302
PARTISAN REVIEW
T.
S. Eliot's Achievements
WORDS ALONE: THE POET T. S. ELIOT. By Denis Donoghue. Yale Uni–
versity Press. $26.95.
DENIS DONOGHUE'S
Words A/olle,
which he says is "partly a memoir,
partly a study of IT. S.I Eliot's poetry," recounts Donoghue's young
manhood in Dublin, mainly insofar as it was an educational/literary
encounter with Eliot's poems. And yet, although that's about all we
learn of the young Donoghue, there is an air of bildungsroman about
the book, because its aim is to "describe the process by which a young
student tries to gain access, however limited,
to
a book of poems. What
is entailed in submitting oneself to a writer?"
This is a great, neglected, and (one fears) anachronistic subject: a
young person's encounter with literature as an experience of awe, of
dazzling discovery-something along the lines of Hazlitt's "My first
Acquaintance With Poets." It would once have been coml11on for higher
education to be seen as an engagement, at worst illuminating and at best
transformative, with books. In the U.S., this engagement would have
been significantly
literary.
Today you can go through an entire course in
college composition, which may be the only English course you take,
without reading a single piece of literature.
For this very reason, Donoghue's autobiographical approach to
Eliot's poetry is especially apt. For at least two or three decades, up to
roughly the mid-J 960s, Eliot was
the
figure with whom you began your
"serious" education, and in relation to whom you measured your intel–
lectual growth. You read "The Love Song of
j.
Alfred Prufrock" in
freshman English. There was a kind of appropriate progression, not so
much ch ronologica I as existentia I, from" Pru frock"
to
The Waste Lalld
and later to
Four Quartets,
the poems read at different stages of one's
college years.
That first encounter with "Prufrock," though, was the most stun–
ning, was what knocked you back and buckled your knees. This was
finally
it.
Just as it was for Donoghue, whose account of his first read–
ing of Eliot is especially good. It is the music, Donoghue says, that drew
him into Eliot's poetry, the music and his way with words, the displace–
ment of words from their simple roles as signifiers into some other
authority when rendered within a poem, an authority derived in part
from
sound.
"Eliot's genius took the form of the auditory more than the
visual imagination," Donoghue writes.
