A reader tells me that: “The latest (1999) edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse gives Eliot ten pages, more than all but a handful of other

poets. Milton gets twelve, Shakespeare twenty, Wordsworth thirteen,

Christina Rossetti (affirmative action, no doubt) fifteen.”

I discount this entirely. (1) The OBEV is compiled by scholars, and what

the hell do they know? If the progress of poetry had been decided by the

opinions of scholars, we should never have got any further than reading

Horace and Virgil in Latin. (2) OUP are looking for the American market.

Some years ago, trying unsuccessfully to place a novel with New York

publishers, I said to my agent: “Let’s try London. Maybe we can get it

published over there.” He waved this away: “Not worth the trouble. The US

market is the thing.” (3) The kinds of scholars who work at Eng. Lit. in

English univerisities are very badly paid, and go to bed dreaming of a post

at an American college.

For a more representative look at UK non-scholarly opinion on Eliot, I refer

readers to the “Classic FM One Hundred Favorite Poems,” available on Amazon

UK. This is a series of cassettes, featuring English actors–including some

quite famous ones like Vanessa Redgrave and Simon Callow–reading poems.

The poems were chosen by polling the listeners to Classic FM, a

middle-to-highbrow UK radio station, asking them to send in the name of

their favorite poem. The results were then ranked by number of votes, and

the top 100 chosen for reading. T.S. Eliot makes three appearances, the

first in 30th place:

30 Journey of the Magi (those sentimental Anglican old ladies, see?)

68 Macavity (what _is_ it about that darn poem?)

88 The Waste Land.

The prosecution rests. Oh, not quite: while I was typing that out, a

reader came through with the British critic I mentioned taking a 14-lb

hammer to Eliot’s poetry. This was Bevis Hillier in The Spectator for

9/7/96. He ranks Eliot as a poet with Edward Lear(!) as “a misanthrope

nonsense-poet.” Tempting fate yet again, in the form of _The Spectator’s_

attorneys, I shall post the piece on my website in half an hour or so.