Books, Arts & Manners: To Criticize the Poet

T. S. Eliot: A Memoir By Robert Sencourt Dodd, Mead, 310 pp., $8.95 The laboratory conditions of classroom study are bad for poetry and the understanding of human life. What often happens is that an instructor, under the pressure of time and his own conceptions, imposes a meaning upon verse that will endure an examination. The students then know that The Waste Land refers to the decline of Western culture, and that their teacher is broadly sympathetic to Eliot’s despair. They absorb the allusions and comprehend the method; should any of them recall the poem in later life itisasa form of cultural eschatology. This is at least demi scientific and has the advantage of powerful and rapid communication to those sensitive enough for anxiety.

The value of memoir is that it contaminates such purity. It makes the act of reading poetry uncertain because biography does not depend on ideas, which are reductive, and because we cannot impose the intentional fallacy on life’s disorderliness. Some of the material now available on Eliot, exemplified by this book, demands that we qualify our natural instinct for positivism; as Sencourt reminds us, Eliot himself said that there was no such thing as the disillusionment of an age. Sencourt suggests some things, in fact, not tolerable to modern criticism: one of them is that the tone of The Waste Land may be related to Eliot’s desperately unhappy first marriage rather than to From Ritual to Romance. The poem may be the act of a man working his way through a nervous breakdown—its allusions and learned plagiarisms not being assimilated by a structure, but forcing notice of the rejection of unity. In short, this book takes us back to the virtues and failings of biographical criticism, interpreting Eliot as we would once have simplemindedly interpreted Keats or Tennyson. Within limits, this is a good thing.

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Ronald Berman

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T. S. Eliot: A Memoir By Robert Sencourt Dodd, Mead, 310 pp., $8.95 The laboratory conditions of classroom study are bad for poetry and the understanding of human life. What often happens is that an instructor, under the pressure of time and his own conceptions, imposes a meaning upon verse that will endure an examination. The students then know that The Waste Land refers to the decline of Western culture, and that their teacher is broadly sympathetic to Eliot’s despair. They absorb the allusions and comprehend the method; should any of them recall the poem in later life itisasa form of cultural eschatology. This is at least demi scientific and has the advantage of powerful and rapid communication to those sensitive enough for anxiety.

The value of memoir is that it contaminates such purity. It makes the act of reading poetry uncertain because biography does not depend on ideas, which are reductive, and because we cannot impose the intentional fallacy on life’s disorderliness. Some of the material now available on Eliot, exemplified by this book, demands that we qualify our natural instinct for positivism; as Sencourt reminds us, Eliot himself said that there was no such thing as the disillusionment of an age. Sencourt suggests some things, in fact, not tolerable to modern criticism: one of them is that the tone of The Waste Land may be related to Eliot’s desperately unhappy first marriage rather than to From Ritual to Romance. The poem may be the act of a man working his way through a nervous breakdown—its allusions and learned plagiarisms not being assimilated by a structure, but forcing notice of the rejection of unity. In short, this book takes us back to the virtues and failings of biographical criticism, interpreting Eliot as we would once have simplemindedly interpreted Keats or Tennyson. Within limits, this is a good thing.