The Modern Dilemma: Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism 9780773575059

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the modern dilemma

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The Modern Dilemma Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and Humanism leon surette

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston London Ithaca G

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2008 isbn 978-0-7735-3363-9 Legal deposit second quarter 2008 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Surette, Leon, 1938– The modern dilemma : Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and humanism / Leon Surette. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3363-9 1. Stevens, Wallace, 1879–1955 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888–1965 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Humanism in literature. 4. Civilization, Western, in literature. I. Title. ps3537.t4753z7682 2008

811’.52

c2008-900591-0

Typeset by Jay Tee Graphics Ltd. in 10.5/13 New Baskerville

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1 A Modernist Poetic: Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot 20 2 Eliot and Humanism: Charles Maurras, J.M. Robertson, and Bertrand Russell 45 3 Writing Poetry in a Time of War 4 Rethinking Western Culture

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5 Eliot, Stevens, and “Pale Ramon” Fernandez

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6 The Function of Poetry: The “Pure Poetry” Debate

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7 Avoiding the Abyss: Ash-Wednesday and “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 273 Conclusion Notes

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Works Consulted Index

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ents

Acknowledgments

Quotations from t h e c o l l e c t e d p o e m s o f wa l l ac e s t e v e n s by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Quotations from l e t t e r s o f wa l l ac e s t e v e n s by Wallace Stevens, copyright © 1966 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Quotations from o p u s p o s t h u m o u s by Wallace Stevens, edited by Milton J. Bates, copyright © 1989 by Holly Stevens. Preface and Selection copyright © 1957 by Elsie Stevens and Holly Stevens. Copyright renewed 1985 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Quotations from c o l l e c t e d p o e m s 1 9 0 9 – 1 9 6 2 by T.S. Eliot, copyright © 1936 by T.S. Eliot. Use by Permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Quotations from s e l e c t e d e s s ay s by T.S. Eliot, copyright © 1932 by T.S. Eliot. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Quotations from knowledge and experience in the philosophy of f.h. bradley by T.S. Eliot, copyright © 1964 by T.S. Eliot. Used with permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

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Quotations from t h e l e t t e r s o f t . s . e l i o t 1 8 9 8 – 1 9 2 2 , ed. Valerie Eliot, copyright © 1988 by Valerie Eliot. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd. Quotations from T.S. Eliot, t h e wa s t e l a n d : a fac s i m i l e a n d t r a n s c r i p t o f t h e o r i g i n a l d r a f t s , ed. Valerie Eliot, copyright © 1971 by Valerie Eliot. Used by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.

Preface

This study began in 2001 with the title Two Harvard Poets: Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot. It was conceived as a comparative study of two great American poets whose rather similar background belied very different poetic styles and contrasting careers. A motivating factor in my choice of such a topic was the virtual absence of any comment by either poet on the other. Perhaps as a consequence of that lack, relatively little comparative commentary on them has until now emerged. Previous comparisons have mostly attempted to demonstrate the superiority of one or the other. This study is motivated by the puzzle of their mutual neglect, rather than by a desire to elevate one over the other. However, since the following discussion takes place in the context of postmodern revaluation of literature generally, and of these two poets in particular, the issue of their comparative ranking cannot be ignored entirely. The original plan to anchor the study in their Harvard background was soon found to be inadequate. The poets’ Ivy League background was certainly important, but it was only an initial phase in their careers, and hardly determined the curves they took. In addition, we have very little information about Stevens’ much briefer time at Harvard, and quite a lot about Eliot’s long career as undergraduate and graduate student. As the study progressed, it became clear that what did define both their poetic careers was what Eliot called the “modern dilemma,” in a 1932 Listener series of that title. In that piece he identified the dilemma as the choice between Communism and Christianity, but for most of his career he saw the competing creeds as Christianity and Humanism – of which Communism is a special case. Stevens was less drawn to organized religion, but he, too, acknowledged Humanism as the option

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adopted by most who felt the lack of religious faith. The common critical assumption is that Stevens’ celebration of a “supreme fiction” is essentially equivalent to Humanism. But I demonstrate that Stevens rejects Humanism as well, and insists that his posture is distinct from it. A focal point of the discussion of Stevens’ posture is “The Idea of Order at Key West” and its challenge to the French conservative Humanist Ramon Fernandez. Here, too, we find Eliot and Stevens crossing paths, for Eliot published Fernandez in his journal, The Criterion, and discussed his views. Because of the paucity of comment by either poet on the other, this study proceeds by juxtaposing the two poets’ comments on the same topic or individual. I begin, for example, by examining their views on the poetry of Marianne Moore. Eliot selected the poems and wrote a preface for the Faber edition of her Selected Poetry, and Stevens reviewed it. The second chapter demonstrates – what has not previously been recognized – that Eliot flirted with Humanism under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell during the war years (1914–18). Although not so well balanced by Stevens’ less copious concern with Humanism, “Sunday Morning” provides a surprisingly cogent contrast to Eliot’s contemporaneous ridicule of religion in such poems as “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” Chapter 3 examines their poetic responses to the War in prose and poetry. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “Gerontion” are more celebrated and more successful than Stevens’ suppressed war poem, “Lettres d’un Soldat,” and his “Comedian as the Letter C,” but their concern with the meaning of the war for culture and civilization is comparable. Chapter 4, “Rethinking Western Culture,” is not keyed to any poetic texts; it examines the two men’s search for belief in the interwar years in the context of the political and philosophical speculation of the period, including that of Martin Heidegger, with whom Stevens has been rather carelessly allied. The fifth chapter focuses on Stevens’ “Idea of Order at Key West” and the two poets’ relation to Ramon Fernandez. Instead of a matching Eliot poem, I examine Eliot’s response to Fernandez in prose commentary, as well as Fernandez’s Humanist arguments in articles appearing in the Criterion and La Nouvelle Revue Française. No previous scholar has undertaken such an analysis of the poem or of Eliot’s relation with Fernandez. Chapter 6 examines the two men’s reaction to the notion of “pure poetry,” first proposed casually by Paul Valéry and later elaborated by the Abbé Bremond. Eliot was hostile to the notion but nonetheless fascinated by it. Stevens, of course, endorsed “pure poetry” on the dustjacket for Ideas of Order.

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There is not much clarity about just what “pure poetry” is, but their discussion of the issue reveals much about the poetics of the two poets. In this case there are copious quantities of prose commentary from both poets on the issue, and there is less occasion for illustration from their poetry. The final, seventh, chapter examines Eliot’s conversion poem “Ash-Wednesday” and Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” as statements of their ultimate positions with respect to the modern dilemma. The study has occupied the last three years of my teaching career and the first two of my retirement. It was generously supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant which I held from the Spring of 2001 until it expired in 2005. I also benefited from a halfsabbatical from the University of Western Ontario in the Spring term of 2003 and the opportunity to teach a graduate course on Stevens and Eliot in the final year of my teaching career. Anderson Araujo, while a PhD candidate, provided me with valuable assistance in the research. Professor Leslie Murison of the Classics Department at Western traced and translated a classical reference for me after I had failed to locate it. I am grateful to the staff of the Huntington Library for their kind assistance during a visit to consult the Stevens archives. I also thank Jane McWhinney and Joan McGilvray of McGill-Queen’s University Press for catching errors and infelicities in the original version.

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the modern dilemma

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Introduction “Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma, you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist.” T.S. Eliot, “Second Thoughts about Humanism”

A comparative study of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot might be seen as an unpromising enterprise since one of the most notable things about the relationship between them is that it was virtually non-existent. When William Van O’Connor claimed in The Shaping Spirit that Stevens knew Eliot “only slightly and principally through correspondence,” Stevens took the trouble to write to him: “As a matter of fact, I don’t know him at all and have had no correspondence whatever with him ... All I knew about him in the days of Others was the correspondence between him and the people who were running Others. After all, Eliot and I are dead opposites and I have been doing about everything that he would not be likely to do (Letters 25 April 1950 77). One of the objectives of this study is to unpack what Stevens might have meant by declaring himself a “dead opposite” of Eliot. Although Eliot is not on record with any similar opinion of the relative nature of their poetic enterprises, it is possible to infer from his views on other poets – especially Valéry – that he would not have disagreed. Despite the lack of mutual contact, and the paucity of testimony to their view of one another, the two poets have been enlisted as rivals in the reputation stakes. Although Eliot was first out of the gate, Stevens has pulled at least even with Eliot – if not well in advance of him – in the last decade or two. Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s Harvard classmate and fellow editor of the Harvard Advocate, anticipated such a development, telling R.P. Blackmur in a letter of 14 February 1931: “Eliot will go down, somewhat, (keeping however a marked historical importance, in addition to his pure merit) and Stevens will, I feel sure, come up” (Killorin,

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ed. Selected Letters 170). The current high regard for Stevens’ poetry is based on precisely the attributes of playfulness and undecideability that justified its critical neglect during his lifetime, and which – in contrast to the way it affected most of his contemporaries – had delighted Aiken.1 Of course, Eliot’s reputation has suffered a precipitous decline independent of Stevens’ rise, largely because of his somewhat tongue-incheek representation of his ideology as classical in literature, royalist in politics, and catholic in religion. The “reactionary” character of that posture is much more of a handicap in the postmodern era than it was in the days of his ascendancy. But if Stevens and Eliot are indeed “dead opposites,” it is not because of their ideological differences. Though hardly a royalist, Stevens was a lifelong Republican. And the rumour that he was baptised a Roman Catholic shortly before his death is plausible, even though not well documented. What Stevens presumably had in mind is the one area in which they do seem to be opposed: the manner and subjects of their poetry. That they are “dead opposites,” if true, must be attributed to their different personalities, since their backgrounds are very similar. Both had a middle-class upbringing. Eliot’s St Louis childhood was certainly more privileged than Stevens’ Pennsylvania childhood, but both were able to attend Harvard (though Stevens left early to pursue a law degree and Eliot persisted to a PhD, short only of a defence). They both came from Protestant backgrounds and pursued middle-class careers as executives in respectable businesses. Stevens’ career as a lawyer specializing in indemnity insurance was more distant from literature than Eliot’s career as a publisher, but both poets were nine-tofivers for most of their adult lives. One need only contrast their livelihoods with the precarious freelance income on which Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence, and Robert Graves subsisted to see the basic similarity of the lifestyles that Stevens and Eliot followed. If one adds a comparison with the more bohemian sexual behaviour of Pound, Lewis, and Graves, and the peripatetic life of Lawrence, the similarity of the lives of the two Harvard men is even more marked. Finally, both poets were preoccupied with what Eliot called the “modern dilemma,” that is, the loss of faith in Judæo-Christian beliefs. Even though that dilemma had been felt by their parents’ generation, and even their grandparents’ in Europe, like most Americans at that time, both men were raised in conventionally believing families – Unitarian for Eliot and Presbyterian for Stevens. Although neither could

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maintain their ancestral faith in the face of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scepticism, both sought a substitute for the faith of their fathers. It is well known that Eliot thought for a brief time that Bergson might serve as such a substitute and that he abandoned him for Bradley, who also failed to fill the void. The most prominent substitute for Christianity in both Europe and America in their day was Humanism, but neither poet was able to rest content with such a dry, abstract “faith.” Eliot scholarship has for the most part failed, however, to notice that Eliot was for a time drawn to Humanism.2 This attraction was most evident during his early years in Britain. It began with his residence as an exchange graduate student at Oxford in 1914–15, but it extended beyond that academic year under the influence of Bertrand Russell with whom he and Vivien were intimate for a time. This brief flirtation with Humanism is an important missing component in the reception of his poetry of the war years up to and including The Waste Land. In the following pages I trace Eliot’s search for a faith adequate to the modern condition, a condition that was marked for him by the general loss of faith in Christianity. Unable to find one, he returned to Christianity. Among his motives for that move was his conviction that mankind could not survive well without the sense of sin that the Judæo-Christian tradition provided: “It is ... not only natural, but right, that when people have ceased to hold any Christian faith they should begin to question Christian morality; and I think it extremely difficult, if not rationally impossible, for any unbeliever who can think intelligently and independently for himself to remain attached to Christian morals. I am sure that I could not.”3 The claim that Eliot was hostile to Humanism will surprise no one. The matter is rather different with Stevens, who is widely assumed to have remained within the admittedly broad church of Humanism. However, that assumption is based on a rather careless reading of Stevens’ poetry and a neglect of his prose, which, to be fair, is not preoccupied with Humanism as Eliot’s is. Like Eliot, Stevens recognized Humanism as the most prominent candidate for a substitute “creed.” Nonetheless, his comments in a letter of 9 January 1940 leave no doubt that he was dissatisfied with Humanism by that date: “I ought to say that it is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion ... My trouble, and the trouble of a great many people, is the loss of belief in the sort of God in Whom we were all brought up to believe. Humanism would be the natural substitute, but the more I see of

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humanism the less I like it. A thing of this kind is not to be judged by ideal presentations of it, but by what it really is. In its most acceptable form it is probably a baseball game with all the beer signs and coca cola signs, etc. If so, we ought to be able to get along without it” (Letters 348). The point of comparing Humanism to a baseball game would seem to be that it offers nothing more than a distraction – a comment equivalent to Eliot’s view that Humanism is no more than a sort of “cheering oneself up,” as he put it in his 1927 talk “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (Selected Essays 131–2). In addition to sharing a disaffection with Humanism, Eliot and Stevens both looked to Europe as the model of a highly developed cultured and civilized life. In this respect they were much like most of their literary-minded contemporaries. But only Eliot actually experienced European life, a fact that contributed in myriad ways to the differences in the themes and concerns of their poetry. Europe remained an imagined realm for Stevens – one he was unwilling to visit lest it fail to live up to the imagined world he had constructed through reading and correspondence, and as a collector of European paintings and exquisite book bindings commissioned in Paris. Eliot’s case is markedly different. He first sailed to Europe as a newly minted Harvard ma for a summer at the Collège de France; later as a Harvard PhD candidate he studied for a year at Oxford. As an innocent abroad he was enticed into an unwise marriage with a vivacious English girl, Vivien Haigh-Wood, and shortly after became the victim of Bertrand Russell, a sophisticated, brilliant, and philandering European aristocrat who would not have been out of place in a Jamesian novel. Although Vivien’s adultery with Russell is no longer a matter of speculation – despite Eliot’s careful avoidance of admitting any knowledge of it – Eliot scholarship has not recognized that Russell seduced Eliot intellectually even before he seduced Vivien carnally. Eliot was not as circumspect about Russell’s intellectual influence as he was about his seduction of Vivien. In A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel, which he read on 7 March 1948, Eliot revealed that Russell’s essay “The Free Man’s Worship,” which he had read in 1913 or 1914, had made a strong impression on him. It is a Humanist tract (first published in 1903) recommending that “man worship at the shrine his own hands have built.” Although Eliot told his Magdalene audience that Russell’s essay drove him toward Christianity, there are strong indications that, on the contrary, Eliot was drawn to Russell’s Humanism during the period of

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their intimacy while he was writing his dissertation on Bradley. I will further argue that Eliot turned away from Humanism toward Anglicanism not so much because of the essay as because of Russell’s misbehaviour with Vivien during their disastrous cohabitation with him as a newly married couple. The disillusion caused by Russell’s misbehaviour was exacerbated by the papal condemnation of Charles Maurras late in 1926 – just six months before Eliot’s baptism. Eliot had been an admirer of Maurras and the Action Française since his 1911 sojourn in Paris, and he reacted with shock and dismay at the condemnation of a man who prominently supported the institution of the Catholic Church while remaining a Humanist atheist. That Eliot saw Humanism as the principal antagonist for the hearts and souls of his contemporaries is not news. What has been less noticed is that it was a principal temptation for Eliot himself. In the case of Stevens, the compatibility of his philosophical position with Humanism is widely taken for granted. The following discussion calls both assumptions into question. No doubt Russell’s influence on Eliot has been largely ignored because Eliot’s flirtation with Russell’s Humanism did not last. But its existence places Eliot’s later preoccupation with Humanism as an antagonist in a new light. Stevens’ case is less dramatic. He, too, felt the loss of Christianity, and like Eliot was educated in the Harvard milieu where Humanism was widely regarded as the appropriate successor to religious belief.4 Moreover, Russell’s characterization of Humanism as man worshipping “at the shrine his own hands have built” is compatible with Stevens’ notion of a “supreme fiction.” Careful attention to chronology reveals, however, that Stevens shied away from Humanism because of its commitment to a militant atheism. But he stopped short of joining any community of believers as Eliot did – unless we accept the report of Stevens’ deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism. But even if that report is believed, his conversion comes after his poetic activity and could not be seen as informing it. The contrasting nature of Eliot’s and Stevens’ poetry reflects the different curves of their “spiritual” lives. Eliot’s early poetry is characterized by a satirical and bitterly sardonic tone that betrays his own doubt and anxiety. That poetry has long been accepted as expressing the predominant mood of his generation of urban unbelievers. What has not been noticed is that the satirical poems he wrote in London – most obviously “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” – reflect the Humanist scorn for believers that he shared briefly with Russell. Stevens’ early poems, such as “Sunday Morning” – though full of gaiety

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and “gorgeousness” – express a much gentler Humanism. The lightheartedness of Stevens’ poetry has led readers to charge it with triviality, an assessment it has never entirely escaped. As late as 1953, the anonymous reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement of Faber and Faber’s edition of Stevens’ Selected Poems judged the poetry to be gorgeous but vacuous. The poems are, he said, “subjective, exquisite poetry, inclining easily to the frivolous, the rechérché, the chic, but then as suddenly tending towards the ominous, the superstitious, the mystic wonderland of religious terms divorced from religion” (Trinity Review viii 47). Although the Times reviewer does acknowledge a development in Stevens’ poetry from the early gorgeousness to a later portentousness, he or she considers both to be without any true cognitive content: “If there is perhaps no one else, only the poet jotting down notes toward his supreme fiction – the belief he hopes to embrace without believing – what does it matter if the poems that result have the hidden significance of shopping lists?” (47). The perception that Stevens is a poet of surfaces, cleverness, and opacity persists through all Modernist or New Critical assessments of his work. The fact that the very negative Times Literary Supplement review just cited was reprinted by the undergraduate journal Trinity Review in a commemorative issue on Stevens, testifies to the persistence of that judgment. (The faculty advisor for the journal was Samuel French Morse – not a person who could be accused of hostility toward Stevens.) The Trinity Review issue is dominated by assessments of Stevens’ reception in England, and appears to have been timed to coincide with the publication of Selected Poems by Faber and Faber – Stevens’ first (belated) British publication. Contributors included William Empson, Julian Simons, and T.S. Eliot – all of whom are cautious in their praise. Empson, in fact, finds little to praise, merely submitting his unenthusiastic Listener review of Selected Poems. Empson’s review is scarcely more positive than the review that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and concludes with the standard assessment that Stevens is an accomplished wordsmith with nothing to say: “One can’t help wishing he had found more to say, if only because he could evidently say it.” Eliot’s contribution is more generous – though exceedingly cautious. He writes as an executive of Faber, the firm that finally introduced Stevens to the British reading public: “I write not only as an admirer, but with the special responsibility of a Director of the firm who publish Wallace Stevens in England. I am not boasting of that: in fact I am rather ashamed of the fact that Stevens has not been published in London

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before” (9). It is difficult not to take this remark with a grain of salt, since I have been unable to find any corroborating evidence that Eliot admired Stevens’ poetry or had earlier sought to publish it. Stevens himself believed that it was only because Marianne Moore championed him that Faber agreed to publish a selection of his poetry. Stevens even suggested to Moore that she select the poems – though in the end Eliot made the selection himself (Letters 734 and 732). The balance of Eliot’s brief contribution is devoted to explaining why he has no time to write at greater length and to an account of Stevens’ neglect in Britain. He concludes evasively: “If I was writing a critical article, I should have to try to explain why I like the poems of Wallace Stevens so much; and the explaining why is always what takes the time. But I am only writing in order to get my name into this Festschrift; and I hope that the Editor will see that my name is printed so that no one can miss it” (9). As far as I have been able to determine, this brief and evasive comment on Stevens is the only one Eliot ever committed to print. He did not contribute to the Stevens issue of The Harvard Advocate in 1940 – although it is difficult to imagine that he was not approached.5 And he did not mention Stevens in any of the correspondence I have seen, not even in his extensive unpublished correspondence with Pound, where several contemporary literary figures receive mention – Thomas Hardy, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, and W.H. Auden, to name a few. But Stevens appears only once, and that in a passing remark by Pound, who listed him as one of a group of “stinkin’ second rate versifiers” together with Spender and Auden (Beinecke Pound to Eliot, 6 April 1935). Eliot let the remark pass without comment. In contrast to Eliot, Stevens was a late bloomer. Harmonium, his first poetry volume, appeared in1923 when he was in his forty-fourth year. A year earlier Eliot, at the age of thirty-four, was canonized as the spokesman for the postwar generation with the publication of The Waste Land. In contrast, Harmonium was largely ignored – a fate Stevens had gloomily anticipated in a letter to Harriet Monroe: “All my earlier things seem like horrid cocoons from which later abortive insects have sprung. The book will amount to nothing, except that it may teach me something” (28 October 1922. Letters 231). He probably had not seen The Waste Land at the time of this letter, since the November issue of the Dial, in which it appeared, did not hit the street until mid-October. But he could not have remained ignorant of the younger Harvard man’s triumph for long – at least not if William Carlos Williams is to be believed. A quarter century later Williams bemoaned that on the appearance of

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The Waste Land in 1922 “all our hilarity ended.” “It wiped out our world,” he said, “as if an atom bomb had been dropped, and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust” (Autobiography 174). Stevens’ response in 1922 was dismissive rather than despairing. Had he known how much staying power The Waste Land would have as a paradigm for poetry in English, he might well have reacted as Williams did. But he could not have anticipated that longevity when he acknowledged in a letter to Alice Corbin Henderson on 27 November 1922 that: “Eliot’s poem is, of course, the rage.” He did not feel threatened by it, adding: “As poetry it is surely negligible. What it may be in other respects is a large subject on which one could talk for a month. If it is the supreme cry of despair, it is Eliot’s and not his generation’s. Personally, I think it is a bore” (Kermode 940).6 It is striking that neither Williams nor Stevens felt the existential angst that, according to its admirers, The Waste Land expressed for an entire generation.7 Their detachment from the “Waste Land” mood no doubt derived from the fact that the dismay Europeans felt in the wake of The First World War was not felt in the United States, since American participation was so late, and so minimal.8 Given Stevens’ reaction to The Waste Land it is unlikely that his departure from the poetry scene was prompted by that poem’s unprecedented success. It may well be that the failure of Harmonium to find an audience was a factor in his withdrawal, as was the curve of this personal life – both domestic and professional.9 Nonetheless, there is some indication in a remark to Marianne Moore nearly twenty years later that Stevens may have been discouraged by Eliot’s success. Moore records the remark having been made when – after several years of correspondence – she and Stevens first met at Mount Holyoke in 1941. Moore told Donald Hall that Stevens was “extremely friendly” on that occasion, and added: “over lunch, a girl kept asking Stevens questions. One was, ‘Mr. Stevens have you read the Four Quartets?’ To which Stevens replied, ‘Of course, but I can’t read much of Eliot or I wouldn’t have any individuality of my own’” (Plimpton 83).10 Implausible as this fear must seem to readers of Eliot and Stevens, it does suggest that Stevens felt a sense of rivalry as well as an evident incompatibility. Just three days before making that remark at Mount Holyoke, Stevens had registered his opinion of Eliot’s achievement in the issue of the Harvard Advocate devoted to Eliot (Vol. 135, December 1938, Kermode 801). He begins by denying that he has anything to say, while

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hinting that he could perhaps register an unflattering assessment if only Eliot were not untouchable because of his reputation: “I don’t know what there is (any longer) to say about Eliot. His prodigious reputation is a great difficulty.” He then hints that Eliot’s poetic achievement either does not merit the reputation it has, or that if it once did, it no longer does: “While that sort of thing, more or less complete acceptance of it, helps to create the poetry of any poet, it also helps to destroy it.” Having pilloried Eliot with such left-handed praise, Stevens then turns to his own experience of Eliot’s poetry: “Occasionally I pick up Eliot’s poems and read them, eliminating from my mind all thought of his standing. It is like having an opportunity to see, in an out of the way place, a painting that has made a great stir: for example, it is like having a Giotto in what is called a breakfast nook.” I have scratched my head for quite a while in an attempt to construe this gnomic analogy. Giotto has, like Eliot, a great reputation, and, like him stood at the head of a stylistic revolution. The themes of Giotto’s paintings are religious – a fresco of the life of St Francis at Assisi, the Ascension of the Virgin, and the like. Such topics would no doubt be incongruous in a breakfast nook. What Stevens seems to be saying is that Eliot was out of time and out of place, an anachronism in the twentieth-century world – or at least in twentieth-century America, the nation where “breakfast nooks” were a new fad in 1938. He had called this feature of Eliot’s poetry “hybridization” in his 1935 review of Moore’s Selected Poetry (see below). Stevens concluded with a more positive assessment: “Reading Eliot out of the pew, so to speak, goes on keeping one young. He remains an upright ascetic in a world that has grown exceedingly floppy and is growing floppier.” Even though Stevens conceded that Eliot was resisting tendencies of the modern world that he, too, resisted – its “floppiness” – it is unlikely that he sympathized with Eliot’s asceticism. And how on earth does reading an ascetic “out of the pew” keep one young? My best guess is that Stevens was implying that Eliot suffered from arrested development on the religious front – that he was stuck in a state of belief that Stevens, and almost everyone else, had left behind.11 One does not need to seek far to find evidence in support of this reading. Stevens’ “Connoisseur of Chaos,” published in Twentieth Century Verse in October 1938, just a couple of months before his “homage,” is a pertinent instance of an explicit rejection of the type of orthodox piety to which Eliot was famously committed:

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After all the pretty contrast of life and death Proves that these opposite things partake of one, At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that. The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind, If one may say so. (13–18. My emphasis) Stevens’ conviction that we could not go back to “bishops’ books” was a measure of his distance from Eliot’s Anglican piety. In Stevens’ view Eliot had failed to respond appropriately to the “squirming facts” of twentieth-century modernity and had retreated to “bishops’ books.” As a consequence Eliot’s poetry is as incongruous in the modern world as a Giotto fresco would be in a breakfast nook.12 Such a sentiment is not particularly eccentric: most observers found Eliot’s Anglicanism puzzling. Eliot felt himself drawn to belief by the human condition, which he found insupportable without belief, and belief – conviction – is something one cannot argue oneself into; belief seizes one. Nowhere did Eliot speak more cogently to that than in the series “The Modern Dilemma,” published in the Listener in 1932 (and from which I have taken my title):13 “Towards any profound conviction one is borne gradually, perhaps insensibly over a long period of time ... Some of these reasons may appear to the outside world irrelevant ... At some moment or other, a kind of crystallisation occurs, in which appears an element of faith not strictly definable from any reason or combination of reasons.” One of the reasons, for him, “was that the Christian scheme seemed ... the only one which would work.” Although he hastened to add that such a pragmatic ground was not “a reason for believing,” nonetheless that awareness removed “any reason for believing in anything else.” It brought him to “the scepticism which is the preface to conversion.” By “working” Eliot means providing some sanction for “values”: “Among other things, the Christian scheme seemed the only possible scheme which found a place for values which I must maintain or perish.” But he once again backtracks from that pragmatic principle in a parenthetic qualification, “(and belief comes first and practice second).” Tellingly, his list of the content of his belief omits any reference to anything transcendent (such as God) or anything miraculous (such as the Resurrection). The instances he gives are of belief “in holy living and holy dying, in sanctity, chastity, humility, austerity.” All of these are

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properties of behaviour that the Humanist would certainly think could be achieved in the absence of any supernatural sanctions.14 This article, “Christianity and Communism,” the first in the series, was concerned primarily with economic issues and their relevance to believers. Writing in the depths of the Great Depression, Eliot was preoccupied with the apparent collapse of capitalism and the clear threat of communism. He argued that Christianity was the best bulwark against that threat, restating the modern dilemma in more political terms than those I have quoted in my epigraph (although Humanism maintains a surreptitious presence as “another brand new religion”): “If we are incapable of a faith at least as strong as that which appears to animate the ruling class of Russia, if we are incapable of dying for a cause, then Western Europe and the Americans might as well be reorganised on the Moscow model at once. And you cannot hope to conquer merely with election cockades ... Nor will you succeed in inventing another brand new religion to compete with communism. There can only be the two: Christianity and communism; and there, if you like, is your dilemma” (383.1. My emphasis). The entire series was an appeal for a return to Christianity, and to “the Church,” as a remedy for the political and economic distress in which the West found itself. In the last of them, “Building up the Christian World,” he stated the modern dilemma once again: “We loathe communism and we loathe the world as it is, and if this is the dilemma, if these are the only alternatives, then our strongest objection to communism is that it is a waste of time, of brains, of resources, and a great provocation to still more humbug, to change over from one bad system to another (the Listener 7 [6 April 1932] 502.2. My emphasis). One of the major figures at Harvard, whose presence coincided with both poets’ time there, was George Santayana. It is well known that Stevens exchanged poems with Santayana as an undergraduate, even though he never attended any of his lectures (Letters 481–2), and he wrote a memorial poem on Santayana’s death. Oddly, Santayana left no comment on his relationship with Stevens. When he was asked by Leonard Lyons in an interview (“The Lyon’s Den,” Boston Herald 1 June 1950) to comment on his Harvard students, Santayana replied with a comment on Eliot: “I cannot tell you if he was my most illustrious one ... Eliot got Dante through me, through my Three Philosophical Poets, and Dante stuck with him ... I noticed at once that Eliot was first-rate. But ... we weren’t friends and I never saw him outside of the class room. He did come to my rooms once, but it was only on an errand. I never met him after he grew up” (cited in McCormick 415–16).

