Pound and Eliot

A trend toward cultural studies is marked in this year's critical productions on Pound and Eliot—especially those efforts coming from scholars based in Great Britain. To generalize: with various brands of materialist criticism on the ascendant, the emphasis is on context, biography, and, as has become usual, politics and ideology; on the other hand, a countervailing interest in myth and the occult suggests the emergence of new, less materialist approaches. An important new volume of Pound's correspondence and an updated Eliot biography have appeared; both of them present newly available material. Alec Marsh is responsible for the Pound section, Ben Lockerd for the Eliot.

i Pound

a. Correspondence

Leon Surette and Demetres Tryphonopoulos's edition of the correspondence between Pound and Olivia Rossetti Agresti, aptly titled "I Cease Not to Yowl": Ezra Pound's Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti (Illinois), will be a source of distress and morbid fascination to Pound scholars. Agresti was Ford Madox Ford's cousin and the niece of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. Her Rossetti grandfather was the eccentric scholar who believed Dante's Commedia to have been written in a secret code—something Pound also believed. She was an erstwhile Fascist, yet critical of Mussolini's alliance with Germany and, in hindsight, of the regime in general. A devout Catholic and not at all anti Semitic, she wrote correspondence (only fitfully present in this volume, alas) that forced Pound to more fully examine and justify his various positions, political and literary. The correspondence covers the years 1937-59, from Pound's prewar propaganda to his release from St. Elizabeths. On first reading, Pound's "yowling" seems indeed ceaseless, his obsession with Jewish/Communist conspiracies unremitting. On balance, the correspondence shows the degree to which imprisonment seems to have kept Pound's obsessions alive rather than curing them. Throughout the 127 items gathered here (about 75 percent of the total correspondence), Pound sounds much like a member of the John Birch Society, or a (non-Christian) member of the current Republican right—never more chronically, hopelessly nativist. On subsequent readings, however, evidence accumulates that the letters are indeed a "gold mine"—as Marjorie Perlov promises in a dust-jacket blurb. First, the letters provide a vivid glimpse into Pound's reading during his captivity. His taste for political insider narratives, from Colonel House's Intimate Papers to Hitler's Table Talk, is notable. He finds Alexander Del Mar, the author of The History of Monetary Systems, "our greatest historian"; however, his discomfort is palpable when he reports to Agresti his discovery that "Del Mar was kike." He nevertheless promises to go on "reviving his glorious memory"—as he does faithfully in The Cantos—even as he finds that Del Mar had "no guard against centralization and tyranny" and ignored the usury rate. This typically queasy attempt by Pound to square thinking he admires with his racial beliefs is characteristic of many of these letters. The correspondence also reveals much about Pound's interpretation of Dante, economics, and events in the news—for example, McCarthyism (Pound supported the senator's investigations) and the budding civil rights movement (of which he disapproved). For these reasons, "I Cease Not to Yowl" is the best gloss to some of the obscure political code of the later Cantos that we have.

Three other pieces on Pound's correspondence appear in the pages of Paideuma. Richard Read's "The Letters of Adrian Stokes and Ezra Pound" (27, ii-iii: 69-92) documents the writers' "intellectual rivalry" over the meaning of the Tempio, of sculpture, and art criticism generally. Read's primary interest is in Stokes, not Pound, but the article throws a powerful sidelight onto Pound's thinking in 1934, when his relationship with Stokes came to a kind of crisis over Stokes's carving vs. molding thesis of art criticism. Pound rejects Stokes's interpretation and thus seems to reject Stokes and what he stood for—that is, England, homosexuality, and, subliminally, the danger of Jewish assimilation. Stokes, for his part, "wanted to forget or perhaps to destroy the evidence of his relationship with Pound" after what he took to be a betrayal by the poet. Most important for Pound scholars, however, is seeing how Pound's disagreements with Stokes provoked Pound to reissue Gaudier-Brzeska in 1934 with a new "Postscript" addressed, in part, to Stokes.

Tony Tremblay's "The Literary Occult in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound" (Paideuma 27, ii-iii: 107-27) is richly suggestive about Pound's interest in the occult, the influence of occultism on modernism generally, and, not least, about the intriguing McLuhan, who was "first and foremost a Poundian." It seems that McLuhan came to believe in modernism as an occult conspiracy, that "the arts . . . are in the pockets of these [secret] societies." A Catholic, he was horrified by this thought. Pound never denied the point, Tremblay emphasizes, and the poet seems to have regretted that McLuhan never wanted to probe more deeply into occult matters. Tremblay corrects important facts about the Pound/McLuhan relationship (and about the McLuhan/Kenner connection) that have crept into Pound biographies. The Pound/McLuhan correspondence is located in the National Archives in Canada.

In the same issue of Paideuma Cameron McWhirter's " 'The Dean of Corpses': The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Joseph Vogel" (27, ii- iii: 197-225) gives the complete exchange between Pound and a young would-be author, who later became a writer of proletarian fiction. Vogel is as bumptious and jejeune as Pound is patient and teacherly; a better title for this exchange might have been "Letters to a Young Non-poet." Nonetheless, it reveals much about the insidious pull of ideology, both from the Right and the Left, on would-be artists of the 1930s.

b. The Cantos

Peter Nicholls's " 'To Unscrew the Inscrutable': Myth and Fiction as Belief in Ezra Pound's The Cantos," pp. 139-52 in Myth and the Making of Modernity, ed. Michael Bell and Peter Poellner (Rodopi), explores "the tension between myth and writing" throughout Pound's career, from his early remarks on myth and the poem "Plotinus" to the very late Cantos. This tension runs between "the inscrutability of the divine" and the language of "ethical prescription," between eternity and history. Drawing on the work of Jean Luc Nancy, Nicholls speaks of writing "interrupting" myth and delivering the eternal over to history. On the other hand, as he shows in his reading of canto 90, at times Pound's writing has the opposite effect, seeming to "dissolve the embedded connections between language, authority and myth" in a "specifically linguistic encounter" with "a different kind of temporality" where language becomes an event, "an autonomous temporal structure."

