The International Reception of T. S. Eliot (review)

Anglo-American reception of T. S. Eliot follows a now-recognizable trajectory. Greeted initially by a full range of reaction, from excited recognition of a major talent and revolutionary poet to openly avowed puzzlement about what he was doing and even outraged critique, Eliot was nonetheless quickly established in major critical texts as the leading poet of his time. By the 1930s his work was not only acknowledged as important even by the still puzzled, it became the subject of increasing critical interest, largely focused on analysis and interpretation. While the next few decades were primarily devoted to studies of his sources, style, critical theories, and poetic development as a kind of Dantesque journey from the Hell of The Waste Land to a divine ideal in Four Quartets, by the 1970s new emphases developed. Reconsiderations in light of feminist theory, studies of his representations of Jews and minorities, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and queer theory opened up divisions in critical evaluation. Publications of significant new materials—including the Facsimile edition of The Waste Land, Eliot’s Letters, Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, and new biographical studies—have challenged Eliot’s poetic primacy at the same time that they reinvigorated Eliot studies, which have been intensively addressed in new modernism since the 1990s.

Yet for all these developments in Eliot criticism and evaluation, the focus has remained Anglo-American and largely on interpretation and analysis of form. Elizabeth Däumer’s and Shyamal Bagchee’s collection on Eliot’s international reception comes as a valuable contribution to our understanding and as a major new direction for Eliot studies. Because it not only addresses Eliot’s impact and influence well beyond Anglo-American reaction, but also reveals distinctively different concerns, this is an important book: it provides a timely entry into increasingly recognized literary issues of cultural context, translation, and the extraordinary extent of Eliot’s impact on modern literature.

Däumer and Bagchee have selected and balanced essays that inform in key ways: they include not only studies of Eliot’s connections with European literatures—those he defined as constituting the “mind of Europe” and a single tradition—but with Eastern European, Asian, Australian, and South- as well as North-American writers and readers; they provide historical and cultural background for many countries where literary reception has been framed in political or social terms; and they demonstrate the concerns of writers and scholars from traditions less focused on the centrality of interpretation and more on the effects of new creative and/or linguistic possibilities. The book, thus, provides new insights into modernism(s), a recognition of the plurality emphasized in recent scholarship that uses world-wide sources and texts rather than placing an Anglo-American template over distinctly different traditions. While no text could comprise all these cultures and poetic traditions, this book offers an extensive range. Especially interesting are intersections of texts that reveal parallel or contrasting traditions from quite different perspectives, such as the contrasting analyses of Ernst Robert Curtius’s translations or the parallel experiences in countries devastated by war, for whom Eliot’s early work seemed immediately applicable.

The International Reception of T. S. Eliot comprises eighteen essays examining Eliot’s reception and influence in discrete and disparate cultures. While many questions overlap, notably problems of translation, cultural differences, alternative literary traditions, and differing histories of relationship with England and America, it is possible to suggest, very broadly, major approaches to the larger topic: contrasting theories of modernism, comparisons and/or contrasts of Eliot and individual authors, Eliot as a liminal figure whose own status in between cultures and traditions highlights the complexities of cross-cultural reading, and changing evaluations against the context of a country’s literary and political history—especially in the light of wars and social ruptures.

In the diverse approaches represented here, these themes emerge in interesting and unconventional ways. In the opening essay on Edward Kamau Brathwaite, for example, Matthew Hart brings...