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Eliot for his part left scant record of his impressions of Santayana beyond the remark that his lectures were “soporific” (reported by McCormick 416), a favourable comparison of him to Russell – both of whom were at Cambridge in 1914–15 (Letters 92), and a remark to Norbert Wiener in a letter of 1915: “For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life” (Letters 81). It is unlikely that either Santayana or the later, Anglican, Eliot would have agreed with that remark, which anticipates Richard Rorty’s view of philosophy. Santayana did write a “Note on T.S. Eliot” in the mid-thirties – no doubt in response to Eliot’s conversion (a move Santayana never made), but he did not publish it. Santayana dismissed Eliot’s philosophical and theological speculation as merely “subterranean” – the reflex of the common assessment of Stevens’ musings as “superficial”: The thought of T.S. Eliot is subterranean without being profound. He does not describe the obvious – why should he? Nor does he trace the great lines of the hidden skeleton and vital organs of anything historical: he traces rather some part of the fine network of veins and nerves beneath the surface, necessarily picking his way in that labyrinth somewhat arbitrarily, according to his prejudices and caprice (e.g., hanging his essay on Dante on the alleged fact that he is easy to read). This peep-and-run intuition appears in his leading ideas, as well as in the detail of his appreciations. It appears even in his Anglo-Catholicism: he likes this in Christianity and he dislikes that, and feels a general dismay at the natural course of the world. He dreads and does not understand the radical forces at work in the world and in the church; but he is beautifully sensitive to the cross-lights that traverse the middle distance: and he hopes to set up barriers of custom and barriers of taste, to keep mankind from touching bottom or from quite seeing the light. (Cited in McCormick 416) Stevens’ elegy for Santayana, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” invokes in its very title the motif of conversion – although Santayana never embraced the Catholicism in which he grew up. However, he spent his last years as a convalescent in a Roman hospital run by nuns, a circumstance that Stevens exploits in his poem: On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement

Introduction

15

Of men growing small in the distances of space, Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound, Unintelligible absolution and an end— The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind. It is as if in a human dignity Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which Men are part both in the inch and in the mile. As we shall see, Stevens here relies on the relation between consciousness and the world, a recurrent motif in his poetry and prose, to articulate Santayana’s lingering on the threshold of death. It is a very idiosyncratic elegy in that it speaks from the perspective of the dying man. (Discussion of that must wait for later however. I have introduced Santayana here as another illustration of the incommensurable nature of the two poets’ take on their common experience.) Stevens never engaged in the sort of quixotic public effort to persuade his fellow citizens that he had a solution to the modern dilemma as Eliot did, even though he felt the dilemma just as acutely. He regarded Eliot’s return to Christianity as inappropriate. When his wealthy friend Henry Church was thinking of endowing a poetry chair at Harvard, Stevens wrote a memorandum musing about the qualities one would wish to have in a holder of the chair. Although he invoked both Eliot and Santayana, he advised rejecting both: “The holder of the Chair would necessarily have to be a man of a dynamic mind and, in this field, something of a scholar and very much of an original force. A man like Dr. Santayana illustrates the character, although in him the religious and the philosophic are too dominant. He is merely cited as an illustration. It is possible that a man like T.S. Eliot illustrates the character, except that I regard him as a negative rather than a positive force” (Letters 378). Although Stevens did not explain in just what way Eliot was a negative force, a plausible inference is that he had Eliot’s Anglicanism in mind. Certainly Eliot would not have been suitable to carry out what Stevens identified as the goal of the chair: to articulate the nature of poetry, which for Stevens “is and always has been the idea of God. One of the visible movements of the modern imagination is the movement away from the idea of God. The poetry that created the idea of God will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary” (378).

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Introduction

Eliot’s view of Stevens’ poetry is too little articulated to provide a balancing hypothesis, but it would seem reasonable to attribute to him the view, expressed by others in the Trinity Review number, that Stevens’ poetry is accomplished, but trivial; gorgeous, but vacuous. When Donald Hall asked Eliot in 1951 if there had been any poets as dominant in his youth as Eliot himself, Pound, and Stevens were in the 1950s, Eliot replied that there were not, and added, with respect to Pound and Stevens, “Fortunately we weren’t bothered by each other” (“Interview” in Plimpton 94.) Given the prominent role that Pound played in Eliot’s early career, and the fact that Eliot maintained contact with Pound for the rest of his life – as publisher and friend – this remark can only apply to Stevens. It is certainly true that Eliot was not “bothered” by Stevens, but Stevens was “bothered” by Eliot. Since neither poet had much to say about the other, there is no possibility of a study of their relationship. And there has been very little comparative study of the two poets. The earliest book-length study is Harold Bloom’s 1976 book, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Broadly speaking, Bloom takes Stevens’ relative silence on Eliot to be strong evidence of his preoccupation with the younger Harvard alumnus: “Stevens was too reticent and cunning to speak out overtly against Eliot, but this polemic haunts his letters as well as his verse and goes back, I think, to the reception of Harmonium, and possibly even before” (227). As we have seen, Stevens certainly saw Eliot as antithetical to himself, but it is impossible to take Bloom’s assumption seriously – that, whenever Stevens takes issue with other styles and strains of poetry, he has Eliot in mind. And Bloom says nothing about Eliot’s attitude toward Stevens – perhaps because his strategy of confirming hypotheses by the absence of directly contradictory evidence would scarcely carry conviction in Eliot’s case. Michael Beehler’s 1987 study T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and the Discourses of Difference is so thoroughly inflected by Paul de Man’s adaptation of Derrida’s intellectual nihilism fashionable at that time that it is difficult to know how to respond to it. I can do no better than to quote from his Afterword: “The poetries of Eliot and Stevens are not each wholly unique and independent. Rather, they overlap, and the site of this overlap is the site of a problem: the eternal return of difference. Their poetries do not speak with two voices about a single identity immanent in both but suggest the essential difference with which all thinking, all writing, originally emerges. Where Eliot and Stevens overlap and repeat each other, there is the site not of identity but of interference and the redeployment of difference” (176). It is difficult to

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disagree with the descriptive comments, but equally difficult to accept the proposition that both poets were preoccupied with “the redeployment of difference.” The other significant assessment of the two poets is Denis Donoghue’s 1995 essay, “Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and the Space Between Them.” For Donoghue “the issues between Eliot and Stevens – not that they ever debated them – concern reason, faith, and authority” (303). On that score we are in substantial agreement – although I do not see Stevens as particularly concerned with authority, Eliot certainly was. However, Donoghue accepts the standard view that Stevens participated in Enlightenment scepticism – that is, Humanism – a view that this study demonstrates to be erroneous. In a rather bizarre move Donaghue attempts to explicate Stevens’ philosophical posture by invoking C.S. Peirce’s logical system of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, which he misconstrues as an ontological theory.15 While I agree with his account of Eliot’s hostility to the Enlightenment project of displacing religion with Humanism. Donoghue fails to discriminate between the Humanist and the scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, the latter of which Eliot and Stevens both accept. In his later study of Eliot, Words Alone, the ninth chapter retreads the 1995 article. There he reveals more clearly the Catholic bias that animates his assessment of both poets: “The main difference between the pope and Wallace Stevens is that the pope does not claim to have invented, or deduced from his private desires, the articles of his belief. This is what Stevens claims, and he is self-deceived, since most of what he claims to have invented he has inherited from a certain philosophical tradition” (184). This charge is a complete canard. Certainly, Stevens claimed his beliefs were inventions or fictions that he generated, but he made no claim that they were independent of the culture that had formed him. In this respect he is exactly like the pope, except that Stevens’ “beliefs” were provisional. Both men, presumably, chose their beliefs – though, of course, the pope can claim that the beliefs chose him – as Eliot would also have liked to believe. Stevens was not nearly as hostile to tradition as Donoghue claims, and he was much closer to Romantic than to Enlightenment views, as his recurrent celebration of the irrational amply illustrates. The strategy of this study is to juxtapose these two major poets so as to highlight the differences and similarities of their responses to the same issues or the same works. The over-arching issue is what Eliot called the modern dilemma, which I have extended beyond Eliot’s own characterization of it as the conflict between secularism and religion to include

18

Introduction

the nature and status of poetry, as well as religious belief or disbelief, and political engagement or the lack thereof. I have made no attempt to assess their relative achievements as poets. Instead my goal will be to illuminate the shape and curve of their careers in the light of the political and cultural developments within which those careers were fashioned. I do not proceed chronologically, as in a biographical account, but select particular moments or topics where the thought and practice of the two men intersect. The result is a series of distinct discussions in which the issues mentioned above recur in new contexts. A more procedural approach would perhaps have been superior, but it would also have been quite unmanageable given the status of the two authors and the massive amount of commentary already in print on each of them. I am careful about chronology, for no one – least of all these men – is unaffected by the march of events. And no one as reflective as these two retains precisely the same views at thirty as they had at twenty, or at forty as they had at thirty, and so forth. Eliot himself complained that commentators all too often failed to take due account of this universal attribute of human thought and belief. In the preface to To Criticize the Critic (a series of lectures delivered at the University of Leeds in July 1961) Eliot says that he re-read his earlier essays in preparation for this retrospective talk. He was “happy to say that ... [he] did not find quite so much to be ashamed of as ... [he] had feared.” But that survey prompted him to remark: “I find myself constantly irritated by having my words, perhaps written thirty or forty years ago, quoted as if I had uttered them yesterday.” He noted that even though he had been careful to include the dates of publication of his essays when he published collections,“rare is the writer who, quoting me says ‘this is what Mr. Eliot thought (or felt) in 1933’ (or whatever the date was)” (To Criticize the Critic 14). What emerges from this study is to some degree an essay in cultural history. The First and Second World Wars serve as benchmarks between which the two poets work out their distinct beliefs in the context of strong intellectual winds and tectonic shifts in the political and ideological geography of the West. Living in England, Eliot was much closer to these perturbations than was Stevens, but both men felt them and both reacted to them in their own way. Their experiences differed not only because they lived on different sides of the Atlantic but also because they had different temperaments and a difference in age. When Europe was being convulsed by the First War, Stevens was already married and well launched on his life-long career as an indemnity lawyer;

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the war had little direct effect on his life. Eliot, in contrast, was preparing for graduate studies as an exchange student at Oxford, with a summer sojourn in Marburg, Germany, when war broke out, forcing him to come to Britain earlier than planned. At Oxford he met and soon married Vivien Haigh-Wood, and – equally fatefully – while down in London, he reconnected with his former teacher Bertrand Russell. He also met Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. These encounters in many ways determined the future course of Eliot’s life. I shall say little about Pound, but without him it is doubtful if Eliot would have had the early success that sealed his decision to abandon a career as a philosophy professor for which he was being groomed. Despite their continued friendship, Pound’s religious and political views were much too radical to have had any substantial influence on Eliot. Lewis’ influence is harder to judge. Certainly Eliot read Time and Western Man and admired it. He was a close friend of Lewis for a time, and they shared a political conservatism. But Russell’s relationship with Eliot was a determining factor in his turn to Anglicanism, and that was, of course, the factor that determined the balance of his life and career. Vivien’s chronic illness and her adulterous relationship with Russell placed stresses on Eliot that certainly contributed to his abandonment of Humanism and his decision to enter the Anglican community. Although Eliot’s estrangement from Russell was not irrevocable,16 his turn away from Humanism was.

oetic ilemma

1 A Modernist Poetic Marianne Moore, Eliot, and Stevens

Until postmodern revisionism altered our perception of modernist poetry, the consensus was that modernism represented an essentially stylistic revolution: an abandonment of the vague, suggestive, and mellifluous verse of the Aesthetes for a direct, ironic, and spare verse style. Eliot, of course, was seen to be the principal architect of this change, with some assistance from Pound and his Imagist movement. Stevens’ marginalization was in considerable part a consequence of his failure to participate in this stylistic shift, because of his persistence in a mode more compatible with the Aesthetes or the Symbolists, who preceded them. Marianne Moore is seldom considered a significant player in this stylistic revolution, but her poetry certainly shares many of the attributes considered definitional for modernism – not least of which is an obscure indirection. A comparison between the initial reception of her poetry by Stevens and Eliot when their own poetic practice was still not irrevocably fixed and a second assessment when their practice was mature (if not fixed) provides a unique opportunity to illuminate the modernist stylistic revolution and their own views of it – from the inside as it were. Stevens’ and Eliot’s respective responses to Moore’s poetry are tangentially related to the dilemma of the modern in that both poets were troubled by the perception that Moore’s poetry seems not to strive toward the expression of a view of life but instead skips and floats above a world that is vividly imagined but never ordered into a world view or philosophy. Such a poetry is one way to respond to the loss of faith: rather than seeking for a substitute to religion, one simply indulges in the pleasure of living – of observing, and recording in verse, one’s engagement with the world. But the dilemma facing Stevens and Eliot

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when they reviewed the Faber selection of Moore’s poetry in the thirties was less an issue of religious belief than one of political engagement and social relevance. Eliot felt obliged to consign Moore’s poetry to the status of “minor poetry” on the grounds that it lacks such relevance, while Stevens strove in his review to articulate a theory of poetry that would justify precisely that feature of her poetry, which, as we shall see, represents a radical change from his first response to it. Marianne Moore was one of the earliest and most persistent admirers of Stevens’ poetry. “Well Moused, Lion,” her review of Harmonium in the Dial (6 January 1924) was very favourable. She took the cryptic title of her review from A Midsummer Night’s Dream – perhaps taking her cue from “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” The remark is spoken by Theseus after the rustic, Starveling, (who is wearing a lion costume) has frightened the young lover, Thisbe, and torn her mantle. Moore cited it as an instance of a liberty successfully taken with language – a feature she admired in the Harmonium poems. She praised Stevens for just those attributes that other less sympathetic readers also found in his poetry – the “riot of gorgeousness” in which she said his “imagination takes refuge.” She also saw in him a bit of a mystical property that not every reader perceives, saying of “Sunday Morning” that it “gives ultimately the effect of the mind disturbed by the intangible; of a mind oppressed by the properties of the world which it is expert in manipulating” (Complete Prose 93). If one excludes the reference to the intangible, these two remarks pretty well adumbrate the next several decades of commentary on Stevens – most of it unsympathetic to just those features that Moore praises. At the time she wrote the review Moore was already familiar with Stevens’ poetry from his contributions to the Dial (where she was assistant editor and later acting chief editor) and to Poetry Magazine, and she was a fan. She repeatedly urged Stevens to submit poems to the Dial.1 Despite her encouragement Stevens submitted nothing during her editorship (1925–29). Of course, he did not publish any poetry during those years. Surprisingly, Stevens reacted negatively to Moore’s poetry in the period leading up to Harmonium, couching his negative reaction in terms curiously similar to the standard complaints made of his own poetry. For example, he told Alice Corbin Henderson (27 March 1922) that Moore’s first volume, Poetry (1921), meant very little to him. “She concerns herself so much with form, and concerns herself by evading it, that I cannot arouse myself about her worth. There is a curious lack of substance in so many of these things, even after conceding that

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substance may be a matter of nuances, sounds, colors, etc. instead of eighteenth-century avoirdupoids” (Kermode, ed. 939). Since admirers and detractors of Stevens’ poetry, pick out the “nuances, sounds, colors, etc.” of his poetry as features to be respectively admired or deplored, and detractors uniformly complain of his “lack of substance,” it is striking to see Stevens applying the same strictures negatively to Moore’s poetry. He did change his opinion, but not until he returned to the literary scene in 1935 with the publication of Ideas of Order. Moore’s Selected Poems were published in 1935, the same year as Ideas of Order, providing Stevens with an opportunity to register his change of opinion. He was then emerging from a dozen years of virtual silence. Clearly something had changed – either in his life, in his aesthetic practice, or perhaps in the great world. We do know that Ronald Lane Latimer’s request for poems to make up a new volume prompted Stevens to search his attic to see what poems he had in hand (10 December 1934, Letters 272), but that can hardly be the whole story. In any case, Latimer’s query seems to have set Stevens to writing poetry again and to new speculation about the nature of poetry. On 12 March 1935 he sent Latimer a new poem, “Sailing after Lunch,” explaining it in terms that reappear in his review of Moore’s Selected Poems: “While it should make its own point, and while I am against explanations, the thing [“Sailing after Lunch”] is an abridgment of at least a temporary theory of poetry. When people speak of the romantic, they do so in what the French commonly call a pejorative sense. But poetry is essentially romantic, only the romantic of poetry must be something constantly new and, therefore, just the opposite of what is spoken of as the romantic. Without this new romantic, one gets nowhere; with it, the most casual things take on transcendence, and the poet rushes brightly, and so on. What one is always doing is keeping the romantic pure: eliminating from it what people speak of as the romantic” (Letters 277). The key term in this account is “transcendence.” The essence of the romantic, for Stevens, was the sense of something beyond mere “things as they are.” The “new romantic” would be a way of capturing that sense of the transcendent that was compatible with the intellectual milieu of the twentieth century. Stevens’ mode, like Wordsworth’s, was to cast “a certain colouring of imagination” over “ordinary things,” but it could not be done in Wordsworth’s style – or that of any of his successors. Armed with this insight, Stevens now saw Moore’s poetry as offering an unWordsworthian mode of looking and seeing.

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When T.C. Wilson, editor of the Westminister Magazine, asked Stevens to review Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems just thirteen days later, however, Stevens declined, saying he was “planning to start a piece of work which is likely to keep me busy for some time to come.” That “piece of work” was Ideas of Order. Although he declined to take on the review, Stevens told Wilson that he had some thoughts about Moore’s poetry that he would like to work through. Those thoughts turned out to be substantially the same as those he had conveyed to Latimer: “On the other hand, it seems to me that Miss Moore is endeavouring to create a new romantic; that the way she breaks up older forms is merely an attempt to free herself for the pursuit of the thing in which she is interested; and that the thing in which she is interested in all the strange collocations of her work is that which is essential in poetry, always: the romantic. But a fresh romantic. Anyhow, whether or not that is what she intends (even though unconsciously) it would be interesting too, if on a careful review of her work, the work supported it, to apply her work to that theory” (Letters 279). It would seem that either Stevens’ view of poetry in general, or his opinion of Moore’s poetry, had changed since the letter to Henderson thirteen years earlier. Apparently he had begun to formulate a theory of poetry in the years of his relative silence and was now ready to try to articulate it and to put it into practice in new poems. The ostensible impediment to doing a review – his preparation of Ideas of Order – soon disappeared, since he gave the text for the volume to a stenographer the very next day (26 March), leaving him free to undertake the review after all. He took a good deal of time over it, not sending it in until 1 July (Letters 281). It seems clear – as B.J. Leggett has argued – that Stevens agreed to do the review because he now saw Moore’s poetry as belonging to the same mode as his own and was keen to express his own views on what he liked to call the “theory of poetry.”2 The fact that Stevens did not have the habit – then or later – of reviewing books of poetry, or any books, tends to corroborate Leggett’s view. For example, he had declined Moore’s suggestion (in March 1925) that he review William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain in the Dial, and when Frederick Morgan asked him in 1953 to do a review article on Santayana for Hudson Magazine, he (absent-mindedly) replied, “I don’t think I have ever reviewed a book in my life and I don’t want to start because there is very little time for the things I want to do” (Letters 771). That Stevens agreed (after initially declining) to review Moore’s

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Selected Poems bespeaks not only his interest in the type of poetry that Moore wrote but also his conviction that he had something to say about the nature of poetry. It is also possible that, since Eliot had edited Moore’s Selected Poetry and written an introduction for it, Stevens might have thought of the review as an opportunity to articulate his alternative conception of what poetry should be in the twentieth century. Stevens’ review consists of one leg of a three-way discourse – or rather of three monologues – involving Stevens and Eliot on Moore, and Moore on Stevens. In addition to Stevens’ review of Moore’s Selected Poems, we have Moore’s review of Stevens’ Ideas of Order in Eliot’s Criterion, and Eliot’s introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems. I will consider Eliot’s introduction first, since it precedes Stevens’ review, and Stevens had no doubt read it before he wrote his own review. Unlike Stevens, Eliot had been favourably impressed by Moore’s poetry from his first contact with it – as was already clear in his 1923 review of Moore’s Poems and the pamphlet Marriage (Dial 75 December 1923). Where Stevens had found “a curious lack of substance” in the volume, Eliot found it to be “aristocratic” and praised the poetry – rather condescendingly – for possessing “a quite new rhythm,” for the “satirical use” of the “curious jargon produced in America by universal university education,” and for its “almost primitive simplicity of phrase” (594). This focus on her language was a recurrent aspect of Eliot’s comments on Moore’s poetry; he repeated it thirty years later in a comment reported by Mary Trevelyan. Eliot told Trevelyan that Moore was “quite outstanding and way above most of the men of her generation. She has invented a new idiom, hitherto unused” (quoted in Imperfect 468). In the 1923 Dial review, Eliot explained that he had added the pamphlet Marriage as compensation for the two-year delay in submitting his review of Poems. Marriage included an essay on Moore’s poetry by Glenway Wescott which drew a distinction between “proletarian” and “aristocratic”art. Eliot took issue with the distinction, maintaining that “fine art is the refinement, not the antithesis, of popular art” (594).3 However, he agreed with Wescott that Moore’s poetry was “‘aristocratic,’ in that it can please only a very small number of people.” He illustrated at some length those attributes that he praised – a new rhythm, a satirical use of the American idiom, and a simplicity of phrase, softening the condescension of his earlier remark. In particular he singled out one phrase for being reminiscent of Valéry: “a magnificence of phrase like, ‘I recall their magnificence, now not more magnificent / than it is dim, (how like Valéry’s “entre les pins palpite, entre

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les tombes” or like his “éternellement, / Éternellement le bout mordre” (596–7). It is striking that Eliot should compare her to Valéry, a poet with whom he was to have a long and conflicted relationship. As will be seen in subsequent chapters, Eliot confessed to enjoying Valéry’s poetry very much, but ended by disapproving of it as what he called a “poésie de luxe,” by which he meant poetry about writing poetry – very much like Stevens’ poetry, and not unlike Moore’s.4 At the end of the review Eliot returned to Wescott, citing his characterization of aristocratic art as one that emulates “the condition of ritual,” and took issue with it in a manner that is of interest, coming as it did in the midst of The Waste Land’s success and about the time Eliot was composing “The Hollow Men”: “But of course all art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment. And nothing belongs more properly to the people than ritual – or indeed than aristocracy itself, a popular invention to serve popular needs” (597). It is not clear where Eliot would place Moore’s poetry on the ritual/art continuum, but “The Hollow Men” certainly represented an effort to exploit such a continuum. The view he expressed here, however, did not survive his conversion unaltered. As an Anglican, Eliot insisted on a clear separation of art and religion. Nonetheless, his poetry – and especially the dramatic poetry – continued to exploit the symbolic action that is central to religious ritual. In his introduction to Selected Poems, twelve years after the Dial review, Eliot was much more cautious in his praise. However, since he was the executive at Faber and Faber responsible for the decision to publish the selection in the first place, he was obliged to be positive about Moore’s poetry. He now appears to be somewhat at a loss as to how to justify her practice in terms satisfactory to himself. His difficulty is the same that many readers have with Stevens’ poetry – the apparently trivial nature of its “subject matter.” Eliot can praise Moore only for her skill with language and her mental agility – both “technical” virtues. He cannot find it in himself to praise her for what she says about life, love, death, and the like. Nor is he apparently willing to redeploy the popular/aristocratic dyad of twelve years earlier. And he no longer invokes Valéry as a parallel. He declared that his conviction that “Miss Moore’s poems form part of the small body of durable poetry written in our time” has “remained unchanged for the last fourteen years.” While in the earlier review he had drawn attention to her use of American jargon, he now praised her for “maintaining the life of the English language”(xiv) – incidentally

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The Modern Dilemma

abandoning the claim that her poetry was uniquely American. As in the review, he used the occasion of the introduction to make general points about the nature of poetry. In the review he had attributed Moore’s innovative and eccentric use of language to her American milieu. Now he felt the need to defend her poetry against the charge of its “lightness” – the feature, we recall, of which Stevens had complained to Alice Corbin Henderson. But instead of confronting the criticism head on, Eliot retreated to a generalization about the impossibility of assessing value in poetry contemporary with oneself: “We know very little about the value of the work of our contemporaries, almost as little as we know about our own ... The last thing, certainly, that we are likely to know about them is their “greatness” ... For in greatness are involved moral and social relations, relations which can only be perceived from a remoter perspective” (vii). These remarks reflect Eliot’s Arnoldian conviction that poetry must serve some educative – or at least heuristic – purpose, a prejudice he shares with Stevens, though perhaps not with Moore. Although we are unable to judge greatness, Eliot believes we can still discriminate between the genuine and the bogus: “But the genuineness of poetry is something which we have some warrant for believing that a small number, but only a small number, of contemporary readers can recognise” (vii). His conclusion that Moore’s poetry is not for everyone is perhaps an echo of the proletarian/aristocratic distinction he drew in the Dial review. Struggling to find something positive to say, Eliot repeats his praise of her language. She is, he said, “one of those few who have done the language some service in my lifetime,” and rather lamely claims that she is sui generis (viii). Oddly he prints the poem “A Talisman” in the introduction as an instance of a poem inspired by Hilda Doolittle, and then pretty well trashes it: “The sentiment is commonplace, and I cannot see what a bird carved of lapis-lazuli should be doing with coral feet.” Gamely trying to be positive, he then commended its Moore-like virtues: “but even here the cadence, the use of rhyme, and a certain authoritativeness of manner distinguish the poem”(ix). Since he told us that “A Talisman” is a poem he had not included in the selection, he seems to have intended its mention as a bit of corrective advice to Moore that she refrain from imitating the Imagists – or at least “H.D.” Moore seems to have taken the hint, so far as this poem is concerned, since she has not included it in her Complete Poems. Eliot approved Moore’s attention to minute detail, but once again his praise was peculiarly qualified: “The minutiae may even irritate the unwary, or arouse in them only the pleasurable astonishment evoked by

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the carved ivory ball with eleven other balls inside it, the full-rigged ship in a bottle, the skeleton of the crucifix-fish. The bewilderment consequent upon trying to follow so alert an eye, so quick a process of association, may produce the effect of some ‘metaphysical’ poetry” (x). Eliot’s selection of trivial “artworks” that display ingenious craftsmanship as analogies for Moore’s poetry reflects his discomfort with her style and mode. And his continuation in the introduction did nothing to dispel the impression that he found her poetry trivial, albeit engaging. Characterizing it as descriptive rather than lyrical or dramatic, he attempted to valorize this minor vein, noting that she does not engage in meditations arising out of description as the Romantics do: The aim of ‘imagism’ ... was to induce a peculiar concentration upon something visual, and to set in motion an expanding succession of concentric feelings. Some of Miss Moore’s poems ... have a very wide spread of association. It would be difficult to say what is the ‘subject-matter’ of ‘The Jerboa.’ For a mind of such agility, and for a sensibility so reticent, the minor subject, such as a pleasant little sand-coloured skipping animal, may be the best release for the major emotions. Only the pedantic literalist could consider the subject-matter to be trivial; the triviality is in himself. We all have to choose whatever subject-matter allows us the most powerful and most secret release; and that is a personal affair.” (xi). While the last sentence is perhaps somewhat confessional, the gist of the remark is that the things that prompt “the most powerful and most secret release” for Moore are much less momentous than those that operate for major poets. This remark on “The Jerboa” is very odd since that poem is replete with historical references to Roman and Egyptian objets d’art, to which the little desert rat is contrasted. The “pedantic literalist” is more likely to consider the subject matter to be affected or precious than he is to judge it trivial. One can only conclude that Eliot is more concerned to categorize Moore’s poetry as minor than he is to offer helpful commentary. Moreover, this poem of seventeen six-line stanzas does not suggest “imagism” to this reader. Indeed, in her 1960 interview with Donald Hall, Moore rejected the notion that her poetry derived from Imagism. She did, however, endorse Eliot’s (somewhat contradictory) view that her poetry was sui generis, although using the less honorific label, “pariah”:

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Hall: “What in your reading or your background led you to write the way you do write? Was imagism a help to you?” Moore: “No. I wondered why anyone would adopt the term.” Hall: “The descriptiveness of your poems has nothing to do with them, you think?” Moore: “No; I really don’t. I was rather sorry to be a pariah, or at least that I had no connection with anything. But I did feel gratitude to Others. (Plimpton 72) Whether it is Imagist-like or not, Eliot acknowledges that Moore’s attention to detail renders her poetry “cold.” “The result” of this feature, he says, “is often something that the majority will call frigid; for to feel things in one’s own way, however intensely, is likely to look like frigidity to those who can only feel in accepted ways”(xi). He adds that this emotional “coldness” or distance “shows itself in a control which makes possible the fusion of the ironic conversational and the high-rhetorical.” Eliot may be speaking of himself, more than of Moore – though her poetry is admittedly dispassionate. The absence of subjective emotional commitment in her poetry is perhaps a feature that Eliot and Stevens both empathize with – and it is arguably the feature that Stevens attempts to theorize as the “new Romantic.” The balance of Eliot’s introduction praised Moore’s technical excellence, especially her use of “light rhyme.” Stevens’ assessment of Moore’s poetry contrasts strongly with Eliot’s. Where Eliot stresses her dispassion and her admirable and original technique, Stevens praises her passion, her truthfulness, and her intellect: Instead of being intentionally one of the most original of contemporary or modern poets, she is merely one of the most truthful. People with a passion for the truth are always original. She says: Truth is no Apollo. She has thought much about people and about poetry, and the truth, and she has done this with all the energy of an intense mind and imagination and this book is the significant result. It contains the veritable thing. (Opus Posthumous 222) As we have seen, these remarks coincide with Stevens’ preparation of Ideas of Order for publication, after a dozen years of near silence. It is evident from the list of small corrections that he sent to T.C. Wilson, the editor of Westminister Review, that he took an unusual amount of trouble over the review, even asking Wilson to send the review to Moore and

