T S Eliot, Poems 1920

Surely the first thing that strikes anyone on looking at the selection from Poems, 1920 is that they are extraordinarily difficult. In 'Gerontion' and the quatrain poems, Eliot uses dislocation: we seem to slide suddenly from one scene, or voice, or topic, or image to another, and the link is not at all clear. Then there is the obstacle course of quotations and allusions - in 'Burbank' a whole heap of them - which defy us to recognise and make sense of them. On top of this are difficulties in language, such as the tortuous syntax of 'Gerontion', and the abstruse vocabulary ('Polypohiloprogenitive' etc.). As if that were not enough, we have strange names to makes sense of (Princess Volupine, the 'characters' in 'Gerontion'), references to classical myth ('Sweeney among the Nightingales') and obscure theology ('Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'), and a lack of clear subject matter. And the voice with which the poems are delivered seems frequently to change in tone - from ironic and sardonic to philosophical to, occasionally, lyrical (the description of the painting in 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'). It is comforting to discover that the best-read critics and scholars have found these poems
extremely hard - even impossible - to fathom. Some have seen them as a bit of a dead end in Eliot's work (he never returned to this tight quatrain form for more than a few lines), an experimental phase between Prufrock and 'The Waste Land'.

Difficulty is itself an important aspect of Eliot's work, so we should pause and consider it. He himself took the view that modern poetry had to be complex if it was to present a truthful representation of modern experience. Here he is, in a lecture published in 1921:

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. ('The Metaphysical Poets')

Why, we might ask following Eliot, should poetry be easy? Scientists don't expect the material world to deliver its secrets up easily; and if art is a comparable investigation into the human world of culture and civilization, then that, too is likely to be as dense and exacting as scientific research (Eliot compares the creative act to a scientific experiment in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'). This is especially the case when that culture lies shattered into fragments after the cataclysm of World War One.

Here are some links to commentaries on the 1920 poems as a whole, and some of the individual poems.

Poems, 1920
Nigel Alderman, 'Where are the eagles and the trumpets?': the strange case of Eliot's missing quatrains - on the quatrain poems as a group. Accessible from JSTOR here.
Heather Bryant Jordan, Ara vos Prec: A Rescued Volume

Individual Poems
Critical interpretations of Gerontion
Thomas Day, analysis of 'Gerontion' in agenda poetry
Skylar Hamel, essay on The Hippopotamus
Cummings Guide, Sweeney Among the Nightingales
Gabriel Ellsworth, Analysis of 'Mr Eliot's Sunday Morning Service'
Keith Sagar, link on this page to Sagar's paper on 'Prufrock Supine and Sweeney Erect'

T S Eliot: Prufrock and Other Observations

With a writer as densely allusive and suggestive as T S Eliot, we can sink happily into the details  of each particular poem, without ever feeling we have quite touched the seabed.  This is an intensely rewarding activity, of course, but it also calls out for a complementary panoramic view of the work, in which we view poems next to each other and get a sense of the poet's general preoccupations. I offer here some thoughts on the first section of the Selected Poems (Faber), Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). This is a remarkable first collection, in which the poet speaks with a fully achieved voice, in a formally innovative style, and assays the great themes that we will see worked on again across the oeuvre.

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). Observations? It gives the poet a distant air: he is not the Romantic poet expressing his emotional life, but a detached, clinical observer of his times. This is Eliot's impersonal poet, reserved and elusive, using the masks of personae rather than speaking in his own voice: there are many such masks in the Selected Poems: Prufrock, Gerontion, the voices of 'The Waste Land', Simeon ... Eliot is writing dramatic monologues in the tradition of Browning, but with a modern twist. His speakers are ghostly, phantasmal, barely characters at all perhaps beyond the poem they are in. After the psychotic swagger of Browning's Duke in 'My Last Duchess' we get the traumatised voice of Prufrock, vehicle for the doubts and hesitations of modern man, consumed by early twentieth-century angst. For a curious thing about some of the great modernists - Eliot, Pound, Lawrence - is that they hated the modern world. They were really anti-modernists, seeking in the past the order and vitality and sense which they felt had been drained out of the Western world. The contemporary scene they regarded with horror: it was, literally, a waste land, a spiritual desert life is savaged, mechanised, brutalised, rendered meaningless by the loss of a shared cultural tradition. One of the preoccupations we meet in the first volume is this sense of disenchantment: other ages might have known the grace and loveliness of the mermaids, but they are silent now. The later religious poems can be read as a search for a way out of this disenchantment, back to grace, beauty and meaning.

