell's Midquest," goes even further: "Dante might be said to be the guardian spirit or the muse of the whole oíMidquest. . .Dante is the single author whose work is most significant to the architecture and the thematic development of Chappell's poem" (102). In fact, Dante is but one of countless writers, thinkers, musicians, and works that Chappell refers and alludes to throughout his long poem. Lang says, "Such allusions are typical of Chappell's artistic strategy in Midquest. Only rarely are they obtrusive. Instead, they work together to suggest the underlying unity of human experience"—a literary "kinship," Lang's word, that creates "a series of wide-ranging communities" ("Points," pp. 99, 97). Lang concludes his section on Midquest in his later book, Understanding Fred Chappell, with a prediction that also resounds as a plea: "As the book receives the kind of searching critical analysis its achievement merits, it will increasingly be seen for what, in fact, it is—one of the finest long poems in twentieth-century American literature" (94). This essay proposes to begin that "kind of searching critical analysis" that Lang believes Midquest deserves, and which I believe it can certainly withstand. Among the allusions Lang identifies in Chappell's long poem, the first after Dante—and the first to an American writer—is T. S. Eliot ("Points," p. 99). The presence of Eliot in Midquest has been acknowledged but not widely explored. I believe that that presence figures in numerous references and allusions to Eliot, in a wider allusiveness that parallels Eliot's own allusive 49 practices, including many shared or similar literary, philosophical, and musical sources, and in the very structure and design of Chappell's long poem. I believe that Chappell and Eliot have numerous "points of kinship" with one another. That they share an affinity or filiation neither diminishes Chappell's achievement nor obscures him under Eliot's looming shadow. Rather, with Midquest Fred Chappell has earned a place among America's greatest poets. Chappell himself has acknowledged the importance of Dante to Midquest. He writes in the "Preface" to the poem that, "first of all" and "because of design," Dante was the poet he had "most in mind" and felt the closest "kinship" with (even if he qualifies that as "respectfully distant kinship"). Before Chappell, no other American poet than T. S. Eliot felt such a close kinship with the author of The Divine Comedy and La Vita Nuova. Eliot himself said, "The greatest debts are not always the most evident... . The kind of debt that I owe to Dante is the kind which goes on accumulating, the kind which is not the debt of one period or another of one's life" (To Criticize the Critic, p. 126). "'Midway in this life I came to a darksome wood.' But Dante, however befuddled, was Good." That's Chappell from poem two of River, volume one of Midquest, quoting Dante. Here is T. S. Eliot, from the second of Four Quartets, East Coker, part two: "In the middle, not only in the middle of the way/ But all the way, in a dark wood. ..." Part five also echoes Dante: "So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years... Trying to learn to use words... ." Beyond structure or design, Dante's work was similarly important to Chappell and Eliot in its concern with a dominant theme: spiritual rebirth and renewal. Lang points out that Midquest "is centered upon Ole Fred's search...