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authorizing her to suppress it if she did not think it fair or correct (1 July 1935 Letters 281). All of this supports Leggett’s contention that the review represents Stevens’ first attempt to articulate his own poetic practice (Leggett 91). Fortuitously for my current purposes, he does so in part by comparing Moore’s practice to Eliot’s. Stevens was at this time enamoured of Valéry’s notion of “pure poetry.” Stevens does not invoke Valéry in his review, as we have seen Eliot did – approvingly – in his 1923 Dial review. But he did invoke Valéry’s notion on the dust jacket of the second (Knopf) edition of Ideas of Order (1936): “The book is essentially a book of pure poetry. I believe that, in any society, the poet should be the exponent of the imagination of that society. Ideas of Order attempts to illustrate the role of the imagination in life, and particularly in life at present. The more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination” (Reprinted in Kermode, ed., note 5.1, p. 997).5 Stevens’ point is that poetry offers an alternative to the mundane world in which we live. That role is especially important, “the more realistic life may be.” In this rather awkward way, Stevens was alluding to the troubles that Europe and America were experiencing in the thirties. Stevens felt the pressure from the political left, which was clamouring for a socially responsible literature – an imperative to which he was disinclined to succumb. Moore’s poetry offered a platform from which he could promulgate his views in support of an autonomous poetry. In addition, both he and Eliot were in a stage of transition in their own work. As a consequence of these factors, their divergent assessments of Moore’s poetry reveal as much about their own preoccupations and inclinations as they do about Moore’s poetic practice. Where Eliot was troubled by the lack of social or moral relevance of her poetry, Stevens was particularly concerned to praise and justify exactly that attribute. Leggett’s conclusion that Stevens was using Moore as a stalking horse for his own poetic theory and practice is surely correct. That motivation contrasts sharply with Eliot’s. Stevens was primarily concerned to praise her poetry without compromising his own loftier standards. Even before beginning the review, Stevens had recorded his response to her poetry “in the back flyleaf and paste-down of his copy” of Selected Poems (Leggett 77). In contrast to Eliot’s introduction, the unpublished, “unguarded” comment – as Leggett characterizes it – stresses the content, rather than the technique of Moore’s poetry: “What are the spiritual forces that have made Miss Moore? One of them is the desire to come close to the truth. About what? I think about literature as a phase of

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life. Not about literature alone. Nor about life alone. Not about literature and also about life. But about literature as a phase of life. And not, of course, about life as a phase of literature. This gives her book an extraordinary value, vivacity and an extraordinary variety. It is an exquisite book. But it does communicate literature rather than life although it is true that the literature that it communicates is a phase of life” (Leggett 80. My emphasis). The last sentence is echt Stevens in that it takes away with the left hand what the right hand seems to offer. But leaving aside that cautionary gesture, Stevens’ private assessment seems to be in accord with that of the published review, where – even though he stresses technique – he repeats the perception that Moore collapses any supposed distinction between life and art: “Miss Moore’s form is not the quirk of a self-conscious writer. She is not a writer. She is a woman who has profound needs. In any project for poetry (and one wishes that the world of tailors, plasterers, barkeepers could bring itself to accept poets in a matter-of-fact way) the first effort should be devoted to establishing that poets are men and women, not writers” (80). As already suggested, Stevens doubtless had in mind the left-wing criticism then prominent in American literary circles, that Modernist poetry is merely pleasing, without socially redeeming features. (Eliot’s complaint that Moore’s poetry lacked the articulation of “moral and social relations” that is a requirement of great poetry was similarly grounded, although from the opposite end of the political spectrum.) Stevens wanted to collapse the distinction between life and poetry – or between life and fiction – by making poetry an aspect of life, rather than an alternative to it, as the dust jacket comment implies. His point is that poetry is just as legitimate a human activity as tailoring, plastering, or barkeeping and need not be justified by some higher purpose. But that is not to say that the product of poetic imagination is not, nonetheless, an alternative world to that of tailoring, plastering, and barkeeping. Stevens then drew attention to the absence of people from Moore’s poetry, a feature Eliot does not mention even though it is a feature that contrasts strongly with his own early poetry: “It [her poetry] has not the tiniest interest in people. There are no people in the book. Thank God. This is a great relief. It is nice to relax with a book that is not about people. On the other hand, there are more animals than there are in Barnum & Bailey’s big show” (81). Stevens’ gratitude for the absence of people was, I believe, another symptom of the looming cloud of socially relevant art that the times seemed to demand. About the time he was

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writing this review Stevens was also working on “A Statue in Africa,” a poem – as he told Ronald Latimer – in which he was trying “to apply my own sort of poetry to ... what one reads in the papers” (Letters 308). Among the things one was reading in the papers at that date was news of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia.6 Like Eliot, Stevens praised Moore’s metrical and verbal skills, and in the first two pages engaged in a detailed analysis of “The Steeple-Jack” (the first poem in the volume). The “point of the poem” he told us, “is a view of the commonplace.” Her merit is in rendering that view meticulously and honestly: “that is Miss Moore’s method.” “Subject,” he said, “with her is often incidental” (Opus Posthumous 218). After listing the considerable menagerie of creatures – and the less numerous collection of human beings – mentioned in the poem, he concluded: “Out of her whales and the college student and Poole and the danger signs she composes a poem simple, radiant with imagination, contemporaneous, displaying everywhere her sensitive handling [and it] leaves one indubitably convinced that she leans to the romantic” (219). Pursuant to his project to define a “new romantic,” Stevens then qualified that assessment, citing the following lines from “The Steeple Jack”: ... There are no banyans, frangipani nor jack-fruit trees; nor an exotic serpent life.7 He found the mark of the poem’s “new romanticism” in the negativity of these lines: “If she had said in so many words that there were banyans, frangipani, and so on, she would have been romantic in the sense in which the romantic is a relic of the imagination. She hybridizes the thing by a negative. That is one way. Equally she hybridizes it by association”(220. My emphasis). The exact import of the term “hybridization” here is not self-evident. As it happens, Moore uses the same term in her “Note on the Notes” for Complete Poems. She explains that notes are needed because of her “hybrid method of composition”: “Since ... in anything I have written, there have been lines in which the chief interest is borrowed, and I have not yet been able to outgrow this hybrid method of composition, acknowledgements seem only honest” (Complete Poems 262. My emphasis). Her meaning is clear: hybrid poetry is poetry that incorporates words, phrases, and perhaps rhetorical ideas from other poems – in short poetry on the allusive model of Eliot’s early verse, with the difference

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that the reader is not necessarily intended to recognize or “catch” the allusions, as Eliot’s readers surely are. Later in the review Stevens used the term “intermingling” to characterize Moore’s technique, which he said is “romantic,” but in an honorific, not a pejorative sense – the “new romantic.” He found the same attribute in Eliot’s poetry and praised it: “It is in the sense of living intensity, living singularity that it is the vital element in poetry. The most brilliant instance of the romantic in this sense is Mr. Eliot, who incessantly revives the past and creates the future. It is a process of cross-fertilization, an immense process, all arts considered, of hybridization. Hamlet in modern dress is another instance of hybridization. Any playing of a well-known concerto by an unknown artist is another” (Opus Posthumous 221. My emphasis). From these illustrations it seems that Stevens meant no more by “hybridization” than that shibboleth of undergraduate lectures on modernist poetry – the juxtaposition of disparate elements. He probably meant the same thing by remarking that Eliot’s poetry was “like having a Giotto in what is called a breakfast nook” in his later (1938) Harvard Advocate commentary on Eliot. As noted above, Eliot thought Moore’s focus on minute detail reflected an imagist influence on her poetry. But that reflects a rather idiosyncratic understanding of Imagism. The classic locus for the definition of Imagism is Pound’s explanation of the genesis of “A Station in the Metro.” It speaks not to minute detail, but to the juxtaposition of two images – faces in the crowd and “petals on a wet, black bough.” “The ‘one image poem,’” Pound wrote, “is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea set on top of another” (Gaudier-Brzeska 89). Though “Hamlet in modern dress” fits this model, it is not clear to me how Stevens’ last illustration – the “playing of a well-known concerto by an unknown artist” – can be read as juxtaposition. I suppose he might have had in mind the coincidence (hence juxtaposition) of knowledge (of the concerto) and ignorance (of the artist), which renders the experience novel, or – more likely – that the unknown performer is contemporary and the music antique.8 In any case, by “hybrid” Stevens must have meant some sort of mixture, some kind of impurity, some degree of adulteration of one mode, stream, or style by another. It is this impure feature that he considered common to romantic poetry, to Moore’s poetry, and to Eliot’s. In describing the romantic mode, Stevens maintained this principle of miscellany. It is, he said, “always the living and at the same time the imaginative, the youthful, the delicate [that] constitutes the vital element

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in poetry” (Opus Posthumous 220). Unfortunately, he muddied the waters somewhat by invoking Irving Babbitt, the Harvard French professor and Humanist (and early mentor of Eliot’s), for whom a “thing is romantic when it is strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique” (Opus Posthumous 221). For Babbitt, then, “romantic” is a synonym for “exotic.” I suppose we can say that the exotic implies a juxtaposition of the strange or intense with the familiar and mundane. Certainly Stevens’ example from Moore – “Imaginary gardens with real toads in them” – illustrates the notion of the juxtaposition of incongruous elements (Opus Posthumous 221) in its mixture of the factual or actual and the imaginary or fictional – a feature frequently found in Stevens’ poetry. A sentence following the passage cited above speaks once again to the shadow that I believe current affairs cast over the review, and which partly prompted Stevens to take it on despite his distaste for reviewing: “Just what it [romantic] means, Miss Moore’s book discloses. It means, now-a-days, an uncommon intelligence. It means in a time like our own of violent feelings, equally violent feelings and the most skilful expression of the genuine” (220. My emphasis). The review, then, was designed to justify his own poetic practice at a time when action rather than contemplation seemed to be called for. He deployed his notion of the “new romantic,” of the hybrid – a mixture of the false (but gorgeous and pleasant) and the true (but plain and unpleasant) – as a response to the criticism of the political left. It permitted him to stay within the palace of art while still acknowledging the turmoil below:9 “The romantic that falsifies is rot and that is true even though the romantic inevitably falsifies: it falsifies but it does not vitiate. It is an association of the true and false. It is not the true. It is not the false. It is both. The school of poetry that believes in sticking to the facts would be stoned if it was not sticking to the facts in a world in which there are no facts: or some such thing” (Opus Posthumous 222. My emphasis). The “throwing up of the hands” represented by the last phrase is typical of Stevens’ feigned insouciance when he feels himself out of his philosophical depth. It becomes less frequent in later years as he gains confidence in his idiosyncratic views. Stevens regarded Marianne Moore as a kindred spirit, a “new romantic” engaged in articulating a world that never existed on earth or in heaven but which nonetheless somehow includes real toads. And – rather surprisingly – he praised Eliot’s “Preludes” for also possessing the properties of the “new romantic”: “Mr. Eliot’s ‘Prelude’ [sic] with

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the smell of steaks in passageways, is an instance [of the new romantic], in the sense that the smell of steaks in the Parnassian air is a thing perfectly fulfilling Professor Babbitt’s specifications” (221). “Preludes” was first published in Poems 1909–1925, though it belongs to an earlier period, having been written in 1909, 1910, and 1911. (Stevens presumably read it as set in Paris – though we now know it was partly based on Boston scenes – hence his reference to “the Parnassian air.”) Stevens’ point may be that Eliot’s focus on the sordid venue of tenements in the “Parnassian air” of the city of light fulfills Babbitt’s criteria for the romantic – that it should be “strange, unexpected, intense, superlative, extreme, unique.” The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o’clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps. Perhaps by “Parnassian air” Stevens did not mean the splendour of Paris, but rather the imagined world of poetry where such mundane unpleasantnesses as the poem catalogues are not expected. However, there would not be much difference, since for Stevens Paris and France remained throughout his life an imagined world. For example, he told Paule Vidal, the daughter of his Paris art dealer in 1953: “I am one of the many people around the world who live from time to time in a Paris that has never existed and that is composed of the things that other people, primarily Parisians themselves, have said about Paris. That particular Paris communicates an interest in life that may be wholly fiction, but, if so, it is precious fiction” (Letters 773). Although I cannot imagine that Stevens would not have read Eliot’s introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems, I do not detect any traces of that reading in his review – unless it is the stress both men place on “the

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genuine.” It is more likely that they both took their cue for that term from Moore herself, for one of her most famous lines from the poem “Poetry” draws attention to that feature of her poetry: one discovers in it after all, a place for the genuine. In Stevens’ view this concern for the “genuine” puts Moore as much out of step with the age – or at least with the prevailing poetic style of the age, a style largely formulated by Eliot’s poetic practice – as he was himself. Moore’s poetry, then, served Stevens as a vehicle for the articulation of his own understanding of the place and value of poetry, while, as already noted, Eliot’s introduction seeks to find a place for her poetry – so different from his own. We know that Stevens was expressing his own view of poetry at that moment, for on sending the review to T.C. Wilson, he remarked: “both the poem, Sailing After Lunch, and the note on Selected Poems are expressions of the same thing. The poem preceded the note” (12 July 1935. Letters 282). The title of the poem juxtaposes a pleasurable and unnecessary activity – sailing – with a necessary one – eating lunch, that is, it juxtaposes imagination/poetry with reality. Perhaps it also suggests the indigestion or reflux that might interfere with the pleasure or efficacy of “sailing”: It is the word pejorative10 that hurts. My old boat goes round on a crutch And doesn’t get under way. It’s the time of the year And the time of the day. Perhaps it’s the lunch that we had Or the lunch that we should have had. (ll. 1–7 Collected Poems 120) The speaker complains that he is “A most inappropriate man / In a most unpropitious place.” His “old boat” – symbolizing his poetry – “goes round on a crutch.” If one ignores the awkwardness of the mixed metaphor, the meaning is clear: the boat (poetic tradition) is worn out. Abandoning the marine analogy for a moment, the poem turns to the issue of the “romantic” and its out-of-datedness.

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Mon Dieu, hear the poet’s prayer. The romantic should be here. The romantic should be there. It ought to be everywhere. But the romantic must never remain, Mon Dieu, and must never again return. (ll. 11–16 Collected Poems 120) Returning to the marine analogy, he complains of its “heavy historical sail,” presumably symbolic of the romantic heritage, a heritage that makes it difficult to manoeuvre the boat – that is, to write poetry. It is “a really vertiginous boat” that runs away with the sailor/poet “through the mustiest blue of the lake.” In what appears to be another mixed metaphor, the poem castigates the boat (or perhaps the sail) for being “wholly the vapidest fake ...” (Stevens’ suspension points). He explains the fakery in the following line: “It is least what one ever sees.” In short the romantic boat (or sail) avoids or occludes reality in addition to being only imperfectly controlled. (Perhaps the mustiness of the lake represents the occlusion of reality by the romantic.) But the poem does not rest there; it now asserts that, although the boat’s sail is heavy and dirty – and even though the lunch/romantic heritage sits heavy on the sailor’s stomach – the wheel is “gorgeous,” and permits boat and sailor to “rush brightly through the summer air”: It is only the way one feels, to say Where my spirit is I am, To say the light wind worries the sail, To say the water is swift today, To expunge all people and be a pupil Of the gorgeous wheel and so to give That slight transcendence to the dirty sail, By light, the way one feels, sharp white, And then rush brightly through the summer air. (ll. 22–30 Collected Poems 120–1) The “escape” of the boat from its impediments, however, requires the poet to “expunge all people.” This is an odd detail, and one that hardly

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fits snugly into the analogy consisting of lone sailor, boat, sail, and lake. Awkward as it is in the poem, the line expresses an essential component of the thought Stevens wants to express: that poetry is an activity to which people – society, history, the poet himself or herself – are peripheral if not positively inimical. That sentiment is clearer in “Mozart 1935,” published together with “Sailing after Lunch” in “Five Poems” (Alcestis 1 Spring 1935 2–6). The juxtaposition of the eighteenth-century composer and the contemporary scene in 1935 drives home the point: Poet, be seated at the piano. Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, Its envious cachinnation. If they throw stones upon the roof While you practice arpeggios, It is because they carry down the stairs A body in rags. Be seated at the piano. (ll. 1–9 Collected Poems 131–2) “Cachinnation” is “loud or immoderate laughter,” suggesting the mocking nature of contemporary iconoclastic mockery of things and attitudes previously valued. The sentiment here is very close to that expressed in Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli,” written in July 1936, approximately a year later than Stevens’ “Five Poems”: I have heard that hysterical women say They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow, Of poets that are always gay, For everybody knows or else should know That if nothing drastic is done Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out, Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in Until the town lie beaten flat. All perform their tragic play, There struts Hamlet, there is Lear, That’s Ophelia, that Cordelia;

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Yet they, should the last scene be there, The great stage curtain about to drop, If worthy their prominent part in the play, Do not break up their lines to weep. They know that Hamlet and Lear are Gay; Gaiety transfiguring all that dread. (ll. 1–17 Yeats, Collected Poems 338) But where Yeats insists on the appropriateness of the artist’s detachment from the suffering of ordinary life in the “gaiety” of art, Stevens calls for the artist to articulate that suffering – though as an individual (the pianist addressed as “thou”), not as a member of a group (“you”) such as a political movement: Be thou the voice, Not you. Be thou, be thou The voice of angry fear, The voice of this besieging pain. Be thou that wintry sound As of the great wind howling, By which sorrow is released, Dismissed, absolved In a starry placating. We may return to Mozart. He was young, and we, we are old. The snow is falling And the streets are full of cries. Be seated, thou. (ll. 16–24 Collected Poems 132) The fact that Stevens’ artist does not put down his pen, or leave the piano, puts him in the same camp as Yeats’ “gay” actors and sages. In both cases the artist sticks to his task. “Mozart 1935” is not as confident as “Lapis Lazuli,” but both poems express the view that poetry is not obliged to reflect the sufferings of humanity. The concluding lines of “Sailing After Lunch,” invoking “the gorgeous wheel” and the sailor’s ability to “rush brightly through the summer air,” are closer in spirit to “Lapis Lazuli” than is “Mozart 1935.”

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The “same thing” that Stevens told T.C. Wilson that both “Sailing after Lunch” and the note on Selected Poems expressed was his concern to maintain the autonomy of poetry in a time of impending crisis. Such a concern is not evident in Eliot’s introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems, even though he was just as troubled by the world’s drift toward war in the 1930s as was Stevens, and had certainly written more about it. But by this date Eliot believed that it was through religion and the community of believers that the social and political ills of the age must be addressed, not through poetry. The “Choruses” Eliot wrote for the religious pageant ‘The Rock’” (1934) are an exception to his rule, but the other contemporaneous poem, “Burnt Norton” (1936), exemplifies it. The Choruses express Eliot’s concern with the troubled times – particularly the economic depression and the godless state of the world. The response he recommends is a return to the Christian faith, as opposed to the aesthetic detachment that both Yeats and Stevens recommend: The world turns and the world changes, But one thing does not change. In all of my years, one thing does not change. However you disguise it, this thing does not change: The perpetual struggle of Good and Evil. Forgetful, you neglect your shrine and churches; (Collected Poems 163, “the Rock” speaking) In the following passage Eliot alludes to Nazism (“Race”) and Communism (“Dialectic”), and lumps them together with Humanism (“Reason”), capitalism (“Money and Power”), and social Darwinism (“Life”), suggesting an unwillingness to discriminate between these secular solutions to the contemporary global distress. He focuses on economic distress and godlessness, rather than the threat of war: Men have left god not for other gods, they say, but for no god; and this has never happened before That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, And then Money, and Power, and what they call Life, or Race, or Dialectic. The Church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do

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But stand with empty hands and palms turned upwards In an age which advances progressively backwards? (Collected Poems 178) This choral comment is followed by the “far off” voice of the unemployed, whose complaints of too few cigarettes and of bitter ale indicate the shallowness of a godless populace. The role of the artist, in Eliot’s view, is to serve the Lord, synecdochically represented by the building of the temple: The lord who created must wish us to create And employ our creation again in His service Which is already His service in creating. For man is joined spirit and body, And therefore must serve as spirit and body. Visible and invisible, two worlds meet in Man; Visible and invisible must meet in His Temple; You must not deny the body. Now you shall see the Temple completed: After much striving, after many obstacles; For the work of creation is never without travail; The formed stone, the visible crucifix, The dressed altar, the lifting light, (Collected Poems 182) This passage is as different in sentiment from Stevens’ injunction to the poet in “Mozart 1935” – “Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cachinnation” – as it is different in style. Yet both poets were reacting to the same events and trends in the world around them: the loss of faith, the failure of prosperity, and the insecurity of world peace.11 The “modern dilemma” is the difficulty of selecting an appropriate response to these perturbations – a religious, scientific, political or aesthetic one. Eliot’s choice was clear and consistent – a revival of Christian faith. Stevens was much more ambivalent; as we shall see, he thinks that poetry and art can somehow help – not by offering a cure for the difficulties, but by making them supportable. It should not be forgotten that at the time Eliot wrote The Rock and the introduction to Moore’s Selected Poems he was still trying to extricate himself from his marriage to Vivien Haigh-Wood. Although he had

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left her irrevocably in 1932 and was assiduously avoiding all contact with her, they were still married. His attempt, in June of 1935, to have her certified as of unsound mind and committed was unsuccessful (Seymour-Jones 541–4). The first of the Quartets, “Burnt Norton,” grew out of Eliot’s personal situation more than the state of the world in 1934 and 1935. “Burnt Norton” was written after a visit in the autumn of 1934 to an abandoned manor house near Chipping Camden in the company of Emily Hale, with whom Eliot had a romantic attachment that was never fulfilled. Even so, “Burnt Norton” does look to the consolation that can be found in an aesthetic perspective that transcends the mundane world: Words move, music moves Only in time; but that which is only living Can only die. Words, after speech, reach Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern, Can words or music reach The stillness, as a Chinese jar still Moves perpetually in its stillness. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts, Not that only, but the co-existence, Or say that the end precedes the beginning, And the end and the beginning were always there Before the beginning and after the end. (“Burnt Norton” v Collected Poems 194) It is symptomatic of the difference between Stevens’ imagination and Eliot’s – or Yeats’ – that Stevens chose the active and ultimately patternless analogy of sailing to express his view of poetry’s relation to life – while Yeats chose the static Chinese lapis lazuli figurine and Eliot chose a Chinese jar and a patterned dance.12 One exception to Eliot’s preference for fixed pattern that comes to mind is the sailing passage in The Waste Land: Damyatta: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands. (v 418–2 Collected Poems 79)

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But even here, it is control that is stressed, not the mysterious and uncontrollable force of the thrusting wind. And, of course, it is the emotional life, not the aesthetic, that is being rendered. However, for the Anglican Eliot, an aesthetic pattern can be no more than a shadow or echo of divine providence, as the opening lines of “Burnt Norton” make quite clear: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. (i Collected Poems 189) One of the standard contrasts between the classical and romantic imagination is precisely this tendency of classicism to privilege form, finish, completeness, and stability, whereas the romantic is thought to favour growth or dynamism, and hence to privilege the grotesque, the unfinished, and the incomplete. While such a contrast set is familiar, if not clichéd, it is nonetheless an inescapable point of departure for a consideration of the aesthetic postures of Eliot and Stevens. And it is a contrast that they themselves insist upon. In reviewing T.E. Hulme’s translation of George Sorel’s Reflections of Violence in 1914, Eliot praised Sorel for expressing “that violent and bitter reaction against romanticism which is one of the most interesting phenomena of our time” (“George Sorel” 478). It was a reaction in which Eliot fully participated. Nine years later, disagreeing with Middleton Murry’s remarks on Classicism and Romanticism, Eliot wrote in “The Function of Criticism” that “the difference seems ... rather the difference between the complete and the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the chaotic” (Selected Essays 25). That sentiment of 1923 was reiterated more than two decades later in his memorial essay for Valéry: “The proper end of the romantic is to achieve the classic” (“Leçon de Valéry” 79). And he praises Valéry for having made the transition: “In Valéry a long curve of romanticism rejoins the classic” (80).

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Though Stevens’ attraction to romantic features contrasts with Eliot’s hostility, Stevens was acutely aware of the negative connotations the term “romantic” held for most of his contemporaries. Despite his caution, Stevens’ insistence on imagination being the heart and soul of poetry made it impossible for him to evade the romantic aesthetic. Among his expressions of the centrality of imagination, the following from 1949 is the most succinct: “It may be that the imagination is a miracle of logic and that its exquisite divinations are calculations beyond analysis, as the conclusions of the reason are calculations wholly within analysis” (“Imagination as Value” Selected Poetry and Prose 738). And in a later essay he abandoned caution, openly admitting his romantic bias in a neat inversion of Eliot’s praise of Valéry: “The whole effort of the imagination is toward the production of the romantic” (Opus Posthumous 266). To conclude this tripartite discussion we need to give Marianne Moore a chance to have her say about Ideas of Order. Unlike Stevens, she did not send her review to Stevens for his consideration. But Latimer, the publisher of Ideas of Order, did forward the review to him. Judging from Stevens’ letter of acknowledgment, he was pleased with it: “Thanks for the copy of Miss Moore’s review. She is one of the angels: her style is an angelic style. It is just as unique as Gertrude Stein’s and, to my way of thinking, makes Miss Stein seem shallow” (5 November 1935. Letters 290–1). Not every poet would have been pleased with her opening remark: “Poetry is an unintelligible unmistakable vernacular like the language of the animals ... and Wallace Stevens is a practised hand at this kind of open cypher.” In this rather cryptic sentence Moore manages to encapsulate the common complaint of the obscurity of Stevens’ poetry with praise of its vividness and vivacity. Apparently Stevens liked the remark. The balance of the review is a rather noncommittal collection of snippets from the volume. She praises him for his “dexterousness,” compares him to Brahms, and illustrates her observation with a mischievous anecdote that suggests a degree of evasive self-protection in the poetry: “In the untrite transitions, the as if sentimental unsentimentality, the meditativeness not for appraisal, with hints taken from the birds, as in Brahms, they recall Brahms his dexterousness, but also his self-relish and technique of evasion as in the incident of the lion-huntress who was inquiring for the celebrated Herr Brahms: ‘You will find him yonder, on the other side of the hill, this is his brother’” (308).

