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the last decade of the twentieth century will find no complete edition of his writings and no comprehensive catalog of unpublished materials.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.