John Kelly's brilliant and informative "A Dweller by Streams and Woodland: The Influence of Emanuel Swedenborg in The Cantos " (Paideuma 27, i: 55-78) shows how fruitful an "occult" reading of Pound's epic can be. Focusing on obscure moments in cantos 14, 15, 17, and 20, Kelly reveals Swedenborgian correspondences and images that shed light on the more obscure aspects of these hellish and paradisal poems; he makes a convincing case that "Swedenborg's philosophy represents a schema with which one may interpret the paradisal vision and the recurring presence of the divine in The Cantos."

H. Hilmy's "Dionysian Metamorphosis: A Reading of Canto II" in the same volume (Paideuma 27, i: 93-108), which brings the poem into contact with Nietzsche's Apollonian and Dionysian, is less successful. He sees the Homeric model of canto 1 and the Ovidian canto 2 as "contrasting structural models . . . essential to the composition" of the epic. Hilmy's prolix Nietzschean interpretation—despite gestures toward complexity—seems rigid and forced; his Apollo is more Freudian superego than sublime bearer of joyous wisdom.

Edgar M. Glenn's goddess-obsessed, faintly Jungian "Serendipitous Aphrodite in Ezra Pound's Canto 1" (Paideuma 28, i-ii: 9-51) is a bravura explication of the closing lines of that canto. In alluding to the Homeric hymns and Aphrodite, it seems that Pound alluded to much, much more. Glenn adduces the whole history of the goddess from late neolithic figurines to the mascaraed vamp of prewar Kensington. He presents the complete art history of golden lingerie, including a thorough account of the pre-Raphaelite brassiere. He dwells on the golden bough of Aricida via Frazer and Vergil and, well . . . it is an exhilarating performance, making it impossible to read those lines the same way again.

c. Shorter Poems

All of Thomas F. Grieve's "Pound's Other Homage: Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" (Paideuma 27, i: 9-30) can be found in slightly different form in Grieve's Ezra Pound's Early Poetry and Poetics (see AmLS 1997, pp. 137-38). However, this strong article contains the book's thesis in a nutshell and introduces Grieve's notion of poetic "homage" as a literary genre. After an expert review of Mauberly criticism, Grieve argues that the poem can neither be seen naively as self-congratulation nor as "bitter self-castigation"; rather, "the consistency of Mauberly's voice lies in the continual destabilization of such oppositions." The poem is, like much of Pound's pre-Cantos poetry, a "meditation on and an investigation of his [own] identity." By inventing the "homage"—a "form . . . occluding distinctions between pastiche, imitation, and translation, and combining critique and lament, irony and affirmation, self-parody and self-defense—Pound was enabled to define and to present most fully and intensely his struggle to forge a voice for the epic" that he hoped to write.

d. Relation to Other Writers

Despite the collection's Italian title and provenance, 13 of the 15 essays in Dante e Pound (Ravenna: Longo Editore) are in English. Maria Luisa Ardizzone, the editor, introduces the book in Italian, and Mary de Rachewiltz and Vanni Scheiwiller offer essays in that language. The book gathers talks given at the 1995 Ravenna conference on the two poets and includes work by major Pound critics both here and in Italy; it is essential reading. Space does not allow me to do justice to every essay, but they are for the most part pithy and readable precisely because they were originally talks. Several of the contributors (Ardizzone, Walton Litz, Louis Martz, Leon Surette, Demetres Tryphonopoulos) approach the Dante/Pound relationship by means of theses more fully explained in those authors' well-known books (for Martz, see below). Two essays are philosophical—Peter Makin's powerful essay addresses the "ideogrammatic method" via Wittgenstein, and Ardizzone pursues her thesis that Pound attacks monotheism and Aristotle's unity through his use (and misuse) of Dante and medieval philosophy; both yield surprisingly different insights about "form" in the Cantos. Both Louis Martz and Theodore Cachey Jr. address Pound's richly informative comments on Lawrence Binyon's translation of the Commedia. Hugh Kenner, Litz, and Surette take up the very American context in which Pound first encountered Dante—T. S. Eliot and the famous Temple Classics edition of the Commedia used by both Eliot and Pound are much discussed. Overall, many essays bear variously on Pound's surprisingly adversarial relationship to Dante. Pound loved the Commedia but had trouble with Dante's Christianity, which made it difficult for him to fully appreciate the Paradiso (Makin). Indeed, Tim Redman reminds us that for many years Pound thought of his Cantos as the "Commedia Pagana, " and (citing the Pound/Agresti correspondence) Surette shows that Pound's Dante is not even a Christian, but a "Swedenborgian visionary." Both Stephen Sicari and Martz see Pound as a prophetic writer, which helps them make sense of the obstacle that Christian orthodoxy posed for Pound: he made Dante a prophet too and thereby bypassed several doctrinal thickets.