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She illustrates that evasiveness by reference to “Sailing after Lunch”: “Mr. Stevens alludes to ‘the eccentric’ as ‘the base of design,’ ‘the revealing aberration’; and employs, noticeably in such a poem as ‘Sailing after Lunch,’ the principle of dispersal common to music; that is to say, a building up of the theme piecemeal in such a way that there is no possibility of disappointment at the end” (308–9). In contrast to my effort (above) to generate a paraphrase of the poem’s intent, Moore is content to celebrate the “building up of the theme,” without – in Keats’ phrase – any “irritable reaching after fact and reason” in the poem. The reader will recall that in the famous letter, Keats held up Coleridge as an example of one who could not rest with “the sense of beauty” that “overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration”(Forman 72). If we can take Keats as representative of the Romantic sensibility – as surely we can – then Moore’s aesthetic is purely romantic, as Stevens clearly saw. Moore concludes the review with a characteristically enigmatic – albeit suggestive – judgment: “Serenity in sophistication is a triumph, like the behaviour of birds. The poet in fact is the migration mechanism of sensibility, and a medicine for the soul. That exact portrayal is intoxicating, that realism need not restrict itself to grossness, that music is “an accord of repetitions” is evident to one who examines Ideas of Order; and the altitude of performance makes the wild boars of philistinism who rush about interfering with experts, negligible” (309). The first sentence of this final paragraph recapitulates the opening sentence of the review with its invocation of birds and Brahms as emblems of the effortless, selfeffacing generation of beauty. But Moore complicates the analogy by describing the poet as a “migration mechanism of sensibility,” by which she presumably means someone who takes his or her own sensibility and disperses – or perhaps – dispenses it to others. It is no wonder that Stevens was pleased with the review. All the same, it reinforces the prevailing view that Stevens’ poetry is gorgeous nonsense.

anism ilemma

2 Eliot and Humanism Charles Maurras, J.M. Robertson, and Bertrand Russell

Eliot was such an indomitable warrior in the battles against Humanism conducted in the pages of the Criterion and Middleton Murry’s Athenaeum that his brief infatuation with that alternative to Christianity has been largely overlooked. Stevens, on the other hand, is widely assumed – and not without reason – to have adhered to Humanist ideas despite his statements to the contrary. It is certainly true that both poets lived and breathed in an intellectual climate in which Humanism was the most appealing option for those who had lost their religious faith but balked at the bleak prospect of social Darwinism or Socialism/ Communism. Social Darwinism’s confidence in a biological equivalent of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” guiding the blind actions of individuals was unappealing to anyone whose imaginative life was a central aspect of their self-esteem. Rather surprisingly, Communism’s equally depressing confidence in historical determinism did not prevent many artists and writers from being drawn to it – though few of Stevens’ or Eliot’s cohort groups. Eliot’s recurrent attacks on Humanism – as opposed to his relative neglect of both Darwinism and Communism – are a measure of the importance he attached to it as a threatening alternative to religion. Stevens was less hostile toward Humanism, but he too began his intellectual life in the belief that there was really no other alternative for a world in which Christian faith was no longer possible. Ultimately he found that Humanism could not meet the emotional needs that religion had satisfied. Before looking at some poems that illustrate the degree of ambivalence that both poets felt toward Humanism, it will be helpful to look

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once again at the aetiology of Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism. Stevens’ purported conversion to Catholicism came too late, is too poorly attested, and is too uncertain to provide a parallel case. But there is lots of evidence of Stevens’ struggle to separate his own position from the Humanist one. I will consider Eliot’s case first. “Humanism” is a term that has had different meanings in different historical periods, as well as for different individuals in the same period. Erasmus and St Thomas More were Christian Humanists, that is thinkers who turned their attention away from pure devotion toward an investigation of mankind’s relation to God and to one another. In pursuit of this goal they engaged in Biblical scholarship, treating the Bible and the Gospels as human documents – albeit inspired. The consequences of that scholarship played out three centuries later– in such thinkers as George Eliot and Ernest Renan – in scepticism about the inspired nature of the sacred texts. Nineteenth-century Humanism was a response to that scepticism. Its principal English voice was Matthew Arnold, whose belief that literature could replace religion as a moral guide and a social glue adequate to maintain the status quo dominated Humanist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I should make it clear that I am using “Humanism” in a somewhat more restricted sense than Jeffrey Perl does in his two admirable studies of modernism: The Tradition of Return (1984) and Skepticism and Modern Enmity (1989). Perl argues that modernism is essentially Humanist, defining Humanism as the desire for continuity and seeing it as continuous from the days of Erasmus and More to the twentieth century. He sets it against the romantic celebration of the interruption of continuity. “For its partisans,” he says, “modernism is the restitution of tradition; for detractors, an interruption of it.” He adds that Humanists (like the romantics and the moderns) were often self-deceived, believing themselves to be iconoclasts and revolutionaries: “those who most recoil from humanism, axiology, [and] the classical tradition, are most dependent on them” (Skepticism 15). My focus is much more modest. I make no effort to place Eliot and Stevens in the context of metahistorical movements and tendencies; I seek rather to reconstruct their struggles to find their way in a world of conflicting opinion and belief played out against a background of accelerating scientific discovery and technological change. These factors led them to fear that they were witnessing the disintegration of a European (or Atlantic) culture founded on Christianity. Stevens thought men of imagination – poets, artists, and musicians – might be

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able to construct a new, post-Christian cultural milieu. Eliot once thought so too, but despaired of that rather Quixotic endeavour and withdrew to a variety of Christianity that had turned its back on modernity – understood here as Perl’s romantic celebration of “the interruption of continuity.” On this more intimate level of cultural observation, we can recognize that Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Human Species (published in 1853) was a serious blow to the accommodation with early modernism – that is, everything between Descartes and Darwin – that Christianity had achieved during the first Humanist period. Darwinism spawned militantly atheistic Humanists like J.M. Robertson, who rejected the Arnoldian strain of Humanism because it retained the emotional trappings of Theistic superstition in forms of communal worship. Much of the debate about Humanism in Eliot’s day was concerned with the degree to which it was compatible with some form of belief in a higher power, of whatever nature. We shall see that, for a time, Eliot counted himself in the ranks of those who insisted on a rigorous exclusion of any theistic survivals from Christianity. The following exfoliation of Eliot’s search for a creed by which he could live must articulate the nature of the competing belief systems with which he flirted. It must also document the fact that he did, indeed, consider them as possible “faiths” at one time. The account of Eliot’s intellectual affinities in the following pages is at odds with a strong strain of Eliot criticism, powerfully represented by Louis Menand’s 1987 study Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. Menand aligns himself with Frank Kermode’s excellent, but venerable, Romantic Image and Levenson’s A Genealogy of Modernism (1984) among others. These critics all agree that the early modernists perceived themselves to be at a moment of cultural crisis – as do I. But they perceive a species of fraud, charging that under pretense of novelty, these modernists disguise a deep indebtedness to the nineteenth century (3 & note p. 165). Oddly Menand does not mention Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson’s 1931 study, which makes the same argument. Surely it is time we stopped castigating the modernists for duplicity in disguising their origins, a practice motivated by a Marxist bias against their allegedly elitist posture. That bias is clear in Menand’s conclusion, where he invokes another 1958 study, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society: “The critical thought of the first half of the twentieth century belongs – as Raymond Williams explains in Culture and Society (1958) – to a tradition in which ‘culture’ is required to play the role of

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the transcendent arbiter of value in a social formation characterized precisely by its inhospitality to transcendental agents” (163). Precisely! I could not agree more. Where I differ with Menand and Williams is that I see no reason to dismiss the resistance of the modernists to that cultural condition as wrong-headed or archaic. Eliot’s declaration of his affiliation with the Anglican Church in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, following his baptism on 29 January 1927, was a shock to many of his admirers as well as a scandal to Williams and Menand. In declaring his aesthetic, political, and religious posture, he also inadvertently christened himself “Possum”: “I have made bold to unite these occasional essays merely as an indication of what may be expected, and to refute any accusation of playing ’possum. The general point of view may be described as classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion. I am quite aware that the first term is completely vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the third term does not rest with me to define” (viii–ix). His good friend Ezra Pound picked up the opossum reference, and thereafter addressed his friend as “Possum” in their correspondence – a nickname that Eliot himself later canonized in the title of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. An opossum, the only marsupial native to North America, uses the defence mechanism of playing dead – an attribute that Pound detected in his phlegmatic friend. What Eliot no doubt had in mind, was the potentially perceived hypocrisy of concealing from his audience a religious affiliation not to be expected of the author of “The Hippopotamus,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” or The Waste Land. Eliot may also have been concerned about the possibility that he might be charged with playing ’possum in the debate over Humanism with Middleton Murry and others in which he had engaged in the pages of the Criterion and Murry’s Athenaeum in the mid-twenties,1 for he had not acknowledged a Christian belief in those exchanges. More positively, in this remark – as James Torrens has pointed out – Eliot echoed the masthead of Charles Maurras’ journal, Action française: “classique, catholique, monarchique.”2 Now, in the preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot finally laid his ideological cards on the table so as to “refute any accusation of playing ’possum in those debates. Of course, being Eliot, he lays them face down, in that he declares the term “classicist” to be “com-

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pletely vague,” “royalist” to be “without definition,” and “anglo-catholic” to be ineffable.3 However elusive Eliot’s classicism and royalism may have been, his Anglicanism is not to be doubted.4 For the balance of his life he was a practising communicant in the established Church of England. We have lots of testimony of his religious convictions – both in published pieces, and in correspondence, but he has said little about the conversion itself. Conversion from agnosticism to Christian belief was not a rare thing among intellectuals of Eliot’s generation, and the one before it. Two prominent such converts were G.K. Chesterton, and Jacques Maritain – both of whom went to Rome, rather than Canterbury. Even Henri Bergson would have converted to Catholicism in his old age had he not been unwilling to abandon his Jewish co-religionists in the face of Nazi anti-Semitism. Shortly after his baptism in the Anglican community, Eliot attempted to recruit Chesterton for the debate on Humanism in the Criterion: “I have wanted to start in the Criterion some discussion of the question of Humanism and Religion, to which I had hoped to induce you to contribute ... I want to generalise the question beyond the work of Babbitt, into the question of the possibility of any Humanism as a substitute for organised religion. (Letter to G.K. Chesterton, 21 October 1928. Eliot-Chesterton Collection British Library). Obviously the Catholic Chesterton would have been hostile to Humanism, but Eliot told him (in a letter of 6 May 1929) that he sympathized with Chesterton’s political, social, and religious views – though, of course, with reservations on the matter of religion.5 He had better luck with another Catholic convert, Jacques Maritain, whose contribution to the Criterion Eliot translated himself (though the translation is attributed to F. S. Flint).6 Another Christian convert of note with whom Eliot was associated is Paul Elmer More, a close friend of Irving Babbitt and, like Babbitt, a Humanist prior to his conversion. Eliot carried on an extensive correspondence with More from 1928 until the latter’s death in 1937. Like most converts, Eliot possessed a “religious sensibility” from a young age, although it took him years of reflection to reach the point of conversion, as Lyndall Gordon explains: “From the first, Eliot took up the task of recording the private habits of mind, the fears and solitary impulses that led him to a religious position. That position took hold in about 1914, but many of the earliest poems, particularly those he never published, record an underground phase of religious searching, a slow

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incubation and maturing of motives” (Imperfect Life 33). The discussion that follows, however, will support Jewel Spears Brooker’s view that Eliot’s route to Anglicanism was much more tortuous than that envisioned by Gordon: In the twenty years before his conversion, the years during which he had struggled to do without religion, he had been moving from one substitute to another and although his substitutes are more respectable than Yeats’s, they are “Make-Believe” just the same. Eliot’s substitutes for religion can be roughly classified as erotic, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical ... He early associated his own experience of fragmentation and his longing for the Absolute, both of which are by definition religious, with sexual transcendence. (Brooker 1988 42) Although I am in broad agreement with Brooker’s assessment of Eliot’s route to Anglicanism, I am not persuaded that Eliot ever agreed with his friend Ezra Pound that sexual transcendence could lead to a psychic experience analogous to mystical revelation. The Bolo poems and “Sweeney Agonistes” do not support such a view as much as the contrary view that sexual behaviour mocks spirituality. If Eliot ever did entertain hopes of some sort of Laurentian transport, his marriage to Vivien put an end to them – as Brooker herself points out (43). That qualification aside, I would merely add Humanism to her list. In order to reconstruct Eliot’s philosophical posture as it developed and was modulated between 1913 and his baptism in 1927, it will be necessary to move back and forth between Eliot’s testimony that has survived from the early years in which his position was most fluid, and his retrospective observations on his beliefs and predilections of the early years. The result is a somewhat scattered discussion wrapped around Bertrand Russell’s essay “The Freeman’s Worship,” which Eliot identified in A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (7 March 1948) – as an important influence on his decision to convert to Anglicanism. The “pre-Christian state of mind” to which Eliot refers in the following passage, should be understood as characteristic of his entire adult life prior to his conversion. The Unitarianism in which he was raised would hardly qualify as Christian from an Anglican perspective, and in any case he had abandoned that faith in favour of Bergsonism as an undergraduate:

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No one ever attempted to convert me; and, looking back on my pre-Christian state of mind, I do not think that such a campaign would have prospered ... My only conversion, by the deliberate influence of any individual, was a temporary conversion to Bergsonism. It is perhaps impossible to say, in a particular case of conversion to Christianity, how much is due to observation of the outside world and how much to the gradual discovery of oneself; but I am sure that for me the strongest outside influences were negative. Observation of the futility of non-Christian lives has its part; and also realization of the incredibility of every alternative to Christianity that offers itself. One may become a Christian partly by pursuing scepticism to the utmost limit. I owe much, in this way, to Montaigne; something, in this way, to Bertrand Russell’s essay, “A Free Man’s Worship”: the effect this essay had upon me was certainly the reverse of anything the author intended.7 Montaigne’s scepticism hardly needs any discussion, since his is the classic statement of Renaissance scepticism. The influence of Bertrand Russell is a very different matter. Eliot had a complicated relationship with him as student, tenant, cuckolded husband, and beneficiary – more or less in that order. When they first met, in the spring of 1914 in Russell’s Harvard graduate class, Russell was in his forty-second year. He had been invited to Harvard on the strength of his fame as the co-author, with Alfred North Whitehead, of Principia Mathematica. Eliot was in his twenty-sixth year and a PhD candidate. Their Harvard relationship did not develop into any sort of discipleship or student-professor friendship. That did not happen until they met accidentally in London that autumn. “The [not “A”] Free Man’s Worship” was first published in December of 1903. It is unlikely that Eliot read it at that time (he was just fifteen). Most probably he read it as republished in the collection Philosophical Essays (1910)” after registering in Russell’s graduate seminar – about the time that, according to Gordon, his religious position “took hold” (An Imperfect Life 87–94). The earliest reference to it by Eliot that I have found is in his 1918 review of Russell’s collection Mysticism and Logic (which also reprinted “The Free Man’s Worship”). He there quotes the clause “Brief and powerless is man’s life” from its conclusion, identifying it as one he knew “as well as the conclusion to the Studies in the Renaissance.”8 From this we can infer that he had read the essay some years before, as

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well as that it made a strong impact on him (“Style & Thought,” The Nation 22 [23 March 1918] 94). The review in which this revealing remark is found puts Russell in the company of earlier celebrated English Humanists: Dull critics, usually of an idealistic turn, have remarked that Mr. Russell’s empiricism is merely a more exact development of Mill’s. This observation misses precisely what makes all the difference. But there is another side on which Mr. Russell has close affinities with the generation of Mill; with George Eliot walking in the garden and denying God while she affirmed the Moral Law with fuliginous solemnity. Like these, Mr. Russell is an emancipated Puritan; a little more emancipated, for his is of a later time, but like them, he takes his emancipation seriously. We know the passage as well as the conclusion to the “Studies in the Renaissance”: “Brief and powerless is man’s life ...” (94) Eliot’s point seems to be that Russell was not as completely emancipated from a Christian background as he might or should have been. If that is his point, Eliot would be reflecting the views of J.M. Robertson, a militant Humanist whose influence on Eliot has been largely overlooked. As far as I can determine, Ronald Schuchard is the only Eliot scholar to have drawn attention to Robertson. Schuchard claims that Eliot “had his students read J.M. Robertson’s Modern Humanists: Sociological Studies of Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin and Spencer (1891)” for the extension course that he offered at the University of London in three academic years – from the autumn of 1916 to the Spring of 1919 (Schuchard 2003 2–3). He adds that “the theme of Eliot’s course was that of Robertson: these were false prophets of religion and culture.” However appropriate this characterization of Eliot’s lectures might be, it rather misses the mark so far as Robertson is concerned. He is described by Odin Dekkers as “the heir of Bradlaugh’s militant lower-class atheism,” which Dekkers characterizes as remote from “the respectable middle-class agnosticism debated in the Metaphysical society.” According to Dekkers, “only the strictest rejection of religion could satisfy” Robertson ( J.M. Robertson 89). Robertson is the twenty-third of thirty authors listed in “Supplementary Reading” for Eliot’s course. While the list is alphabetical, and the relative obscurity of Modern Humanists in the list scarcely justifies

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Schuchard’s assertion, it is nonetheless true that the outline for lectures 2 through 5 for the 1917/18 course offering does reflect the topics of Robertson’s book: 2. “History and Criticism – Thomas Carlyle”; 3. “A contrast in Ideas: John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold”; 4. “The Influence of Science – Darwinism in T.H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer”; 5. “Art and Economics – John Ruskin and William Morris.” (Schuchard 1999 40). Robertson’s chapters are: “Carlyle,” “Emerson,” “Ruskin,” “Arnold,” “Mill,” and “Spencer.” Neither Huxley nor Morris gets particular attention, though they are mentioned in the discussion of the central figures. Although we do not have the content of Eliot’s extension lectures, we do have testimony that Eliot admired Robertson. He told Herbert Read, in a letter of September 1924 on the topic of prospective contributors for the Criterion: “For Robertson I have a very great respect: he is I believe wholly honest; I do not mind if he be called dull.” In the same letter, he links Robertson with Charles Whibley, the man who introduced him to Geoffrey Faber, an introduction that led ultimately to his position at the new house of Faber and Gwyer (Matthews 85): “Whibley and Robertson support us [that is, the project of the Criterion], and as they represent to the public such antithetical abstractions, they are both valuable. They have both shown more sympathy and kindness than anyone but myself is aware of” (Herbert Read Archives, University of Victoria). And he also acknowledges his admiration for Robertson in his retrospective essay, “To Criticize the Critic.” Speaking of the term “objective correlative,” Eliot mentions that it appeared in “Hamlet and his Problems,” written when he was “hand-in-glove with that gallant controversialist, J.M. Robertson” (“To Criticize the Critic” 19). He published nine pieces by Robertson in the Criterion between 1923 and 1930. Robertson died in 1933 at the age of seventy-nine.9 Although Schuchard is not mistaken in labelling Robertson a critic of Humanism, it was the weakling Humanism of the nineteenth-century British sages that Robertson criticized. Robertson was himself a militant atheist and abhorred the hypocritical persistence of religious practices in what he regarded as an age of unbelief. Self-described as a Spencerean, he roundly condemned the desire of Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, Mill – and even Spencer himself – to preserve some vestige of religious practice while abandoning belief in a benevolent deity. In Modern Humanists Reconsidered, the 1927 revision of the1891 book that Eliot had recommended to his students in 1917, Robertson sets out his disagreement with Spencer’s softness on religion:

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“Religion,” he [Spencer] tells us, contains one indestructibly true element – the belief that the Reality behind the universe is Unknowable. Science, he strangely implies, has denied this, and its denial is false. For those propositions, what is the “proof” what is “Religion?” The theorist has unavowedly made an abstraction which represents no known body of religious belief whatever, and which is the reverse of what is either tacitly or explicitly alleged by nearly every body of religious doctrine in the past. Putting aside the illusory phantom of Abstract Religion, we find that religious creeds, churches, communities, documents, always claim to give us a knowledge of the Power “behind the universe” ... Spencer has presented as the abstraction of Religion the one doctrine that no creed ever contained (save in incidental formulas such as: “God is past finding out,” which are constantly contradicted in part by positive propositions), and that most creeds explicitly and implicitly deny.10 (Robertson 177) Eliot’s severe assessment of Russell’s concluding paragraph in “The Free Man’s Worship” seems, then, to be more in the spirit of Robertson’s atheism than in that of an apologist for Christianity. The passage Eliot remembered so well articulates Russell’s Humanism in a rather purple prose designed to stir the blood: Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals has fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power. (Russell 1910 70. My emphasis) The injunction that man should “worship at the shrine his own hands have built” is the essence of Russell’s Humanism. It is distinct from the

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Humanism of any of the Victorian sages, or of Irving Babbitt, in that it recommends a self-conscious “worship” of avowed fictions as opposed to simply honouring the wisdom of the ages encapsulated in the arts. At first glance Russell’s Humanism appears to be identical to Stevens’ idea of a fiction in which one can invest belief – though without the qualification of an over-arching “supreme” fiction. We shall see that there are important differences, but that will have to wait. In his 1918 review of Mysticism and Logic, Eliot is evasive, dealing more with style than substance. Still, it is clear that he has in mind the conclusion to “The Free Man’s Worship” in the following complaint of Russell’s “lyricism”: “The possibilities of lyricism are limited. Mr. Russell’s Man, the unglucksel’ger [unfortunate] Atlas staggering beneath the probability of the collapse of the solar system, is a descendant of Man Conceived in Sin. Elsewhere Mr. Russell has made us feel ‘the passionate splendour’ of Time and Fate and Death; here he has merely told us about it” (“Style and Thought” The Nation 22 [23 March 1918] 94). In this remark Eliot has unfairly collapsed two distinct aspect of Russell’s argument. Russell is encouraging mankind to face up, “proudly defiant,” to the absence of a benevolent God. He evoked the remote prospect of “the collapse of the solar system” in the opening pages of the essay in contrast to the fairy tale of the Second Coming and the rapture of the faithful. Russell does not suggest that the prospect of a collapse of the solar system in some remote future is some sort of punishment for human pride or disobedience – which is the essence of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Instead of reading Eliot’s comment as being motivated by a dissatisfaction with Russell’s atheism, I think it more plausible to read it as coming from a dissatisfaction with his failure to rise completely above the shadow of Christian eschatology. In the same vein, he characterizes Russell as “an emancipated Puritan” and compares his theology to that of John Stuart Mill and George Eliot – the former being a “weakling Humanist” in Robertson’s opinion. George Eliot, a more robust atheist, escaped Robertson’s strictures, receiving only positive mention. When Eliot turns to Russell’s prose style he praises his Humanism, but once again the praise is in the spirit of Robertson’s severe scepticism: “Mr. Russell’s hardness is from within. His style has perfect lucidity; it neither increases nor dissimulates the difficulty of the subject. The liberation of English philosophy from German influence, glibly discussed in the autumn of 1914, will have been the work, not of Mill (who was an amateur), but of Mr. Russell. His victory has been largely

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due to the possession of a science which most admirers of German philosophy in this country but imperfectly understood, but in the end will be due to his style, a style which this science has trained” (95). Eliot’s reference to Russell’s “liberation of English philosophy from German influence” is not just a bit of wartime jingoism, but an index of Eliot’s emancipation from the Hegelian idealism of Bradley, an emancipation in which Russell and Robertson played principal roles. John Stuart Mill is a different matter. Eliot’s mentions of Mill are singularly uncommon. I know of only three: this one; a derisive reference in his review of Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian, cited below; and a mention in an unpublished letter to Herbert Read of 27 February 1926 as one in a list of candidates for a proposed series on great thinkers of the nineteenth century. The last two mentions belong to Eliot’s Anglican period. His characterization of Mill as “an amateur” is rather striking. He may have picked up this estimate from Russell, who – like Eliot – was an apostate from Bradley’s absolute idealism, and the co-author of the most influential work on logic of the early twentieth century, Principia Mathematica.11 However, Eliot would also have found a debunking of Mill’s logic in Bradley, who had famously criticized Mill’s System of Logic (1843) in his Principles of Logic (1883) – something that Robertson notes in Modern Humanists Reconsidered. Robertson comes to Mill’s defence, but concedes that “Bradley’s razor was certainly a finer and stronger blade than Mill’s” (138). Years later, in his hostile review of Why I Am Not a Christian, the Anglican Eliot rather unexpectedly lists Robertson together with Arnold, Mill, Russell, and D.H. Lawrence. He is speaking of Russell’s arguments against Christian doctrine: Mr. Russell’s “arguments” might be dealt with one by one. They are all quite familiar. I remember that his argument of the First Cause (as put to J. Stuart Mill by James Mill) was put to me, at the age of six, by a devoutly Catholic Irish nursemaid.12 Mr. Russell supposes that he is not a Christian because he is an Atheist. He should know, as well as anyone, that what matters is not what he thinks but how he behaves, in the psychologist’s sense of behaviour. As we become used to Atheism, we recognize that Atheism is often merely a variety of Christianity. In fact, several varieties. There is the High Church Atheism of Matthew Arnold, there is the Auld Licht Atheism13 of our friend Mr. J.M. Robertson, there is the Tin Chapel Atheism of

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Mr. D.H. Lawrence. And there is the decidedly Low Church Atheism of Mr. Russell. (Criterion 6 [August 1927] 179) This put-down of Russell and the others is the mirror-image of Robertson’s strategy in Modern Humanists. For each of the nineteenthcentury Humanists that he considers, Robertson finds him or her to be inadequately emancipated from Christian belief, and considers that incomplete emancipation to be a failure of nerve or of intellectual rigour. Eliot employs the same polemical strategy in his critique of Why I Am Not a Christian, but for the opposite purpose, implying that the residue of Christianity in his list of sceptics is grounds for believing that Christianity – or at least the notion of a divinity – cannot be expunged from philosophical systems. Of course, such an argument is merely a rhetorical thrust without logical force. Although Lyndall Gordon does not mention “The Free Man’s Worship,” she does note that Eliot put Russell’s name opposite the first Tempter in the typescript for Murder in the Cathedral – an observation that supports the argument of these pages. She also mentions Eliot’s hostile review of Why I Am Not a Christian (274). She does not pursue the possibility that Eliot may have flirted with Russell’s Humanism and makes no mention at all of J.M. Robertson. Schuchard has paid some attention to Russell’s influence on Eliot – as well as Robertson’s – but he concentrates on the undoubted impact of Vivien and Russell’s adulterous affair on Eliot’s emotional life without giving much attention to either man’s belief system. Schuchard’s candidate for a crucial intellectual influence on Eliot is T.E Hulme – an issue to which we return a little later (Schuchard 1999 54–67). Throughout his life Eliot was circumspect on the matter of his relationship with Russell. However, in a letter of 1933 to Ottoline Morrell, Russell’s former lover and still a confidant of Russell’s in 1933, Eliot did allude to the bad influence Russell had had on Vivien: “Bertie, because at first I admired him so much, is one of my lost illusions. He has done Evil, without being big enough or conscious enough to Be evil. I owe him this, that the spectacle of Bertie was one contributing influence to my conversion.” Eliot does not specify what “evil” Russell had done, nor what the “spectacle” was. The “bad influence” that Eliot says Russell had on Vivien is unrelated to marital infidelity: “Of course he had no good influence on Vivienne.14 He excited her mentally, made her read books and become a kind of pacifist, and no doubt was flattered because he

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thought he was influencing her ... Unfortunately she found him unattractive” (14 March 1933. Cited in Schuchard 1999 179). Given that Russell had already confessed to Ottoline that he had been intimate with Vivien, Eliot’s letter must have seemed rather pathetic to her. There seems to be no way at present of knowing if Eliot was merely preserving appearances, or if he was in truth ignorant of the actual relation between Vivien and Russell.15 But when he says that Russell was one of his “lost illusions,” it is reasonable to infer that one of those illusions was Russell’s Humanism. Humanism – unlike Catholicism or Anglicanism – has no orthodoxy. Russell’s Humanism was much closer to Robertson’s in that it was resolutely atheistic and anti-Christian – in contrast to Victorian and American Humanism, both of which sought to preserve the emotional aspects of Christianity while abandoning its creed. “The Free Man’s Worship” begins with a scientific “Genesis,” from the formation of the solar system out of a starry nebula and proceeding to the beginning of life in the primal ooze. He contrasts this scientific view of creation to the Judæo-Christian account of mankind’s creaturely relation to a transcendent and jealous God. And in place of St John the Divine’s heated visions in Revelations of an Armageddon preceding the final rapture, Russell envisions an even less attractive conclusion to human existence: “And God smiled; and when he saw that Man had become perfect in renunciation and worship, he sent another sun through the sky, which crashed into Man’s sun; and all returned again to nebula” (60). Looking back from the perspective of the Anglican Eliot, one would not expect him to respond positively to such a travesty of Christian eschatological belief. But despite his later mocking of Russell’s Humanism, there is good reason to believe that his response to it was at first positive. A neglected bit of evidence in support of my view is Eliot’s exchange with the mathematical prodigy Norbert Wiener on the topic of philosophical relativism. It took place while Eliot was working on his thesis at Oxford. Wiener, of cybernetic fame, was then a fresh Harvard PhD in philosophy, pursuing post-doctoral studies at Cambridge – with Russell, among others. The exchange took place early in 1915, not long after Eliot’s accidental encounter with Russell the previous October. Russell likely put the two Harvard philosophy students in touch, although I have seen no evidence to corroborate that presumption. In a letter to Wiener of 6 January 1915, Eliot acknowledged that the “scientific view” of the universe was unavoidable, implicitly dismissing

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the “religious view”: “The only way in which we can talk about the ‘universe’ at all, it seems to me, is with reference to the universe of physical science; or, in other words the mechanistic world is that to which one would tend to conform” (Letters 80). He told Wiener: “[My] relativism made me see so many sides to questions that I became hopelessly involved, and wrote a thesis perfectly unintelligible to anyone but myself,” adding that he planned to rewrite it (Letters 81). Eliot’s essay “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers” – which was written after he had finished his thesis, and which Russell helped to get placed in the Monist – suggests that Eliot had moved on from Bradley. In that essay he characterized the philosophical posture of both Leibniz and Bradley as “disquieting and dangerous ... leaving one disconcerted at the end” (Knowledge and Experience 198). Bradley’s relativistic idealism, he says, holds that “relations are the work of the mind. Time exists only from finite points of view. Nothing is real, except experiences present in finite centres. The world, for Bradley, is simply the intending of a world by several souls or centres” (203). His continuation makes Bradley’s philosophy appear to be compatible with Stevens’: “For Bradley, I take it, an object is a common intention of several souls, cut out (as in a sense are the souls themselves) from immediate experience. The genesis of the common world can only be described by admitted fictions, since in the end there is no question of its origin in time: on the one hand our experiences are similar because they are of the same objects, and on the other hand the objects are only ‘intellectual constructions’ out of various and quite independent experiences” (204. My emphasis). It is clear from these remarks that he had moved beyond Bradley by late 1915; just as he had previously moved from Bergson to Bradley, he was now moving from Bradley to Russell. “The Free Man’s Worship” – which Russell republished several times without revision – presumably represents views he still held in 1915. His dismissal there of the Judæo-Christian world view is followed by an account of the scientific world view as equally bleak: “Such, in outline,” he continues, “but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home.” These remarks lead to a survey of the alternatives to religion which might provide the emotional glue required to hold society together. Except for his contempt for religion, Russell is so far very much in line with the Humanist project initiated by Matthew Arnold and the other Victorians examined by Robertson.

