BOOKS
A PEINE MA PISTE
T. S. ELIOT: A Selected Critique. Edited
by
Leonard Unger. Rinehart.
$5.00.
This is a much larger and better collection than the one
edited by B. Rajan last year in London. It brings together essays, re–
views, passages from books, under a number of the most active names in
modern criticism: Pound, Richards, More, Wilson, Forster, Winters,
Ransom, Aiken, Tate, Mark Van Doren, Blackmur, Cowley, Van Wyck
Brooks, Matthiessen, Leavis, Spender, Cleanth Brooks, Delmore Schwartz,
a dozen others. Not all these distinguished critics, indeed, are here at
their best, and nothing is printed for the first time, but the book con–
tains most of the best known studies of Mr. Eliot's work and will be
useful. It would be more useful if it were sensibly arranged, and had
a full, dated table of contents, and an index; if to the check list at the
end of writings about Eliot were added some list of Eliot's writings,
since much of his interesting prose is uncollected and few readers will
have the bibliographic check list published at Yale last year by Donald
Gallup; if, willing to overlap Rajan with Cleanth Brooks's account of
The Waste Land,
Mr. Unger had further overlapped to reprint Wolf
Mankowitz's notes on "Gerontion" (a very difficult poem, of which no
sufficient account is to be found here) and Helen L. Gardner's com–
mentary on
Four Quartets.
But he has nothing so servile, nothing quite
so servile, as the essay in Raj an on
Ash Wednesday-which
glosses justly,
however, the "aged eagle" fumbled by various critics; and I will not
dispute his selections longer, except to say that Wyndham Lewis is a
startling omission, and one perhaps related to the scanting of Pound,
who has three pages, against Mr. Unger's forty-five, and whose essay
"Mr. ' Eliot's Solid Merit" is not even listed. One observes a certain
desire in the universities to disinfect Mr. Eliot by ignoring his disorderly
and animating associations; I do not suggest that this is deliberate in
Mr. Unger (who gives space to several wild onslaughts against Eliot),
but instinct may have prompted carelessness. Of the fact that among
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