When I was asked to write on the figure of Eliot in modern poetry I thought of several reasons not to accept. On a personal level I could imagine no way that such critical work would not reveal more about my limitations than about Eliot's powers, since I would miss or mistake crucial aspects of his heritage. And on a theoretical level I deeply mistrust any study claiming to speak of influences. Where such studies are not obvious, they tend to rely on loose speculations about specific echoes or to invoke problematic analogies attempting to establish one writer's shaping overall projects for another.

Yet here I am. The theoretical problem quickly became a challenge to test a concept of impact that might avoid the problems worrying me, since impact is less a matter of one poet deliberately engaging another than it is a matter of the currency of ideas and of a logic informing how writers shape ambitions or develop styles. Thus we shift from trying to inhabit the mind of specific writers to attempting to describe a theater in which Eliot becomes a stimulus focussing a range of possible investments in versions of his work. And then we also shift the personal stakes. My fears did not subside, but they were outweighed by the opportunity to take responsibility for my own love of Eliot: I could ask how and why the now dominant account misses much that was, and is, culturally vital in Eliot's work; and I could use the reception of Eliot's work by other poets to make clear what in his work does not yield to appropriation or modification, but marks instead his still distinctive modernist voice.

T. S. Eliot began his career by training as a professional philosopher rather than as poet or critic. He ambitiously pursued this academic study at such major philosophical centers as Harvard, the Sorbonne, Marburg, and Oxford, between 1908 and 1915; completed a Harvard doctoral thesis on the philosophy of F. H. Bradley in 1916; and even published between 1916 and 1918 a number of professional articles and reviews of philosophy. Most studies of Eliot recognize that his early absorption in philosophy was very important for his development as poet and critic, though opinions sometimes differ as to which ways and through which thinkers the philosophical influence was most powerfully and beneficially expressed. Bergson's notions of durée, memory, and intuition have been recognized in the flow of consciousness of Eliot's early poems; and Royce, Bradley, and Russell have been cogently invoked to explain such Eliotic notions as tradition, poetic impersonality, the objective correlative, analytic precision, and critical objectivity.

Typically, however, these studies of Eliot as philosopher confine themselves to Eliot as “young philosopher,” the aspiring, well-trained novice who soon abandoned philosophy to pursue a literary career. Philosophy in these studies remains a past, residual influence of youth rather than a continuously active interest and vital concern of Eliot's entire career. This essay will instead insist on showing how Eliot pursued philosophical questions throughout his career, though he ceased to do so through professional philosophical channels. Instead, Eliot insightfully attacked these questions in his criticism, social theory, and poetry. In doing so, he helped by both argument and example to highlight and challenge the narrowness of professional, academic philosophy, so that philosophy could become closer to what is today in the academy often called “theory,” a genre where non-professional philosophers like Walter Benjamin can be studied for their philosophical import and where Eliot himself deserves a better place.

England was the scene of Eliot's encounter as a poet with the particularities of history and place. He went on to develop an idea of England of classical proportions. What follows is an attempt to understand both the encounter and the idea.

Eliot was in Marburg when Germany invaded Belgium on August 3, 1914. The British Government responded to the invasion with an ultimatum. The nation had become impatient for war with its belligerent, industrially confident rival. It was the impatience of an empire that had peaked and needed to reassert itself. German aggression was a challenge, something for an uncertain giant to measure itself against. From the beginning there was a self-conscious pride in the war as being of massive historical moment. Lloyd George described it as the “great conflict,” and saw it as a chance for a nation, long used to empire, to wake up from the sloth of tropical prosperity, and recover its authority and right (Marwick, The Deluge, p. 89).

When war broke out Eliot packed his bags and headed for London. He was twenty-five years old and on study-leave from Harvard. He had already arranged to spend most of the year at Oxford, so the move was not a major inconvenience. It became more inconvenient when he realized how much he disliked Oxford which struck him as a quiet unprepossessing place to live, even before its numbers were depleted by the war.

