| Reference Reviews |
||||
| This companion is timely because T. S. Eliot’s work has recently been in the news. In the autumn of 2009 the British Library mounted an exhibition, “In Bloomsbury Square”, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Faber and Faber, the publishing firm Eliot was long associated with. At the same time, Faber and Faber published a revised edition of a first volume of Eliot’s early letters together with a new second volume. Early in 2010 at Wilton’s Music Hall, London, Fiona Shaw repeated her acclaimed performance of The Waste Land. Books, articles, commentaries and reviews continue to appear. David E. Chinitz opens his Preface to the companion by noting that “critical work on T. S. Eliot has undergone a renaissance since the early 1990s, bringing new ideas and methods to bear on a much-studied writer”. Additional prose and verse by Eliot has been brought out since his death, “further altering critical assessments of Eliot’s development, influences, and social views”. The 37 articles in the companion are divided into three parts: Influences, Works and Contexts. The contributors come mostly from American universities. In Part I, the first influence to be discussed is biographical: Eliot’s life in America and England, his family and his acquaintances. Anthony Cuda’s “The Poet and the Pressure Chamber: Eliot’s Life” clearly summarizes the principal events. One of Cuda’s opening comments shows the importance of this “pressure chamber”: “The most intensely creative stages of Eliot’s life often coincided with the periods in which he faced the most intense personal disturbances and upheavals”. Other influences, numerous and varied, dealt with in this first part are tradition, symbolism, Buddhism, Western philosophy, popular culture, myth and anthropology and (perhaps unexpectedly) imperial decline. As in many of the articles in the companion, explanation, analysis and suggestion are combined. The editor’s own essay, “A vast wasteland? Eliot and popular culture”, ends, for example, with a number of questions on the relationship between “popular culture and the fine arts”. An indication of the use that can now be made of Eliot’s youthful work is Vincent Sherry’s quotation from Inventions of the March Hare (1996, edited by Christopher Ricks) in order to illustrate cultural decadence in his chapter on “Imperial Decline and Eliot’s Development”. In a later chapter, Patrick Query uses a “representative example” of bawdy from the same posthumous collection of Eliot’s early verse in his article on Sexuality.
|
The Works in Part II are discussed in chronological
order, beginning with Inventions, just mentioned, and ending
with two articles on Eliot’s plays and three on his essays. Readers
may well turn first to The Waste Land, the key poem in Eliot’s
development and in modernism. Michael Coyle knows that those who “seek
the comfort and unity of narrative” in the poem may find their
expectations partially satisfied at first. But he tells us that a “richer
experience” is available to those readers who “resist chasing
shadows”. Stating that “the poem is not narrative”,
Coyle embarks on a wide-ranging analysis of its content and technique,
concluding that it resists “attempts to separate its meaning from
the experience of the poem”. His scrupulous approach is typical
of that taken by the other contributors tackling the individual works
in this part. Lee Oser lays out the structure of the Four Quartets,
looks at the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy and finally asserts
the poet’s truth to his art. Or consider John Xiros Cooper’s
“In Times of Emergency: Eliot’s Social Criticism”,
which opens with the need for definitions of “culture” and
“society”: “let’s be clear about what we mean
by these words”.
Part III offers a wide range of contexts, including gender, race, sexuality (already mentioned) and politics as well as practical concerns in Eliot’s life—his editorship of the Criterion and his work as a publisher. Tthese activities are described in excellent essays by Jason Harding and John Timberman Newcomb. Harding refers to the “unrivalled stable of young poets that Eliot and recruited for Faber & Faber”, an achievement that complements Nancy K. Gish’s consideration of his critical reception. We return to The Waste Land in James Longenbach’s concluding essay on Eliot’s influence, an essay which can be seen to some extent as a counterpart to the survey of influences on Eliot himself at the beginning of the companion. The articles are fully informative, readable and stimulating. They are mostly free of unnecessary abstraction and of trendy jargon. Students, teachers and all readers interested in literature and poetry will enjoy—and benefit from—this companion. After all, many of us think that Eliot is essential reading. A chronological table listing Eliot’s publications alongside contemporary cultural and historical events would have been useful, but there are lists of references and further reading at the end of chapters and a comprehensive bibliography of Eliot’s works.
| |||