Over at The New Republic, Helen Vendler offers a variation on the argument that T. S. Eliot’s ghastly marriage was the source of his genius, that it “taught him what philosophy had failed to teach him.” (Maybe.) The introduction reads in part: “Prufrock and Other Observations, published in 1917, was followed in 1922 — after Eliot’s nervous collapse and treatment in Switzerland — by the English and American publication of The Waste Land, the work that in its cosmopolitan scope and haunting free verse changed the face of modern poetry.”

Eliot would have been embarrassed to find himself accused of writing “free verse,” and in fact dedicated a famous essay to arguing that free verse does not exist: “And as for vers libre,” he wrote, “we conclude that it is not defined by absence of pattern or absence of rhyme, for other verse is without these; that it is not defined by non-existence of metre, since even the worst verse can be scanned; and we conclude that the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos.”

The essay contains one of my favorite of Eliot’s observations, one that Tom Wolfe got a whole book out of: “When a theory of art passes, it is usually found that a groat’s worth of art has been bought with a million of advertisement.”