The poet as revolutionary

Now, 100 years after Prufrock and 50 years after Eliot’s death, Ricks, along with his collaborator, Jim McCue, has published an annotated version of Eliot’s poems. It has taken them almost a decade, and it shows. When they say annotated, they really do mean annotated. The two volumes consist of 2,000 pages, of which more than two-thirds are commentary and textual history; much of the remaining third consists of doggerel, jottings, alternative versions and second-rate stuff. Mind you, as Ricks says: “Eliot at less than his supreme best is much better than most of the poems we read.” And as Eliot said: “The most important thing for poets to do is to write as little as possible.” The spadework can be left to the critics.

Consolingly, Ricks also says you don’t actually need this book to appreciate Eliot. “If you are reading for pleasure simply, you don’t need another edition. If you’re reading for study with pleasure — which, fortunately, a lot of people are able to do — then there’s nothing written by somebody with the genius of Eliot that isn’t likely to be germane to his achievement.”

Still, the very fact of the book’s existence is a statement that should interest even the most casual poetry reader. Ricks doesn’t like the “knockout tournament” way of judging writers, but this mighty book effectively says Eliot is among the greatest, not just of our time, but of any time. Is this true?

The answer to that must lie in 1922. Europe was beginning to emerge from the trauma of the First World War, but its impact was still unfolding. The old empires were crumbling, along with old certainties. The 600-year-old Ottoman empire was abolished in November, the British were facing the first stirrings in India and the Irish Free State was established. Modernism in the visual arts — largely a left-wing movement — had been flourishing for two decades; but the primarily conservative movement of literary modernism was only to be fully launched by the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in February and, in October, Eliot’s The Waste Land.

It is now generally regarded as the greatest poem in English of the 20th century, a work that stands alongside Picasso’s 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913) as a definer of modernism, the most convulsive movement in western art since the Renaissance. All these works provoked outrage and disgust — reactions that, in Eliot’s case, seem downright bizarre.

Nobody looked less like a revolutionary than Eliot. He didn’t look like a great artist, he looked like a banker; indeed, between 1917 and 1925, he made his living in the foreign-transactions department of Lloyds. (From then until his death in 1965, he worked at the publishers Faber & Faber.) He wore a bowler hat and carried a furled umbrella. Even when he became a full-time literary figure, his manner was described as “liturgical” — strict, precise and inhibited.

“Come to lunch,” ran a Virginia Woolf invite, “Eliot will be there in a four-piece suit.”

The current prurient interest in Eliot’s sexy poems, like How the Tall Girl’s Breasts Are, is fired by what Ricks calls his “punctilio”. Beneath that four-piece suit, we giggle, there are lusting loins. The same sort of revelations about Ted Hughes — notably in Jonathan Bate’s recent biography — seem all of a piece with our sense of the smouldering, hunky Yorkshireman. With prim Eliot, hot sex feels somehow undermining, though, of course, it isn’t.

“Clearly,” Ricks says, “in the case of somebody like [Robert] Lowell or Byron, being some kind of rapscallion verging on a scoundrel is part of the curse of being a gifted artist. Eliot both being and pretending to be a banker, this punctilio of his, the formality, all mean it’s more fun to bring him out in some way.”

The Waste Land is, I think, unique in literary history in that it was written by one genius and edited by another. Ezra Pound sliced and diced Eliot’s original manuscript in spite of the fact that he knew from the first draft that Eliot had outclassed him.

“Complimenti, you bitch,” he wrote to Eliot. “I am wracked by the seven jealousies.”

Eliot responded by dedicating the poem to Pound, calling him “il miglior fabbro”, the better craftsman. This is fair enough — without Pound’s cuts, the poem would have lacked the intensity and the shocking distillation that makes people say it is “difficult”, even though, at heart, it is not. Later, Eliot was to describe it as “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”, which, in a cosmic, world-transforming sense, is exactly what it is.

Great works followed — climaxing, between 1936 and 1942, in Four Quartets — but the staggering innovations in The Waste Land mean that he could have written nothing after 1922 and still been a dominant force in poetry.