The air of coldness of the title of Prufrock and Other Observations clashes with the warmth of the dedication, to Eliot's friend Jean Verdenal, who died in the First World War. It is characteristic that Eliot should express his warmth of feeling for Verdenal through a quotation from Dante, a poet Eliot revered and turned to throughout his life. It is the first of the many, many allusions and quotations we will meet in the book. And it stirs questions. Why express yourself through the words of another poet, from another time, in another language? For some, it is simple elitism: an epigraph in Latin or Italian is like a sign saying 'Don't bother with this unless you're part of the club of the hyper-educated', a way of ring-fencing culture off from the common man. Another suggestion has been that it is a deliberate strategy of invoking (literally, calling in) the great tradition in the contemporary: through allusion and quotation, Eliot's poems seek to be inclusive, to involve the formative texts of Western civilisation. Quotation is a kind of genuflection to the great lights of culture. Or, perhaps, it is a form of reticence. A rather shy way of uttering affection, we may feel. Eliot cannot salute his dead friend directly, in his own words, but does through in a sideways fashion, through the words of Dante. Cleverness deflects the grief. Deep feeling is in this way managed and ordered through the apparatus of erudition. Or a mixture of these motives. Or none of the above.

Even before the first poem, we are in Dante's underworld, where he is guided by Virgil among the souls in Inferno and Purgatory: 'trattando l'ombre come cosa scalda', treating the shadows [the dead] like the solid thing. Shadows and reality, the dead and the living - this is one of the great Eliot themes. He is fascinated by the meeting between the living and the dead: on a literary plane, this is the meeting of past and present writers, the relationship between modernity and tradition. In Eliot's scheme of things, Dante is a modern poet, a voice expressing the present. And Prufrock, Gerontion, the inhabitants of 'The Waste Land', the Hollow Men - they are all in some shadowland, the twilight kingdom, between life and death. The living can seem more dead than the dead, an idea still being worked through in the Ariel poems, where we find the Magi between the old (dead) dispensation and the new world, or Marina's father between life and death in the ephemeral smoke (an echo of the fog of Prufrock). And overshadowing the work is the the tragedy of the First World War. Against that Inferno, everything can collapse into unreality. In Eliot, we barely leave Dante's underworld, where the living poet descends, with the help of Virgil, to meet the spirits of the dead, and where the spirits, through poetry, give voice to their vexations.

The first persona we meet is Prufrock, speaker of the first poem. He is himself an 'observation'. A strong influence here is the French poet Jules Laforgue (1860-87), who cultivated an air of sceptical, cynical detachment from vulgar modern life. Prufrock - whose tidy respectable name deflates the romantic expectations of 'Love Song'  - is in the Inferno of modernity, and the 'you and I' suggests Dante and Virgil, touring this latest manifestation of spiritual death. (Another key influence is Baudelaire, whose speakers take refuge in the imagination from the sordid urban world: 'La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait', the deafening street howled around me, he wrote). Prufrock is captive in the lonely, fog-bound city, and his particular circle of hell is the world of society, the drawing rooms, cultured conversations and teatime rituals which form the timetable of his existence. It is a poem of existential crisis: Prufrock is existing but not living. He cannot live. He looks out at the world around him and vertically down into himself. His world has 'formulated' him, and he is acutely aware of its judgements and expectations. Confined by this self-consciousness, he cannot find in himself any will to act, to take on an independent life: even to speak about it would be a presumption, a disturbance of the settled world. Though he walks and talks, Prufrock is, spiritually speaking, dead - a soul in agony, in hell. His condition is that of paralysis, a morbid lassitude born of the sense of the pointlessness of life, which leads to an inability to do anything apart from retreat into guilt-ridden introspection. This ennui is a major theme in Baudelaire; and we find another treatment in James Joyce's Dubliners, whose characters are unable to move or act beyond the narrow circumscribed world defined for them by place, tradition, religion. In this condition, life itself - meaningful, fulfilled life - is deferred, indefinitely postponed. Yet another reference here is Matthew Arnold's 'The Buried Life', which describes the sense of our real lives and selves being hidden from us:

