136
W. W. ROBSON
THE UNREAD eliOT
T. S. ELIOT'S INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 1922- 1939. By John D.
Margolis. University of Chicago Press.
T. S. ELIOT'S SOCIAL CRITICISM. By Roger Kojecky. Faber. £3.
T. S. ELIOT: A MEMOIR. By Robert Sencourt. Edited by Donald Adam·
son. Dodd, Mead
&
Co. $8.95.
ELIOT AND HIS AGE. By Russell Kirk. Random House. $12.50.
THE POUND ERA. By Hugh Kenner. University of California Press.
$14.95.
There is no sign at present, at any rate in Great Britain, that
T. S. Eliot's fame as a poet is likely to suffer the fate of Abraham
Cowley's. It is true that the present generation of poets shows no trace
of his influence; but even in his heyday no good poet seems to have
been able to assimilate much from Eliot.
It
is also true that in the lit–
erary world in general there is still an intransigent minority - vocal
again recently when the original drafts of
The Waste Land
were pub–
lished - which dismisses his poetry as sterile, over-ingenious, concocted
from other people's poetry, and lacking in true inspiration. But these
dissenting voices have been heard ever since Eliot's verse became widely
known, and I suspect that they always will be; after all, the similar
debate on whether Pope was really a poet shows no tendency to die out
after more than two centuries.
It
would appear that, for good or ill,
Eliot's poetry is the kind of poetry that provokes that kind of disagree–
ment. But if its repute is still broadly secure, this cannot be said of the
rest of Eliot's work - his plays, and his prose writings as a critic of
literature and society, and as a man of faith. In 1972 this Eliot is in
limbo. It is now current convention to say that his plays, especially the
comedies, have become damagingly dated, and to hold that his lifelong
quest for a renewal of poetic drama - at least in the form in which he
pursued it - was vain. As for his literary criticism, some of which may
be the most influential ever written in English, it no longer retains for
many readers its old ring of authority; ironically, some of the most ef–
fective demolition and disparagement of this part of Eliot's work, and
the academic " new" criticism which it inaugurated, came from Eliot
himself in his later years. Above all, his writings on culture and educa·
tion, on which he spent so much time and care, seem to be read only
by professional literary students ; they are ignored, not only by sociol–
ogists, but by the general intellectual public; they have been seen merely
