The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. ; pot (Faber

45s)

Vrai naif

:MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH

Besides collecting all Eliot's poems from 190 to 1962, this volume also . includes ,0,41 Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the five plays and an appendix, Poems Written in Ear& Youth, containing fourteen poems. It is thus the first time that all Eliot's published. poetry and drama has been collected into one volume.

So far as fashion goes, Eliot's stock is now low, although his position is secure. This was inevitable: the continuation of a process_ that began some years before his death. The authority he wielded in English literary circles between the wars, and afterwards, was,so abso- lute that the pendulum was bound to swing. A school of 'native' American poets, including Williams and his younger disciples, is begin- ning to make itself felt in this country—as is their Anglophobic scorn for Eliot's tradi- tionalism.

Few, however, would assert that Eliot's.own critical authority was based on. nothing. His early insistences upon the excellence of the Elizabethan dramatists and the metaphysical poets were exactly to the- point; all his criticism, even when he is at his most provoca- tive (as when writing on Hamlet as an 'artistic failure'), is sensitive and responsible—it de- mands assent or challenge, it cannot really -be ignored. And if it became a little thin, and leaned more and more upon a disconcertingly insensitive type of authoritarianism as he ad- vanced in years—well, less rather than more writers improve with age.

There is no doubt, either, that Eliot's poetry will survive as classic, in the sense that it will always be there, and read. But it will not neces- sarily be regarded as major poetry; indeed, once the sentimental reverence and the 'trembling voice are withdrawn, the achievement is seen to be an insubstantial although start- lingly brilliant one, which was much too grocisly inflated during the author's life. .

The beginning of this century was not-an easy time to establish an entirely new style. It is to Eliot's credit that in his first book, Prufrock and Other Observations (1917): he achieved this. Pound's early style—however much he personally fertilised and encouraged Eliot—has long been seen to -have been a syn- thesis of many past modes (mixed in with an element of sheer nuttiness); 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,' for all its self-conscious

culture and its subtle dependence on French models, is stylistically profoundly original, a triumphantly ambitious and deliberate achieve- ment. Nevertheless, criticism of Eliot will have to take into account the real reasons why the young poet chose the pathetic and ageing persona of Prufrock as a vehicle for his love song. For one of the most notable things about his poetry as a whole is its signal failure to celebrate or give any account of human love; when he touches upon the subject is when he is at bis most super-literary—and distracting.

In his earliest poems he was comparatively un-. evasive about this; yet even the exquisiteness

of 'Portrait of a Lady' may fairly-be- seen as, among other -things; a camouflage for a most chilling incapacity for experience.

This incapacity—it was, poetically, a sort of emotional invalidism—was progressively ob- scured by an increasing portentousness of manner and a religious commotion; and the private but audible giggle that accompanied the famous declaration of conservatism, royal- ism and catholicism was not, however much one may sympathise, an altogether pleasant

sound. One is suspicious of the reality—

although not of the sincerity—of this too famous position. And that Eliot, whose immense skill and poetic sensibility are not in

question, remained naively incompetent to 'respond in meaningful terms to his own emo- tions is cruelly demonstrated by the -fact that lie published A Dedication to My Wife, 'pri- vate words addressed to you in public.' How-

ever creditable or touching in purely bio-

graphical terms, this is simply a confession of -total poetic failure in a large (and some say important) area of experience. But in this and

other ways Eliot was much more naive than his extreme sensibility and extraordinary eminence suggested; and, despite his personal gentleness and courtesy, this naivety did not escape cor- ruption. I do not think that the poems, from Ash Wedneiday onwards, conceal or compen- sate for this.

Like Willa Cather, Eliot saw the pure strain in America as in process of destruction by com- mercial 'foreigners,' mainly Jewish—and so he tried to discover the English fount of what he saw as dying, and to turn himself into an English gentleman. It was a false position be- cause it was too frigidly considered; it was, - also, I think, intellectually remote from the man himself and his actual practice—Eliot may not, in fact, have been less than obtuse in discovering himself. The meaningless and abusive ferocity of Pound's straightforward anti-semitism is really less dangerous.

The Waste Land is an impressive perfor- mance; but all traces of the experience that prompted it seem to have been artificially re-

moved. .I do not think that we need to con-

tinue regarding Pound's excisions as in any sense sacrosanct. The well-known accusation that the poem, as it stands, is a ragbag of short poems arranged in sequence has never been satisfactorily answered; we have to be told, with a pomposity not all of us will tolerate, that it is about the most important abstractions in human existence in order to accord it `significance'—otherwise we see only the brilliant moments.

Again, it seems mean but is just—in the light of their technical and stylistic brilliance —to point out that the Quartets themselves consist of theological and philosophical ab- stractions piled up on an almost commonplace series of experiences. The famous passage in Little Lidding beginning 'In the uncertain hour before morning' is so beautifully done that we do nearly forget that its content is little more profound than that of a rather poor sermon. It all goes to show that solemnity, mysticism and stylish, piety are no substitute, in poetry, for emotional wisdom and ripeness. And Eliot may now be seen to have lacked this altogether. It is remarkable what he achieved in spite of it.