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It is worth bearing in mind that the young Eliot reading “The Free Man’s Worship” was in many respects a refugee from Arnoldian Humanism as reflected in American Humanism. Eliot had undertaken a fairly extensive reading of Arnold in 1908, his junior year at Harvard16 – perhaps prompted by his Harvard French teacher, Irving Babbitt, a prominent Humanist. More evidence of Arnold’s influence on Eliot is that his name recurs frequently in Eliot’s social criticism – though not always with approval. But Arnold was not the only early Humanist influence on Eliot. According to Kenneth Asher, Eliot was exposed to the French Humanist Charles Maurras as early as 1910. He points out: “Babbitt had been won over to the Maurrasian line during his own Parisian visit in 1908. After returning to Harvard, he proceeded, for the next quarter century, to drum the demonization of Rousseau and anti-Romanticism into an admiring Eliot and his successors.” When Maurras and the journal Action française were condemned by the pope in 1926, Eliot soon rose to Maurras’ defence, revealing in a 1920 Criterion “Commentary” that he had “been a reader of the work of Maurras for eighteen years,” that is, since 1910, his summer in France. Asher concludes that “it was a highly receptive Eliot who encountered firsthand the works of Maurras during his time in France” (“T.S. Eliot and Charles Maurras” 24). We have already seen that Eliot’s declaration of his Anglicanism echoed the masthead of Action française: “classique, catholique, monarchique.” But Maurras’ Catholicism was cynical. The movement he headed grew out of the Dreyfus affair and was militantly anti-Semitic, as well as anti-German and Royalist. Its adherence to the Catholic Church was purely strategic; it was the only effective institution in France that could support the Royalist project. Babbitt had no interest in either Catholicism or Royalism, but took only the movement’s hostility to Romanticism and preference for the classical – a preference that Eliot adopted.17 I am not concerned here with Eliot’s political or literary critical attitudes, however, but with the development of his religious beliefs. His interest in Maurras represents a curious stage. On his own testimony, Eliot became an admiring reader of Maurras even before he undertook his study of Bradley. Insofar as he did so under the tutelage of Irving Babbitt, it seems reasonable to assume that it was Maurras’ classicism that appealed to Eliot rather than his Humanism – although the two are clearly compatible. Such a supposition is supported by the fact that the only thing by Maurras that Eliot published in the Criterion, “Prologue

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to an Essay on Criticism,” translated by Eliot himself and published in the January and February numbers of Criterion 4 (1928). Maurras had first published it in1896, several years before he joined the Action Française, a movement that, according to Edward Tannenbaum, was motivated by the desire to engender a world that would allow writers a freedom from monetary concerns: “Their sensitive natures revolted against the mercenary spirit of modern society. In order to earn a living they had to appeal to the general public. Since they could not satisfy its tastes, they also expressed their longing for a return to the Old Regime in their literary criticism” (Tannenbaum, The Action Française, quoted by Margolis 90). Obviously, such a movement would appeal to Eliot – as it would not to Stevens, who was determined to find his way out of colourless modernity by going forward, not by returning to an earlier cultural and social condition. It is clear from Eliot’s reaction to the papal condemnation of Maurras, however, that it was not just Maurras’classicism that he admired. The papal condemnation was announced in December of 1926. Eliot was baptised on 29 June1927, just six months later. The proximity of these events led Paul Elmer More, a contemporary and close friend of Irving Babbitt, and later of Eliot – himself a Humanist who belatedly embraced Christianity – to speculate that “some time between The Waste Land and For Lancelot Andrews [Eliot] underwent a kind of conversion, due largely I believe to the influence of Maurras and the Action Française.”18 On the basis of More’s testimony, both Margolis and Asher speculate that the condemnation of Maurras may have prompted Eliot to get off the fence and embrace Anglicanism – in contrast to Maurras who remained a Humanist sceptic until near death.19 Whatever the merit of these speculations, Eliot was undeniably shaken by the condemnation of Maurras and the Action Française. He took the occasion of a Catholic defence of that action by Leo Ward, The Condemnation of the Action Française, to come to Maurras’ defence in his “Commentary” for March 1928. He conceded Ward’s accusation that Maurras’ thought was a “gradual development from the humble and (I admit) grotesque origins of Positivism,” but bristled at Ward’s accusation that Maurras disguised his atheism so as to recruit the support of Catholics for his political program. “It is,” Eliot wrote, “an imputation of unscrupulousness and even of dishonesty ... [Maurras’] attitude is that of an unbeliever who cannot believe, and who is too honest to pretend to himself or to others that he does believe; if others can believe, so much the better not only for them but for the world at large. The

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peculiarity of Maurras’s agnosticism (or atheism if you like) is that he recognises that he has much more in common, in the temporal sphere, with Catholics than with Protestants or atheists. Had he wished to trim his sails to a political breeze, he might have done better for himself by a brilliant and dishonest ‘conversion’” (Criterion 7, 3 March 1928 197–8). This is a very strange remark to come from a man on the eve of his own conversion, and very unlike what we have seen, and will see, him saying about other Humanists. True, Eliot praises Maurras for his honesty in not converting, but at the same time excuses him the hypocrisy of endorsing the institution of the Catholic Church while denying its dogma – exactly the charge that Robertson had made against Arnold and Spencer. In this lengthy “Commentary,” Eliot quibbles in detail over Ward’s exposure of Maurras’ atheism, attempting to excuse his hero, and he appends an extensive bibliography that demonstrates considerable familiarity with Maurras’ works, including secondary articulations of the philosophy of the Action Française. And he invites Ward to respond – which Ward does in Criterion 7 (June 1928). There he offers a summation of Maurras’ ideological position, which is worth citing since it demonstrates how incompatible it is with Eliot’s political thought: Maurras perceived long ago that France needs above all to be held together and stabilized, especially by monarchical and authoritarian institutions. Nothing is so fissiparous as mysticism and individualism. Christ was the Mystic and therefore Individualist par excellence. He is therefore the most dangerous of disruptive influences. France therefore must be de-Christianized, but the Roman Church (which Maurras regards as Greco-Latin and not necessarily Christian) is systematic and institutional and cohesive. Therefore he would establish the Church as a social glue seeing that no better way can be found of de-Christianizing France. (76) Eliot appends his rebuttal to Ward’s article. His remarks are astonishing given that he was about to embrace Anglicanism: “Mr. Ward, asserts again that Maurras is a profoundly anti-Christian thinker. How can Maurras be anti-Christian, when he admits that Catholic Christianity is essential to civilization? Mr. Ward would, on the same assumptions, be obliged to affirm that Mr. Irving Babbitt is ‘profoundly anti-Christian.’ What Mr. Ward says of M. Maurras, he ought to say of several other

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people of importance: and amongst persons of no importance, he might say it of myself” (86. My emphasis). Ward’s claim is that to embrace the institution and practices of a Christian Church in the absence of belief in its dogma is “profoundly anti-Christian.” Eliot’s lame defence, which would permit a hypocritical support of such an institution in the absence of belief, and his remark that such an accusation would apply to himself, suggests that at this point he was merely a sentimental and politic Christian, if one at all. Certainly it lends credence to More’s speculation that it was the influence of Maurras that prompted Eliot’s conversion – though it was not so much his example as the spectacle of his condemnation by the Vatican that was in play. Eliot was no longer comfortable playing ’possum in the face of that shock. Eliot apparently met Maurras, but just when is a matter of speculation. In an unpublished letter to the Bookman (dated 31 March 1930) in which he contests the allegation that he felt “open enmity” for Maurras and Babbitt, Eliot protested that his “personal acquaintance with M. Maurras is but slight,” in contrast to his long association with Irving Babbitt, adding: “Your critic quite overlooks the circumstances: that when I have spoken of Maurras it has been to defend him against what I believed to be injustice” (cited in Kojecky 74). That was in 1930. Five years earlier, discussing the launch of the Criterion in a letter to Herbert Read, Eliot remarked parenthetically: “I have thought that there was a conspiracy of silence in England against Maurras also, to whom I have thought of devoting a future No. Who has ever heard of Georges Sorel but ourselves?” (13 March 1925. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). And in a letter of 14 September, he proposed a series on foreign writers, including one on Maurras, which he would write himself, and he refers to it again in a letter of 11 December, admitting that he would “have to look into Comte, Joseph de Maistre etc.” As late as 1955, in “The Literature of Politics, “he was still speaking in defence of Maurras: “I think of a man whom I held in respect and admiration, although some of his views were exasperating and some deplorable – but a great writer, a genuine lover of his country, and a man who deserved a better fate than that which he had in the end to meet20 ... But with the reservations compelled by this awareness, I have sometimes thought that if Charles Maurras had confined himself to literature and to the literature of political theory, and had never attempted to found a political party, a movement ... then those of his ideas which were sound and strong might have spread more widely and penetrated

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more deeply, and affected more sensibly the contemporary mind” (To Criticize the Critic 142–4). Clearly Eliot never abandoned his admiration for Maurras, despite his persistent atheism.21 Eliot wrote an article, “Hommage à Charles Maurras” for the right wing journal Aspects de la France et du Monde (April 25 1948), in support of Maurras, who was then on trial for treason. He there listed L’Avenir de l’intelligence, Anthinéa, Les Amants de Venise, and La Leçon de Dante as books by Maurras that he had read, and mentioned that he had purchased L’Avenir de l’intelligence in Paris in 1911 (Kojecky 68, Margolis n88). Eliot’s persistent defence of Maurras contrasts strongly with his later criticism of Russell, the third Humanist mentor after Babbitt (whose thought he also criticizes), and Maurras. Another potent Humanist influence belongs to an earlier age – Matthew Arnold. Eliot’s later antipathy for Arnoldian Humanism is manifest, but I believe it is the antipathy of an apostate.22 The grounds of his dissatisfaction with Arnold are revealed with especial clarity in his December 1927 review of the reissue of Bradley’s Ethical Studies, written just six months after his baptism. Eliot aligns Bradley (for whom he declared an undiminished admiration) with Arnold in their common opposition to Utilitarianism. Although both of them were, he wrote, “catholic, and civilized and universal,” they shared a common reliance on an inner moral compass – a survival no doubt of Luther’s confidence in the “inner light” – as a governor and guide of moral behaviour: In Culture and Anarchy, which is probably his greatest book, we hear something said about “the will of God”; but the “will of God” seems to become superseded in importance by “our best self, or right reason, to which we want to give authority”; and this best self looks very much like Matthew Arnold slightly disguised ... Professor Irving Babbitt, has said again and again that the old curbs of class, of authoritative governments, and of religion must be supplied in our time by something he calls the “inner check.” The inner check looks very much like the “best self” of Matthew Arnold; and though supported by wider erudition and closer reasoning, is perhaps open to the same objections. (Times Literary Supplement [29 December 1927] 981–2, Selected Essays 452) Although in 1927 Eliot faults Arnold for holding a Humanistic notion of divinity which is nothing more than a projection of our “best self,” his criticism of 1920 was on entirely the other foot. In a letter to

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his friend Sydney Schiff (responding to Schiff’s comments on The Sacred Wood, published in November 1920) Eliot criticized Arnold for his failure to be a fully Humanistic “free man” – just as Robertson had done: “Of course Arnold is tarred with his own brush. He is not really a free man, in the best sense of the word; who in England was, at his time? Who in England is now?” (Letters 406. My emphasis). Excusing Arnold’s failure to become a “free man” on the grounds that no one of Arnold’s era went so far, Eliot implies that he and Schiff (a non-observant Jew) were so emancipated. After confessing a long-standing interest in Arnold’s social criticism, Eliot observed: “What makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again”(xi), a labour that Eliot doubtless felt he had begun in The Sacred Wood.23 That labour, of course, was to emancipate mankind from religious superstition and to replace religion with “culture.” We do not have Schiff’s comments on The Sacred Wood, but it would seem that he complained that Eliot gave Arnold too much respect, for as Eliot explained: “[I was] using Arnold a little as a stalking horse, or as a cloak of invisibility-respectability to protect me from the elderly. I wanted him as a scarecrow with a real gun under his arm” (406). The general purpose of the Introduction to The Sacred Wood was to redefine the role of the poet as critic, using Arnold’s critical theories as a contrasting mode or “stalking horse.” In any event, Eliot acknowledged his long-standing familiarity with Arnold in a remark to which Robertson alluded in Modern Humanists: “To any one who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of justice, it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one has vaguely depreciated [sic] for some years. The faults and foibles of Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago, after my first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on rereading some of his prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position” (The Sacred Wood xi). Arnold’s “position” was Humanism, the belief that societies can maintain ethical standards in the absence of belief in divine sanctions, that “sweetness and light” can prevail through the example of literature and the arts. It is one that Eliot could “better appreciate” in 1920 than he could in 1913 or 1914, when he was still under the influence of Bradley. Arnold’s “labour” requires that we be able to discriminate between the first and second rate in the arts so as to generate a culture adequate to the role of displacing religious belief. For if literature is to fill the role of religion in human societies, it must be purged of the transient

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and local as well as of the tawdry and clumsy; that is to say, literature must be classic as Maurras also believed: “It is part of the business of the critic to preserve tradition – where a good tradition exists. It is part of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole; [a selfconscious echo of Arnold] and this is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years ago with the same eyes” (xv–xvi). Nothing could be more Arnoldian than that. What Eliot saw as central to Arnold’s inadequacy was, rather surprisingly, his failure to become a literary critic: “In a society in which the arts were seriously studied, in which the writing was respected, Arnold might have become a literary critic.” “How astonishing it would be,” Eliot mused, “if a man like Arnold had concerned himself with the art of the novel, had compared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more serious writer than Dickens” (xiii). A “critic,” then, for Eliot is not someone who – like Arnold – sets out the theoretical criteria that govern the classification and assessment of artworks, but rather one who gets down in the trenches and cleanses the literary canon of unworthy and inappropriate works. Eliot’s comments on Arnold are all the more instructive because of the date, for they come shortly after the Eliots broke with Russell early in 1919. In effect, the Schiffs, a wealthy couple who held a literary London salon, replaced Russell in the lives of Tom and Vivien for a time.24 As guest editor, Schiff published two of Eliot’s satirical poems in the summer 1919 issue of Art and Letters: “Burbank with a Baedeker” and “Sweeney Erect.” Schiff was the principal financial angel of Art and Letters, edited and founded by Frank Rutter and Herbert Read. The journal foundered when Schiff withdrew his support. (Its demise was a major factor in Eliot’s decision to found the Criterion in 1921.) Eliot sent Schiff “Gerontion” for his opinion in 1919 – though not for publication in Art and Letters. He also read and commented upon the draft versions of Schiff’s autobiographical novels, Richard Kurt and Richard, Myrtle and I – both published over the pseudonym Stephen Hudson.25 In his introduction to The Sacred Wood, Eliot endorsed Arnold’s negative assessment of Romantic poetry – “the poetry of the first quarter of this [the nineteenth] century” – as “premature.” He applied the same judgment to the poetry of his own generation, presumably including his own poetry prior to The Waste Land: “This judgement of the Roman-

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tic Generation has not, so far as I know, ever been successfully controverted; and it has not, so far as I know, ever made very much impression on popular opinion. Once a poet is accepted, his reputation is seldom disturbed, for better or worse. So little impression has Arnold’s opinion made, that his statement will probably be as true of the first quarter of the twentieth century as it was of the nineteenth” (xii. My emphasis). We can conclude, then, that Eliot had not yet “depreciated” Arnold when he read “The Free Man’s Worship” in 1914. At that date, he was just emerging from his infatuation with Bergson, whose lectures at the Collège de France he had attended three years earlier (from early January to 17 February 1911) – perhaps prompted by his reading of Maurras. Bergson had offered Eliot a world view that permitted a force (élan vital) transcendent of the merely human, though immanent in the world, not transcendent of it. Unlike Darwinian evolution, which is dependent on random variation, élan vital is endowed with direction and “purpose.” Bergson’s vitalism thus offered Eliot a way out of a cosmos devoid of purpose or ethical principle. It also represented a way of avoiding the brutal implication of Darwinian evolution represented by Herbert Spencer’s world ruled by purposeless survival of the fittest. And it was the Spencerian version of evolution that dominated his childhood world, as Eliot told his Magdalene audience: “Herbert Spencer’s generalized theory of evolution was in my childhood environment regarded as the key to the mystery of the universe “(Magdalene 5). Bergsonism also offered the possibility of a rational basis for faith in that extra-rational “best self” in which Arnold had placed his trust, since one could see it as a manifestation of Bergson’s élan vital. But in the end Bergson proved inadequate to Eliot’s needs. In “The Free Man’s Worship” Russell also dismissed the optimism common to Herbert Spencer, the American pragmatists,26 and Bergson. Whereas Bradley – who had displaced Bergson in Eliot’s favour – paints an optimistic picture of a purposeful cosmos, Russell’s cosmos is devoid of any purpose or direction: That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feelings can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the

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inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins. All these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built. (Philosophical Essays 60–1. My emphasis.) One could scarcely ask for a more uncompromising expression of what Eliot later called “the futility of non-Christian lives.” But Eliot perhaps needed more life experience than he had undergone in 1914 in order to appreciate that futility. His marriage to a sickly woman and Russell’s betrayal of his trust may well have provided the necessary life experience. Russell rejected Spencerian social Darwinism as antipathetic to Humanism, pointing out that “those who, in our own day, base their morality upon the struggle for survival, maintaining that the survivors are necessarily the fittest,” have also succumbed to the counsels of despair. Many, he said, recoil from such views, as being “repugnant to the moral sense.” Instead they “adopt the position which we have become accustomed to regard as specially religious, maintaining that, in some hidden manner, the world of fact is really harmonious with the world of ideals. Thus Man creates God, all-powerful and all-good, the mystic unity of what is and what should be” (62. My emphasis). Like Robertson, Russell had no doubt that the scientific view was broadly correct and that religious or poetic inventions were nothing more than whistling in the dark. In this they were both in agreement with Humanism as defined in Humanism and America: Essays on the Outlook of Modern Civilisation, according to which it is “the study and practice of the principle of human happiness uncomplicated by naturistic dogmas [Darwinism] on the one side and religious dogmas on the other.”27 But – unlike Robertson and the American Humanists – Russell also believed that human societies require illusions, such as those provided by religion, if they are to survive. His conviction that the residue of religious beliefs can be retained for their social utility even though known to be the product of the human imagination, is the founding principle of his Humanism – as it was of Arnold’s. Such a view is of course incompatible with Christianity and represents a serious threat to an adherent

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of any religion founded on stories passed down from the past – such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some – among whom Wallace Stevens – could accept such scepticism in the hope that those inventions (human and error-prone as they were) might nonetheless reach toward an ineffable truth, even if it could never be fully attained. Such is the posture of American pragmatism with respect to scientific truths. But that was not Russell’s position. For him – as for Maurras – religious fables could not be presumed to have any truth value at all. Their only utility lay in their capacity to influence individual behaviour for the better and to provide some emotional solace. The key component of Humanism, then, may be seen as “the study and practice of the principle of human happiness.” Its goal is to make existence bearable in a meaningless cosmos of random events. Eliot later saw this mildly hedonistic component of Humanism as its principal feature and, for him, its principal shortcoming. In a lecture he gave to the Shakespeare Association in March of 1927, three months before his baptism, he mocked Stoicism as the root of “a number of versions of cheering oneself up,” and contrasted it to Christian humility (Selected Essays 132). Although Eliot did not target Humanism specifically, Russell can be accused of recommending just such a “whistling in the dark” in “The Free Man’s Worship”: “How, in such an alien and inhuman world,” he asks, “can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished?” His answer is that since we can no longer believe in the reality of an omnipotent God, or other varieties of the divine, we should consciously and deliberately choose to worship fictions frankly acknowledged as the products of the human imagination. Moreover, he portrays religious worship as being motivated by craven fear, asking: “Shall we worship Force, or shall we worship Goodness? Shall our God exist and be evil, or shall he be recognised as the creation of our own conscience?” (63. My emphasis). Russell’s “free man” is not a Nietzschean “free spirit” confronting a hostile universe in “a spirit of fiery revolt.” In Russell’s view Nietzschean “indignation is still a bondage, for it compels our thoughts to be occupied with an evil world” (64). Like Eliot, Russell preferred Christian humility to Nietzschean or Stoic defiance: “Although the necessity of renunciation is evidence of the existence of evil, yet Christianity, in preaching it, has shown a wisdom exceeding that of the Promethean philosophy of rebellion” (64). “This degree of submission to Power,” Russell added,”is not only just and right: it is the very gate of wisdom” (65). But submission is not enough. We also need dreams:

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But passive renunciation is not the whole of wisdom; for not by renunciation alone can we build a temple for the worship of our own ideals. Haunting foreshadowings of the temple appear in the realm of imagination, in music, in architecture, in the untroubled kingdom of reason, and in the golden sunset magic of lyrics, where beauty shines and glows, remote from the touch of sorrow, remote from the fear of change, remote from the failures and disenchantments of the world of fact. In the contemplation of these things the vision of heaven will shape itself in our hearts, giving at once a touchstone to judge the world about us, and an inspiration by which to fashion to our needs whatever is not incapable of serving as a stone in the sacred temple. (65–6. My emphasis) I suppose it was rhetoric such as this that led Eliot to complain of Russell’s “lyricism” in his review of Mysticism and Logic. All the same, the notion that literature can formulate an ideal world to which we can aspire would surely have appealed to the young Eliot on the rebound from Bergson, and contemplating a study of the idealist, Bradley. Just when Eliot read “The Free Man’s Worship” is a matter of some interest for my hypothesis that it drew him toward Humanism. I have assumed – as seems probable – that he read it in 1914 – either just before or during the course he took from Russell in the spring term, or perhaps after he reconnected with Russell in London in October, 1914. We do know, however – on the evidence of two graduate papers that he wrote at Harvard in 1914 – that Eliot’s disenchantment with Bergson was in place by the Spring of that year.28 It is unlikely that the course he took from Russell – beginning on 27 March 1914 – was a factor in Eliot’s rejection of Bergson, for it was a course on symbolic logic. The spur may have been his reading of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. He purchased a copy of it in June of 1913 (Gordon 71) and most likely read it before the Fall term of 1913. Since it was Bradley – not Russell or Bergson – that he chose to study for his dissertation, it is reasonable to assume that he found Bradley’s monistic idealism an attractive alternative to Bergsonism. In a 1914 graduate paper Eliot faults Bergson, as well as the pragmatist William James, for confusing “human and cosmic activity.” His complaint that Bergson “denies human values” would fit a Humanist perspective, but that conclusion is misleading for he complains of James’ pragmatism – that it is Humanist: “for pragmatism, man is the measure of all things” (cited in Childs, “Fantastic Views,” Lobb 120).

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Humanism, he thinks, is too easy. He spells out the Humanist project in the same terms as Russell: “It may be true that man does not live by bread alone, but by making fictions and swallowing them alive & whole.” But unlike Russell, Eliot finds such a scheme unacceptable: “This seems to reduce the high cost of living by eliminating living” (Childs 121). Eliot is unwilling to accept a meretricious belief as a substitute for religious faith: “If all meaning is human meaning, then there is no meaning. If you assume only human standards, what standards have you? ... Complete freedom, or complete determination for a human being, is unthinkable” (Childs 122–3). “Complete freedom” is what the Humanist would claim, and “complete determination” is the equally unattractive option that nineteenth-century physical sciences offered.29 Eliot, then, was not sympathetic toward Humanism in the spring of 1914. He apparently believed that Bradley offered an alternative to both Humanism and Bergsonism, on the one hand, and to scientific materialism on the other. Another graduate essay of the same period articulates a quite different critique of Bergson, one now informed by his reading of Bradley, for he deploys Bradley’s notion of “pure identity” in a critique of Bergson’s notion of durée.30 In his dissertation, a study of Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, Eliot discusses “pure identity.” For monistic idealism such as Bradley’s, identity is a problem, since in a monistic universe an existent cannot be isolated from knowledge of it, the existent. If it could be, we would fall back into the dualism of idea and thing. On the other hand, if an existent cannot be separated from knowledge of it, we run the risk of solipsism.31 In the paper Eliot claims that if Bergson had accepted the Bradleyan view, he would not have hung his philosophical cloak on durée but rather on arrest. And that would have reversed “the apparent conclusions of his theory, time would be the child of space; the formula being/time = eternity/space.” But he adds that had Bergson done so, it would have exposed him to the charge of neo-Platonism, and as a consequence “science in the narrower sense of the word would of course find short shrift.” Eliot contrasts these unfortunate consequences of Bergsonism to Bradley’s more acceptable doctrine: “the absolute, as Bradley says, bears buds + flowers + fruit at once; time gives the menue monnaie [small change] ad infinitum” (cited in Douglass 61). In short, for Bradley there is no process, no movement, no force – such as Bergson’s élan vital – guiding the cosmos toward some ever-receding goal. For Bradley everything is always present in the absolute, which therefore “bears buds + flowers + fruit at once.” There is neither a

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Darwinian anti-entropic development, nor a thermodynamic entropy – a running down toward absolute stillness – but rather an eternal present. On the strength of this graduate paper it would seem that it was Eliot’s reading of Bradley, not of Russell, that led him away from what he called Bergson’s “weakling mysticism.” However, if Bradley did lead Eliot away from Bergson, to what did he lead him? Certainly not to Anglicanism, for that was still more than a decade in the future, a future that would include a catastrophic world war, a ruinous marriage, and undreamt-of acclaim as the poet of modern angst. After all of that, Eliot returned, less approvingly, to the Bradleyan perception in Burnt Norton, in which he expressed a disaffection with the inhumanity of a world in which everything is already fulfilled in an eternal present: Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present All time is unredeemable. What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility Only in a world of speculation. What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present. (i, ll. 1–10) Though these lines were written decades later, they put their finger on what Eliot found unsatisfactory about Bradley’s idealism – its fatalism. However, the next section of “Burnt Norton” seems to revisit Bradley’s notion of an eternal present, now adapted to the Christian notion of incarnation; that is, what in “Dry Salvages” Eliot calls “the point of intersection of the timeless / With time”: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. (ii, ll. 16–21)

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But in 1914 Eliot had not reached that accommodation, and Russell’s suggestion that man should “worship at the shrine that his own hands have built” must have seemed an attractive alternative to Bergson’s Darwinian optimism as well as to Bradley’s idealistic fatalism. Although Eliot most likely would not have known it when he was writing these essays, Russell had gone through a disillusionment quite similar to his own. However, Russell’s response to his crisis of belief was to renounce it, and to become, like Robertson, a champion of unbelief so far as the transcendent was concerned – though not, of course, a philosophical sceptic. “The Free Man’s Worship” was, in effect, a declaration of that renunciation. A further parallel is that Russell was a Bradleyan for a time. His biographer, Ray Monk, tells us that “Russell’s adoption of a rigorous philosophical monism that rejects the reality of relations was no doubt influenced by Bradley’s influential book Appearance and Reality, which Russell re-read in the summer of 1897,” when he was twenty-five. According to Monk, Russell abandoned Bradley for exactly the reason that Eliot was attracted to him, and eventually found him inadequate: “An important element in Russell’s abandonment of this conception of the world was his rejection of the emotional and religious comforts it provided.” Russell explained his rejection of Bradley’s idealism and of religious knowledge in a paper presented to the Apostles32 late in 1897. Monk concludes on the evidence of this paper that “Russell’s original hopes for philosophy – and, especially for McTaggart’s metaphysics – were misplaced. He concluded that ‘we cannot find in philosophy the consolations of religion’” (Monk, Spirit 115). Eliot was to come to the same conclusion seventeen years later, although his response was the contrary of Russell’s: he turned away from philosophy toward religion. Although we have no way of knowing the details, it is difficult to imagine that Eliot did not discuss Bradley’s philosophy with Russell during their years of intimacy – years in which Eliot was writing his dissertation on “Appearance and Reality.” We know from the letter to Norbert Wiener of 6 January 1915, cited above, that he entirely rewrote his dissertation after he and Vivien had co-habited with Russell for nearly four months. He told Wiener that “the second version [would] be entirely destructive”33 (Letters 81). Clearly something had happened in Eliot’s intellectual life to change his attitude toward Bradley’s philosophy between the two versions of the dissertation. The most likely source of the change is his new-found admiration for Russell and their intimacy

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from 1914 to 1917. Eliot revised his thesis in that period, finishing by April 1916. Although in retrospect Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism seems inevitable, it could not have appeared so to him in 1915 or 1916. He was then very much under Russell’s influence, and also in his debt – intellectually, professionally, and even financially.34 His letters of those years give ample evidence of his admiration for Russell and his gratitude for Russell’s help and guidance. Nonetheless, Eliot retained his intellectual independence. He even presumed to patronize Russell in a letter to Eleanor Hinkley (21 March 1915). Russell, he wrote, “has a sensitive, but hardly a cultivated mind, and I begin to realise how unbalanced he is.” (I presume by “unbalanced” Eliot means “not well-rounded” rather than “off his head.”) He added, “I do enjoy him quite as much as any man I know ... and [he] is wonderfully perceptive, but in some way an immature mind: wonderfully set off in contrast by Santayana”35 (who was also at Cambridge) (Letters 92). “The Free Man’s Worship” was first published in 1902, only five years after the paper Russell had presented to the Apostles abandoning Bradley’s idealism. It expresses the accommodation Russell had reached with religious belief from his new sceptical perspective, an accommodation that, from a religious perspective, amounts to idolatry – worshipping “at the shrine his own hands have built.” One would have thought that this would be one aspect of the essay that would have rubbed Eliot the wrong way, but I have found no indication that it did. Rather surprisingly, even after his conversion Eliot did not seem to have shared the Biblical prophets’ horror of idolatry. In a “Commentary” of April 1933, for example, he conceded that the idolatry that he saw as an aspect of Communism was preferable to no worship at all, alluding to the canonical incident of idolatry in Exodus (32: 1–35): “My only objection to it [Communism] is the same as my objection to the cult of the Golden Calf. It is better to worship a golden calf than to worship nothing; but that, after all, is not, in the circumstances, an adequate excuse. My objection is that it just happens to be mistaken.”36 We can see perhaps in this tolerance of idolatry some residue of Eliot’s early idealism, which allowed no firm distinction between the real and the imagined.37 In any case, Eliot’s mature objection to the Humanist strategy of investing fictions with belief was not so much that it is a form of idolatry as that it is founded on an error. “Man is man,” he wrote in “Second Thoughts about Humanism” (1929), “because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them.” He