Paolo Cherchi's inspiring discussion of The Spirit of Romance addresses Pound's "philological limitations" while revealing his "sense of poetic language unmatched by [any] philologist of his day"—or ours. His point is fully supported by Pound's comments to Binyon as reported by Cachey. Giuseppe Manzotti's fashionably continental essay links canto 74 to Canto XXXIII of the Inferno—the canto on traitors, of Ugolino in the tower; Manzotti calls it Dante's "Pisan canto." Reed Way Dasenbrock's very American talk is concerned with "what it means" to study Pound and Dante in the United States today. He worries insightfully about the "new thematic" criticism, which is "overwhelmingly concerned with the themes or content" of literature while neglecting form. Pound's reputation has suffered under the New thematic regime—as has Dante's. They are perceived as paradoxically too central; actually, they are decidedly concerned with "the other": they are multicultural writers avant la lettre. Dante e Pound also contains some useful primary documents, including a 1943 radio speech called "Civilization," a previously unpublished scheme for The Cantos c. 1940, and a letter to Santayana.

It is not for me to assess the value of my own Money and Modernity:Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Alabama). This work connects the work of the two college chums through a shared "Jeffersonian" ideology. The Pound discussed in this book is very "American," and I attempt to show how characteristic Jeffersonian concerns about money, finance capital, and republican probity as well as a defensive, not to say paranoid, attitude toward modernity influenced both The Cantos and Paterson. I produce a "genealogy of Poundian economics," trying to show how Pound and Williams were predisposed to Social Credit for Jeffersonian reasons; a Marxist analysis of Social Credit supplements this proposition. Other chapters show how many American poets turned toward the newly prestigious discourse of economics to defend poetry by promoting poesis over "production"—the opposite of the Marxist view current in the 1930s. Contrasting analyses of the corporation by the two poets—Pound's followed Mussolini while Williams's followed Dewey—help explain some of the differences in their two epic poems and suggest the contrasting ways by which both poets attempted to overcome modernity itself. Finally, I address Pound's peculiar brand of fascism. Although the book can be read as a work of cultural studies, I prefer to think of it as intellectual history.

e. General Studies

Lawrence Rainey's readable and well-illustrated Institutions of Modernism is an exemplary work of cultural materialism, with all of that approach's strengths and very few of its weaknesses—i.e., Rainey is well aware that the "aesthetic" is a problematic category for this kind of materialist criticism, and he downplays his own ideological commitments. The key words of his book are "cultural production," and its theme is patronage as an institution, specifically the crisis of patronage that faced the emerging modernist writers at the beginning of the century. With the collapse of the older patronage institutions in the face of modern and avant-garde art, the modernist writers needed "new strategies of reputation building—involving theatricality, spectacle, publicity, and novel modes of cultural marketing and media manipulation. . . ." All of the chapters in Institutions of Modernism have been published in slightly different form (and under slightly different titles) elsewhere, including the two chapters specifically devoted to Pound. Pound's role in Rainey's argument is more pervasive than that, however; he is central to the author's conception of modernism. The best chapter in the volume, on the invention and promotion of the deluxe limited edition of Joyce's Ulysses as an investment (in much the fashion of visual art) could be transposed to describe Pound's own deluxe edition of The Cantos (see Jerome McGann's "Pound's Cantos: A Poem Including Bibliography" in Rainey's 1997 collection A Poem Containing History). Pound also plays the vital middleman role in Rainey's gripping account of the selling of The Waste Land (see below) and a marginal one in his description of H.D.'s "coterie" poetics.

The poetics of the coterie made possible by the unlimited funding supplied by Winifred Bryher gutted H.D.'s art, Rainey concludes. Rainey feels that had Pound followed a similar path—as he tried to do in his early London days—his art also would have been ruined, and much of his criticism, which was written for money, would not exist. "Prodded by the exploits of [F. T.] Marinetti, consumed by his desire for public attention, and impelled by his passionate conviction that the arts are a serious social concern, Pound pursued a very different career" than H.D.; he negotiated "a discursive space that was half withdrawn from, yet also half nestled within, the larger culture of which it was a part." This space is typically modernist, comporting uneasily with commodity culture and craving social engagement while insisting on aesthetic autonomy.

Also operating under the signs of cultural criticism and "cultural production" is the unusual Modernism, Technology, and the Body (Cambridge) by Tim Armstrong. The outflow of surprising information under such chapter headings as "The Regulation of Energies," "Reshaping the Body," "Technologies of Gender," and so on in this highly original work does not permit the author to stay with one figure or text for long, nor is Pound the focus of the book, which has much more to say about Poe, Yeats, Stein, Mina Loy, and others as well as the rejuvenating "Steinach operation," Fletcherism, and other forms of interventionist therapy, surgery, and practice that Armstrong demonstrates to be characteristic of modernist medical cultural production. The discomfort with hierarchy and aesthetics symptomatic of cultural studies makes for a book that spreads its argument as much as it builds it; the volume teems with addictive subchapters about weird stuv: early sex-changing operations, Taylorism, toilets, and the electrified (and, via the electric chair, electrofried) body. Pound's enthusiasm for Dr. Louis Berman's glandular theories and the "seminal power" of Rémy de Gourmont's sexology is just the stuff for Armstrong. Briefly, he argues that the human body, by the beginning of our century, "harbored a crisis." It was seen to be a kind of machine that could be improved and better regulated by the application of technologies such as "drugs, inoculation, electricity; as well as various external regimes designed to improve its make-up, shape, and the flow of energies through it." At the same time, Darwinism hinted at underlying primitive material within the body, arousing "widespread fears of regression," thereby "destabilizing the relations between self and world," the individual and society. Armstrong could have said much more about Pound, but his book provides a new context for further Pound scholarship.

