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PARTISAN REVIEW
framework of belief and an instituted religion: but in his case, it hap–
pened that his personality was structured in such a way that he could
dwell in amity with doctrine , writing a poetry which was intellec–
tually pure, emotionally robust and entirely authentic . An un–
constrained, undebilitated mind measured itself against impositions
and expectations which were both fundamental and contingent to it.
Its discipline, however, proved equal to its challenges , so that a pun
on the word
choler,
meaning both outburst of anger and emblem of
submission could hold the psychic and artistic balance; and a rhyme
of "child" with "wild" could put the distress of his personal predica–
ment in a divinely ordained perspective.
Moreover, what holds for George Herbert also holds for the
T. S. Eliot who wrote
Four Quartets.
As C. K. Stead also pointed out,
this was a poet very different from the one who wrote
The
Waste
Land,
one who turned from an earlier trust in process and image to
embrace the claims of argument and idea. To this grave and senior
figure , the example of Dante was also important, although his im–
port was significantly different for Eliot than for Mandelstam. Both
men, interestingly enough, were turning to the great Florentine at a
moment of mid-life crisis, Eliot's first essay appearing in 1929 and
Mandelstam's being written, though not published, in the early thir–
ties. (One thinks again of preserving jars in the dark garden.)
Mandelstam was interested primarily in vindication by language,
Eliot in salvation by conversion. Eliot's essay ends with an evocation
of the world of the
Vita Nuova,
of the necessary attempt to enter it, an
attempt "as difficult and hard as rebirth ," and bows out with the
declaration that "there is almost a definite moment of acceptance
when the New Life begins." Here , ten years before the
Quartets
began
in earnest, Eliot's writing looks forward to the concerns of those
poems . What obsessed Mandelstam and shook him into heady
critical song - namely, the sensuous foragings and transports of the
body of poetic language - hardly seems to interest Eliot at all. He is
much more preoccupied with the philosophical and religious sig–
nificances which can be drawn from a work of art , its truth quotient
rather than its technique/beauty quotient, its aura of cultural and
spiritual force. There is a stern and didactic profile to the Dante
whom Eliot conjures up and, as he embraces a religious faith, it is to
this profile he would submit in order that it be recreated in his own
work.
The Eliot of
The Waste Land,
on the other hand, reproduced in
his poem a sense of bewilderment and somnambulism, a flow of in-
