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ELT 41:2 1998 ernism and documents the degree of both poets' familiarity with the business of literary production. It sheds additional light on Pound's thinking during the crucial period of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and on his state of mind and interests during the St. Elizabeths years. In addition, both Pound and Cummings freely express their opinions of the works, intellects, and personalities of some of their equally famous contemporaries, sometimes delivering their evaluations in humorous verse. And these letters provide a good indication of the extent of both men's interest in and awareness of contemporary American popular culture—the volume contains references to UFOs, the 1946 CardinalsRed Sox World Series, Elvis Presley, Ethel Merman, Ezio Pinza, Danny Kaye, JFK's Profiles in Courage, and William F. Buckley's National Review. Ahearn's annotations are usually thorough and informative; a great deal of research has gone into producing this edition, and scholars will find it a good place to pursue leads or confirm suspicions. But above all else, this correspondence is a chronicle of an important and long-lasting literary friendship, one that "brought together not only the two poets, but their loved ones as well." The dynamics of that relationship as recorded in Pound's and Cummings's idiosyncratic, inventive, and sometimes scatological prose are interesting enough to warrant sustained reading. These letters are often illuminating, troubling, and entertaining . E. P. Walkiewicz ________________ Oklahoma State University Essays on Eliot A. David Moody. Tracing T. S. Eliot's Spirit: Essays on His Poetry and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxi + 195 pp. $49.95 DAVID MOODY, best known for his comprehensive and penetrating examination of Eliot's career in Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (1979), has collected here ten essays on that writer, nine of which were composed during the past decade. Yet ofthat material, just under 80% has already appeared or been collected in book-form elsewhere, leading this reviewer to question the need for Tracing T. S. Eliot's Spirit. One can usually defend such collections on one of two grounds: the collected essays have been culled from hard-to-locate journals or they represent in toto a radical, new version of the artist or his work that emerges only through the course of the accumulated writing. In this 208 BOOK REVIEWS case, of the essays already published in books in the past ten years, only two come from relatively minor university presses; of the rest, one would expect to find them easily enough in any decent college library. As for the presentation of a revolutionary aggregate portrait, that fails to take place. In fact, according to Moody, the essays reveal him "essentially working things out for my own peace of mind without giving too much thought to a possible readership." Well, this is only partly true, for most of the work in the collection originated as conference papers written for very specialized audiences like members of the T. S. Eliot Society or participants in a series of Eliot symposiums around the world. As such, the essays assume a fairly detailed knowledge of Eliot's writing and they speak to the reader as an informed fellow-admirer of the poet. Therefore, Moody is loathe to engage in the Eliot-bashing that has taken place over the past number of years in the popular and academic presses, generated as a result of studies like Anthony Julius's recent book on Eliot and anti-Semitism (interestingly, from Cambridge also). Moody's Eliot is not a monster; he is human and humane, a man struggling to make sense of his complex world. As for "working things out," that certainly describes the method in just about all of the essays, which take as their primary formula careful, close readings of Eliot's work, which means mostly the essays and the poetry (the plays make a late appearance in a couple of pages). As the title promises, the book attempts to "trace"—often in detailed, line-byline exegesis—something called Eliot's "spirit," an ambiguous term that signifies his religious sensibility, his moral consciousness, his American strain, and even his pessimistic outlook on the world, among other...

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