Pound (and Eliot) figure in Michael Bell's Literature, Modernism, and Myth (Cambridge) as counterargument to an ambitious debate about modernism and the limitations of ideological criticism. Bell argues that the double meaning of the term "myth" as both "supremely significant foundational story and falsehood" reflects "the cardinal recognition in the modern literary use of myth." More precisely, he is interested in mythopoeia as "the underlying metaphysic of much modernist literature." Ultimately, Bell's book is a subtle and penetrating assessment of the kind of cultural criticism practiced in the works reviewed above, which, true to their materialistic bias, evade the aesthetic as a category in favor of "cultural production" and a belief in "history." Yet criticism, Bell rightly argues, "must question the legitimacy of every exclusion; the basic aesthetic contract of the work in question. In works of literature with claims to serious attention, a given world view is experimentally inhabited, while criticism involves both understanding the world view and assessing its habitability." The key term here is "assessment"—the vexed and ultimately ethical problem of value. "What literary mythopoeia signals is not so much transhistorical as intrinsic value"—"it engages the question of value as such." The "mythopoeic conception of literary meaning," Bell continues, "recognizes the limits of ideological understanding even if by definition there can be no discursive encompassing of what is left out."

It is a certain self-consciousness about inhabiting a particular worldview—in recognizing it as a myth—that distinguishes modernist writing. Pound, in Bell's account, because of his "pre-modern self"—a kind of medieval sensibility not given to introspection—tended to take myth more literally and less metaphorically than most moderns. The result is the fierce conviction that energizes his Cantos but that also cripples them when, because of Pound's constitutional "literalism," they become merely dogmatic and ideological as a result of the poet failing to adequately question the meaning and consequences of his beliefs. The Pisans are the most moving cantos precisely because Pound's situation forced him into introspection. In the cage the mythopoetic situation bubbled up, as it were, flooding and deepening the poem.

In Bell's book, both Pound and D. H. Lawrence are linked as prophets, a point more fully articulated in Louis Martz's Many Gods and Many Voices. Martz believes that "the voice of the prophet tends to oscillate between denunciation and consolation, between despair and hope, between images of desolation and images of redemption, between the actual and ideal" and that these prophetic oscillations make cantos 1- 51 a "unified and potent book of prophecy." In his opening chapter Martz pays close attention to an early poem in the prophetic Whitmanian vein, "From Chebar." Three more chapters over brisk tours of Pound's shaping of The Waste Land into a prophetic work, the influence of Joyce's "fugal" technique on The Cantos, and a version of the talk on Pound and Dante mentioned above, in which both poets are seen to be under the influence of the Hebrew prophets.

Alex Zwerdling devotes two chapters to Pound in Improvised Europeans, a study of four great American expatriates who chose to live in London at the moment when English power was succumbing to a triumphant United States that self-consciously portrayed itself as inheriting the English imperial purple along with the white man's burden. The four Americans, Henry Adams, Henry James, Pound, and Eliot, are linked as members of the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy in the United States. All were to one degree or other anti-Semites and xenophobes. The "trans-Atlantic theme" links these geniuses, and a pithy chapter called "Anglo-Saxon Panic" is helpful in placing them in an anxious cultural context. Pound scholars will, I think, find the chapters on him thought-provoking more than thought-fulfilling—much, much more could be said here about Pound's vexed and ongoing participation in "the trans Atlantic slanging match." Instead, Zwerdling focuses on early poems and Hugh Selwyn Mauberly; he says nothing about The Cantos. A work of "cultural history," Zwerdling's book is highly readable, biographical, and unencumbered by "theory."

f. Translations

Robert Kern's excellent Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge, 1996), which has belatedly come to our attention, provides the fullest intellectual history we have of the Orientalist tradition in American letters. This tradition, fully articulated by Emerson and transmitted to Pound through Fenollosa, continues today in the work of Gary Snyder and others. Kern's book overs a focused account of what Derrida called "the European hallucination"—our ongoing cultural romance with the Chinese written language, which Westerners have wanted to see as natural, even Adamic, writing. Pound's famous "invention of China" by means of what Kern calls his "English-as-Chinese" not only "modernized orientalism," but also "orientalized modernism." Kern stresses that Pound's approach had the effect, as Kenneth Rexroth once noted, of presenting Chinese poetry as "a special form of free verse"—not the formal and tightly rhymed poetry that it actually is. In fact, Pound's Chinese versions have more to do with his own reaction against Victorian poetic convention than they do with faithful translation. Nonetheless, Kern agrees with many other commentators that Pound managed, somehow, to capture the spirit of the Chinese poems as no one else has—even as he uses them to express his own Poundian agendas, both poetic and political.

Wenxin Li, "The Li Po That Pound Knew" (Paideuma 27, i: 81-91), and Yu Zhang, "Ezra Pound's 'The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter': On Mistranslation of the Two Allusions" (Paideuma 27, ii-iii: 185-94), are critical of Pound's versions of the Chinese. Li focuses on the Li Po poems that Pound left out of Cathay to show that the Li Po presented by Pound reflects Pound's own concerns. Zhang shows that the speaker of Li Po's poem is by no means as naive as Pound would have us believe; Pound's decisions as translator significantly distort the poem's import and tone.

