Collaborations: Henry James and the Poet-Critics

In "The Perfect Critic," the first essay in The Sacred Wood (1920), T. S. Eliot defended his use of the term "poetic critic"—the source of the later and now commoner term "poet-critic"—by observing that criticism and creativeness are complementary "directions of sensibility." To be sure, Eliot concluded, "it is to be expected that the critic and the creative artist should frequently be the same person" (16). In 1920, however, Eliot couldn't think of a single English poet who met his requirements—or, at least, none whom he was willing to acknowledge. ¹ Oscar Wilde, for example, didn't rate a single mention in The Sacred Wood, even though—or, perhaps, because—he had said the same things about the relationship between poetry and criticism as Eliot; indeed, in an uncollected essay Eliot dismissed "Wilde and his circle" as representatives of "the end of a type of culture" ("Preface" 44). ² Finding no acceptable models of poetic criticism among the English poets, Eliot turned instead to fiction—specifically, to the novels of Henry James. "As a critic," Eliot claimed in his famous essay "In Memory of Henry James" (1918), "no novelist in our language can approach James" (1). According to Eliot, James revealed his critical powers not in his literary criticism, which was "feeble," but in his novels:

He was a critic who preyed not upon ideas, but upon living beings. It is criticism which is in a very high sense creative. [. . .] James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [. . .] He is the most intelligent man of his generation. ("In Memory" 1-2) ³

In Eliot's formulation, then, the art of the poet-critic was emphatically a Jamesian art. It was an art distinguished, as others have argued, by a conscientious commitment to technical expertise, which not only conferred artistic perfection on the work but also bestowed a certain prestige, an aura of modern professionalism, on the author. ⁴ It was also a heterosexual art— or, at least, not an overtly homosexual one. To be a poet-critic, moreover, was to be a special kind of Euro-American artist, or, more precisely, a European artist, but in a sense that only an American might realize. For it was not simply that James was "like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea," "James's best American figures in the novels," Eliot urged,

have a fullness of existence and an external ramification of relationship which a European reader might not easily suspect. [. . .] It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become. ("In Memory" 1-2)

Indeed, "I do not suppose that any one who is not an American can properly appreciate James," Eliot observed. This is the poet- critical corollary of Eliot's theory of literary tradition in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919): "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour" (Sacred 49).

While Eliot spelled out the initial terms in which James would be constructed in the modernist era as the exemplary international—indeed supranational—literary artist, he was hardly alone in putting James to such use. Eliot's contemporary and fellow American expatriate, Ezra Pound, asked James to serve a similar function. And both Pound's and Eliot's attempts to turn James's example as literary expatriate to poet-critical advantage would be reconfigured by later poet-critics such as W. H. Auden, an Englishman who emigrated to America in 1939, and R. P. Blackmur, an American who disliked travel but who fashioned himself...