“He remains at the centre of the poetry community,” says Matthew Hollis, a poet and Eliot’s successor as poetry editor at Faber & Faber. “The material that poets draw on and the expression they choose for it are things that they can make their own, and they don’t have to work under the reception of convention.”

“I have steadily found,” says Clive James, now a bestselling poet, “like any other poet since his time, that I am still in his time, which he continues to dominate with his range of poetic tone and critical brilliance. The Waste Land opened up so many possibilities of pace and construction that poets are still wondering which toy to choose.”

The Waste Land was mostly “free verse”, in that it did not obey conventional meter and verse forms. It also abandoned the conventional poetic voice. Characters drift in and out of the poem and the tone of the narration constantly shifts. As Hollis points out, this freedom of voice and form still defines contemporary poetry. Look, for example, at the different personae adopted by the poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy.

Before all that, however, before even his pilgrimage to the High Anglicanism of Four Quartets, comes what James calls the “low-down sonic level” of Eliot’s poetry, to be found even in the humble lines of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

“I would never want,” James says, “the discussion of his great mind and talent to get too far away from the sheer enjoyment of reciting ‘Macavity’s a Mystery Cat: he’s called the Hidden Paw’. It’s on that basic, low-down sonic level that Eliot still so daunts all other poets. He had the verbal magic.”

This magic — the correct word, as it is often completely inexplicable — is what draws people in. Hollis mentions the line “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god” from Four Quartets. I would offer the first line of Song for Simeon — “Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and” — which still gives me inexplicable shivers long after I first read it decades ago. It is all something to do with the perfection of the cadence, a perfection that makes Eliot a surprisingly easy poet to learn by heart. This magic meant he lived up to his own insistence that great poetry communicates before it is understood.

At a more workaday level, his role at Faber for the last 40 years of his life meant he effectively created the poetic generation that followed him. The list of the poets he published is breathtaking — Ezra Pound, WH Auden, Louis MacNeice, Marianne Moore, Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes. Old Possum — Pound’s nickname for him — still presides over the class- and lecture rooms, and so he should.

What did he mean? What was it all about? Well, the initial paradox — the revolutionary modernist with a furled umbrella in a four-piece suit — persists to this day. His politics, for example, remain troublesome to his admirers. “[In] his political thought,” James says, “the presence of his acquired Anglo-Catholicism bothers me much less than the absence of any recognition on his part that the massacre of the Jews might have done something to injure his notion of the unity and continuity of a Christian society, not to say his definition of culture. In other words, one is either in awe of him or in contention with him all the time, every day, and at every level.”

Psychologically, however, this is understandable. Eliot’s extreme sensitivity to the age in which he lived is a core aspect of his genius. His journey to an intensely conservative, intensely English Christianity draws attention to the fragility of what was left of the civilisation he fought to reconstruct in his poetry.

Ricks points out that the phrase “entre deux guerres” — between two wars — crops up several times in his writing. Eliot was struck by Keynes’s warning that the Treaty of Versailles that ended the Great War would lead to another German war. He came to think that all wars were one war, and that the warlord — “the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent” — was always waiting in the wings.

But, to play Ricks’s knockout tournament, was he the greatest? The challenger is another American, Wallace Stevens. Grand US critics such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, as well as our own Sir Jonathan Bate, provost of Worcester College, Oxford, go for Stevens.

“Eliot,” Bate says, “was unquestionably the most influential poet of the 20th century, but if I had to choose a poet whose work repays endless rereading and who transcends his historical moment, it would have to be Stevens.”

Stevens is, indeed, endless, but, though his words still run daily through my head, Eliot feels completed, finally placed. Never mind, his place is deservedly as high as any poet’s, and as long as English is spoken, people will be reading The Waste Land’s first line —“April is the cruellest month...” — and feeling the shiver down the spine that is the first, the highest and the truest critical response that great art can provoke.

The Poems of TS Eliot, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, is published in two volumes on Nov 5 (Faber & Faber £80).