Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 1

Master of Style

page 228

Master of Style

This book of Eliot’s shorter poems contains nothing we have not seen before. It omits several of his New England poems. Yet it is a necessary acquisition for any bookshelf where the work it contains has not yet found a place. On reading (or re-reading) these poems one can see clearly why Eliot has had a major formative influence upon the development of English and American poetry of this century. The answer does not lie in originality of content or a totally new treatment of the material that has come to the poet’s hand. Many Georgian poets (Harold Monro, or at an opposite pole, D.H. Lawrence) had illuminated for us the bric-à-brac of personal experience; many had written lucidly and rhetorically. But they lacked one thing, style.

Eliot’s private statements assume in the reader’s mind the stature of general statements about spiritual reality mainly because every phrase and echo in his verse conveys from the beginning an impression of dispassionate maturity, of a mind native to the analytical tradition of Western culture. A code of manners to him is a subsidiary division of a code of ethics; and more important, a guide to the labyrinth of the modern world. His true progenitor is not Dante but Henry James. The delusion that society can make its members happy never occurs to him; nor the more profound delusion that people can exist meaningfully outside society. Passion expressed within the social forms (as in ‘Prufrock’) is irony, the wound, in Eliot’s own later language, by which what is eternal drains away into time:

I have watched the moment of my greatness flicker,
I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

As the prophet and the seer of ‘The Rock’ and ‘Ash Wednesday’ Eliot has great virtues, which could only be discussed at considerable length. But he has set a balanced and elastic style (so simple a gift, it would seem) before the eyes of his barbaric contemporaries, to drive them to envy and despair.

1955 (105)