VIOLENT contrasts racked his life and art. His poems could be golden and struck by grace, split by the metaphysical hammer of God; but his most golden lines were yoked to an ironic, satanic vision of the meanness of a scrap-iron age. He captured, and still captures, the minds of the young; but he personified himself as "an old man in a dry month," and his characteristic poetic voice was that of a man who seemed at least 50 the day he was born.
He was born a prairie-state American; he made himself the apotheosis of the cultured, conservative Englishman. He was painfully reserved, with a huge store of natural dignity; he delighted in playing schoolboy practical jokes on his friends. The theme of his art was chaos and despair, death-in-life; yet in life he was the model Christian gentleman, kind and good—and in his last years supremely happy. At his death in London last week of pulmonary emphysema, it was clear that Thomas Stearns Eliot, 76, was one of the few major poets of a minor poetic age, and far and away the most influential man of letters of his half of the century.
The published poems of Eliot's long lifetime's work hardly fill 200 pages. He also wrote five major verse plays of varying quality and several volumes of criticism. His strongest admirers recognize that his poetic subject matter and emotional range were limited. But no poet has ever been more fortunate in his time and place: Eliot was uncannily attuned to the moment after World War I when an entire generation was haunted by spiritual despair.
Out of the Enchanted Forest. For that generation, Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was a shock—the bitter, bracing shock of recognition. Prufrock was simply the first modern poem. It abandoned romantic oratory for conversational speech, threw away stately "poetic" meters for the subtle syncopated rhythms of the jazz age, brought poetry out of the misty enchanted forest into the gritty reality of the modern city
Spread out against the sky Like a patient etherised upon a table.
Eliot achieved some of his strongest effects by stringing together what seem to be banalities. But the banalities were chosen with such cool precision that they grew in the mind to be images of modern urban alienation. Then, typically, they were thrown into sudden contrast with images of romance and the glories of the past.
I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them, riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.