Liam RectorInheriting Eliot
Where is the work of T. S. Eliot these days? Is his work being taken up by the generations of poets coming up? And, moreover, what's the situation for inheriting Eliot among his grandchildren and his latter-day great-grandchildren?Once upon a time there no doubt was what Delmore Schwartz called the literary dictatorship of T. S. Eliot, a dictatorship whose orthodoxies entranced, captivated, defined, refined, and terrified his children. My sense now is that the Eliot juggernaut in America has been overtaken, in the land of the living, by the influence of Wallace Stevens, a line Harold Bloom has traced well behind Stevens and on forward into the land of Ashbery. It's a powerful, imaginative, linguistically talented, and romantic lineage. Eliot's orthodoxies overturned and by now in many quarters almost ignored, it's a perfect time to be reading and inheriting Eliot without the terror.
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I don't feel I am working with nor for "the mind" of Europe or even "The West" in my work, even though that too is an inheritance I treasure. "The mind of America" is the mind in which I know I write, and I hear in that mind Dr. Williams also, the Williams of "the pure products of America go crazy." The New Criticism of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, the main purveyors of the Eliot orthodoxy among Eliot's sons and daughters, still gives me the creeps, though I do thank them for their worship of the poem on the page, and the dream of a work of art outside the world of history. But nothing is finally outside of history and its gossip, and poetry is our deepest gossip.
Eliot has been for me my most abiding poet, largely because he has been my most countervailent poet. Even as he was high church, a Royalist, and a classicist, I have been the opposite. The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference, and even a countervailent rapport can be finally an utter rapport.
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I've come to think Eliot's notion of pure impersonality was something of a ruse, but a very useful ruse, nonetheless. Art no doubt comes from personal origins, but any work that does not obtain for itself the dimension of the impersonal, the transcendence of the personal, if you will, really does not attain the greatness of a work of art from which and in which readers will find their necessary communion.
In her third book on Eliot, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon extensively rewrote her first two biographies, Eliot's Early Years and Eliot's New Life. In her foreword Gordon writes,
I was driven to this, in part, because I believe that we are now ready to view Eliot from the vantage point of the next century, more detached from the spiritless disillusion of his own time and less beguiled than his contemporaries by his normative masks, with a keener sense of his strangeness, his prejudice, and extremism. The aim, though, is not to reduce Eliot to the level of others in an extremist century, but to follow the trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of us whose lives are imperfect.Gordon's defining and splendid biography of Eliot is a good place to start on Eliot after taking in the poems. Perhaps because we are now so balkanized and comparatively free of reigning orthodoxies, it is a good, even an innocent time to take up Eliot again. A culture is in reality an aggregate of individuals, not an abstract whole to be subdivided into groups, and Eliot was one hell of an individual. He and his poems were and are in it for The Long Haul, for grandchildren beyond the children, and that calling constitutes, as Eliot wrote, "A condition of complete simplicity/ (Costing not less than everything.)"
Liam Rector's books of poems are American Prodigal and The Sorrow of Architecture. He directs the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College and lives in the Boston area.