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life.

The buried life, the life not fully lived is another great Eliot theme, or really the same theme as the meeting of living and dead, for it is about the life which never happens, which turns into a mental death. Prufrock cannot act; Gerontion ends up in a waste land at the end of an empty life; The Hollow Men take this spiritual inactivity to an extreme; and even Simeon, having been granted the revelation, resigns himself to an otherwise uneventful life.

After Prufrock's love song, which describes not being able to love, and not having a song, we meet the similarly tortured speaker of 'Portrait of a Lady'. The title alludes to a Henry James novel, and the poem is a Jamesian 'moment', consciousness investigated to breaking point. The lady believes her companion is an understanding friend (lines 19-23), but he knows he isn't: he stands back from the scene he is in, treats it as material for art, reflects on his incapacity for true friendship (the musical images form an analogue of this guilt pulsing through him), and takes refuge in social rituals - admiring the monuments and so forth. It is another version of Arnold's buried life, the unspoken world where conversation falters, the subterranean anxieties which lie beneath social ritual. (This acute awareness of hidden, vertiginous depths beneath the surface of events is a great modernist trope: it is the basic premise of Joyce's Ulysses and Woolf's Mrs Dalloway - both, incidentally, published in 1922, the same year as 'The Waste Land'.) Feeling unequal to the emotional demands made of him, the speaker of 'Portrait' takes refuge in the persona of the refined flaneur, the ironic observer of urban life. Music throughout is the unconscious force that jerks him into recognising his inadequacy. When she dies - she is nearing her journey's end, she says - how will he respond to that? Will she have the better of him by pointing out in her death his total inability to find the right feeling in himself? Intellect, culture, irony .. all here have led to a dead end, a failure of sympathy and communication. Eliot the tremendously educated (Harvard, Paris, Oxford) intellectual poet is contemplating the emotional atrophy which follows from over-cultivation of the intellect. As in Prufrock, the form expresses the emotional narrative of the piece, giving us an x-ray of the synaptic currents as the speaker feels his nerves grow, then calms himself, then starts again ... And we are getting an uneasy sense now of Eliot's representation of women - terrifying presences in Prufrock, and a source of neurotic anxiety here.

In 'Preludes', we return to the modern city, as explored by Baudelaire (Eliot seems here to be remembering his home town of St Louis, Missouri - in exile in London, the memory grows keener). We can see the waste land forming - the streets are shabby, life is made up of pointless 'masquerades', the poet watches and cultivates his observational powers. The Preludes look back to Baudelaire and more recently to Imagism, the school of poetry formed by Pound and others in opposition to the (as they saw it) vacuous rhetoric of Georgian poetry. Imagism is devoted to clear, sharp delineations in a language which is born of common speech but exact. From the image the reader 'gets' the emotional state behind it. Compare the images in these poems to Pound's famous 'In a Station of the Metro':

This apparation of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

From these deft observations and metaphors an emotional world is built up in the reader's mind. Alongside the clarity and economy of the writing, we also note the detached poet stance uttering some rather unpleasant observations about the sordid contents of some unnamed, ordinary person's mind. Thanks! And how does he know, anyway? The ironic detachment here becomes an aggressive snobbery, as in the dead crowd on London Bridge in The Waste Land. We could read this as the speaker projecting his own disenchantment and self-loathing onto what he sees: Preludes and Rhapsody, after all, explore the process of perception, dramatise the way inner state colours observations of the external world. But nonetheless, elitist detachment from ordinary life is for many one of the less agreeable aspects of the Eliot poetic.

