T.S. Eliot's Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music, and: Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood (review)

T. S. Eliot's Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music. Edited by John Xiros Cooper. (Border Crossings, 7.) New York: Garland, 2000. [xix, 352 p. 0-8153-2577-0. $75.]

Walt Whitman and Modern Music: War, Desire, and the Trials of Nationhood. Edited by Lawrence Kramer. (Border Crossings, 10.) New York: Garland, 2000. [xxi, 179 p. + 1 CD. 0-8153-3154-1. $65.]

In his preface to Garland's Border Crossings series, general editor Daniel Albright writes provocatively, with no sops to "on-the-other-hand" judicial balancing: "To study one artistic medium in isolation from others is to study an inadequacy" (p. ix). This interdisciplinary article of faith drives the series, which examines manifold relationships between the different arts from ca. 1900 onward, with the emphasis so far on music as the dominant partner, and which has gotten off to a prolific start, with ten volumes issued since its inception only three years ago. The books are typically collections by multiple authors, and they vary widely in approach, scope, and the disciplinary make-up of the contributing team.

Such variety is vividly on display in the two books featured here. The Eliot volume takes a very broad view of its subject, dealing both with Eliot's attitudes to music and with diverse responses to him from musicians, although the emphasis is firmly on the former; of its fourteen essays, eleven are written by literary scholars, the remaining three by musicologists. (Such tallying runs counter to the spirit of the enterprise, no doubt, but monodisciplinary professional formation remains the norm in academe and has important implications, not surprisingly, for the approaches taken.) In contrast, the eight contributors to the much slimmer Whitman volume are roughly evenly divided between literature and music --I say "roughly" because Lawrence Kramer teaches both English and music--and focus closely on several key aspects of the poet's reception by composers, with rather less discussion of Whitman's own attitudes toward music. This volume also has the added bonus of an accompanying compact disc, which features Whitman songs by Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, and George Crumb, as well as some persuasive settings by the book's editor, including a refreshing take on the overworked "Dirge for Two Veterans."

What the two books most obviously have in common is their core subject matter: each takes as its basis a great poet-prophet of modernism who was fascinated by music as a potential model for poetry, and who has in turn fascinated musicians (though in terms of actual settings, Whitman's openhearted verse, not surprisingly, has proven more inviting than the hall-of-mirrors self-sufficiency of Eliot). And other shared themes emerge: the growing significance of music for literary language pushing harder and harder against the boundaries of rational intelligibility; music as a marker for and agent of the erotic; music as a formal model for modernist literature; and the power of new popular musics to articulate and stand for modernity, especially the challenges of democracy and urban life.

As John Xiros Cooper makes clear in his preface to the Eliot volume, critics have always recognized that music was hugely important to the poet--if this were not obvious enough from the poems themselves, Eliot spelled it out in his lectures and essays --but the topic has typically been treated summarily and restricted to jazz, Beethoven, and Wagner. This thought-provoking collection revisits such established concerns from new perspectives, but it also broadens the scope in all directions, interrogating closely the notion of what music "stood for" in Eliot's work and addressing his fascination with music as a unique "mode of active perception and cognition," to use Cooper's words (p. xvii). In addition to Beethoven and Wagner, Michael Tippett, Igor Stravinsky, and Charles Ives are each the focus...