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sees this point as a test that distinguishes theism from naturalism: “Either everything in man can be traced as a development from below, or something must come from above. There is no avoiding that dilemma, you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist” (Selected Essays 485). Few of us are so rigorous. But Eliot would not have put the modern dilemma so starkly in 1914. Shortly after his arrival in England, following a remark on a mutual friend’s lapse from religious belief, Eliot confessed to Hinkley that he may have “come very near to drifting ... into something rather similar” himself. “I have had for several years,” he added, “a distrust of strong convictions in any theory or creed which can be formulated. One must have theories, but one need not believe in them!” (27 November 1914. Letters 72–3. My emphasis). If we take his “several years” at face value, we can date his relativism to his undergraduate years. In that case, he thought of himself as a philosophical relativist at the time he was attracted to Bergson. It seems odd that he still saw his philosophical posture as relativism during his Bradleyan phase, but that reflects perhaps the influence not only of Russell but of Maurras as well, for, as we have seen, the latter endorsed the Catholic church despite being an unbeliever. Eliot explicitly adopted philosophical relativism in his dissertation – the final draft of which was written in his Russellian phase. His philosophical relativism is very like Stevens’ idea of holding contingently a belief in what is known to be a fiction. Here is Eliot in the dissertation – essentially channelling Bradley: “We have the right to say that the world is a construction. Not to say that it is my construction, for in that way ‘I’ am as much ‘my’ construction as the world is ... the world is a construction out of finite centres38 ... Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself” (Knowledge and Experience 166. My emphasis). These comments arise out of Bradley’s belief that we exist within an embracing Absolute to which we all have fleeting access as experiencing “finite centres.” As Eliot put it in the graduate essay, cited above: “time gives the menue monnaie [small change].” We subsist in the Absolute as a fish in water, aware of the circumambient reality only fleetingly and occasionally. For the experiencing human, the “sea” is the eternal present of the Bradleyan Absolute. It should be clear, then, that Eliot’s relativism was not equivalent to Humanism. The former is a philosophical – indeed metaphysical – posture which holds that human reason cannot have incorrigible knowledge of the nature of the world. Bradley was not a relativist, nor was

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Russell. Both believed that incorrigible – though not complete – knowledge is possible, at least in principle. Humanism is not a philosophical position at all, but essentially a sociological one. The Humanist is concerned to find a modus vivendi in a world lacking the ethical guidance and moral sanctions of some transcendent reality. For the Humanist within post-Christian societies, the essential issue is how to retain the good features of Christian societies – respect for persons and property, care for one’s fellow citizens, fairness in social relations, and so forth – in the absence of the fear of God. The most prominent feature of Russell’s behaviour on the social and ethical front was his pacifism, which he discussed with Eliot over tea on their first meeting in London. Eliot told Eleanor Hinkley that even before that conversation, he had suspected that Russell was a pacifist, though he was not himself a pacifist. On the other hand, he found that Russell “talked very interestingly on the European situation” (Letters 64). Russell, for his part, was shocked by Eliot’s support of the war (Monk, Spirit 424). After that chance encounter, he took the somewhat forlorn Eliot under his wing. He not only got him opportunities to review books, but later became his landlord and fellow lodger when the newly married Tom and Vivien accepted his invitation to share his tiny London flat. They remained with him for four months – from September 1915 until January of 1916. Afterward, Russell and the young couple continued to share country weekends at hotels, and eventually shared the rental of a cottage in Bosham – from January 1918 until Russell’s imprisonment in May of that year for pacifist activity. Some indication that Eliot was influenced by Russell’s philosophy is provided by the recollection of Brand Blanshard, a young American undergraduate student at Oxford, who shared lodgings in Swanage, Dorset during the Christmas break of 1914–15 with Eliot and another Oxonian, Karl Culpin. They were all philosophy students, although Eliot was considerably older than Blanshard and Sculpin. (Sculpin, an Englishman, was called up and killed at the front.) Blanshard’s recollection of that holiday portrays Eliot as being very much preoccupied with Russell’s philosophy – even studying Principia Mathematic assiduously: “I well remember Eliot’s figure as he sat at the dining room table each morning with a huge volume of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica propped open before him. He had a certain facility in dealing with its kind of symbols; he said that manipulating them gave him a curious sense of power. Russell was the most accomplished philosopher he had met. Like Eliot, he had been a disciple of Bradley, but he had

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turned strongly against him. Eliot was so much affected by Russell that for the present he had laid his Bradley aside. But in the contest for Eliot’s mind, Bradley won” (Blanshard in Olney 32). Blanshard’s judgment that Bradley won is disputable – although there is no doubt that Russell lost in the “contest for Eliot’s mind.”39 More important for my argument is Blanshard’s view that “Eliot was so much affected by Russell” that he had “laid his Bradley aside” at that time – the Christmas break of 1914–15. There are grounds, then, for concluding that during the few years of their intimacy, Eliot thought that Humanism could be an adequate “belief” for him. Even though he had been deeply influenced by the Humanism of Babbitt and Maurras, his turn to Bradley suggests that he found their Humanism – focused on culture and society as it was – unsatisfactory. He would most likely have turned to Anglicanism in any event, but the years of his closeness with Russell were undoubtedly crucial in shaping Eliot’s mature philosophical and religious beliefs. In addition it can hardly be doubted that Russell’s seduction of Vivien during that period contributed to Eliot’s turn away from Humanism. Why that turn should have been toward Anglican Christianity is a question that Lyndall Gordon has addressed in her biographies of Eliot. What Gordon, and most commentators, have overlooked, however, is the few years of Eliot’s flirtation with Humanism.40 When Eliot told Ottoline Morrell, “the spectacle of Bertie was one contributing influence to my conversion,” it is reasonable to assume that the “spectacle” included Russell’s seduction of Vivien – even though Eliot never admitted knowledge of their affair. But Eliot was not baptised until a good eight years after his break with Russell. The “spectacle of Bertie” was only “one contributing influence,” and clearly a negative one. As we have seen, the papal condemnation of Maurras of December 1926 seems to have been the final spur that led to his baptism on 29 June 1927. “The Free Man’s Worship” stands in Eliot’s Magdalene sermon as a synecdoche for Russell’s entire “negative” influence on him. Although Russell’s behaviour could hardly have legitimized Anglicanism,41 taken together with the Maurras disaster, it might well have tipped Eliot toward thinking that Humanism was not the solution to the modern dilemma.42 Russell’s Humanism, like Arnold’s, was deeply inflected by his Christian childhood and was not unlike the Unitarianism of Eliot’s childhood. Even more than Eliot, Russell had a strong social conscience. He was a founding member of the Fabian movement, a British socialist

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movement that called for gradual reform of capitalist society along socialist lines, as opposed to Marx’s call for violent revolution. The Fabian movement spawned the British Labour Party – for which Russell stood unsuccessfully in the election of 1922. And Russell had a lifelong interest in promoting the welfare of ordinary men and women. During the war Russell’s humanitarian and socialist principles led him to oppose the war with sufficient vigour that the authorities indicted him for sedition, and he was sentenced to a six-month jail sentence – which he served in 1917. Eliot visited him in jail. Decades later the nearly nonagenarian Russell was jailed again for his opposition to nuclear weapons – though only for seven days. However, his humanitarian instincts were often at odds with a self-centred personal life that left quite a few damaged individuals in its wake – Tom and Vivien among them. Since Eliot’s Harvard graduate essays were unsympathetic to Humanism – celebrating instead Bradley’s idealism – we can safely infer that the influence of Maurras and Babbitt was confined to literary and cultural issues. But by the time he finished his dissertation in 1916, Eliot had distanced himself from Bradley in his turn. As we have seen, he declared himself a relativist in a letter of January 1915 to Norbert Wiener. He repeated the sentiment in a letter of August 1916 to Conrad Aiken (21 April 1916): “I am still a relativist, a cracker of small theories like nuts, essentially an egoist perhaps, but I have not the leisure to be cynical, a good thing perhaps, life is always positively something or the opposite, it has a sense, if only that” (Letters 146). Of course, a relativist need not be a Humanist. As I indicated above, Humanism is not a philosophical position, but an ethical and social one, and is compatible with a range of philosophical positions – except for theism. From about 1915 to 1919 we find Eliot writing reviews that reflect a Humanist hostility toward religious belief. They were also the years in which he was choosing his career – whether to become a professor as his parents hoped, or a poet and public intellectual as was his eventual choice. Russell helped launch him as a philosopher by getting him reviews in philosophical journals. Ezra Pound helped launch him as a poet by getting him published. If we were to think of these years as a tug-of-war between Russell and Pound, Pound won. Eliot returned to the United States in the summer of 1915 – leaving Vivien in Russell’s tender care – and arranged to return to Harvard the following autumn to finish his degree. He was obliged to return to England prematurely (in mid-August) because of a serious illness that

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befell Vivien (Letters 112–13). Shortly after returning to London (11 September), he wrote to J.H. Woods, the chair of graduate studies at Harvard, informing him that he would not be returning after all, but would complete his thesis in England (Letters 116–17). He had still not decided to abandon an academic career, but seems to have become disenchanted with his Bradley thesis, for he temporarily abandoned it in favour of reviewing philosophical books (Monk, Spirit 443). Although Eliot wrote some poetry of an undeniably religious – if not mystical – cast in 1913 and 1914 (Gordon, An Imperfect Life 84–94), he did not choose the religious path at that time. After coming under Russell’s influence, he seems to have moved still further from religious belief. A series of reviews and articles published between January 1916 and October 1918 clearly reflect a Humanist posture. They were written both before and after he finished the dissertation in April of 1916.43 Indeed, it was through Russell that Eliot got the opportunity to review in International Journal of Ethics (Letters 143). Most of the books he reviewed are concerned in one way or another with the issue of religious belief. All the reviews display an attitude of sceptical relativism, if not Humanism, on Eliot’s part.44 In addition, during the period of these reviews he attended Russell’s 1916 lecture series (later published as Principles of Social Reconstruction) and wrote a commentary on it early in1917, which he sent to Russell. From what hints are to be found in the correspondence, that lecture series seems to mark a beginning of his disaffection with Russell’s Humanism. Eliot’s comments on Russell’s lectures will be discussed below. The earliest – and longest – of the reviews was of Theism and Humanism by Arthur Balfour (IJE, 26 [January 1916] 284–9). Balfour had been the Tory premier of Britain from 1902 to 1906, and (as foreign secretary) the signatory of the famous “Balfour Declaration”(1917), which promised Zionists a national home in Jerusalem. Eliot makes no reference to the eminence of the author, indeed showing him little respect. He rejects Balfour’s argument that “belief in a conscious purpose or design” can alone “explain the existence of value and of truth” (284–5). The attitude toward religious belief that Eliot articulates in the review is quite clear, and thoroughly relativistic: “If Mr. Balfour is matching a popular materialism against an enlightened theism, it is not a fair fight; if he matches a popular materialism against a popular theism, the struggle is of no interest; and if a philosophic materialism against a philosophic theism, then the evidence fails to show any

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advantage to one side more than the other” (285–6). It is not possible to say whether these sentiments reflect a Bradleyan idealism or a Russellian scepticism, but there can be little doubt of Eliot’s hostility to Balfour’s Theism. Since Balfour identifies Humanism as the alternative to Theism, a friendliness toward Humanism is at least implied. The next review is of Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics by the Reverend Hastings Rashdall (IJE 27 [October 1916] 111–12). In this brief review Eliot rather curtly dismisses Rashdall’s defence of Christianity: “We find Dr. Rashdall taking up a position hardly different from Unitarianism. But Dr. Rashdall has an argument of his own. He proceeds, I believe, first to assimilate Christ’s teaching to his own morality, then makes Christ the representative of this morality” (112). The next review, also in the October number, is of Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the Individual by Clement C.J. Webb. It is a hostile survey of positivistic explanations of religion by anthropologists (IJE 27 [October 1916] 115–17). Eliot pays particular attention to Webb’s criticism of Lévy-Bruhl’s hypothesis of a primitive mentality that is contrasted to the logical/empirical mentality of civilized man. Eliot finds the contrast to be sound: “Lévy-Bruhl maintains that a sharp differentiation of function is necessary, without abandoning either of two essential attitudes of the human mind” (116).45 He also takes issue with Webb’s criticism of the French sociologist Émile Durkheim, who held a positivistic view of religious belief. While Eliot is willing to allow for what he calls “the rights of ‘individual’ religion,” he does “not sympathise with [Webb’s] demand for the personality of God nor with his demand for individual immortality.” All in all, the review is clearly written from the atheistic perspective of Humanism. Eliot also reviewed Religion and Science: A Philosophical Essay by John Theodore Merz in the same number of International Journal of Ethics. Judging from Eliot’s account, Merz offers an idealistic treatment of the issue of religion versus science, drawing on both Bergson and Bradley. According to Eliot, for Merz personality “is that which is most real,” and Merz believes that the “highest experience which we can have is the feeling of absolute dependence ... which we trace to the influence of a Higher Power.” Perhaps Eliot’s most damning comment is that Merz’s views constitute “a form of anti-intellectualism which suggests Bergson.” He concludes the brief review dismissively: “The phrases ‘stream of thought’ and ‘firmament of consciousness’ recur many times. Those who feel that not only their own creed but religion itself stands in need of defence should not neglect the aid which this

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book offers them(IJE 27 [October 1916] 126). For those of us accustomed to Eliot’s later dismissal of Humanist arguments, it is difficult to recognize the same man in these remarks. Another of Eliot’s brief reviews in the October number of the International Journal of Ethics is of Emile Boutroux’s Philosophy and War – a very topical issue in 1916 (IJE 27 [October 1916] 128). Eliot complains that Boutroux buries a criticism of German philosophy – which Eliot thinks is justified – “in a volume of commonplace patriotism.” Nonetheless he agrees that Boutroux makes “a few critical reflections upon German philosophy which should have been made long ago.” Among them, he says, is “the lack of humanism in German scholarship.” However, it seems that Eliot does not have Humanism in mind, for he elaborates: German scholarhip’s “aim is specialisation, laborious precision of detail, research jobbed out among a swarm of students – and nowhere the synthesis of a controlling mind.” He paraphrases with approval Boutroux’s assertion that,”The pure intellect, dedicated to abstractions, becomes sophistical and immoral; the pure will ‘takes itself as an end, and wills simply in order to will.’” “Such,” Eliot continues, “is the fatality of monism.” Then he asserts – presumably still paraphrasing Boutroux: “In the philosophy of Aristotle, on the other hand, we find a god who is intelligence and goodness, apart from whom is material force which he permeates with desire and thought.” Aristotelian dualism, of course, has been the rock bed of Christian theology since St Thomas Aquinas. That Eliot finds all that Boutroux says on German philosophy “admirable” reflects his apostasy from the monism of Bradley, more than any attraction to Christian theology. Eliot’s review of Mens Creatrix by William Temple and Religion and Philosophy by R.G. Collingwood in the July 1917 issue of the International Journal of Ethics is quite substantial, and reveals a thoroughly Humanist rejection of religious belief. Temple was one of those admirers of Bradley who expected that his idealism would culminate in the validation of Christianity. The publication of Appearance and Reality, the work Eliot studied in his dissertation, dashed those hopes. Temple’s book is an attempt to “complete” Bradley’s philosophy by arguing that it should culminate in Anglican Christianity. His arguments sound very like those Eliot will make as an Anglican apologist, but in 1917 Eliot rejects them: “There is much that is suggestive, and even cogent, in the course of the argument. But to agree with the author we must not only concede that “Intellect and Imagination, Science and Art, would reach their culmination in the apprehension and contemplation of the

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supreme principle of the universe adequately embodied and incarnate,” but that this culmination is found in Christianity. And might it not be maintained that religion, however poor our lives would be without it, is only one form of satisfaction among others, rather than the culminating satisfaction of all satisfactions?” (542–3. My emphasis). The italicized remark would seem to endorse participation in religious ritual even in the absence of belief. Both Matthew Arnold and Herbert Spencer attended Anglican service despite their agnosticism, and they were castigated for such a hypocritical and “weakling” practice by J.M. Robertson46 – whose views Eliot admired. In effect the practice aestheticized religious ritual. Maurras, also, recommended church attendance – even for atheists like himself. That Eliot should consider religion “one form of satisfaction” reflects the therapeutic view of religion held by many Humanists and roundly condemned by the Anglican Eliot. Collingwood’s Religion and Philosophy, the second book Eliot reviewed in the July issue, belongs to the effort, quite widespread at the time among Christian thinkers, to preserve Christianity by “demythologizing” it. That is not how Eliot sees it, however. He considers Collingwood’s project to be much the same as Temple’s: “Mr. Collingwood has conceived a task very similar to that of Mr. Temple (“Mens Creatrix”) – the necessary completion of philosophy in religion.” But Temple argued that philosophy is fulfilled in religion; Collingwood’s preface declares that his intention is to demonstrate that Christianity – whether defensible on historical grounds or not – contains a philosophy that can be defended on rational grounds: “This book is the result of an attempt to treat the Christian creed not as dogma but as a critical solution of a philosophical problem. Christianity, in other words, is approached as a philosophy, and its various doctrines are regarded as varying aspects of a single idea which, according to the language in which it is expressed, may be called a metaphysic, an ethic, or a theology” (Collingwood xiii). Nevertheless, Collingwood insists on the actuality of Christ as a historical personage: The whole value of an example is lost unless it is historical ... if the life of Jesus is a myth, it is more preposterous to ask a man to imitate it than to ask him to imitate Herakles. Any valid command must guarantee the possibility of carrying it out; and the historical life of Jesus is the guarantee that man can be perfect if he will. Further, in that perfection, or the struggle towards it, the religious man somehow feels that he is in personal touch with a risen

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Christ. We do not at present demand an explanation of this feeling, or ask whether there is a real intercourse; it is enough that the feeling exists and is an integral part of the Christian consciousness. The presence of Christ is as real to the believer as the love of God. But it can hardly be real if Christ is a myth. ... The belief that Christ really lived, whether it is true or false, colours the whole consciousness of the believer. (53–4) If Eliot had been leaning toward Anglicanism at the time of the review, one would expect him to have found Collingwood’s argument attractive, but he rejects Collingwood’s insistence on the historicity of Christ: “It is true that history and philosophy, as Mr. Collingwood contends, are interdependent. But philosophy depends upon the whole course of history, not upon any particular signal and unique fact; and its freedom of interpretation is limited only by its obligation to exclude nothing” (543). Rather revealingly, Eliot seizes on a particularly “difficult” component of the Christian story as one that Collingwood cannot get around: “Religion ... or at least the Christian religion, depends upon one important fact. Philosophy may show, if it can, the meaning of the statement that Jesus was the son of God. But Christianity – orthodox Christianity – must base itself upon a unique fact: that Jesus was born of a virgin: a proposition which is either true or false, its terms having a fixed meaning. It seems therefore insufficient to claim, what seems to be the extent of Mr. Collingwood’s historical demands, that Jesus was an historical person” (543). Although Collingwood spends considerable time defending the doctrine of incarnation, he is entirely silent on the question of the virgin birth. That Eliot should choose to attack an inessential and “difficult” feature of Christian belief – moreover, one that Collingwood does not defend – once again reflects his Humanist bias. Near the end of the review Eliot mocks Collingwood’s defence of Christianity against the charge that it cannot account for the existence of evil. He takes Collingwood to task for the following remarks: “The perfection of the universe depends on its being a totality; and, as we have already said, it is only a totality in posse, not a totality in esse. The non-existence of evil, its destruction by goodness, is neither an accomplished fact nor an automatic and inevitable conclusion. It is a process, and yet not a process if that means something never actually fulfilled; rather an activity, a process like that of seeing or thinking, which is complete at every moment and is not a sum of successive

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states (Religion and Philosophy 142). Although Collingwood’s position here is consistent with Bradley as well as with Anglicanism – not to mention “Burnt Norton” – Eliot mocks it: “Mr. Collingwood admits that the universe is a totality only in posse. One is tempted to ask whether the omnipotence and absolute good will of God are also in posse.” The suggestion that the “absolute good will of God” exists only in posse – that is, is potential rather than actual – is certainly one that a believing Christian could make – as, indeed Collingwood does. After all, he is discussing the undeniable existence of evil in the world, and is disinclined to deploy a Manichean postulate of an evil Demiurge opposing God’s will. Of course, from a logical perspective, one cannot have an omnipotent and benevolent deity while at the same time admitting limitations to his omnipotence and benevolence – an admission that the existence of evil seems to require. Collingwood attempts to finesse this problem by deploying the same argument that Bradley uses: God’s omnipotence and benevolence will be fully manifest only in the fullness of time, hence they are in posse. But the Humanist Eliot is not persuaded. These reviews indicate at the very least that Eliot had not yet settled on any form of belief, but was still a relativist – as he had confided to Norbert Wiener. However the necessity to choose – as a newly married man – between an academic career and an uncertain life as a poet must have been more compelling for him in 1917 and 1918 than even philosophical or religious issues. In retrospect, Eliot recalled that it was his meeting with Ezra Pound in 1914 that convinced him to abandon an academic career for the life of a poet and public intellectual (Letters xvi). However, the commitment he made to Professor J.H. Woods in 1915 that he would return to Harvard to take up a teaching position and complete his degree belies that recollection. Pound’s help and encouragement were doubtless important factors in Eliot’s decision to risk a literary career, but they did not precipitate it. Russell, on the other hand, took a direct hand in Eliot’s change of plans. He cabled Eliot’s father in support of his decision not to return to Boston to defend his thesis, a decision that pretty well put paid to the possibility of an academic career.47 Another important factor must have been Vivien’s refusal to cross the Atlantic in wartime when passenger ships as well as freighters were being sunk by the Kaiser’s U-boats. In any case, Eliot’s decision to abandon an academic career preceded the availabil-

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ity of any alternative remunerative career other than the rather unsatisfactory one he had begun at Lloyds bank. Another published item of this period which bears on Eliot’s philosophical position as well as his relation with Russell is Part I of “Eeldrop and Appleplex.” It appeared in the May 1917 issue of the Little Review. Eeldrop – described as “a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism” – is surely Eliot’s alter ego, and Appleplex – described as “ a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism”– can be none other than Russell.48 To further support this identification we are also told “that Eeldrop was learned in theology and that Appleplex studied the physical and biological sciences.” This work might be read in place of Eliot’s lost response to Principles of Social Reconstruction, a series of lectures (discussed below) which Russell gave in January, February, and March of 1916. At the time Eliot was writing Part I of “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” Russell was serving a six-month sentence for sedition, and Eliot visited him at least once during that period. It seems reasonable to assume that Eliot was cogitating his disagreement with Russell’s theories in Principles of Social Reconstruction, and was at the same time feeling some sympathy for his friend’s plight. It would appear that Eliot had in mind a satirical narrative along the lines of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet, whose eponymous protagonists engaged in an undisciplined pursuit of scientific learning. Certainly that was Pound’s view. In a letter to Eliot he expressed puzzlement that Eliot was unwilling to republish the dialogues, remarking that the “letch toward Bouvard and Pecuchet in 1917 was of interest,” and adding: “Your best way to wipe out whatever the hell it is you object to in the dialogs wd. be to revise ’em” (24 November [1939] Beinecke). Flaubert’s objective had been to ridicule the nineteenth-century faith that science would provide cures for society’s ills. In Eliot’s case, it would seem to be Russell’s social and political theories that are targeted – at least in the first episode. Unlike the inseparable Bouvard and Pécuchet, Eeldrop and Appleplex met only occasionally. They rented rooms in a disreputable part of town so as to observe the denizens of that neighbourhood in a spirit of sociological research. Although the second instalment was promised for the following June issue, it did not appear until September and was of a very different character than the first. Eliot assigns the two contrasting men a common motive, which he places in quotation marks: “to apprehend the human soul in its concrete

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individuality” (8). In pursuit of that goal they observe the behaviour of their neighbours and acquaintances: “Appleplex entered the results of his inquiries into large note-books, filed according to the nature of the case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen [sic]).” Eeldrop, in contrast, only “smoked reflectively” (8). He denies the possibility of generalizing from particular cases: “Any vital truth is incapable of being applied to another case: the essential is unique” (8–9). Such an observation fits Russell’s atomic theory of meaning based on the denial of universals, indicating that Eeldrop has some affinity with Russellian doctrine. Eeldrop, however, continues in a vein more suitable to Eliot: “Perhaps that is why it [the vital truth] is so neglected: because it is useless. What we learned about that Spaniard is incapable of being applied to any other Spaniard, or even recalled in words.” This pessimistic and sceptical conclusion prompts nostalgia for “Bishop’s books”: “With the decline of orthodox theology and its admirable theory of the soul,” Eeldrop continues, “the unique importance of events has vanished” – a remark that calls to mind Eliot’s assertion, in his 1948 talk at Magdalene College, that his observation “of the futility of nonChristian lives” played a part in his conversion to Anglicanism. In such a world, Eeldrop continues, a “man is only important as he is classed. Hence there is no tragedy, or no appreciation of tragedy, which is the same thing.” The friends establish themselves across the street from a police station, the better to observe the dregs of society. Eeldrop notes that “whenever a malefactor was apprehended, a wave of excitement curled into the street and broke upon the doors of the police station” (8). They find that the crowd was driven by morbid curiosity more than by concern for the victim: “For the man’s neighbours the important fact is what the man killed her with? And at precisely what time? And who found the body?” (9). The concerns of the more respectable members of the public who look for sociological explanations of crime are similarly denounced: “For the ‘enlightened public’ the case is merely evidence for the Drink question, or Unemployment, or some other category of things to be reformed” (9). The narrator believes that such generalizations suck the passion and meaning out of human affairs: “The awful importance of the ruin of a life is overlooked.” Eeldrop’s view that the mediaeval world’s insistence “on the eternity of punishment, expressed something nearer the truth” (9) is close to that of the Anglican Eliot still some years in the future.