Few readers would disagree that Eliot the man has been as much a puzzle as Eliot the poet. Two small books, with others, have now begun to clarify that puzzle. The chief contribution of biography is to present relevant personal facts, and Ms. Gordon's patiently assembled facts have pointed, very pertinently, to how readers might have erred in their puzzlement over Eliot by not recognizing what might now be considered obvious: that Eliot's work represents a series of efforts, each trying to make sense of a persistent moral dilemma. The oeuvre of T. S. Eliot will appear to us differently if, instead of treating the whole Collected Poems as due to Eliot's “impersonal” aesthetic, we perceive his poetry as negotiating intractable personal material which persists even in the final form.

We now know, in some detail, that there was indeed another woman in the life of the man, and that much of the work of the poet can be seen as full of some emotional and moral matter which the writer would not expose to light, and could not go away from. Since the only way of negotiating a moral dilemma is to find an objective situation which corresponds to that specific dilemma, it may be that Eliot's problems were such that the very données precluded objective resolution. And the alternative to resolution, in anyone who knows what it means to endure a situation one wants to escape from, may indeed be a form of madness, perhaps less the intensity of insanity than the desperate role-playing of the apparentposeur. We need, to be sure, a great many more facts in Eliot's biography; we should like to know, for example, whether, when and in relation to what personal crisis, he read Milton's The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. Certainly his animus towards Milton can seem in excess of the verse as we know it.

There are many Americas. Which were Eliot's? Born into a family whose ancestors came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and whose members had more recently settled in a distant region, T. S. Eliot combined a New England cultural memory with midwestern experience. Although his grandparents reached Missouri in the 1830s, the family carefully maintained its New England connection. Indeed, after the patriarch, Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, died in 1887, the poet's family began to gravitate back to Massachusetts. In the 1890s Eliot's father purchased a house on Cape Ann where his family could retreat from sweltering St. Louis summers. Soon after her husband died, Eliot's mother moved to the Boston area, as would all but her youngest child. A century after his grandparents arrived, none of Eliot's immediate family remained in St. Louis.

Partly southern and partly midwestern, located in the center of a vast continent but poised on a great inland waterway, St. Louis marked Eliot's childhood imagination. During Missouri winters he yearned for the firs, red granite, and blue ocean of coastal New England. Yet as he summered there, limestone bluffs full of fossil shellfish near the “long dark river“ drew his memory back to the Mississippi. Even opening his mouth to speak, drawling like a southerner during boyhood visits to Boston, reminded Eliot of his double origins. In fact, his father was born and bred in St. Louis, and his mother and both paternal grandparents were born or raised south of the Mason-Dixon line. Yet Eliot also knew that his family, for reasons that reach deep into American history and into their past, considered themselves socially superior to the southerners they met in St. Louis.

By the time in which T. S. Eliot wrote, religion, literature and society in western culture had already, he knew, shared a long and ambivalent history. Often, literature had been a medium of critical support for such Judeo-Christian religious doctrines as creation, covenant, exile, incarnation and redemption, and a source of relative stability for various moral and social orders based on their premises. This “easy and natural” association between religion, literature and society, Eliot argued, had happened when society was moderately healthy and its various discourses in some relation with one another, though necessarily not always perfectly harmonious. Just as often, however, or so it seemed, literature had been either a monolithic reflection or a mode of subversion of society and religion, as each discourse set up its own creative and prophetic energies over and against the others, vying for a totalizing hegemony on its own terms (SE [1950], p. 390; NTDC [New York], pp. 67-69).

Eliot felt keenly the value of the rare moments of “easy and natural” association between literature, religion, and society (though he noted that “many of the most remarkable achievements of culture” had been made “in conditions of disunity” [NTDC [New York], p. 71]); and he spoke with eloquence of their combination of underlying order and deliberate if controlled cultivation of differences in point of view. As Eliot recognized, the maintenance of these differences made for cultural strength; just as their collapse into one totalizing discourse made for one-dimensionality, and their proliferation into a congeries of special interests for disintegration. He also felt, however, the difficulty of realizing the ideal of a harmonious but multivalent culture, especially in the midst of the “immense panorama of futility and anarchy” which was, for him, contemporary history.

