The Overwhelming Question: A Study of the Poetry of T.S. Eliot by Balachandra Rajan (review)

HUMANITIES 437 that these lines often read like drafts of a Keats lyric. To study her revisions is to experience an exuberance that is in . fact a passion for life in its renewing fullness. But it is more. It is to witness a reconstituting of such phenomenological experience into new artistic forms , forms that better reflect her own revelation of something true that remains impersonal . 'Have I the power of conveying the true reality: she often asked, 'or do I write essays about myself?' Since the artistic impulse to select and formulate is in itself a reductive act, the reader may well question how the artist can remain open to the fullness of life while adopting an attitude that shapes vision into art. How can the novelist, in Woolf's idiom, enclose a world without enforcing a view? The two holograph drafts illustrate her attempt to deal with these apparently contradictory intentions. The vision of a fin emerging from the wastes of the Ouse Valley marshes eVidently first inspired her to begin what was to become The Waves. Confessing that she cannot find an explanation, she seeks to net the fish through a form of fiction less impositional than the novel. She names it tentatively 'the play-poem idea.' Woolf struggled to keep a first-person, omniscient narrator throughout the first draft and into the second draft. Compelled to indict those psychological novelists who 'labour under the oppression of omniscience ,' she advocated 'a more poetic point of view,' an attitude she first associated with the Russian writers' capacity to live with doubt. 'There may be no answer to the questions [they raise]: she wrote years earlier, 'but at the same time let us never manipulate the evidence so as to produce something fitting, decorous, agreeable to our vanity: or for that matter to the expectations of the reading public. The Waves in its three versions records Woolf's effort to lead her readers to risk alternate visions of reality, to urge them towards the insight that experience no less than reason reveals eternal diversity (an idea she might have derived from reading Montaigne). Stasis in all its moribund forms remains the enemy of renewal. When man is most alive, then, he is an experimental being whose impulse is to revise and reconstitute the given. It is the idea of finality, in art as in life and death, that Bernard opposes so passionately at the close of the novel. (LUCIO P. RUOTOLO) Salachandra Rajan. The Overwhelming Question:A Study of the Poetry ofT.S. Eliot. University of Toronto Press. vii, 155. $10.00 This is the last of three studies of differing patterns of wholeness in major writers; the other two dealt with Yeats and Milton. For Professor Rajan Eliot's ceuvre is a 'macropoem of the human journey: a journey of 438 LETTERS IN CANADA 1976 exploration. 'Each poem represents a step forward, or upward, building on the position won in the previous poem: Most of us believe that already, but Rajan's demonstration is valuable for its unusual precision, fullness, imaginativeness, and, at best, responsiveness to Eliot's words and rhythms. He asks us to accept more than that, however, and there his case is more questionable. I recommend this book, though this review mainly concerns my reservations about it. One of them is that it is a struggle to get through . The prospective reader needs encouragement, and I suggest that anyone who likes to test the temperature before plunging in should first try pages 6-7 ('Prufrock') 67- 71, (the last section of Ash-Wednesday), and 106-7 (introducing the discussion of The Dry Salvages) . These represent Rajan at his best. Take a brief example. Prufrock never sings his love song; Rajan comments: 'To sing is to achieve a definition and Prufrock's fate is to fan short of definition, to bring momentous news only to thresholds: This is stimulating; it brings to mind with equal vividness the young man in Portrait of a Lady, left 'sitting pen in hand: similarly falling short of expression. Rajan follows up his general characterization with a sensitive examination of the nuances of Prufrock's diffident aside, 'Oh, do not ask, "What...