BOOKS
743
concretize ideas that have developed from his
Essay on Rime
(1945)
through
Beyond Criticism
(1953) to these latest pieces:
It has taken me twenty years to break away completely from
modern poetry and modem criticism. . . . Being a teacher has helped
me immeasurably to see how pernicious this poetry and criticism
really are. . .. Being an editor has helped me see . . . the essential
dishonesty of the modem critic, the dearth of taste, the misuse of
understanding. . ..
"Literary affectation," excessive abstraction and "the culture
religion instituted by modern poetry" are among his main targets,
and he eyes with skepticism the sacred cows of modem literature
and their anxious keepers: Pound, Eliot, Auden and some of Yeats's
projections. What is more, this literary tangle is artificial, manu–
factured, almost a hoax:
Eliot created a literary situation deliberately; he and his "situation"
are fabrications. . . . Eliot invented a modem world which exists
only in his version of it.
So much is true. There
is
a web of misconception and misrepre–
sentation stretched across modem literature like a wordy snare, and
it's
that
Shapiro wants broken. And it needs breaking, but Shapiro
goes at his
task
without the necessary precision and care. These es–
says against the cyclopean shadows are nervous, excited; Shapiro
knows what he dislikes about them but he confuses the complex of
historical relationships--Eliot is sometimes a malicious conjuror,
sometimes an agonized victim-and his attempts to trace the intel–
lectual "dry-rot" of the age are muddled and repetitious, the ele–
ments of cause and effect often confused. All of this, of course, might
be excused as vehement polemic, but as polemic
it
is distorted by
Shapiro's arguments with himself, the running, irregular record of
his conversion; he was, as he himself points out, long under Eliot's
wing. And as polemic these essays are inferior to the battles others
have staged with the same figures: Robert Graves's essays in
The
Saturday
Review,
for instance, were far more effective,
if
I remem–
ber correctly; F. R. Leavis's essay in
Commentary
(Nov. 1958), a
detailed dissection of Eliot's criticism, was more damaging because
of its documented care.
For there is about these essays a strained naivete, a forced and
cumbersome innocence. I don't know
if
Shapiro is actually an ama-