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To the extent that Eeldrop is Eliot’s alter ego, this remark would seem to support the notion that he was at this date (April or May 1917) beginning to abandon a Humanist ethic in favour of a religious one. Appleplex, does not disagree with these observations. He reinforces the principle that generalizations are nugatory. “We could,” he says, “if we liked, make excellent comment upon the nature of provincial Spaniards, or of destitution (as misery is called by the philanthropists), of homes for working girls. But such is not our intention. We aim at experience in the particular centres in which alone it is evil. We avoid classification. We do not deny it. But when a man is classified something is lost” (10. My emphasis).49 Eeldrop enthusiastically agrees, observing that most men have no real sense of identity except as “government officials, or pillars of the church, or trade unionists, or poets, or unemployed.” In such a case, Appleplex opines that we must have a “philosophy,” and says that Mrs Howexden has recommended Bergson to him – admittedly not a very Russellian posture. Eeldrop, reflecting the apostate Eliot’s animus, demurs, proposing instead a relativism compatible with Eliot’s dissertation: “Our philosophy is quite irrelevant. The essential is, that our philosophy should spring from our point of view and not return upon itself to explain our point of view” (10). (This sounds remarkably like the existential principle of authenticity, and very unlike the Anglican Eliot.) It would seem, then, that Eliot had not yet embraced religion in early 1917, but was still attempting to articulate a secular, Humanist ethic without the firm foundation of a “grand narrative,” as we would say today. When Appleplex attempts a rejoinder, saying “At least we are...” he is cut off by Eeldrop, who supplies the continuation “individualists,” and then rejects it, along with another label, “anti-intellectuals” (10). “These also are labels,” he says, and continues: “The ‘individualist’ is a member of a mob as fully as any other man: and the mob of individualists is the most unpleasing, because it has the least character. Nietzsche was a mob-man, just as Bergson is an intellectualist. We cannot escape the label, but let it be one which carries no distinction, and arouses no self-consciousness. Sufficient that we should find simple labels, and not further exploit them” (10–11). Rather unexpectedly, Eeldrop confesses, in a coda to this remark, that (like Eliot) he is a bank clerk, and Appleplex provides the additional information that (unlike Eliot) Eeldrop has “a wife, three children, and a vegetable garden in a suburb,” information that Eeldrop confirms as “precisely the case,” adding

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that he will return to his suburb and spend “tomorrow in the garden” (11). Appleplex, for his part, says he will call on Mrs Howexden. The first instalment thus ends ambivalently, with the interlocutors scornful of the mundane, conventional lives they are doomed to live but unable to rise above them to some grander purpose. At this date the relationship between Vivien and Russell was undergoing strain because of Russell’s affair with the actress Constance Malleson. In January of 1917 Russell had told Vivien that he would not be seeing her anymore. However, by October he had broken up with Malleson, and had resumed his relationship with Vivien (Monk, Spirit 482–90). Although we do not know how much Eliot knew about these developments, he cannot have been unaware of strains in their relationship with Russell, even if he remained blind to their cause. He probably knew of Russell’s affair with Constance Malleson, who is perhaps represented in “Eeldrop and Appleplex” by Mrs Howexden. As mentioned, the second instalment of “Eeldrop and Appleplex” did not appear in June as promised but in September. The delay was probably a consequence of Eliot’s heavy workload at the time and his preoccupation with the need to formalize his military status after the United States declared war on Germany and Austria on 6 April 1917. Part ii is very different in nature, being primarily a ridicule of contemporary feminists through the composite figure Scheherezade/Edith. Dora Marsden, the co-editor of the Egoist, is a probable target, though no one is unambiguously identifiable.50 In a letter to Pound written just prior to sending Part ii to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Eliot described the piece as “Eeldrop on the feminisation of modern society” (Letters 198). As well as being a feminist, Edith is portrayed as an aesthete, an anarchist (as Marsden was), and a sexual adventuress (as she was not). The philosophical debate between Eeldrop and Appleplex is not continued in Part ii, and Eliot abandoned the proposed series. Writing to John Quinn in 1919 on the contents of the forthcoming Sacred Wood, Eliot said that he would prefer to withdraw “Eeldrop and Appleplex” if there were enough material to fill a volume without them (9 July 1919. Letters 313). It was not included. Whenever their republication was later proposed, he adamantly refused. When Pound suggested including the two pieces in an anthology he was planning in 1935, Eliot replied: “They will only be republished podesta [his nickname for Pound] literally over my Dead body” (13 August 1935. Beinecke). When the issue came up again, nearly thirty years later, he was less forceful, but still refused to have them republished, telling Herbert

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Read: “I remain of the impression that this is a callow piece of writing which I did not wish to revive” (1 August 1963. University of Victoria). As Eliot’s only attempt to write prose narrative, they are admittedly of only marginal interest, but Part I offers a snapshot of his developing philosophical or ideological posture and its relation to Russell’s in 1917. Part ii is of less interest and can only reinforce the allegation of misogyny that is frequently levelled against Eliot. The American declaration of war on Germany and Austria distracted Eliot from philosophical and poetic endeavours, forcing him to concentrate on career issues. From April, 1917 until the end of the war he was preoccupied with the effort to secure a commission in one of the American armed forces – especially one that would keep him out of the trenches. He told Mrs Gardner in November of 1918 that it had been “the most terribly exhausting year I have ever known.” In addition to Vivien’s chronic illness and their financial uncertainty, he faced the prospect of being called up.51 After great effort he thought that he had secured a position with the navy, and accordingly resigned his position at the bank, but the navy commission fell through (Letters 250–2). Much to his relief the bank took him back. In any event, the armistice was signed four days after his letter to Mrs Gardner. The years 1914 to 1919 had seen Eliot achieve considerable prominence as a poet. Although his great fame was still ahead of him, the die had been cast: he would be a poet not a professor. However, he had still not settled on a philosophy of life or creed. The Humanism that he found in Russell had drawn him away from Bradley, but it was not to hold him. Initially he turned away from Russell’s Humanism – as he had from Bergson and then Bradley – and toward the more political Humanism of Maurras and the Action Française. His wellknown debates with Middleton Murry, Ramon Fernandez, and Irving Babbitt – Humanists all – were still ten years in the future, as was his baptism. One may well argue that, had not Russell’s betrayal of trust turned Eliot away from a “faith” that was too much like the unsatisfactory Unitarianism in which he had grown up, something else would have done. I would not dispute such a claim. The papal condemnation of Maurras was doubtless “something else.” Without that shock Eliot may well have persisted in uncertainty for several more years – or perhaps forever – but then, we would have lost much splendid poetry and some commendable plays. One of the inadequacies of Humanism in Eliot’s view was its feeble sense of evil – as his review of Collingwood demonstrated. Humanism’s

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only ethical principle is “do no harm.” Eliot’s experience – and perhaps his temperament – led him to require some place for evil in his belief system. For his friend Ezra Pound – as for Stevens – beauty justified belief in a transcendent realm. But for Eliot the existence of sin and evil required such a belief. Although Lyndall Gordon argues that Eliot’s lively sense of evil was present at an early age, we cannot dismiss the relevance of the extraordinarily painful experience of Vivien’s adultery with Russell in reinforcing that sentiment. Despite the criticism recently levelled at Eliot as a husband, he was dutiful and considerate in the early years of their marriage, whatever his failings as a lover may have been. His cold behaviour in “abandoning” Vivien in 1932 after twenty-two years of marriage should not be projected back to 1915 or 1916. He then regarded his marriage as a love match, and – if his letters are to be believed – laboured mightily to make it work, apparently unaware of Russell’s duplicity and Vivien’s “fall.”52 Eliot may well have been speaking of himself at this stage of his development when he described the nihilism of Valéry in his 1943 memorial essay on the French poet: The constructive philosopher must have a religious faith, or some substitute for a religious faith; and generally he is only able to construct, because of his ability to blind himself to other points of view, or to remain unconscious of the emotive causes which attach him to his particular system. Valéry was much too conscious to be able to philosophise in this way; and so his “philosophy” lays itself open to the accusation of being only an elaborate game. Precisely, but to be able to play this game, to be able to take aesthetic delight in it, is one of the manifestations of civilised man. There is only one higher stage possible for civilised man: and that is to unite the profoundest scepticism with the deepest faith. But Valéry was not Pascal, and we have no right to ask that of him. His was, I think, a profoundly destructive mind, even nihilistic ... The agony of creation, for a mind like Valéry’s, must be very great (“Leçon de Valéry” 76. Eliot’s emphasis). The Eliot of 1915 to 1919, like Valéry, did not have “a religious faith,” and was studying to become an academic philosopher. Events suggest that Eliot was unable to “blind himself to other points of view, or to remain unconscious of the emotive causes which attach[ed] him to his particular system.” He was unable or unwilling to “play” with ideas in a Nietzschean or postmodern manner as he thought Valéry did, and as

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Richard Rorty believes is the practice of the literary critic.53 Had he given the matter much thought, on these grounds Eliot would surely have put Stevens’ poetry in the same camp as Valéry’s. It may be a stretch to characterize Eliot as nihilistic – even in 1918 – but such poems as “The Hippopotamus,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and The Waste Land fail to reveal any solid moral or religious ground for the reader to stand on. One could say of them what Eliot said of Donne’s poetry in his 1927 lecture “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”: The problem of belief is very complicated and probably quite insoluble ... In making some very common-place investigations of the “thought” of Donne, I found it quite impossible to come to the conclusion that Donne believed anything. It seemed as if, at that time, the world was filled with broken fragments of systems, and that a man like Donne merely picked up, like a magpie, various shining fragments of ideas as they struck his eye, and stuck them about here and there in his verse ... [I find in Donne] only a vast jumble of incoherent erudition on which he drew for purely poetic effects. (Selected Essays 138–9. My emphasis) This assessment of Donne in 1927 strikes much the same note as his assessment of Valéry sixteen years later. Eliot was not content – as Pound was – to pick up “various shining fragments of ideas” and stick “them about here and there in his verse.” But the state of belief – if that is the right label – evoked in The Waste Land six years earlier is similarly fragmented, closing as it does with the line: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” And, of course, its unsympathetic readers found it to be “a vast jumble of incoherent erudition.” In short, Eliot saw a parallel between Donne’s period, marked by the cultural disintegration that the Reformation represented, and the twentieth century, in which the integrity of Christianity – indeed of any religious belief – was challenged, if not destroyed. And Eliot believed that the fact that the disintegration of faith was accompanied in both periods by violent political and military turmoil was no coincidence. When writing “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” Eliot may well have had Russell in mind as a master of “the subtle school.” As already mentioned, early in 1917 Eliot had written an essay in response to the series of eight weekly lectures that Russell gave from January to March

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1916. In the opinion of Russell’s biographer, Ray Monk, they “constitute one of Russell’s most original and enduring contributions to social and political thought” (1996 446). Eliot sent the essay to Russell and thanked him (in a letter of 13 March 1917) for having read it so promptly (Letters 162). Though Eliot’s critique has not survived, it is clear from this letter, and from another of 23 March, that Eliot disagreed with the position Russell adopted in the lectures. Apparently he was unable to articulate his criticism to his own satisfaction, and consigned the essay to a drawer from which it never has emerged. While we cannot say with confidence just what it was that Eliot objected to, he did tell Russell that his “chief objection is to the passage on p.165.” Valerie Eliot thinks the passage in question is the one in which Russell celebrates the anarchic, subversive, and transgressive nature of free philosophical speculation and concludes very much in the spirit of “The Free Man’s Worship” (Letters 162): “It [free speculation] sees man, a feeble speck, surrounded by unfathomable depths of silence: yet it bears itself proudly, as unmoved as if it were lord of the universe. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man” (165). It is by no means implausible to suppose that this is the passage in question, since Eliot recurrently shied away from such Stoic chest thumping, an attitude he characterized as “cheering onself up” in “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (Selected Essays 132). However, that talk was given almost exactly ten years later than his initial response to Principles of Social Reconstruction and after Eliot had decided to join the Anglican communion – though he was not baptized until the following June. I think, however, that Eliot may have taken exception to the previous paragraph, which begins on page 164 and runs on to 165, rather than the passage that Valerie Eliot cites: “The same love of adventure which takes men to the South Pole, the same passion for a conclusive trial of strength which leads some men to welcome war, can find in creative thought an outlet which is neither wasteful nor cruel, but increases the dignity of man by incarnating in life some of that shining splendour which the human spirit is bringing down out of the unknown. To give this joy, in a greater or less measure, to all who are capable of it, is the supreme end for which the education of the mind is to be valued” (164–5. My emphasis). In these remarks, Russell is elaborating the pacifist argument that forms the core of Principles of Social Reconstruction. His hope is to redirect some of the energy and passion that mankind has spent wastefully and harmfully in military conquest toward more socially redeeming behav-

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iour. But the passage is also a triumphalist celebration of the unaided capabilities of the human mind; in other words, it is a Humanist exhortation for man to pull himself up by his own bootstraps. As we have already seen, this is an attitude that Eliot comes to find offensive. Russell can be seen as committing the Faustian and Satanic sin of claiming the divine prerogative of autonomous knowledge for the merely mortal. In short, it is the sin of pride, a sin against which Eliot railed in his December 1927 Times Literary Supplement review of a reprint of Bradley’s Ethical Studies – written shortly after his baptism on 29 June of that year. There he cites with approval a passage from Ethical Studies to the effect that the human can never be the coeval of the divine; hence submission to the divine will is the only possibility. And he insists on the difference between Bradley’s sense of the suprapersonal and Arnold’s: “The words cannot be interpreted in the sense of Arnold. The distinction is not between a ‘private self’ and a ‘public self,’ it is between the individual as himself and no more, a mere numbered atom, and the individual in communion with God. The distinction is clearly drawn between man’s ‘mere will’ and ‘the will of the Divine’” (Selected Essays 452–3). If it was Russell’s Humanist celebration of the unaided capabilities of the human mind in Principles of Social Reconstruction that offended Eliot, in March of 1917 – by his own admission – he was not yet able to articulate a reasoned response, judging his critique of Russell’s lectures to be “too scattered and incoherent.” It seems appropriate to infer that he was not yet ready to embrace a faith based on belief in a supernatural realm and an omnipotent God, though he was beginning to distance himself from Russell’s Humanism. The hypothesis that Eliot’s belief system was still in flux is supported by another letter in which he thanked Russell for supportive comments on his article: “I think what I have said is in appearance too negative and perhaps looks obscurantist.” He apparently contemplated a distinct essay discussing authority and reverence – concepts to which Russell assigned great importance in his lectures. Eliot added: “I am convinced that there is something beneath Authority in its historical forms which needs to be asserted clearly without reasserting impossible forms of political and religious organisation which have become impossible.” The redundant recurrence of “impossible” in this sentence is testimony to Eliot’s distraction at the time, a distraction to which the next sentence alludes: “But this is a task which needs impulse and hope, and without more peace of mind and contentedness, better nerves and

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more conviction in regard to my future, I do not feel capable of satisfying myself” (Letters 163). Russell introduced “Authority” and “Reverence” in his discussion of education. In previous chapters he had portrayed authority as a residue of the claims that kings and popes had historically made to an authority descending from God: “All our institutions have their historic basis in Authority. The unquestioned authority of the Oriental despot found its religious expression in the omnipotent Creator, whose glory was the sole end of man, and against whom man had no rights. This authority descended to the Emperor and the Pope, to the kings of the Middle Ages, to the nobles in the feudal hierarchy, and even to every husband and father in his dealings with his wife and children” (27). Against authority, Russell places the principle of liberty, although he is perfectly aware that there must be some constraints on liberty. Part of the task of Principles of Social Reconstruction was to identify what those constraints might be. He concedes that “authority in education is to some extent unavoidable, and those who educate have to find a way of exercising authority in accordance with the spirit of liberty.” One means of mitigating the negative consequences of the assertion of authority is what he calls “reverence” (146). In the first of his letters to Russell on the lecture series, Eliot complained about this idea: “I made no positive objection to the principle of ‘reverence’ – it merely seems to me inadequate” (Letters 162). The reverence Russell has in mind is not for divinity, nor is it a pupil’s deference toward a teacher, but rather the teacher’s respect for the child’s autonomy: “The man who has reverence will not think it his duty to ‘mould’ the young. He feels in all that lives, but especially in human beings, and most of all in children, something sacred, indefinable, unlimited, something individual and strangely precious, the growing principle of life, an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world. In the presence of a child he feels an unaccountable humility – a humility not easily defensible on any rational ground, and yet somehow nearer to wisdom than the easy self-confidence of many parents and teachers” (147). It is difficult to discern in what respect Eliot found this idea inadequate. Certainly teachers should respect the children in their care, but to ask teachers to “revere” their pupils because they “embodied fragment of the dumb striving of the world” perhaps struck Eliot as a kind of Bergsonian reverence for the immanent élan vital – a reverence he had belittled as “a rather weakling mysticism” in a graduate paper (cited in Childs, 1997 113).

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Although Eliot does not refer to Russell’s application of the principle of reverence to the institution of marriage, it is not improbable that Eliot’s troubled marriage (and Russell’s role in it) coloured his response to the following assessment from Principles of Social Reconstruction: “A man and woman with reverence for the spirit of life in each other, with an equal sense of their own unimportance beside the whole life of man, may become comrades without interference with liberty, and may achieve the union of instinct without doing violence to the life of mind and spirit. As religion dominated the old form of marriage, so religion must dominate the new. But it must be a new religion based upon liberty, justice, and love, not upon authority and law and hellfire” (191). That Eliot was already troubled by his marriage, and had spoken to Russell about it, is attested to by a letter of 1925, in which Eliot alludes to such a conversation they had had ten years previously: “Everything has turned out as you predicted 10 years ago. You are a great psychologist” (cited in Monk, Ghost 84). Since Eliot had Vivien committed to a sanatorium near Watford in October of the year of the letter so that he could spend some time alone to write his Clark Lectures (Seymour-Jones 420), it is reasonable to assume that the prediction to which Eliot alluded was that Vivien’s ill health would eventually turn to some sort of mental deterioration. The general aim of Principles of Social Reconstruction was “to suggest a philosophy of politics based upon the belief that impulse has more effect than conscious purpose in moulding men’s lives.” Russell was led to such a view by his reading in behaviourism, and he later found further confirmation in Freudian psychology (Monk, Spirit 535–6). Then, as later, Eliot was unimpressed with behaviourism. Two years later – while Russell was delivering his lectures The Philosophy of Logical Atomism – Eliot apologized for being unable to attend, and added: “Demos [Raphael Demos, a student of Russell’s] told me that he had been giving you bibliography on behaviourism. I am not convinced that Watson and those people are really very important.” Nonetheless, Eliot thought that “the avenue of investigation” Russell had suggested to him “in a conversation a few weeks ago impressed me very deeply, and I hope you will go in for it very hard. It struck me as important as anything to be done; besides, it would be very amusing to stand the biological sciences on their heads that way” (13 April 1918. Letters 229). He was presumably speaking about the content of Russell’s lectures on “logical atomism,” lectures that evince the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein on Russell’s thought. Russell’s logical atomism would

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“stand the biological sciences on their head” by requiring a language that had a unique term for each particular in the world. Such a requirement would render the materialist arguments of behaviourism otiose (Monk, Spirit 516–19). Although Eliot’s objection to Principles of Social Reconstruction can be seen as evidence of the persistence of the philosophical posture he occupied in 1914, when Eliot began his Bradley studies, it does not represent a clear break with Russell’s Humanism. It merely indicates a continuing resistance to his gradual movement toward Humanism that had begun in 1915. Certainly Eliot continued to be on good terms with Russell, reviewing his Mysticism and Logic favourably in March 1918. Russell, for his part, had hoped to spend the summer of 1918 at Marlow Cottage, which he and the Eliots had jointly rented. However, that plan came to nought as a consequence of Russell’s conviction under the Defence of the Realm Act, which led to his six-month prison sentence (Monk, Spirit 519–20). We have no clear evidence of when – if ever – Eliot became fully aware of Russell’s betrayal of his trust with Vivien. He may have learned of it by the middle of 1917.54 Vivien may well have confessed something of it, after Russell told her he would be no longer be seeing her, something he did twice: first in November of 1916, and again on 3 January 1917 (Monk, Spirit 483, 490). Russell had found a new lover in the aristocrat Constance Malleson (her stage name was Colette O’Neil). Although he did return to Vivien briefly, when he quarrelled with Colette, Vivien must have believed that her relation with Russell was at an end by January of 1917. But if she said anything to Eliot, no record of it has appeared. In any event there was no evident breach between Russell and Eliot at this time; and Eliot’s letters to Russell give no hint that he was aware of the affair. What is clear is that the intimacy that had existed between the Eliots and Russell, beginning with their sharing of Russell’s Bury Street flat in late1915, ended in 1919. Although Eliot remained extremely circumspect on the matter, he did suggest, many years later in “Thoughts after Lambeth” (1933), that Russell’s ethical principles could not guarantee good behaviour: “Were my religion that of Mr. Russell, my views of conduct would very likely be his also” (Selected Essays 367). And in the memoir that Valerie Eliot printed at the beginning of her edition of Letters, he attributes the state of mind that produced The Waste Land to his marriage: “To her the marriage brought no happiness ... to me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land” (Letters xvii). Rather quaintly, the specific

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harm Eliot mentions is the same that he identified in his letter to Ottoline Morrell cited above. It was that Russell “excited her mentally, made her read books and become a kind of pacifist.” But it is impossible to accept such a narrow reading either of The Waste Land or of Eliot’s wartime experiences. The “spectacle of Bertie” of which he complained to Ottoline Morrell can hardly be confined to his pacifism. It should not be forgotten that the whole affair took place during the horrors of the First War, and that Russell was a prominent anti-war activist. A letter Eliot wrote to his mother about the time of “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (23 June 1918) attests to the strain that the war put on Eliot along with his personal difficulties: “The strain of life is very great and I fear it will be for the rest of the lives of anyone now on earth. I am very pessimistic about the world we are going to have to live in after the war” (Letters 235). Early readers of The Waste Land found that pessimism expressed there.

ilemma in a Time of War

3 Writing Poetry in a Time of War

At the beginning of the previous chapter I postponed examination of Eliot’s and Stevens’ poetry of the First World War years until I had examined the evidence in Eliot’s prose and correspondence supporting my contention that in those years Eliot adopted – at least provisionally – a Humanist hostility toward religious belief. There was no necessity to demonstrate the same for Stevens, since it is widely assumed that his view of religion was essentially that of a Humanist – that religious beliefs are fantasies or fictions. In this chapter I examine the poems written and published by both poets before, during, and after the war years with two objectives in mind. First, I demonstrate that both men’s poetry exhibits the same Humanist bias toward religion – though Stevens’ ridicule is much gentler than Eliot’s. Second, I assess the degree to which the trauma of the First World War is reflected in their poetry. Since we have been discussing Eliot’s relationship with Bertrand Russell, it seems appropriate to begin with “Mr. Apollinax” – probably written some time in early 19161 – which looks back to a couple of social occasions of the previous year in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at which Eliot and Russell were both present. (It is generally accepted that Apollinax is a satirical portrait of Russell.) One took place at the mansion of the art collector Mrs Jack Gardner – at whose home Eliot first met Russell (Imperfect 29); another occurred at the home of a Harvard professor – either William Henry Schofield (Valerie Eliot’s choice) (Letters 483), or Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller (Lyndall Gordon’s choice) (Imperfect 29). Scofield, the much older man, seems a better candidate. And the flattering sketch of Fuller by Jean Verdenal in a letter to Eliot renders him a poor candidate for ridicule.

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Verdenal had met Fuller in Paris in 1912; he described him as “un homme charmant, bon garçon, aimable, très joyeux camarade avec tout le monde et plein d’anecdotes” [a charming man, a good guy, friendly, a cheerful companion to everyone, and full of yarns] (Letters 30).2 In the draft version of “Mr. Apollinax” it is clear that Eliot is recalling two separate incidents, for line 6 reads, “In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, again at Professor Channing-Cheetah’s” (March Hare 303). That sequence fits with Gordon’s view that Eliot first met Russell at the Gardner mansion. The speaker of the poem describes Apollinax in terms of pagan deities – the invented Fragilion, a “shy figure among the birch-trees,” the contrasting “Priapus in the shrubbery,” and “the old man of the seas” (Poseidon or Neptune). None of these allusive characterizations is flattering. In a rather surreal image (nearly a decade before the advent of Surrealism), Apollinax is said to laugh “like an irresponsible foetus”(a line Harriet Monroe suppressed when she published it in Poetry). But his laughter is also said to be “submarine and profound ... like the old man of the sea.” Then, as Neptune, Apollinax tranquilly watches “while the desperate bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence.” This image is so out of key with rest of the poem that one is tempted to seek some personal relevance. The most tempting is to read it as representing Russell’s detached observation of Eliot’s dysfunctional marriage, but the middle of 1916 is too early for such a reading. Another possibility is that Eliot has in mind the myriad deaths in the fields of France and Flanders – deaths that Russell was accused of dishonouring by his opposition to the war. Although it is impossible to be confident of a reading, one can note that images of drowning are recurrent in Eliot’s early poetry – “Prufrock” and The Waste Land being other instances. The next lines are also surreal, and puzzling. The speaker looks for the head of Apollinax “rolling under a chair / Or grinning over a screen / With seaweed in its hair.” The imagery of submarine existence is reminiscent of the closing lines of “Prufrock”: We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. The decollated Apollinax calls to mind John the Baptist – also invoked in “Prufrock.” But such “echoes” are of little hermeneutic value. All we are left with are macabre images of Apollinax. It would seem that we are

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to take them as humorous rather than as intended to induce fear and loathing. The images belong to the internal imagination of the monologuist, and are more indicative of his attitude to Apollinax/Russell, than of any features he actually possesses. One might interpret them as implying that Russell was seen as a disembodied intellect, but the next lines belie such a reading: I heard the beat of centaur’s hoofs over the soft turf As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon. Since centaurs are traditionally associated with lustful and boisterous behaviour, this allusion picks up the previous characterization of Apollinax as “Priapus in the shrubbery.” Perhaps it is relevant to recall that the centaur Chiron was mentor to many Greek heroes, including Heracles, Achilles, Jason, and Asclepias – as Russell was mentor to Eliot. What remains unclear is whether we are to be appalled or enchanted by Russell’s behaviour and manner. All that is certain is that Russell/ Apollinax is too strong for the Scofields. They are unable to understand either his “submarine and profound” laughter, or his “dry and passionate talk,” and what they do understand they disdain: ‘He is a charming man’ – ‘But after all what did he mean?’ – ‘His pointed ears.... He must be unbalanced.’ – ‘There was something he said that I might have challenged.’ The Harvard notables make very little impression on the monologuist: “Of dowager Mrs. Phlaccus,3 and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah / I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitten macaroon.” That the poem ends with ridicule of his Harvard hosts leaves the reader with the impression that it is they who are ridiculed rather than Russell. But in Ara Vos Prec, published in 1920 after the break with Russell, Eliot added an epigraph to “Mr. Apollinax” from the second century satirist, Lucian. Uncharacteristically Eliot gives no attribution: Ωηατ α νοϖελτψ! Βψ Ηερχυλεσ, Ωηατ α μαρϖελ. Α ρεσουρχεφυλ μαν. (“What a novelty! By Hercules, What a marvel.” “A resourceful man.”) It seems probable that the addition of these ironic remarks is an index of Eliot’s disenchantment with Russell by 1920 – implying that the disenchantment had not yet occurred in 1916 when the poem was written.

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The portrayal of Russell is at least ambivalent – although with the addition of the epigraph it becomes more clearly negative. The comparison of Apollinax to Priapus and a centaur stresses Russell’s physicality and sexuality – aspects of his personality that Eliot could hardly have observed at Harvard, but which he must have noticed during the ménage à trois in Russell’s Bury Street flat. He may have had another opportunity to observe Russell’s Priapic personality in January of 1916, when Russell treated Vivien to a holiday in Devon. Eliot stayed behind in Russell’s flat, later joining them for the weekend (Letters 117). There is no indication in the letters, however, that Eliot was disenchanted with Russell until much later. Perhaps he regarded Russell’s flirtatious ways with the tolerant bemusement of a twenty-eight-year-old for the erotic ambitions of a forty-four-year-old. Whatever Eliot thought of Russell’s social behaviour in those years, we have seen that he did share Russell’s Humanist antipathy for Christianity, and in the last two years of the war he published two poems in the Little Review satirizing Christianity, or at least Christian churches: “The Hippopotamus” (July 1917) and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (April 1918). In contrast to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” (examined below), which merely countenances apostasy, these poems ridicule religious worship. It is hard to see how they could be read in any other way than as condemnations of Christianity – at least as manifested in ecclesiastical institutions and practices of worship. “The Hippopotamus” is unambiguously a condemnation of the established church (whether Roman or Anglican) for its corruption by worldly concerns. The epigraph, “And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodicean,” tells us nothing unless we go to Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, from whose conclusion it is taken. Paul speaks to such corruption – though in the laity rather than the clergy (of course, there was not yet any clergy in Paul’s day): “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips” (Colossians 3: 5–8). Clearly, the author of “The Hippopotamus” does not believe that the church of his day has heeded Paul’s injunction.4 The contrast with Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” (published only nineteen months earlier) could hardly be stronger. Stevens indulges the

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woman’s shirking of church attendance, synecdochically described as “complacencies of the peignoir,” and poses the rhetorical question: Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? It is precisely these things that St Paul would deny the Colossians and Laodiceans if they are to gain the kingdom of heaven. Where “The Hippopotamus” castigates the Church for its failure to live up to a Pauline ethic, “Sunday Morning” meditates on the futility of such an ethic. It is true that Eliot’s ridicule of the church need not imply a disaffection with the doctrine for which it ostensibly stands. Believers frequently find fault with the institution of the church. But it is difficult to imagine a believer ridiculing Christ’s ascent in the portrait of the merely “flesh and blood” hippopotamus’ ascent. Although Eliot’s image owes more to painterly representations of Christ’s ascent than to any biblical passage, the parody cannot be mistaken: I saw the ’potamus take wing Ascending from the damp savannas, And quiring angels round him sing The praise of God, in loud hosannas. Christ’s ascent is much more modestly described in the Gospels. The most circumstantial of the three mentions is Acts 1: 9: “And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight.” It is usually assumed that Eliot’s choice of a hippopotamus as a figure for the hypocritical worshipper is an allusion to Théophile Gautier’s “Hippopotame,” which also mocks smug piety.5 After listing the hazards of the veldt to which the hippopotamus is indifferent because of his size and thick skin, Gautier’s poem concludes: Je suis comme l’hippopotame: De ma conviction couvert, Forte armure que rien n’entame, Je vais sans peur par le désert.

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[I am like the hippopotamus / Covered by my conviction / Strong armour that nothing can damage / I go in the desert without fear.] But the hippopotamus is hardly an appropriate vehicle for the closing image of a sort of Muslim paradise in which the hippo is surrounded by houris-like virgin martyrs: He shall be washed as white as snow, By all the martyr’d virgins kist, While the True Church remains below Wrapt in the old miasmal mist. It is not easy to construe the import of the “True Church’s” condition, “wrapt in the old miasmal mist.” Clearly the appellation “True Church” is ironic, but are we to understand “miasmal mist” as a condition of ignorance, apostasy, or corruption? The OED cites this line from “The Hippopotamus” as the last of three examples for “miasmal,” but its definition is not very helpful: “containing miasmal fluid or germs.” “Miasma” are defined as “noxious emanations.” If Eliot is using the term carefully – as is probable – then the “miasmal mist” would represent erroneous doctrines. On an orthodox view, the Church is “left below” to preach Christ’s gospel (the “good news”) through the apostles and their successors, the anointed bishops. To characterize the Church’s mission as “wrapt in the old miasmal mist” hardly suggests that the good news is to be believed. One can only construe the line to mean that superstition and intellectual darkness enfold the “True Church,” rather than the “good news” it is charged to preach. The fact that the ridicule of Christianity in this poem is not very sharply focused perhaps reflects Eliot’s ambivalence about his beliefs at that time. “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” is even more strongly anti-clerical. It was published in September of 1918, a little less than nine years before his baptism, and four years after his first exposure to Russell. It is probably one of the “several poems” that Eliot told his mother on 2 June 1918 he had written at Marlow House, a cottage the Eliots had leased in January 1918, sharing the expense with Russell (Letters 233). Although both of these poems are difficult to construe, “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” is perhaps the more difficult – a consequence either of a pompous display of learning or, as I think more likely, of a deliberate effort to mask its message.