ii Eliot

a. Text, Biography, and Bibliography

Lyndall Gordon has combined her two earlier volumes of Eliot biography into the one-volume T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (Vintage English ed.; U.S. ed. to be published by Norton in 1999). In the process, Gordon has revised extensively. She makes effective use of newly available material, such as the Clark Lectures (which she uses to help clarify Eliot's conversion) and the 1996 biography of Bertrand Russell (which yields additional information about Russell's affair with Vivien Eliot). Gordon had previously paraphrased some of the early unpublished poetry, but she is now able to quote directly, thanks to the publication of the March Hare volume, and the direct quotations make her analysis much clearer. Similarly, she is able to use the full texts of some letters, where before she was limited to paraphrase (for example, the letters of Maurice Haigh-Wood concerning his sister's committal). We find here many new details concerning Emily Hale, some of them from Jeanette McPherin who spent time with Hale in Europe in 1935. One source is left tantalizingly mysterious: "a private paper written in his sixties" in which Eliot claimed, according to Gordon, "that before he left for Europe in 1914 he told Emily Hale that he was in love with her," but her response did not indicate that she reciprocated his feelings. Increased detail also is provided on some of Eliot's teachers at Harvard, particularly George Herbert Palmer and George Santayana, though Gordon does not attempt to engage Eliot's philosophical convictions. She looks at Eliot's life primarily in relation to the women who were closest to him—a reasonable and fascinating approach, which at times tends to occlude other dimensions. In doing so, she gives a sympathetic but unblinking account of Eliot's troubles with love. I note one misrepresentation, however: Gordon claims that "later in life Eliot called the sex act evil." Her reference is to the essay on Baudelaire, where Eliot attributes this view to Baudelaire and compares it unfavorably to Dante's view of sex. One general complaint I have is that she has reduced the number of footnotes, on many occasions leaving the reader in the dark as to her sources. Still, this is a fine and indispensable biography.

Chris Buttram Trombold continues her inventory of "The Bodily Biography of T. S. Eliot, Part II" (YER 15, ii: 27-44). Her clinical description of Vivien's ailments—including migraines, bronchitis, neuritis, colitis, rheumatism, and shingles—brings frightening clarity to the struggles that the Eliots went through. Trombold suggests that Vivien may have suffered from a pituitary problem, and she gives details about the diagnosis of Tom Eliot's breakdown in 1921.

Several other studies have a more conventional biographical focus. James E. Miller Jr. in "T. S. Eliot's 'Uranian Muse': The Verdenal Letters" (ANQ 11, iv: 4-20) uses Jean Verdenal's letters to reinforce the claim that Miller first made more than 20 years ago: namely, that Eliot was homosexual. While explaining Pound's phrase "Uranian muse," Miller states that the Greek divinity Gaea was masculine, which is not true. Miller similarly presses his evidence too far in other places. Michael Coyle gives the history of Eliot's BBC talks in " 'This Rather Elusory Broadcast Technique': T. S. Eliot and the Genre of the Radio Talk" (ANQ 11, iv: 32-42), pointing out that Eliot's preparations indicate that he was interested in speaking to a popular audience in a conversational tone—evidence that he was neither an elitist nor a Luddite. In "Knowing Good and Evil: T. S. Eliot and Lady Chatterley's Lover" (ANQ 11, iii: 37-50) Roger Kojecky shows that even though Eliot did not allow After Strange Gods to be reprinted, he did not change his view of Lawrence's work; still, he consistently opposed censorship and agreed to testify in favor of Lady Chatterley's Lover at the censorship trial. Ronald Bush, in " 'As if You Were Hearing It from Mr. Fletcher or Mr. Tourneur in 1633': T. S. Eliot's Harvard Lecture Notes from English 23" (ANQ 11, iii: 4-11), examines Eliot's lecture notes for his 1932-33 Harvard course in "Contemporary English Literature," concluding that After Strange Gods developed from these lectures. Let it be noted that all of these essays appeared in the two issues of ANQ devoted to Eliot studies. Thanks are owed to the guest editor, James Loucks.

I note a continuing tendency to assume that Eliot's motives for writing were almost entirely self-serving. Lawrence Rainey exhibits this attitude in his "The Price of Modernism: Publishing The Waste Land," a chapter in his Institutions of Modernism. Rainey tells of Eliot's negotiations with Scofield Thayer, editor of The Dial; Thayer was in competition with Vanity Fair and eventually offered Eliot the $2,000 Dial award when the poet refused to accept the normal fee. Rainey states that the publishing of this poem became "an unprecedented effort to affirm the output of a specific marketing-publicity apparatus through the enactment of a triumphal and triumphant occasion" and asserts that "in an important sense the question of aesthetic value is inseparable from commercial success." Unless one adopts a completely materialist assumption, these values do seem to be largely separable. A similarly cynical view of Eliot comes through in Alex Zwerdling's Improvised Europeans. Zwerdling describes Eliot's rise to prominence in England in metaphors of military conquest, gamesmanship, and economic exchange; thus, "global myths are trumps in the game he is playing" and "to the confident American inheritor, the cultural capital of each country is simply currency to be used, exchanged, accumulated." Surely, cultural traditions meant more to Eliot than this. Nonetheless, Zwerdling's account is engaging.

