Today I reached the end, again, of the T.S. Eliot half of my module on ‘T.S. Eliot and Twentieth-Century Poetry’. The last time I taught it was in Spring 2020, when by late March everyone was off-campus and the rest of the semester was online. So it’s been a pleasure to be back in a room with students, talking together about real books.
After a couple of weeks getting excited about the wildness of The Waste Land (1922) — one student started to read German again after encountering the untranslated lines in it — I wanted to impress on the class how rapidly Eliot transformed his reputation from ‘dangerous American radical’ to ‘respectable English poet’.
So I showed them these: the printed anthologies for verse-speaking contests that were held in Oxford in the 1920s and 1930s.
I’ve forgotten why I own these faded pamphlets. But this was their moment to shine. The syllabus for 1925 was entirely school-room classics: Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantics. But the official syllabus for 1935 featured a special guest: T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday (1930), calmly fulfilling its author’s stated aim — in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) — of modifying the ‘ideal order’ of the canon’s ‘existing monuments’.
Then, when we came to read Four Quartets (1944), I wanted to make them see how significant it was for Eliot to be allowed to publish single-poem pamphlets despite wartime paper rationing — and why these poems about the importance of endurance in English and American landscapes might be seen as part of the war effort (as Eliot himself saw them).
So I showed them my copy of the third Quartet, The Dry Salvages (1941; third impression, February 1943), which is printed on spectacularly rough, deckle-edged rag paper.
Now we have the Easter break, just in time to enjoy the cruellest month. When we return, we’ll look at what happens when Eliot’s poetry gets into other people’s hands, beyond the hedge of respectability that grew up around it, and beyond the reactionary opinions of his critical prose — of which Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o observed, in a remark too long neglected by Eliot criticism, that ‘Eliot’s high culture of an Anglo-Catholic feudal tradition [is] suspiciously close […] to the racial doctrines of those born to rule’.
But we’ll begin with one of my favourite insights into Eliot’s influence as a poet: a footnote from Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice (1984), which elaborates on the claim that ‘what T.S. Eliot did for Caribbean poetry and Caribbean literature was to introduce the notion of the speaking voice’, connecting this to the innovation of jazz and its origins in the African-American soundworld of Eliot’s childhood home, St. Louis:
For those who really made the breakthrough, it was Eliot’s actual voice — or rather his recorded voice, property of the British Council […] not the texts — which turned us on. In that dry deadpan delivery, the riddims of St. Louis (though we didn’t know the source then) were stark and clear for those of us who at the same time were listening to the dislocations of Bird, Dizzy and Klook. And it is interesting that on the whole, the Establishment couldn’t stand Eliot’s voice — far less jazz!