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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    After Eliot's unhappy marriage and separation (Vivienne Eliot died in a mental hospital), he was baptized in the Anglican church, and his poetry became more orthodox. Eventually, he could no longer summon the intense concentration of heart, mind and imagination necessary to produce significant poetry, and he subsided into the versifier of Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats--ironically, the work by which he is now most widely known in the U.S., thanks to its popularization in the musical Cats. He was a formidably intelligent critic of literature and culture, though he did not escape--any more than we can ourselves--the limitations and prejudices of his time and his upbringing. He sent the stock of the 17th century poets soaring while arguing against the romantic notion of "self-expression" in favor of a poetry that was severe and classical.

    Eliot died in 1965. He chose to be buried in East Coker with his ancestors, remaining the unrepentant exile whose Americanness--his Protestant New England, his St. Louis, his Mississippi River--can be seen better by hindsight than it could when he was alive.

    Helen Vendler, who teaches at Harvard, is author of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets

    Other Voices
    By Paul Gray

    In his elegy on the death of Yeats, W.H. Auden wrote that "poetry makes nothing happen" and added, "It survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth." This sentiment seems a long step down from Shelley's 19th century claim that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world." But both statements add up to the same thing: the practical life of getting and spending needs, however grudgingly, the exhilaration and consolation of poetry, of memorable speech, of words striving to be true to themselves. The 20th century perfected the hard sells of propaganda and advertising, but talented people still worked to keep their language pure. They made nothing happen except the enrichment of their readers' lives.

    WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939)
    He was temperamentally a Romantic, eager for seclusion: "I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree." But public life would not let him. Whatever his subject--his native Ireland's struggles for independence, the growing chaos across Europe — he turned current events into lasting art. In the aftermath of World War I, he pronounced a memorable verdict: "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

    W.H. AUDEN (1907-1973)
    The most technically adroit poet of his era, he dazzled readers when his works first appeared in the late 1920s. He struck a distinctive postwar note. His landscapes bristled with rusting machinery and ominous border crossings. He could be chatty: "Let me tell you a little story." He shied away from definitive statements, hedging even his love poems with limiting adjectives: "Lay your sleeping head, my love,/ Human on my faithless arm."

    ALLEN GINSBERG (1927-1997)
    He emerged during the somnolent American 1950s as a bardic reincarnation of Walt Whitman. His incantatory, long-lined verses were styled not for parlor reading or classroom study but for public performances, featuring himself. He provided the music for the Beat Generation and a vision of modern malaise: "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness."

    ROBERT FROST (1874-1963)
    His invitation to read at John F. Kennedy's 1961 Inauguration only confirmed his status as the nation's most widely recognized poet. That popularity stemmed largely from his readability; his poetry seemed to speak plainly, in rhyme. But his surfaces concealed depths. The line "And miles to go before I sleep" at first seems straightforward. Repeated immediately, the words convey a trip toward death.

    SYLVIA PLATH (1932-1963)
    The searing poems she wrote just before her suicide in 1963 made her a literary and feminist martyr. Her onetime mentor Robert Lowell described her last works as "playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder." Plath's poem to her long-dead father redefined confessional writing: "Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you."

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