302
ROBERT SARIS
Poe, but can end this way: "I find that by trying to look at Poe
through the eyes of Baudelaire, Mallanne and most of all Valery, I
become more thoroughly convinced of his importance, of the importance
of his
work
as a whole." Why did he not simply say that he was interested
in the Frenchmen and in their significant misunderstanding of the
American? Eliot may not have collected this .otherwise excellent essay
because of his inability to define a position on Poe.
He considers the line from Poe to Valery, the line to which he be–
longs, the most important development in modem poetry, but thinks
such extreme self-consciousness and concern for language may have
reached a dead end. Here and elsewhere in this volume, Eliot uses the
acute historical consciousness that has given his criticism so much
authority to speculate on what in his own practice and theory will in
future prove obsolete.
The two 1917 pieces bristle, instead, with the confidence of a
young man who is sure he owns the future. Originally an anonymous
little book, "Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry," is mainly valuable
historically, as a polemic. But it does show Eliot trying a kind of
criticism at which he was to excel, criticism by apt quotation. "Reflec–
tions on
Vers Libre"
opens with the stirring cry that
"Vers libre
does
not exist," for "there is no freedom in art." The essay is priceless because
it describes the exacting art of Eliot's own free verse-that verse of
shifting rather than regular patterns of meter and rhyme which is his
supreme technical achievement. Eliot may have considered this essay
too fragmentary to reprint, but it, the "Dante" and the "Poe" are the
best things in the book. We must be grateful, however, for the whole
collection; for when we have a writer of Eliot's stature, a writer whose
place in English literature is already secure, we want all his work in
print-for the record.
Robert Langbaum
LAWRENCE OF AFRICA
AFRICAN STORIES• .By Doris Lessing. Simon and Schuster. $7.95.
Doris Lessing's stories are not the
equal
of Lawrence's greatest,
but she invites the comparison and she isn't disgraced by it. In her
magnificent novel,
The Golden Notebook,
the influence is less pro–
nounced, but in the stories it often reaches the point of actual imitation.
There is a better and a worse side
to
this. When Mrs. Lessing echoes
