Review of T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews

T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews. Ed. Jewel Spears Brooker. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004. xliv, 600 p. $110.

Contemporary reviews of a writer's work are often of interest only as evidence of shifts in reputation or as raw material for reception studies. In T. S. Eliot's case, there is more at stake. Within the six years that separate the first review of Prufrock and Other Observations from those of The Waste Land (1917–1923), Eliot became the most praised and denigrated poet of his time. Reviewed by the old guard and by young writers who later became famous, he served as a lightning rod for controversies about modernism. The introduction to T. S. Eliot: The Contemporary Reviews by Jewel Spears Brooker provides a perceptive guide to the course of those contentions. As she remarks, the early reviews established a pattern that was to persist for a decade: emphasis on an intense and disturbing subjectivity in the poems, and identification of Eliot as a poet whose technical skill and subtlety could neither be imitated nor adequately characterized. After publication of The Waste Land, the subjectivity of the early poems could be construed as expressive of the consciousness of a generation—and condemned for its incoherence, negativity, and perverse intellectualism. A review of Poems 1909–1925 summed up Eliot's reputation at the time: "violently attacked, passionately admired, and . . . perfectly misunderstood" (p. 136).

Publication of The Sacred Wood (1920) introduced another Eliot—one perceived as a "scientific" critic whose scholarship, intelligence, "superior attitude," "stiff and hidebound style," and "ice-cold heart" triggered suspicions about the poet behind the poems. In Homage to John Dryden (1924), one purpose of Eliot's literary criticism became clearer. Edmund Wilson perceptively noted that Eliot praised those of his predecessors (for example, the metaphysical poets and French symbolists) who constituted a tradition of which Eliot himself was a part (124). "Tradition and the Individual Talent" served the same purpose and, in its emphasis on impersonality, replied to critics of his poetry who identified the subjectivity of its personae with the poet himself. In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth said that "entirely to enjoy the poetry which I am recommending, it would be necessary to give up much of what is ordinarily enjoyed." Eliot engaged in an analogous attempt to refashion taste.

Literary modernism was presumed to be progressive. In "The All-Star Literary Vaudeville" (1926), Edmund Wilson referred to Pound and Eliot as writers of "the literary Left." When Eliot's prose of the twenties and thirties extended its range to include politics, religion, and society, the assumed connection between literary innovation and political radicalism began to collapse. His notorious declaration in For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) that he was a royalist in politics, an anglo-catholic in religion, and a classicist in literature prompted strictures from Wilson and Conrad Aiken. Approval of Selected Essays (1932) by the New York Times and the Sunday Times (London) was counterbalanced by the lukewarm reactions of the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, Paul Elmore More, and sharply critical reviews in the New Republic and the Nation.

Hostility reached its height with publication of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) and After Strange Gods (1934). In the latter volume Eliot remarked that his "declaration of faith" in 1928 had been "injudicious," but he created a new basis for repudiation of his standpoint in his comment about the undesirability of many "free-thinking Jews" in nominally Christian societies—a remark that was noted only in passing at the time but that has recently dominated discussion of his work. For those plunged back into these contentions, it is a relief to encounter R. P. Blackmur's comment on After Strange Gods: "Nobler, and rasher, intentions cannot be conceived" (273).

The first Eliot was a poet; the second was a critic. In the early thirties, Henry Hazlitt noted that...