The Poet T.S. ELIOT

Serious poetry was about to be eclipsed by fiction. He provided the stark salvation of The Waste Land

By Helen Vendler Monday, June 08, 1998

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    It annoyed Eliot that The Waste Land was interpreted as a prophetic statement: he referred to it (somewhat disingenuously) as "just a piece of rhythmical grumbling." Yet World War I had intervened between the writing of most of the poems included in Prufrock and the composition of The Waste Land; and in a 1915 letter to Conrad Aiken, Eliot had said, "The War suffocates me." Whether or not Eliot had written down the Armageddon of the West, he had showed up the lightweight poetry dominating American magazines. Nothing could have been further from either bland escapism or Imagist stylization than the music-hall syncopation ("O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag") and the pub vulgarity ("What you get married for if you don't want children") of The Waste Land. Eliot's poem went off like a bomb in a genteel drawing-room, as he intended it to.

    How could The Waste Land--and the sad poems, almost as peculiar, that followed it (from The Hollow Men to Little Gidding)--succeed to such an extent that by 1956 the University of Minnesota needed to stage his lecture there in a basketball arena? The astonishing growth of literacy between 1910 and 1940 certainly helps to explain the rise of an audience for modernist writing. But it was an audience chiefly of fiction readers. Fiction had claimed "real life," and in 1910 poetry was subsisting, for the most part, on vague appeals to nature and to God. Though from 1897 on, Edwin Arlington Robinson had been writing his grim, intelligent poetry of American failures (Miniver Cheevy among them), he was not a popular American poet: Joyce Kilmer and Edgar Guest were the poets who sold.

    Lovers of poetry in the pre-Modernist era had been surviving on a thin diet of either Platonic idealism or a post-'90s "decadence," and it was felt that barbaric and businesslike America could not equal the sophistication of England. Eliot's vignettes of modern life (some sardonic, some elegiac), and his meditation on consciousness and its aridities, reclaimed for American poetry a terrain of close observation and complex intelligence that had seemed lost. The heartbreak under the poised irony of Eliot's work was not lost on his audience, who suddenly felt that in understanding Eliot, they understood themselves.

    The discontinuous and "impersonal" Eliot of course provoked rebellion in some poets. John Berryman wrote, "Let's have narrative, and at least one dominant personality, and no fragmentation! In short, let us have something spectacularly NOT The Waste Land." But other younger poets disagreed. Charles Wright, this year's Pulitzer Prize poet, first read the Four Quartets (Eliot's World War II poem) in the Army-base library in Verona, Italy. "I loved the music; I loved the investigation of the past," he says. "The sound of it was so beautiful to me." The voice of the Quartets--meditative, grave, sorrowful, but also dry, experienced and harsh--has been important to poets from Wright to John Ashbery, because it allowed the conversational tone of everyday life to enter into the discussion of the deepest subjects.

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