Mr Eliot and Some Enemies

MR ELIOT AND SOME ENEMIES E.K.BROWN I MR ELIOT has a greater number, and a greater variety, of enemies than any other poet of our time. The lazy dislike his poetry because hard brainwork is required to understand it. The conventional dislike it because it does not conform to any previously dominant type of English poetry. The decorous dislike it because it habitually mentions subjects not directly mentioned in our poetry since the time of Churchill, ·and mentions them with a salty vigour and brooding subtlety unknown since the time of Don·ne. Romantics dislike his poetry because it seJdom gives free play to rapture or to sensuous moods. Marxists dislike it because it is chiefly concerned with peculiar states of peculiar minds and obtrudes no sociological gospeJ. Conservatives dislike it because the traditionalism from which it issues is unrelated to the political and insular conservatism which alone they understand. Conservatives and Marxists, conventionalists and romantics, lazy people and decorous people-it is a formidable roster of enemies. The most significant deduction from such a roster is that Mr. Eliot's poetry must be a remarkable phenomenon. By the rclativeJy small company of its admirers that small body of verse is thought to mark an epoch in English poetry: the date of The Waste Land, his central performance, is thought to be closely comparable with 1798 when Lyrical Ballad.r came from the presses of Cottle at Bristol. The world into which the Lyrical Ballad.r fell was one in which poetry had long been following an unsatisfactory course. From Dryden to Pope, from Pope to Goldsmith, from Goldsmith to Crabbe, the main stream of English poetry had been steadily becoming narrower, slower, duller. Wordsworth and Coleridge changed the course of that main stream. They shocked their contemporaries; and their cpntemporaries cried out that they were vulgar or that they were mad or that at the least they were criminally incomprehensible. Thirty years after .the publication of Lyrical Ballad.r, in an age which could look back on the poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats as well as of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the master-critic could claim, without supposing that his verdict 69 70 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.QUARTERLY stood in need of substantiation, that the truest poets of the age, the poets whom posterity would read and value were-Rogers and CampbelL Even Byron, says Francis Jeffrey, "is receding from his place of pride," and the others are "melting fast from our field of vision;" Rogers and Campbell stand out as those "who have the longest withstood this rapid withering of the laurel and with the least marks of decay." So difficult it is, so long a time is needed, to recognize a major re-orientation in the stream of English poetry. Authoritative critics to-day make similar pronouncements: those of our poets who will be read in the future are, they insist, those who employ with but slight variations the traditional forms and express approximatel"y the traditional sensibilities, poets such as Masefield, Frost, Davies, de la Mare. The truth is that poets such as these are among the last survivors of the romantic tradition which stems from 1798: they are the Rogerses and the Campbells of our day. From Wordsworth and his contemporaries to Tennyson and Arnold, from these to the Pre-Raphaelites, from the PreRaphaelites to the opium-eaters of the nineties, on from the poets of the nineties to the Georgians, the stream of poetry was again slowly contracting and weakening. Like Rogers and Campbell the men who dominated English poetry in the years preceding the War were imitative, wanting in richness, vitality, and substance. During the years of War the plight of poetry was concealed from all but the most observant. The experience provided men with a great theme and with direct stimuli to strong feeling: Brooke became a great poet, Sassoon and Blunden significant and moving. As the War receded into the past, it became evident that poetry had drawn from it only a momentary quickening, that no permanent development in sensibility or in technique was to be derived from it. Opportunely, in the doldrums of the early twenties, Mr Eliot...