Then we come to 'Rhpasody on a Windy Night', a poem freighted with intimidating learning, if we consult Southam and other guides. One influence is the French writer Henri Bergson, and his theories of memory (like Eliot, Bergson was interested in the coexistence of past and present); perhaps we see a trace of F H Bradley, the Oxford philosopher on whom Eliot wrote his doctoral dissertation (the war prevented Eliot from attending his viva voce exam, and hence he never became Dr Eliot). Bradley's subject was the philosophy of mind: is there any reality beyond the reality of my consciousness? Are there minds other than mine? How could I know if there were? and so forth. (Perhaps the most clearly Bradleyan lines occur in 'The Waste Land': 'each in his prison / thinking of the key'). But 'Rhapsody' is not a philosophical poem. It does not argue a thesis, and source-hunting is likely to lead us away from its emotional depths onto the dry (very dry) land of abstract reflection, where some readers may prefer to be. For 'Rhapsody', like the other poems in the collection, is quite terrifying. It is about suffering, and depicts a mind in an extreme state. Again we find a speaker trapped in a circle of hell, which takes the form of an urban nocturne. Memory is troubling, leading us into madness (11-12). We meet another menacing female (16-22). A prostitute, at that time? Perhaps. Or a projection of the mind? Another paralysed spirit, certainly, unable to communicate.  Failure to communicate is perhaps the keynote. Even the children are oblivious, and the nearest the speaker gets to any kind of interaction with anything is playing tug-of-war with a crab. we never quite know if the images int his poem are nightmare phantoms, or things in the real streets around which, restlessly, he walks. Alongside these themes we notice another Eliot motif, which is eyes: the woman's eye is twisted, and the child's eye is a blank. We remember the piercing eyes in Prufrock. Turn from here to 'The Hollow Men' and you'll see eyes all over the place, eyes unable to see, unable to meet. If the eyes are the windows to the soul, as the saying has it, then we find ourselves here in a soulless place, the place where the soul dies. 'Rhapsody' follows the meandering route of the speaker as he walks through this desolate inferno - waste land - city - unconscious - memory liminal space where thoughts that should be dead and buried come to life. He finally reaches his sparse-sounding lodging, with the single toothbrush hanging pathetically on the wall. The lamp tells him to get ready for the business of living (which is what Prufrock spends his life doing). Life? what life? The irony is savage, hence the last line, locked in place by rhyme (rhyme endings in Eliot are rarely comforting chimes, more often beats of mounting nervous tension).

To sum up the themes announced in Prufrock: failure of communication, the buried life, the life not lived, the mingling of living and dead, past and present, women as a source of fear and self-doubt, elitism (perhaps), despair, suffering. A depressing list, so what stops the experience of reading from being purely depressing? First, the simple fact that is being said: the unspeakable is being articulated, the depths hauled to the surface (cf the image of memory throwing things up on a beach in Rhapsody). There is the creative energy which we find in the exact use of language and the formal techniques: quotation and allusion, the handling of 'free' verse so that the lines form an exact map of the mental journey they describe, the employment of personae, the sharp characterisation, imagery that has not been done to death, and still makes a surprising impact today. And we sense that this is the real thing, not someone writing what they think poetry ought to sound like, but using poetry as an instrument to transcribe experience, whatever dark places that may lead us into. The creative process of art, then, is a way of dealing with pain. The next set of poems, 'Ara vos Prec' (Poems, 1920) will ask, among other things, whether art and intellect are sufficient for dealing with the tribulations of modern (modernist) life.

