American Literary History
2007
 

Visible Poet: T. S. Eliot and Modernist Studies

... I have dwelt on [Hugh Kenner's] Invisible Poet because, reading it again next to two new monographs on Eliot, I am struck by how much things have changed, yet remained the same. (Since this is all rather cliche, I’m glad to confirm that Invisible Poet remains a very good book, well worth the trouble of re-reading.) For Kenner, Eliot’s invisibility is the key to his greatness, but it is not long since Eliot seemed in danger of becoming invisible in the worst possible way. I refer to the invisibility that is the curse of the despised and unread.

David Chinitz warms to this theme in the introduction to T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide (2003), quoting Cynthia Ozick’s 1989 judgment that “by the close of the Eighties, only ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appears to have survived the indifference of the schools” (Ozick 4).<1> Ozick’s assessment is hyperbolic. It is hardly true that “the mammoth prophetic presence of T. S. Eliot himself . . . the latest generations do not know at all” (Ozick 4), for whatever Eliot’s standing in the literary press, his works have never, in my experience, disappeared from educational syllabi.<2> As Chinitz points out, Ozick is not really interested in “the vicissitudes of a poet’s reputation” (2); for it is not just that Eliot has vanished into welcome invisibility, but that we can no longer recognize the poet who was identical with “high art, when art was at its most serious and elitist” (Ozick 9). This shift is in part due to poetry’s long decline from its position as the elite literary art, partly to the collapse of “high” culture as a whole. Chinitz’s monograph, meanwhile, explains the final third of this equation: the fraction that never crosses Ozick’s mind. For Eliot, whatever his critics and defenders suggest, was deeply involved in the consumption, creation, and criticism of popular culture. Chinitz goes beyond the editorial policies of Criterions old and New and tries, instead, to correct our central literary-historical metaphor of Eliot as “the hero or antihero of a losing battle to defend a pristine and sacralized high art from the threatening pollution of ‘lower levels’ of culture” (5). He notes that there has always been sporadic awareness of Eliot’s interest in things like jazz, and he acknowledges a decade of scholarship by scholars such as Lawrence Rainey, Leonard Diepeveen, Cassandra Laity, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Michael North. Still, his book is the first to systematically map Eliot’s investments in popular song, theater, stage comedy, radio, television, and the cult of celebrity. Against the invisibility that flows from the death of high art, Chinitz offers us an Eliot we hardly knew.

There are many surprising things in this analysis, some of which we ought to know by right, like the fact that the notion of Eliot as only an aesthete and elitist began very early and was often tied to tedious resentments (stand up Dr Williams, stand up Ms Monroe) about his expatriate life in England; or that even his “most perceptive readers,” such as Edmund Wilson, had no problem writing about “futile aestheticism” barely “three


<1>Chinitz quotes from the rpt in Ozick’s Fame and Folly (1996); my quotations follow Chinitz’s example and are drawn from his engagement with Ozick’s essay. <return to text>

<2>Though my university education post-dates Ozick’s article by a few years, I can attest that Eliot’s poems and essays were assigned in my graduate seminars in England and the US and appeared frequently on my undergraduate syllabi in Scotland. Nor was I only exposed to “Prufrock.” My two years of A Level English would have been fundamentally different without Deborah Hunton’s introductions to The Waste Land and Four Quartets. That was the kind of teaching that makes a literary scholar out of a theatrical 16-year-old, though its brilliance probably renders the rest of my experience unrepresentative. <return to text>

 

 

 

years after Eliot’s 1928 preface to The Sacred Wood spoke of his current project as ‘the relation of poetry to the spiritual and social life of its time and of other times’” (159). However, the most interesting portion of Chinitz’s book comes in his reading of Eliot as a popular icon. He reminds us that Eliot was a celebrity of the first order, capable of attracting an audience of 14,000 to a lecture held in the basketball arena at the University of Minnesota (and of negotiating an astronomical $2,000 fee). Yet the great irony—and this is Chinitz’s best insight—is that this very celebrity guaranteed the false image of Eliot the high art colossus:

[Eliot’s] celebrity was based on a perception that he was above the rabble who watched television and read bad novels. . . . The central importance of popular culture to Eliot’s work and thought was thus lost entirely. Eliot’s public—those thousands who flocked to his lectures, those millions who tuned in to The Cocktail Party on television, and the many more millions worldwide who came to know him by his name and reputation—came to him because (to recur to Cynthia Ozick’s formulation) he was high art at a moment when high art carried “power and prestige” magnified many times by its being menaced from below. No wonder people came “to get a look at him before he died”: his moment was, by definition, always passing, and his like would never be seen again. That he was the last of his kind was a condition of his fame. (Chinitz 184)
This Eliot is the poet of The Waste Land (1922) and “King Bolo” (1914), of Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Sweeney Agonistes (1925); the critic of Dante and the eulogist of Marie Lloyd. He is the writer whose verse dramas packed Broadway and the West End—and yet we have somehow missed the only really amazing thing about that fact, which is not that a poet should be interested in writing verse drama, but that he should desire a mass audience for the revival of this moribund art.<3> In place of philosophical invisibility, Chinitz offers us a way to see through the too-present corpse of Eliot’s mandarin celebrity and so re-envision him as a living presence in modern literary history. In so doing, he acknowledges Kenner’s importance, citing Invisible Poet as one of the rare studies to give “Eliot’s relations with popular culture any extended consideration,” but complains that the invisible Eliot “does seem rather too arch, too much the confident manipulator” (6). This is a fair comment, and it is to our benefit that Chinitz eschews the well-trodden logic of Bradleyan invisibility in favor of a rigorously historical analysis, where Eliot’s “high” and “low” cultural identities conflict, are occluded, and are demystified. ... <4>

Matthew Hart

<3>Compare Eliot’s attitude to that of Yeats, who, when formulating the poetics of his “plays for dancers,” proclaimed that verse drama ought to be an “unpopular” and “accomplished” art, fit for the drawing-room or country house (Jeffares, ed. 191–93). <return to text>

<4>Part of the overall strength of Chinitz’s book is that he remains unsparing about Eliot’s faults, even as he argues for a more generous and multi-faceted approach to his cultural politics. For example: “[Eliot] could see, but he feared to be seen, across the cultural divide. In his reams of prose, Eliot never sustains an analysis of popular culture for more than four or five pages. . . . The popular influence. . . is audible in, even crucial to his poetry; but only in some of the March Hare poems, which he did not publish, and in Sweeney Agonistes, which he could not finish, does he dare to bring it into the foreground” (187). <return to text>