While Eliot's prose writings between 1925 and 1945 expound the need for self-transcendence, his poetry can be said to display the difficulties involved in this process. As early as 1916, in his dissertation on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, he had made it clear that by “self-transcendence” he meant, paradoxically, the struggle to progress from a purely personal experience of contact with the noumenal, the realm that is beyond phenomena and outside the process of time, by entering more fully into the shared world of objects and of time; and by multiplying experiences to pursue the ideal “of an all-inclusive experience outside of which nothing shall fall” (KE p. 31). The assumption is that the more comprehensive our experience, and the more unified our knowledge derived from experience, the nearer we come to the total truth.

It is the limited scope of merely private experience that compels us to go out of ourselves, out of even our most intense and timeless moments, into the common world of others and of passing events. No individual can be self-sufficient, “for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or lesser extent) jarring and incompatible ones” (KE p. 147). But to “unify” is to incorporate and to transmute, to make what was other our own, and so to get free again of the world of timebound phenomena. The vital difference between the beginning and the end of this process is that what was at first simply one's private experience comes to be confirmed and verified, and established as impersonal and absolute truth.

“The borrowed jewels he has set in its head do not make Mr. Eliot's toad the more prepossessing”: so wrote an early reviewer of The Waste Land, affronted by the bold allusions from which Eliot's poetry was built. Those allusions, reinforced by Eliot's own notes to The Waste Land, have never ceased to affront; even today they account for Eliot's still formidable reputation as a “difficult”poet, and several generations of sourcehunting critics have reinforced that impression. Eliot sometimes played this game himself (“Immature poets imitate,” he quipped early in his career, “mature poets steal” [SE [1950], p. 182]), but other times he was dismayed that readers found the surface difficulties of his poems prohibiting. And while it's true that knowledge of Eliot's models and sources does enrich a reading of his poetry, it is ultimately more important to understand the nature of Eliot's allusive practice - to ask not only what is the source? but why does Eliot allude? and how do we experience the allusion?

For some years we had no full, formal biography of T. S. Eliot, and this seemed, to many people, at the very least odd. For - as those many people viewed it - Eliot was, after all, the dominant figure in English letters for a good part of the twentieth century, and a biography, like being interred in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, would constitute mere public acknowledgment of such status in the literary world. The reason why there was no Life of T. S. Eliot for a considerable time is well known to literary scholars though, I think, imperfectly understood by them, their explanation going something like this: acting on motives that all potential biographers and indeed everyone in the scholarly world seemed to feel free to question, Eliot declared that he wanted no Life written, and he inserted a clause to this effect into his will; and those responsible for his estate (primarily his widow, acting as executor of his will) successfully prevented a biography by making access to the materials necessary for writing a Life difficult if not impossible. When I say that this explanation though well known has been imperfectly understood I mean first that, as an explanation, it seems to me a little too easy and too simple in the case of someone of Eliot's generally acknowledged subtlety and complexity, and second that critics, having accepted this suspiciously easy answer, have then either ignored or misconstrued the principled objection that Eliot held to being the subject - perhaps one might better say the object - of biographical treatment.

When Ezra Pound read the manuscript of The Waste Land at the end of 1921, he objected to Eliot's epigraph from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899):

Pound argued that Conrad was not “weighty” enough for an epigraph, while Eliot, unsure about whether Pound objected to this quotation or to Conrad himself, responded that the passage was the most “appropriate” and “elucidative” he could find (Letters 1, pp. 497 and 504). Pound won out in the end, for Eliot replaced this quotation with the present epigraph from Petronius' Satyricon, a passage in Latin and Greek which in its ancient and mythic references could be said to present the reader with a much weightier, indeed, intimidating opening to the poem:

Readers coming to T. S. Eliot at the beginning of the last decade of the twentieth century will find no complete edition of his writings and no comprehensive catalog of unpublished materials. They will discover, moreover, that many important documents are sequestered in research collections in England and the United States and many manuscripts are sealed well into the twenty-first century. Readers venturing into the secondary writings will find a dark and tangled wood of opinions and counter opinions. The biographies that exist range from partisan to abusive; none are satisfactory, for no biographer has had access to Eliot's papers. Literary criticism fills several library shelves, but it often obscures the poet and his work or, in the interest of cultural politics, turns him into a straw man. Writings about Eliot range from excellent to useless, from reasonably objective to wildly subjective, and for the innocent reader (the non-specialist), it is difficult to know which is which.