The debate about Eliot's anti-Semitism continues, only somewhat abated. Anthony Julius responds to some of his critics in "Reflections on T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form" (ANQ 11, iv: 43-59). He also summarizes his readings of some of the poems, and it seems to me that one must say (without denying that there are anti-Semitic sentiments expressed in the early poems) his summary interpretations are narrowly reductive and simplistic. Notable among responses to Julius are Jonathan Morse's in "T. S. Eliot Says 'Jew' " (AmLH 10: 497-507), which demonstrates a subtle understanding of the complexity of language and meaning that challenges Julius's relatively a historical marshaling of evidence. Omer Ranen accepts the claim that Eliot was anti-Semitic but challenges Julius's assertion that Eliot never changed. Ranen brings forth compelling new evidence in " 'It Is I Who Have Been Defending a Religion Called Judaism': The T. S. Eliot and Horace Kallen Correspondence" (TSLL 39: 321-56). Kallen, an American philosopher, was, according to Ranen, just the sort of secularized "free-thinking" Jew disparaged by Eliot. Still, the two carried on a long friendship, mostly through correspondence, and Ranen argues that Kallen did much to bring about a shift in Eliot's views in formulations like "variety in unity" (Notes Toward the Definition of Culture). This essay is essential reading. If I may add one note to the debate, I have not come across (either in Julius or in responses I have read) mention of a relevant note in The Idea of a Christian Society in which Eliot attacks the "German national religion" as advanced by a Dr. Hauer, who believes, Eliot says, "that Jesus (even if he was wholly Semitic on both sides) is one of the 'great figures who soar above the centuries.' " Is this parenthetical statement (published in 1939) not an oblique attack on Nazi anti-Semitism?

b. General Studies

Colleen Lamos's Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (Cambridge) has two long chapters on Eliot. The first, "Straightening Out Literary Criticism: T. S. Eliot and Error," maintains that Eliot's criticism attempts to correct errors and that "his reprobation of literary inversions is energized by his phobic rejection of male same-sex desire." The second, "The End of Poetry for Ladies: T. S. Eliot's Early Poetry," suggests that the influence of male writers on Eliot is like semen flowing into the young poet from older ones, and hence is homoerotic; that "his early poems are pervaded by an obsession with supposed female corruption"; and that The Waste Land "depicts in painful and desperate ways the modern dilemma of masculine heterosexuality." Lamos's approach is an updated, more subtle, and highly "theorized" version of Miller's thesis about Eliot's supposed homosexuality in which Eliot becomes homophobic and misogynistic into the bargain.

Michael Bell in a chapter on Eliot and Pound in his Literature, Modernism, and Myth (Cambridge) notes that Eliot's philosophical training and religious belief led him "to reject the model of modernist mythopoeia whereby poetic belief became the model of all belief"—an important observation. Bell is deeply versed in philosophy, particularly Nietzsche, and turns his learning to advantage. It seems merely a tautology, however, to say that Eliot's "religious faith kept him from accepting his own beliefs as myths." Bell seems to imply that Eliot really should have acknowledged that Christianity is simply another set of myths useful for making poetry. Sharon Stockton in "T. S. Eliot's Renaissance and the Meaning of Surrender" (YER 15, iii: 8-22) gives an account of Eliot's changing evaluation of the Renaissance and applies this analysis to the Renaissance images in The Waste Land. Another essay by Stockton, "T. S. Eliot and the Rape of God" (TSLL 39: 375-98) makes the claim that "Representations of the divinely raped female body enabled some 'high' modernist artists and writers to conscript (and eroticize) entrepreneurial fantasies of invasion and empire to the service of a new ideology of controlled capitalism." Her ideologically overloaded interpretation finds images of rape everywhere (for instance, in Murder in the Cathedral, where "Society, figured as a collective woman, the chorus, is symbolically assaulted and raped by the god"). Donald Childs gives an interesting overview of Eliot's engagement with occult movements in "Fantastic Views: T. S. Eliot and the Occultation of Knowledge and Experience" (TSLL 39: 357-73), suggesting that Eliot was attracted to these systems until about 1922 and attended seances presided over by P. D. Ouspensky in 1920-21.

My own contribution, Aethereal Rumours: T. S. Eliot's Physics and Poetics (Bucknell), studies Eliot's interest in the philosophy of science and his attempt to understand the intersection between material and spiritual worlds. I examine unpublished class notes and essays from his Harvard years that seem to demonstrate an early commitment to a nondualistic philosophy exemplified by Heraclitus and Aristotle. I suggest that Eliot reacted against the scientific materialism that dominated intellectual circles at the time, and that he recognized in the work of Einstein and the quantum physicists an overturning of this materialism. I see in the early poetry a satiric reaction to scientific materialism: for example, Bleistein's eye "staring from the protozoic slime" is a critique of Darwinian natural selection, and "Gerontion" looks at the modern atomist, who believes the dead are merely "fractured atoms." I analyze the use of elemental symbolism in The Waste Land and point out that the fifth section, with its "aethereal rumours," is identified with the quintessence spoken of in ancient physics, the aether. In Four Quartets I see an exchange of elements according to Heraclitean concepts and at the same time imagery that resonates with the discoveries of quantum physics. I conclude that both ancient and modern physics fit with Eliot's incarnational and sacramental theology.

c. Relation to Other Writers and Artists

Interest in Eliot's Americanness has increased in recent years, and Lee Oser makes an important contribution to that subject with his T. S. Eliot and American Poetry (Missouri), the first full-length study to concentrate on the American writers who most influenced Eliot. Oser has a fine ear, and one finds throughout the book not just source-hunting but genuine literary criticism. He begins with Poe, noting close echoes of Poe's language and reflections of his imagery in Eliot's poetry and noting a tendency in Eliot's later criticism to place Poe within the American context. Echoes of Whitman are also noted, but Oser shows that some critics have exaggerated his influence. Oser takes a serious look at the influence of a much less famous poet, Charlotte Eliot, showing that her son repeated words and phrases from her poem "The Wednesday Club" in "Prufrock," even while rejecting her progressivism. Other American writers who enter the wide-ranging discussion include Henry Adams, Hawthorne, Hart Crane, and another relative, William Greenleaf Eliot. Emerson receives the most extensive commentary. Oser finds in Eliot's early poetry "a moral critique of Emerson and American Unitarianism," but he also notes that "the Emersonian in Eliot could not wholly be checked." In contrast to Emerson's disembodied spiritualism, Oser emphasizes the materiality of Eliot's symbolism in The Waste Land and the "risen body of Christ" in the Emmaus passage. Yet he also suggests that Eliot's return to American locales in Four Quartets is accompanied by an Emersonian "concern for the old Puritan ideal of a common errand" and "vision of the redeemed earth." Oser concludes this fine book with consideration of Eliot's influence on John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, and Robert Lowell.

