Those Dark Angels: T. S. Eliot

Book reviews None of these people are American populists, of course, (Coughlin was Canadian) but their views are in complete harmony with populism's American brand. For that matter, Willis Overholser's A Short Review and Analysis of the History of Money in the United States (1936), which Surette says Pound read in 1938, is a full expression of American right wing populism. Surette notes that in radio speech 119 Pound "attributes his conversion to conspiracy theory" to his reading of Overholser. Pound's own money pamphlets extend a long tradition of anti-bank, anti-finance, potentially anti-semitic agitation that is evident today in the books of Pat Robertson, the televangelist and politician. One of his sources is Eustace Mullins, a member of Pound's circle at St. Elizabeths and the first Pound biographer, whose Secrets of the Federal Reserve is listed in the bibliography of Robertson's The New World Order ( 1991), as is Nesta Webster's Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924) another part of Pound's anti-semitic conspiracy theory reading, though not an American populist one per se. Surette seems to treat American populism as a nineteenth-century phenomenon; in fact, it is one of the most enduring discourses in American life, one that Pound, in his inimitable way, "made new" and extended. Alec Marsh ______________ Muhlenberg College Those Dark Angels: T. S. Eliot Ronald Schuchard. Eliot's Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xv + 268 pp. $45.00 RON SCHUCHARD has been one of Eliot's most sensitive and perceptive critics over the past twenty-five years, so it was with eager anticipation that I picked up a volume gathering together much ofthat work. Eliot's Dark Angel does not disappoint. In this major collection, Schuchard lays out in exhaustive detail a comprehensive vision of modernism 's most influential voice that is rooted firmly in Eliot's life. The resultant portrait is of an artist initially tortured by the dark angels of professional uncertainty, marital betrayal, and spiritual crisis, who eventually overcomes those challenges through an art and criticism that posits order, love, and salvation as antidotes to life-long tortures. Along the way, we are given glimpses into the deep recesses of Eliot's soul and come away from the volume enriched with a new appreciation of and sympathy for this complicated writer. 517 ELT 44 : 4 2001 Readers curious about Schuchard's critical method need go no further than the volume's subtitle, which offers a kind of stubborn challenge to many current theoretical methods of assessing modernist texts. While much exciting work has been done recently on Eliot by critics using a variety of theoretical approaches—Fm thinking of Wayne Koestenbaum, Maud Ellmann, Colleen Lamos, and John Paul Riquelme, among many others—Schuchard throws down a gauntlet at the feet of representatives of such schools by arguing that Eliot's art is not thoroughly knowable except when filtered through the biographical. Since Schuchard reads the majority of the work as fundamentally an expression of the internal conflicts and personal desires of the writer, the only way to lay bare those complications is to proceed through the man himself. The payoff in such a method, according to Schuchard, is to bring Eliot's poetry "down from a high level of spiritual abstraction, and from an impersonal , overly intellectualized explication of allusions, to a comprehension of the personal emotions and memories that are deeply seated in the poem." This strategy results in some other interesting outcomes. For one, it gives a coherence to Eliot's work over a lifetime through the trope of the dark angel (a phrase appropriated from a Lionel Johnson poem), despite Eliot's many personal and professional mutations during his career. Instead of reinforcing one of the predominant and accepted chronologies of Eliot's life—one that marks a significant break in 1927 as Eliot took British citizenship and joined the Anglican Church—Schuchard's version is much more continuous. The approach also successfully overturns Eliot's self-constructed image of disinterested poet, one he cultivated rigorously through a critical vocabulary and poetic practice that stressed objective correlatives, impersonality, dramatic masks, and...