Most Eliot manuscripts and papers are located in the United States and England. The most extensive American holding is the T. S. Eliot Collection in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. This collection, the gift of the poet's brother Henry, contains manuscripts, letters, and family photographs. The Beinecke Library at Yale University has a few Eliot items and will eventually receive the major collection accumulated by the poet's bibliographer Donald Gallup. The Berg Collection of the New York Public Library contains Eliot's early poetry notebooks, The Waste Land manuscripts, and other materials the poet had given to his patron John Quinn. The Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas has a major Eliot Collection, including manuscripts, letters, periodicals, and first editions.

From the start we are teased into thought. The compact title plays upon severalness and singularity: four works, and yet one work. Not just four works either, but four to the power of their four instruments; and still the title declares them to be a single work. Further, the title declares the words on the pages before us to be musical compositions, like those of Haydn or Beethoven or Bartok. What then are the instruments of these “quartets” which are actually composed of words? And are they truly written in quartet-form? Thus the title proposes its own questions and perspectives. Over the first half-century of the poem's life these have provided the most appropriate and rewarding approaches, and they are still the ones to start out from. They will lead us to other and more problematic questions as we discover the meanings and values generated in the verbal music and are confronted by Eliot's radical revaluations of nature and human society and history. Meaning itself, we gather, is merely instrumental: what matters is what the poem can do in the way of altering our values and redirecting our desires. But then is it conceivable that one could love and love no-one and no thing, as the poem would have us do?

In 1917 T. S. Eliot compared the literary critic to a bee building a hive. Even the most gifted thinker, he claimed, is unable to conceive more than a few original ideas:

This conception of the cooperative nature of the literary enterprise is grounded in what Eliot called “the old aporia of Authority v. Individual Judgment” (PP [New York], p. 113). Although he found the criterion for genuine art within the literary tradition, his innovative conception of that tradition also gave authority to the individual artist. He developed his traditionalism with such hive-building thoroughness that it seemed revolutionary rather than conventional. In describing such “new ideas,” Eliot observed that an old idea may be “so perfectly assimilated as to be original.” His deep assimilation of the “old aporia” of tradition and the individual made it a virtually new concept.

We have become used to all sorts of temporal paradoxes which can be found thriving not only in Pynchon's rockets whose screaming one hears after an apocalyptic Fall, but also in domains ranging from contemporary physics to Biblical theology as revised by new textual exegesis. This would define the plight of the “post-modern” sensibility as a cruel or playful awareness of our being aftercomers, inheritors of a culture others have shaped, and so of living as much in the past as in the present. As Eliot puts it: “It seems, as one becomes older,/ That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence” (DS, v). However, this insight is not one he gained upon reaching mellow maturity, since it can be shown to have been the founding stone which helped him build his poetics. For it was as a “young man” that Eliot boldly put forward the idea that if one views European literature as a simultaneous whole, the first logical consequence is that the past is altered by the creation of novelty: “Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past” (SE [1951], p. 15).

INTRODUCTION: ELIOT AND CULTURAL POLITICS

Few of those who admire Eliot have done so for his social and political criticism. Usually this prose has been used to elucidate difficult poems, or ignored altogether, or seen as gratuitously problematic, and a hindrance to the survival of Eliot's reputation. But for those who continue to be struck by the unity and importance of Eliot's art, the social criticism cannot be so marginalized. The result is not just a problem but a perplexity, and at times a scandal.

Great visionary poets have usually had visionary politics as well, and have frequently devoted their prose to immediate causes which in retrospect seem not only reactionary but futile. One thinks of Dante's hopes to resurrect a Roman Empire, or Milton's last-ditch defense of the Commonwealth. We think today of their social criticism on a higher level: as efforts to redefine their relationship, and that of their age, to the cultural authorities of the past. In their oppositional use of canonical texts against the entrenched rulers of their own age, they form a single tradition, as much progressive as reactionary. We may perhaps think of them, in their largely successful claims upon the minds of the future, as practitioners of cultural politics.