For more overview material (online) see:

One-page summary from Books and Writers
Ronald Bush, T S Eliot's Life and Career
General Account on The Poetry Foundation

Also:
Earlier post on this blog on Prufrock
Keith Sagar, 'Prufrock Supine and Sweeney Erect'
Analysis of Rhapsody
Another account of Rhapsody on Wondering Minstrels blog

T S Eliot and Christianity

Links to some excellent online material on the crucial subject (for students of Eliot) of T S Eliot and Christianity. Arranged, very roughly, in order of complexity:

Barry Spurr, T S Eliot's Extraordinary Journey of Faith

Barry Spurr, Suffering Prayer: T S Eliot, his Poetry and his Christianity

Barry Spurr, 'O dark dark dark they all go into the dark: the via negativa in the poetry of T S Eliot'

Lindsay Sarin, Full Circle: T S Eliot's Quest for Spiritual Fulfillment (Honours Thesis)

Florida Gulf Coast University page on Journey of the Magi

Vincent B Leitch, T S Eliot's Poetry of Religious Desolation

Dissertation on Eliot and Religion by Janet MKC (?)

Philip Yancey, T S Eliot's Christian society: Still Relevant Today?

Barry Spurr's findings are treated at full length in his book Anglo-Catholic in Religion: T S Eliot and Christianity


See also earlier blogs on T S Eliot, especially 'Ash Wednesday'.

T S Eliot, Ash Wednesday

Today is Ash Wednesday, and so a  good moment to find some time to read and think about Eliot's beautiful poem. As ever, the first thing is to read it for ourselves, trust it, and trust ourselves to respond to it without any initial external aid. Eliot believed that a poem could have multiple meanings; and we can give the rich images of 'Ash Wednesday' our own private meanings, letting its oblique narrative us take us on a personal journey.

Here is an audio of Eliot reading 'Ash Wednesday'.

After which, of course, listening to other readers and learning from them is a sane and sensible thing to do. From the mountain of academic commentaries (most of them unread by me)  here are a few that I have found helpful and stimulating.

T S Eliot's Ash Wednesday: Conversion and the Transcendent - short online commentary. I can't find an author's name.

Denis Donoghue, T S Eliot and the Poem Itself. Donoghue writes beautifully about Eliot (I recommend his book Words Alone) and this is a long and rewarding essay about and around 'Ash Wednesday', originally published in the Partisan Review.

Theodore Morrison, 'Ash Wednesday': A Religious History. Very clear article, from 1938. [JSTOR]

Two articles tracing parallels between Eliot and Dante:

Audrey T Rogers, T S Eliot's "Purgatorio": the Structure of "Ash Wednesday". Detailed commentary, linking it to the 'mythic structure' of Dante. There is no need to know the Dante to follow the article. [JSTOR]

Sister M Cleophas, Ash Wednesday: the Purgatorio in a Modern Mode [JSTOR]

Journeys through The Waste Land

The Waste Land (please note: it's two words) starts with the disinterment of the dead, and perhaps the first thing we need to do when we meet it - or meet it again - is disinter it from the layers of commentary, opinion, and received wisdom that have settled over it. Not that these things are useless: we just need to travel over this strange place for ourselves a few times before looking for a companion.
We also need to find some way of navigating it that doesn't make us feel too lost. (One way of doing that is to enjoy feeling lost, of course). Another was suggested to me recently by reading the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet's introduction to his screenplay for the equally perplexing film directed by Alain Resnais, Last Year in Marienbad (1961). Robbe-Grillet says that the film was "an attempt to construct a purely mental space and time—those of dreams, perhaps, or of memory, those of any effective life—without excessive insistence on the traditional relations of cause and effect, nor on an absolute time sequence in narrative." That seems to me a pretty good description of The Waste Land, and Robbe-Grillet's advice to the viewer can help us here too. The viewer can, he says, "react in two ways: he can try to construct some Cartesian scheme, as lineal and rational as possible, in which case the film will seem difficult, if not incomprehensible; or instead, by contrast, he can allow himself to be transported by the extraordinary images projected before his eyes, by the voices of the actors, by the sounds, by the music, by the rhythm of the montage". I suggest that we should, at least in the first instance, read The Waste Land like this, as a series of images and speeches that follow each other as in a dream, following some subterranean or emotional current perhaps, but not spelling out a logical sequence. It is an extremely dramatic poem, and it is always a good idea to listen to it. Here is a reading by Eliot, Ted Hughes and Lia Williams, put together for Poetry, Please. Close your eyes, and let the music play on your imagination.