Michael Whitworth's " 'Sweet Thames' and The Waste Land's Allusions" (EIC 48: 35-58) gives a history of allusions to Edmund Spenser's "Sweet Thames," including those of Alexander Pope, Ernest Redford, D. H. Lawrence, and J. E. G. De Montmorency, then defines "author-centered" and "reader-centered" views of allusion as a means of describing Eliot's uses. Georgette Fleischer in "Djuna Barnes and T. S. Eliot: The Politics and Poetics of Nightwood" (SNNTS 30: 405-37) challenges a long-standing accusation that Eliot forced Barnes to cut two-thirds of her novel, including scenes expressing lesbian anger. Her research disproves this accusation and demonstrates a long and close friendship between Eliot and Barnes. Like Oser, Elisabeth Däumer decides to take Charlotte Eliot seriously in "Charlotte Stearns Eliot and Ash Wednesday's Lady of Silences" (ELH 65: 479-501). Däumer takes to task feminist scholars who "regard Charlotte Eliot's effort to combine the tasks of motherhood and authorship with no less suspicion and no more sympathy than the society whose repressive ideals of femininity she sought to humanize." She identifies the Lady of Silences in the poem with Eliot's real poet-mother and finds that silence in this instance "conveys not passive submission . . . but an awe-inspiring, hieratic power to signify the unheard, unnamed, and indeed unnameable." Adam Kirsch argues in "Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot" (ASch 67, iii: 65-73) that Eliot never really became a believer and that his later poetry "is the chronicle of his attempt to force himself to believe"—a claim already made by other scholars who apparently believe that they have divine insight into the depths of Eliot's soul. Christopher Ricks in "Eliot's Sources and 'a Cumulative Plausibility' " (ANQ 11, iii: 4-11) ponders the necessity for tact in making judgments about sources and allusions; he considers parallels with Austin Dobson, John Ford, Lionel Johnson, and Norman Cameron. Kenneth Asher gives an excellent history of Eliot's involvement with the ideas of Maurras in "T. S. Eliot and Charles Maurras" (ANQ 11, iii: 20-29). Asher's conclusion that Maurras is "the source" of Eliot's political ideas may be overstated, however, and his insistence that Eliot never distanced himself from Maurras seems questionable. Asher quotes Eliot's 1948 statement calling Maurras "a sort of Virgil who led us to the gates of the temple" but does not see that this means Maurras (though he is honored) is left behind and even assumed not to be among the saved. Sebastian D. G. Knowles examines Eliot's admiration for Marie Lloyd in " 'Then You Wink the Other Eye': T. S. Eliot and the Music Hall" (ANQ 11, iv: 20-32). Knowles puts Eliot's response in the context of his "London Letters" in The Dial, which (Knowles asserts) tend to disparage middle-class culture in favor of both upper- and lower-class culture, and he goes on to show that Marie Lloyd actually was not very popular with the lower classes. Nancy D. Hargrove describes in fascinating detail the production of the ballet Parade in "The Great Parade: Cocteau, Picasso, Satie, Massine, Diaghilev—and T. S. Eliot" (Mosaic 31, i: 83-106). Hargrove argues (plausibly) that Eliot would have seen the ballet when it was performed in London in 1919 and that its rapid tempo, sounds of modern city life, and mechanized, impersonal characters might well have influenced The Waste Land.

d. Poems and Plays

It is surprising to find a book published on the Buddhist influence on Eliot's poetry, since this topic has been well-treated in a number of places. But skepticism about the need for Paul Foster's The Golden Lotus: Buddhist Influence in T. S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" (Sussex: The Book Guild) is answered by Foster's prefatory explanation of its history. The book actually was first published in Germany in 1977 but received so little notice that the author withdrew it and has only now allowed it to be republished. As he notes, the intervening years have seen the publication of several works on the influence of Eastern thought, most prominently P. S. Sri's T. S. Eliot, Vedanta, and Buddhism (1985) and Cleo McNelly Kearns's T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study of Poetry and Belief (1987). Foster complements these broader studies by offering an extended close reading of Four Quartets from this perspective. While the influence of Buddhism on Eliot's early works is generally admitted, few readers expect to see such influence in a poem written long after his conversion. Foster argues that Eliot—even in later years—continued to see a profound compatibility between Western and Eastern mysticism, and he goes so far as to assert that "in the course of time Eliot's Christianity suffered something of a sea change," to the point that "where he felt Christianity to be lacking . . . he filled the gap for his own purposes by the introduction of Buddhist ideas." At times the author pushes this notion to the limit, as when he claims that the peasants dancing in Burnt Norton exemplify samsaric existence or when he finds hints of the doctrine of rebirth in The Dry Salvages. Nonetheless, the work is a graceful and profound meditation on Four Quartets and on Eliot's continuing fascination with spiritual truths that unite East and West.

In Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge) Tim Armstrong devotes an interesting discussion to the idea of waste in The Waste Land, finding that the poem "bespeaks a simultaneous fascination with, and revulsion from, waste." Jo Ellen Green Kaiser in "Disciplining The Waste Land, Or How to Lead Critics into Temptation" (TCL 44: 82-99) blames Eliot's notes for giving a greater sense of order to the poem than was justified; she further faults critics for accepting that sense. Kaiser defines "modernity" as being "characterized by its desire for order" (though I suspect this desire can be found in other ages as well) and concludes that only poststructuralist theory has allowed critics to "describe once again the sense of disorder The Waste Land evoked for many of the earliest readers of the poem." Samir Dayal also employs poststructuralist theory in "The Efficient Fiction: A Reading of Ash Wednesday" (ClQ 34: 55-73). Dayal displays an acute inventiveness in his discussion of the trope of turning, pointing out that the term tropos itself means "turning." He joins Kirsch and others in denying the reality of Eliot's belief, finding in the poem (incredibly) a "recuperation of human self-sufficiency" and a message that "disillusionment will teach us not to rely on 'grace.' " Patricia Sloane's "Searching for a Statue of a Girl: Freud's Delusion and Dream and Eliot's 'La Figlia che Piange' " (Modern Schoolman 75: 237-50) employs a more old-fashioned theory in a meditation on the poem that is brilliant and learned but which sometimes borders on free association.

The plays receive some commentary as well. Barry Spurr in "Liturgical Anachronism in Murder in the Cathedral" (YER 15, iii: 2-7) clarifies Eliot's religious commitment—as not, he points out, to the Anglican via media but to Anglo-Catholicism, which has its roots in the Oxford Movement and seeks to recover the Catholic liturgical tradition. Spurr discovers, however, that the liturgical passages in Murder in the Cathedral are not always taken from the Anglo-Catholic missal but rather from the mainline Anglican Book of Common Prayer, an anachronism that he takes to imply an unbroken connection between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church of Thomas à Becket. Jack Lynch takes a Lacanian approach in "The Hangman's Waiting for You: Reading the Knock in Sweeney Agonistes" (YER 15, iv: 27-36). He compares elements of the poem to each of Lacan's "registers" and produces valuable insights in the process. One limitation of the approach is that Lacan assumes that whatever is nonlinguistic is also nonsymbolic, a position that I believe Eliot rejects. Martha C. Carpentier's book Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text: The Influence of Jane Ellen Harrison on Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf (Gordon and Breach) has two chapters on Eliot's drama. In "Sweeney and the Matricidal Dance" Carpentier argues that Eliot's dramatic theory owes more to Harrison than to John Middleton Murry or F. M. Cornford, but she also interprets Sweeney Agonistes in terms of Oedipal conflicts and Horney's theories about the male fear of women. "Orestes in the Drawing-Room: Mother, Maid, and Witch in T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion" interprets Harry's confrontation with his controlling mother as parallel to the confrontation of the old matriarchal religion in the Oresteia. In this reading, Harry is released by Agatha/Athena to worship a patriarchal deity.

e. Criticism

The critical debate between Eliot and a relatively friendly antagonist is the subject of David Goldie's A Critical difference: T. S. Eliot and John Middleton Murry in English Literary Criticism, 1919-1928 (Oxford). Though the book's topic is narrow for a full-length study, Goldie's volume does yield important insights into wider questions about Eliot's changing views. Goldie's general outline has it that "whereas in the early days of their relationship they stressed common purpose where there was already some dissension, in the latter stages of that relationship they insisted on identifying differences where there was obviously potential for substantial agreement." In the time just after the war Eliot and Murry both sought "the restoration of a literary-critical standard." But in the mid-1920s they debated the values of romanticism and classicism and (according to Goldie) overstated their cases in the heat of argument. Goldie shows that the two critics adopted definitions of romanticism and classicism that were ambiguous and imprecise early on and then defined the terms polemically in the course of the debate. Eliot later acknowledged that his critical polemic did not apply to any particular book or critic. Along the way, Goldie also clarifies Eliot's relationship to many other critics, including Aristotle, Rémy de Gourmont, and T. E. Hulme. One particularly interesting suggestion Goldie makes is that Murry's 1926 essay, "The 'Classical' Revival," which challenged Eliot to recognize that intellectual belief in God is not real belief, was an important impetus for Eliot's conversion. Goldie notes that their debate about Thomism in the Criterion in 1927 was "the last sustained debate between Murry and Eliot." Still, I think he might have said something about the long note on Murry in The Idea of a Christian Society. All the same, he has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of Eliot's criticism.

Elizabeth Beaumont Bissell gives a subtle and compelling account of Eliot's concern for exactness of definition in " 'Notes towards the Definition of Runcibility,' or 'McTaggart Refuted': T. S. Eliot and the Runcibility of Definition" (YER 15, iv: 2-14). Bissell shows that, while Eliot valued careful definitions, he recognized the impossibility of pinning words down entirely and thus "acceded neither to verbalism nor scientism." Jo-Anne Cappeluti's "Reaching Out of—or Into—Speech: The Stylistics of Voice in T. S. Eliot and M. M. Bakhtin" (YER 15, ii: 2-11) finds (convincingly) agreement between Eliot's view of voice and Bakhtin's. The difference is one of direction: "in Bakhtin, the artist impersonates the impersonal; in Eliot, the impersonal impersonates the artist." Jack Kolb in "Laureate Envy: T. S. Eliot on Tennyson" (ANQ 11, iii: 29-37) argues that Eliot became less critical of Tennyson as his own status began to approach that of the Victorian laureate.