Online study
Still, we cannot shut out entirely the rational bit of our mind (left hemisphere?) which wants to make some sense from this collage of voices. There are mountains of criticism and scholarship - indeed, one wonders how many poems of 434 lines or so can have generated this much secondary material. First we might want to know what the poet himself thought. Eliot referred to The Waste Land at various points in his life, and in a rather contradictory way. There are some interesting comments in the Paris Review Interview, 1959.

Clear and helpful lecture by Nick Mount

Allusions and references are recorded in Southam's book A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of T S Eliot, and can be studied on screen in this hypertext edition.

Another hypertext is offered on the Exploring the Waste Land site.

Keeping up with technology, there is an ipad Waste Land app. I have yet to use it (not having an ipad), but it had been well reviewed and the contents are certainly impressive.

An offbeat and stimulating approach is provided by graphic artist Martin Rowson, who has hardboiled detective Chris Marlowe tracking down the allusions on the mean streets of crime noir. Out of print, about to be reissued.

Study guides

• York Notes produce a serviceable set of notes to the poem by Alisdair Macrae, and brief chapters on context and critical reception. The reading list with suggestions is useful. Use as a starting point, not an ending point! The point being that, it's one thing to know Eliot listened to Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring - as a book like this will usefully tell us - but it's another, altogether more exciting thing, to listen to The Rite of Spring ourselves and look for connections with the poem. (Apologies for stating the obvious.)
• Stephen Coote, The Waste Land for Penguin (Critical Studies and Masterstudies are the same thing) is an outstanding one-volume guide to the poem, from one of the best student monograph series, now sadly out of print. If you just get one book, this is the one to track down.
• Helen Williams's study for the excellent  Arnold Studies in English Literature (no.37) is quite a demanding investigation into structure and meaning in the poem. Serious and rewarding.
• Matt Simpson's Focus on The Waste Land is a more personal approach, and reads the poem as a very personal reaction to Eliot's own experiences. Deeply engaged, inevitably speculative, and interesting to reflect on in the light of Eliot's own theory of artistic impersonality.

Advanced
That is plenty to be going on with, and certainly enough for any sixth form exam on the Selected Poems.  But if you're still hungry you could try:

• Lawrence Rainey's Annotated edition and Revisiting the Waste Land (a study of the compositional process)
• The facsimile edition of the original drafts, edited by Valerie Eliot
• The Icon Reader's Guide to Criticism of The Waste Land, which takes us through accounts of the poem from various angles.
• The Norton Critical edition, as ever, provides the text and key critical essays.

By which stage, we might feel we have buried the poem in explication and it is time to start the whole process again.

T S Eliot, Prufrock

Here are some sources that will help in getting to grips with T S Eliot's 'The Love Song of Alfred J Prufrock'.

First and foremost, here it is being read by the man himself:




Other links

The Wikipedia page on Prufrock is very thorough

The Hypertext edition helps in tracking down allusions etc. 

Excellent study guide on Prufrock

A classic text is Ezra Pound's review of Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) in Poetry, Vol. 10, No. 5 (Aug., 1917), pp. 264-271. Also available here.

A selection of critical comments on the Illinois site.

Post on this blog on Prufrock and Other Observations

Yale Lectures on T S Eliot

I've been enjoying, and learning from, Professor Langdon Hammer's lecture series on Modern Poetry (given in 2007), one of the courses published online in video form by Yale University. Hammer uses a variety of critical approaches - biographical, psychological,  textual - and offers some exciting readings of canonical works. I've been concentrating in particular on the three lectures (10-12) on T S Eliot. Hammer considers in detail Prufrock (the poem), The Waste Land, and key critical essays 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and the review of The Metaphysical Poets. But the ideas suggest ways of approaching the rest of the work too. My own notes are here, but they are offered as a memory aid only - you have to hear this for yourself!

In Our Time, The Waste Land

There is a very good edition of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time on T S Eliot, 'The Waste Land and Modernity'. Guests are Steve Connor, Fran Brearton and Lawrence Rainey.

Rainey's books, Revisiting the Waste Land and The Annotated Waste Land are listed, and would be a good follow-up. My own rather hurried notes on the discussion are available below:

Book: Craig Raine, T S Eliot

Raine’s study of T S Eliot is a curious book. It clearly assumes familiarity with the major works, and with the broad shape of the biography, so is not for first-timers. Yet some of the summary passages, such as the account of Eliot’s view of the person who suffers and the mind which creates, will not give anything new to experienced readers. So who is it for? It offers excellent close readings of some less noticed poems (‘Lune de Miel’ and ‘Dans le Restaurant’) while skipping important works like ‘Preludes’ and ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, and it gives only a general impressionistic account of ‘The Waste Land’. The reading of ‘The Four Quartets’ is too fragmentary to be satisfactory, while as usual making neat local poits about word choice along the way. The main thesis of the book is that Eliot’s work is animated by the Arnoldian Buried Life, the sense of life unlived, emotions unfulfilled. This is just about made to cohere with the secondary thesis that Eliot is a classicist in the sense of being sceptical of romantic emotional effusion, and more interested in the detached depiction of less usual, fugitive emotions. The difficulty here is that, as Eliot recognised, the terms ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’, when applied as anything other than period terms – and perhaps even then -  are too vague to do any useful work.

The main difficulty of Raine’s book is that the  theme of the buried life is strained to breaking point, as it is used to apply to so many things:  Prufrock’s stifling of impulse, the buried voices in ‘The Waste Land’, the idea of a positive renunciation in ‘Ash Wednesday’, the dramatization of repressed conscience in the plays and the spiritual experience in ‘The Four Quartets’. This makes us feel that a whole oeuvre is being blurred over and made to fit a single idea, a reductive strategy false to the variety of Eliot's writing. Along the way, there are some scrupulous readings of lines, interspersed with weird tabloidese one-sentence paragraphs, surprising choices of adjective for a critical work (a Walcott poem, left largely unquoted, is ‘botched’; an interpretation by George Steiner is ‘stupid’). The chapter on the Criticism is entertaining for its comments on inconsistencies and vagueness in Eliot’s work, but Eliot’s criticism really needs to be traced chronologically and systematically, and there is too much hopping about from one essay to another. The chapter defending Eliot against accusations of anti-Semitism is a much-needed counterbalance to what has become critical orthodoxy; it might be stronger if Raine had not earlier been vigorously defending TSE from any and all other accusations (mistreatment of his first wife etc.), making him look like  a defence lawyer rather than an impartial critic (an effect contributed to by the dedication to Valerie Eliot). Some of the readings, such as the contention that Burbank is a dramatic monologue, which we would see if we knew our Joyce better, seem to me over-ingenious. Some are brilliantly precise. The book is certainly not a general introduction to a major writer, but a vigorously argued pursuit of a big idea, the Buried Life that is alleged figure in the carpet of the whole work from beginning to end. Raine's TSE is certainly worth reading, and one would generally prefer criticism with a personal touch like this to a toneless Introductio. But for a general overview of Eliot’s art we need to look elsewhere.