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Beginning with “polyphyloprogenitive,” a word not listed in the OED, it proceeds with arcane allusions to obscure Christian doctrinal disputes of the third century ad. On etymological grounds, “polyphyloprogenitive” must mean “originating from several phyla or families,” that is to say, a hybrid.6 The epithet is free-floating, but since it is followed by “sapient sutlers of the Lord” who “drift across the window panes,” it is presumably they who are the hybrids – part secular, part divine, I suppose. The epithets characterize them as “wise provisioners to the Lord.” What they provide, of course, is souls. The first stanza ends with the opening words of the Gospel according to John: “In the beginning was the Word.” The same line is repeated as the first line of stanza two. The Word, of course, is Christ, the Logos. The second line of stanza two is “Superfetation of τσ ευ.” The Greek means “The One,” and “superfetation” means a second conception while the first embryo is still in the womb – a common occurrence among felines. “Superfetation of the One,” given its proximity to the in principio implies that Christ’s incarnation in Mary’s womb is somehow a secondary conception of the godhead. This must be so, for Mary’s pregnancy with Christ was not in “the beginning” in any obvious sense. So far, then, the poem appears to be mocking the logical inconsistencies, if not absurdities, of the Christian doctrine of Christ’s incarnation. Since Christ is the omnipotent, eternal deity, “The One,” he has existed always and cannot be supposed to have been born of Mary – except as a “superfetation.” The Christian “mystery” – that is a doctrine that defies reason – of the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost) is, by implication, also mocked. The introduction of “enervate Origen” in the second line reinforces such a reading. Origen was born in 185 and died in 254, not long after having been imprisoned and tortured during the persecutions of Decius. He remains to this day a controversial theologian, though recognized by Rome as a Greek Father of the Church. The particular doctrine relevant here is called “subordination of the Divine Persons,” that is to say, a ranking of the persons of the Trinity, with the Father taking precedence over the Son, and the Son taking precedence over the Paraclete or Holy Ghost. Such a view is heretical within the Roman Church. It is followed by a parallel principal clause: “And at the mensual turn of time / Produced enervate Origen.” Eliot had originally written “And at the menstrual turn of time / Produced the castrate Origen,” but Pound suggested revising it to the less gynecological “mensual” and the less explicit “enervate,” and that is how it now reads

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(March Hare 377–8). The tendency of Pound’s emendations is to make the issue of copulation and conception less explicit. The Catholic Encyclopaedia does not indicate that Origen was in fact a castrato, but there is a persistent tradition that he was. The poem then abandons Origen and theology for an examination of a fresco of the “Umbrian school,” a School much praised by the pre-Raphaelites. Its best known artists are Pinturrichio (1454–1513) and Pietro Perugino (1446–1523), both of whom painted a series of frescoes and panels of the life of Christ. Eliot might have seen Perugino’s “Baptism of Christ” in the Pinoteca, Bologna, during his tour of Italian galleries in the summer of 1911 (Gordon, Imperfect 90). It is a very good fit for the poem, although in the detail on the left only the Paraclete can be partially discerned at the top of the painting. There is no nimbus, but it does show both Christ and John’s feet in the water. Another version, in the National Gallery of Perugia, clearly shows the Paraclete, represented as a dove, and provides Christ with a nimbus, but there is no Father, and the feet are not immersed in water.7 A painter of the Umbrian school Designed upon a gesso ground The nimbus of the Baptized God. The wilderness is cracked and browned. But through the water pale and thin Still shine the unoffending feet And there above the painter set The Father and the Paraclete. Christ’s feet are “unoffending” because, unlike mere mortals, he did not carry the burden of original sin that baptism is intended to remove. Notice that Eliot’s “painting” includes the entire Trinity, picking up the Origenian controversy. It is difficult not to read the poem as a mockery of Trinitarian Christianity from the perspective of “The Free Man’s Worship.” Although it must be admitted that, having been raised a Unitarian, Eliot would have heard many sermons detailing the logical absurdities of Trinitarian Christianity long before he encountered Russell. After a break marked by suspension points, the poem returns to the representations of the clerics in the windows. They are now characterized as “sable presbyters,” and represented as if approaching “the avenue of penitence.” In other words, they are in Purgatory, “Where the

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souls of the devout / Burn invisible and dim.” Some of them are young, described (like the amorous clerk in The Waste Land ) as “red and pustular.” These young penitents clutch “piaculative pence,” that is, expiatory offerings – money to purchase pardons or indulgences. Once again the OED is not much help, since it lists only one instance of “piaculative” – its occurrence in this poem. The term “pence” would resonate with Protestant readers who would remember that “Peter’s Pence” (money collected from selling indulgences so as to finance the building of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome) was one of the targets of the ninety-five theses Martin Luther nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, leading to the Reformation. Eliot has the “presbyters” passing “through the gates of penitence,” which are “sustained by staring Seraphim.” They reach a place where “the souls of the devout / Burn invisible and dim.” The last line would remind most readers of Milton’s description of Hell as a place of “darkness visible.” No doubt aware of that echo, Eliot originally had a mock scholarly note in the typescript of the poem: “Vide Henry Vaughan, the Silurist from whom the author seems to have borrowed this line” (March Hare 377). Although the note did not make it into print, it is of some hermeneutic value. The Vaughan poem is “The Night,” a meditation on the afterlife. The lines in question are found in the last stanza, where the poet prays for union with God: There is in God (some say) A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here Say it is late and dusky, because they See not all clear; O for that night! where I in him Might live invisible and dim. Since the phrase is taken from a passage in which Vaughan longs for death, the allusion seems to emphasize the motif of life-denying ascetic Christianity, and also contributes to the poem’s ridicule of Christian fables of the afterlife and mystical revelations of its nature – albeit very obscurely.8 Eliot mentions Vaughan a number of times in his published prose, always characterizing him as a mystic. Although he did not consider Vaughan to be a poet of the first rank, he includes Vaughan in a comment on the prevalence of imagery of light and darkness among mystics: “One of the frequent characteristics of Christian mysticism has been a use of various imageries of light and darkness, sometimes indeed of

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a light which is at the same time darkness; such imagery is used by John of the Cross, perhaps the greatest psychologist of all European mystics; it is used by Meister Eckhart and the German mystics ... very often Vaughan’s are images of transient light” (Listener 2, 2 April 1930 590. My emphasis). However, the elided note can perhaps be dismissed as nothing more than a parody of a learned note – like Eliot’s mocking note to the lines, “But sound of water over a rock / Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees / Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” in the last section of The Waste Land: “This is Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii, the hermit- thrush which I have heard in Quebec Province. Chapman says (Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America) “it is most at home in secluded woodland and thickety retreats ... Its notes are not remarkable for variety or volume, but in purity and sweetness of tone and exquisite modulation they are unequalled.” Its “water-dripping song” is justly celebrated.” But even though the note on the hermit-thrush is unquestionably parodic, it is appended to a section of The Waste Land about which Eliot told Bertrand Russell: “It is not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole, at all. It means a great deal to me that you like it” (cited in Monk Ghost 27). In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot includes “the song of one bird” in the well-known list of “certain images” that “recur, charged with emotion” (178). It is as if he added the note to distract his readers from the strong cathexis which the lines have for him – whether of bird song or mystic union9 – with these parodic notes. The next scene sketched in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” moves outside – to the garden where sweet peas invite bees, who “With hairy bellies pass between / The staminate and pistillate.”10 Bees fertilize plants by carrying pollen from the stamen to the pistil, but – like the clergy – are themselves “celibate” as far as botanical reproduction is concerned. Indeed, worker bees are sexless, an aspect of bees invoked by the adjectival phrase, “Blest office of the epicene.” The evident parallel is to the role of the clergy in “blessing” sexual unions through the sacrament of marriage – a sacrament that Eliot and Vivien had avoided, choosing instead to be married by a Justice of the Peace. If the poem was written no earlier than the summer of 1918, as I am assuming, it may be that Eliot is musing on his own unhappy marriage as well as mocking the Christian clergy. The concluding stanza juxtaposes Sweeney in the bath with the theologians in the stained glass window:

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Sweeney shifts from ham to ham Stirring the water in his bath. The masters of the subtle schools Are controversial, polymath. Sweeney in the bath picks up Christ’s baptism in the river invoked earlier in the poem. And his unreflective physicality is contrasted to the subtlety (to be read negatively as “artfully contrived arguments”) of the theologians. The poem closes, then, with a contrast between the sexless and subtle theologians and the physical – and presumably unreflective – Sweeney. Spirit and flesh are juxtaposed with no clear preference for either, since both are mocked. The obscurity of these poems is, at least in part, a result of the ridicule not being based on any discernible moral or religious ground; they are fundamentally nihilistic.11 Stevens’ poems dealing with religion are much gentler and much less pessimistic than Eliot’s, never descending toward nihilism. And when he is indulging in ridicule, Stevens is always less obscure and less acerbic than Eliot. A flirtation with nihilism, such as we see occurring with Eliot, is something that Stevens never contemplated. In a letter of 12 June1948 to Barbara Church, commenting on André Gide’s Journal, Stevens explained that for him, ordinary, everyday experience was sufficient protection against nihilism: “Gide, in his Journal, speaks of redemption of the spirit by work, in this present time of skepticism. Only to work is nonsense in a period of nihilism. Why work? Keeping a journal, however dense the nihilism may be, helps one. And thinking about the nature of our relation to what one sees out of the window, for example, without any effort to see to the bottom of things, may some day disclose a force capable of destroying nihilism. My mind is as full of this at the moment as of anything except unassorted drivel” (Letters 601). On the other hand, Stevens would certainly have agreed with Russell that man should “worship at the shrine his own hands have built” – although he would not have shared Russell’s view that it should be in the spirit of Christian-like humility. Not that Stevens endorses the contrary Nietzschean posture of heroic defiance. It is just that neither the Christian virtue of humility nor the vice of pride figures at all in Stevens’ moral scheme. One of Stevens’ rare considerations of pride is in the 1917 poem, “The Wind Shifts,” a meditation on the state of the “human without illusions,” that is to say, the Free Man, the Humanist:

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This is how the wind shifts: Like the thoughts of an old human, Who still thinks eagerly And despairingly. The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her. The wind shifts like this: Like humans approaching proudly, Like humans approaching angrily. This is how the wind shifts: Like a human, heavy and heavy, Who does not care. (Collected Poems 83–4) This short poem highlights the difference between Russell’s Humanism and Stevens’: Stevens’ “human without illusions ... still feels irrational things within her.” (It also illustrates Stevens’ penchant for employing female personae – a rare trait among male poets.) Russell has no place for irrationality (in truth he fears it), nor does Eliot.12 Of course, for the religious believer there is a huge difference between the irrational and the mysterious; the “merely” irrational includes human passions – fears, hopes, and lusts; the mysterious is that which is beyond human understanding; passions are below it. It is clear from “The Wind Shifts” that Stevens does not regard being “a human without illusions” as a desirable emancipation. Although, unlike Eliot, he did not commit to any creed during his active years, Stevens retained a strong sense of the mysterious. Although Stevens seems not to have been bothered by Humanism’s lack of a sense of evil, he was bothered by its lack of the emotional intensity that had existed in the age of Faith. He had to make do with the contemplation of the beauty, variety, and intricacy found in the mind’s interchange with the sensible world – which he captured beautifully in the closing lines of “Sunday Morning” (cited below) as well as in the much later “Connoisseur of Chaos”(1938): “The pensive man ... He sees that eagle float / For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.” Stevens’ insistence on passion and delight in the beauty of nature prompts critics to classify him as a romantic – a classification he resists, for reasons that will be considered later.

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An almost unique consideration of the problem of evil in Stevens’ canon is the Second World War poem “Esthétique du Mal” (1944), in which he portrays the bleakness of a world without God: To lose sensibility, to see what one sees, As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift, To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone, As if the paradise of meaning ceased To be paradise, it is this to be destitute. This is the sky divested of its fountains. (ix) But, unlike Russell, Stevens does not strike the heroic attitude of an “unyielding Atlas” sustaining a world that “his own ideas” have fashioned. Instead he closes the poem by questioning the adequacy of the human imagination to people the world, implying that whatever is beyond the human is more compatible with humanity than Russell’s “trampling march of unconscious power”: One might have thought of sight, but who could think Of what it sees, for all the ill it sees? Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, But the dark italics it could not propound. And out of what one sees and hears and out Of what one feels, who could have thought to make So many selves, so many sensuous worlds, As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming With the metaphysical changes that occur, Merely in living as and where we live. (xv) Although Stevens was not a reader of Bradley, his notion that we are embedded in a world with which our minds and bodies are compatible is consistent with Bradley’s view of human beings as finite centres embedded in the infinite Absolute. All of Stevens’ poetry expresses that sense of creative participation in the world not of our own making, but to which we belong. So far as I can discover, Stevens did not read “The Free Man’s Worship,” but he refers to Russell’s Inquiry into Meaning and Truth in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet.”13 And he did share Eliot’s ambivalent relation with Humanism. As a Harvard man, he could hardly have avoided it. Stevens bought an edition of Arnold’s Notebooks several years

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after his graduation, and there is a well-marked copy of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism from Stevens’ library at the Huntington.14 Stevens shared a citation from Arnold’s Notebooks with his wife, Elsie, in a letter of 9 April 1907 that captures beautifully Stevens’ poetic personality: “Yesterday I bought a little volume called the ‘Note Books’ of Matthew Arnold. It is made up of quotations jotted down by him from day to day, and of lists of books to be read at various times. The quotations are in a half-dozen different languages ... Here is a Latin one: ‘Angelica hilaritas cum monastica simplicitate;’ and here is what I guess it to mean: ‘Angelic hilarity with monastic simplicity’” (Letters 101). I can think of no better description of Stevens’ poetry at its best. That Stevens once held a positive view of Arnold’s Humanism is confirmed in a letter to Barbara Church, written late in his life. The occasion was his purchase of a more complete edition of Arnold’s Notebooks in 1953 (apparently having mislaid the one he bought in 1907). On re-reading Arnold, he discovered that he no longer belonged to the Arnoldian “church”: “I used to have a book containing a collection of aphorisms on which Matthew Arnold’s soul depended. Recently his entire collection of notebooks was published. I started to read them as I once read the lesser volume but lost interest. One good saying is a great deal; but ten good sayings are not worth anything at all. Anyhow, it may be that I don’t belong to that church anymore, or that I don’t care for conversation with that particular set of gods; nor perhaps, with any” (8 June 1953. Letters 780. My emphasis). It is the failure to celebrate an intimate and emotional engagement with a world friendly to man that Stevens finds unsatisfactory in Arnold, and in Humanism generally. As we have seen, Russell’s version is even bleaker than Arnold’s. For Russell it is the bleakness of the world that justifies the generation of sunnier fantasies – a kind of whistling in the dark, as Eliot characterized it. Stevens would not concede that his sunny portrayal of the world is merely an avoidance of a cosmos devoid of God. It was for him a celebration of mankind’s kinship with the cosmos. “Sunday Morning,” one of Stevens’ most celebrated poems, is a case in point. It was finished by June of 1915 (Buttell 63). While trench warfare was in full swing by that date, the terrible blood baths of Verdun and the Somme were still in the future. Although the sinking of the passenger ship Lusitania by a German U-boat had occurred in May of 1915, “Sunday Morning” reflects nothing of the war. Stevens had previously written “Phases,” which is a war poem. It is a sequence of eleven poems, four of which had been published in a Poetry Magazine issue

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entitled “Poems of War” the previous November. Stevens did not republish it, but it was reconstructed by Milton Bates in Opus Posthumous. Bates sees “Phases” as a sort of precursor of “Sunday Morning,” largely on the grounds that both poems strike a Humanist attitude toward religious belief, although he does not use the term “Humanist”(231–41). Nonetheless, his assessment that “both poems indicate that the conception of a heaven has lost its validity”(232) amounts to reading them as expressing a Humanist view. The full sequence vacillates among three stools: celebration of the heroism of the soldier, dismay at suffering and death, and pious sentiments on the futility and brutality of war. Poem V, for example, attempts to celebrate the soldier’s heroism, while simultaneously bemoaning the senseless loss of life: Death’s nobility again Beautified the simplest men Fallen Winkle felt the pride Of Agamemnon When he died. What could London’s Work and waste Give him – To that salty, sacrificial taste? What could London’s Sorrow bring – To that short, triumphant sting? (OP 10–11) As Bates makes clear, “Phases” is not a very successful poem: “What is intended to be clear is not; what is intended to be highly charged poetry is heavy-handed ... What is meant to be impressive and shocking often becomes melodramatic” (239). Perhaps “Sunday Morning” succeeds where “Phases” fails just because it ignores the war. After all, as a non-combatant living in a country not participating in the war, Stevens had little hope of saying anything of interest about something as unprecedented as the slaughter of trench warfare. Allusions to Homer or Aeschylus hardly meet the need. “Sunday Morning” is the first poem in which Stevens’ mature voice appears. Rather than being a meditation on war and death in the absence of God, like “Phases,” “Sunday Morning” is a meditation on

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living well and pleasantly without God. It is organized as a colloquy between a woman and the poet – perhaps dimly echoing conversations Wallace might have had with Elsie – and it expresses a hedonistic version of Humanism, pitting pleasure against worship and giving the palm to pleasure. In Part I the woman in the poem, lounging in her peignoir on a Sunday morning, feels some twinges of guilt at the pleasure she takes in “coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,” when she ought to be attending church service, “The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.” Perhaps made somnolent by the sun and coffee and oranges, she dreams of “silent Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.” In Part ii the poet attempts to reassure her that she is doing no wrong, since enjoying the sun is just as pious as listening to stories of Palestine: Why should she give her bounty to the dead? What is divinity if it can come Only in silent shadows and in dreams? Shall she not find in comforts of the sun, In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else In any balm or beauty of the earth, Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven? Divinity must live within herself: .... All pleasures and all pains, remembering The bough of summer and the winter branch. These are the measures destined for her soul. A more succinct and eloquent statement of Humanism as it emerges from Russell’s “The Free Man’s Worship” would be hard to find. Stevens expressed a similar Humanist perspective in a less celebrated poem published six years later, the somewhat opaque “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.” Fortunately, Stevens glossed it for Alice Corbin Henderson, telling her “The bland old gentleman who does the talking to the bland and credulous old ladies about him, with whom he is having tea anywhere – at the Palaz of Hoon if you like, is simply explaining everybody in terms of himself” (27 March 1942 in Kermode, ed. 937–8). As with “Sunday Morning,” we have a male lecturing a female audience – though here the women are not permitted any response. The bland old gentleman claims attributes that are normally reserved for divinities – an aggrandizement of the human very much within the Humanist creed:

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Not less because in purple I descended The western day through what you called The loneliest air, not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw Or heard or felt came not but from myself; And there I found myself more truly and more strange.15 The lines “I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw / Or heard or felt came not but from myself” anticipate “Key West,” another thirteen years on, and also echo Eliot’s paraphrase of Bradley previously cited, but worth repeating here: “We have the right to say that the world is a construction. Not to say that it is my construction, for in that way “I” am as much “my” construction as the world is ... the world is a construction out of finite centres16 ... Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself” (Knowledge and Experience 166. My emphasis). As we shall see, the female singer in “Key West” is not as autonomous as the male lecturer in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” which reflects Stevens’ gradual movement away from Humanism toward his own subtle creed. In Part iii of “Sunday Morning,” we have a compressed history of religion from paganism (“Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth”) to Christianity (“Until our blood, commingling, virginal, / With heaven, brought such requital to desire / The very hinds discerned it, in a star.”) But then the speaker asks the Humanist’s question: “Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be / The blood of paradise? And shall the earth / Seem all of paradise that we shall know?” He does not immediately answer, but promises instead that if we give up our illusion of a transcendent divinity, “The sky will be much friendlier then than now, ... Not this dividing and indifferent blue.”

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In Part iv, the woman initially expresses contentment with this newfound Humanist freedom to revel in the innocent pleasures of the world, but then backslides: “I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” The poet’s response is fully Humanistic. After recapitulating the shattered illusions of myth and religion, he reassures the woman that the birds will endure longer than those illusions: There is not any haunt of prophecy, Nor any old chimera of the grave, Neither the golden underground, nor isle Melodious, where spirits gat them home, Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured As April’s green endures; But he almost gives away the game in the continuation, which equates the persistence of the natural world with the rather more transient persistence of her memory and desire, thereby risking the woman’s metamorphosis into a Proustian recluse: or will endure Like her remembrance of awakened birds, Or her desire for June and evening, tipped By the consummation of the swallow’s wings. Rather irritatingly, the woman is not quieted by these observations, and wants still more reassurance: “But in contentment I still feel / The need of some imperishable bliss.” The speaker responds with a little more male flattery: “Death is the mother of beauty, hence from her, / Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams / And our desires.” The comfort he offers this querulous woman, then, is that impermanence is the price of beauty. He (rather manipulatively) appeals to her femininity

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by invoking the romance of courtship and dalliance: “She causes boys to pile new plums and pears / On disregarded plate. The maidens taste / And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.” The queries with which Part V begins are not placed within quotation marks, but surely they are intended to be the woman’s questions, whether spoken by her or anticipated by the increasingly controlling male interlocutor: “Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging?” This is the issue Keats had addressed in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” His view was that although “heard melodies are sweet, those unheard / Are sweeter still.” The view of the poet of “Sunday Morning” is quite different: Alas, that they should wear our colors there, The silken weavings of our afternoons, And pick the strings of our insipid lutes! Death is the mother of beauty, mystical, Within whose burning bosom we devise Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly. The term “mystical” is certainly not one a Humanist would use. It is recurrent in Stevens’ prose and poetry, and will be discussed later; here, I think it reasonable to read “mystical” as meaning simply “mysterious.” In Part vii, the poet seems to forget about his complaining female interlocutor, and waxes enthusiastic about some sort of ritual – apparently pagan, pantheistic, and homo-erotic: Supple and turbulent, a ring of men Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn Their boisterous devotion to the sun, Not as a god, but as a god might be, Naked among them, like a savage source. The female interlocutor is twentieth-century, middle-class, and clothed; she is sitting quietly in a sunny chair worrying about her neglect of religious duties. In contrast, the men in Part vii are antique, primitive, and naked. Far from worrying about the silence of “Palestine, / Dominion of the blood and sepulchre,” they are in a state of transport induced by a Nietzschean dance of cosmic participation:

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Their chant shall be a chant of paradise, Out of their blood, returning to the sky; And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice, The windy lake wherein their lord delights, The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills, That choir among themselves long afterward. The woman is solitary, but the men “shall know well the heavenly fellowship / Of men that perish and of summer morn.” No doubt Stevens is thinking of natural, non-violent death, but the date of the poem obtrudes once again, for men were dying in their thousands on the fields of France and Belgium and in Gallipoli when the poem was published. English poets – some of them – were still celebrating death in combat as dulce et decorum, though that sentiment soon disappeared. But, perishing aside, these lines clearly celebrate boisterous male fellowship in contrast to the mild pleasures of the solitary female’s tea and oranges. The picture of men consorting with the gods is one that sticks with Stevens. When he spoke of the disappearance of the gods in his Mount Holyoke talk of 28 April 1951, it was as if they were real entities that had once existed: “To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences. It is not as if they had gone over the horizon to disappear for a time; not as if they had been overcome by other gods of greater power and profounder knowledge. It is simply that they came to nothing.” “It left us,” he said, “feeling dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents.” In a charming and puzzling note he adds: “What was most extraordinary is that they left no mementoes behind, no thrones, no mystic rings, no texts either of the soil or of the soul. It was as if they had never inhabited the earth” (Opus Posthumous 260). Such nostalgia for something that Stevens is well aware has never existed is extraordinary, but very characteristic of Stevens’ imagination, and of American Humanism as well, which, despite its programmatic atheism, never lost the habit of reverence. Indeed it was not uncommon for its proponents to revert to Christianity as Paul Elmore More did – perhaps the most prominent American Humanist to do so – and as Eliot (and maybe Stevens, too) did. But if the poet feels this nostalgia – despite the advice he gives the woman – she is not permitted such an indulgence. The last section introduces a third, unmistakably Humanist, voice:

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She hears, upon that water without sound, A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine Is not the porch of spirits lingering. It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” There is no ambivalence here. Christ’s tomb still contains his bones. There has been no resurrection, hence no salvation, no heaven or paradise. Instead: We live in an old chaos of the sun, Or old dependency of day and night, Or island solitude, unsponsored, free, Of that wide water, inescapable. In short we are “dispossessed and alone in a solitude, like children without parents,” just as Stevens said thirty-six years later in the Mount Holyoke talk cited above.17 The consolation provided by the poem is very different than that provided by Keats’ famous and gnomic closing lines to “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Beauty is truth, truth Beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Instead, Stevens gives us a celebration of the sights, sounds, and tastes of nature – alive and active: Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail Whistle about us their spontaneous cries; Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness; And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. The last three lines are truly magical, but what do they tell us? Only the Humanist’s sceptical conviction that we know nothing of what awaits us beyond the grave. Stevens underwent no life-altering experiences during the First World War such as those Eliot experienced with his marriage and his flirtation with Russell’s Humanism. No doubt Stevens’ age was a factor in the comparative equanimity with which he responded to the First World War. He was just shy of his thirty-fifth birthday when war broke out in August 1914, an age at which a man might be expected to have

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found his way. (At thirty-eight, Eliot was only a little older when baptized into the Anglican faith.) Nonetheless, Stevens was not unaffected by the war. “Phases” was an unsuccessful attempt to deal with the war in poetry and “Lettres d’un Soldat” represents a second attempt. Stevens was unhappy with both. “Lettres d’un Soldat” was published – though in a truncated form – in Poetry in May of 1918, just a few months before the end of the war. That he did not submit the whole sequence and did not include even that abbreviated version in the first (1923) edition of Harmonium are good grounds for concluding that he did not regard the sequence as a success. When he did print four poems from it in the 1931 reissue of Harmonium, he did not identify them as part of “Lettres d’un Soldat.” They are “The Death of a Soldier,” “Negation,” “The Surprises of the Superhuman,” and “Lunar Paraphrase.” They have all been retained in Collected Poems. The full sequence was first published in Opus Posthumous. “Lettres d’un Soldat” is much more intimately connected to the soldier’s combat experience than anything Eliot wrote, being based on the letters of a French sergeant, Eugène Emmanuel Lemercier, whose letters from the front to his mother were published posthumously in 1916 as Lettres d’un Soldat. They are characterized by a Catholic piety to which Lemercier appeals in his effort to come to terms with the death, destruction, and suffering that he sees all around him. In his study of the sequence, Glen MacLeod concludes that Stevens was unable to reconcile Lemercier’s Catholic faith with his own agnosticism so that “the series as a whole, trails off into dull irresolution. Not only Lemercier’s faith, but Stevens’ imaginative energy seems to have faltered before the terrible reality of war” (MacLeod 1981 52). While I agree that the sequence highlights Stevens’ disconnect from Lemercier’s Catholic piety, it seems to me that it is marked more by a mockery of that piety than by a failure to reconcile it with Stevens’ agnosticism. On my reading, the sequence is characterized by a Humanist mocking of Christian piety not unlike Eliot’s ridicule of Christianity in “The Hippopotamus” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service.” Lemercier’s letters are strongly marked by the pious acceptance of death and injury as Christian sacrifice, a position adopted by both sides in the war in an effort to sanctify the outrageous slaughter of young men in futile battle after futile battle. It seems that Stevens came to realize that the anti-war and anti-Christian sentiment of “Lettres d’un Soldat” was inappropriate in wartime – especially after the United States declared war on Germany and Austria on 6 April 1917. And after

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the armistice, there was no longer any need for a sequence whose motivation was primarily anti-war. As published in Opus Posthumous, “Lettres d’un Soldat” is provided with an epigraph in French drawn from André Chévrillon’s introduction to the original edition of the letters. The epigraph is a paraphrase of a passage from the Baghavad-gita in which the god Krishna prepares the hero Arjuna for battle. It is the same passage to which Eliot alludes in Dry Salvages iii, written during the Second World War. Chevrillon’s paraphrase stresses that the soldier must battle beside his comrades without hope of glory or profit, but simply because that is the law. For readers of Stevens’ poetry sequence, it emphazises the state’s requirement of mindless obedience from its citizens, an obedience sanctioned by religion, but not by Stevens. Eliot alludes to the following more encouraging – and more mystical – part of Krishna’s speech: “Whosoever at the time of his death thinks only of Me, and thinking thus leaves the body and goes forth, assuredly he will know Me. On whatever sphere of being the mind of man may be intent at the time of death, thither will he go. Therefore meditate always on Me, and fight; if thy mind and thy reason be fixed on Me, to me shall thou surely come.” In Dry Salvages Eliot picks up “goes forth,” rendering it as “fare forward”: So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna On the field of battle. Not fare well, But fare forward, voyagers. Chevrillon’s point was that the soldier must “do or die” and not ask questions. Eliot’s point is quite different, and could be paraphrased as follows: although we cannot know the future, we must nonetheless make choices, and the correct choice may not appear to be in our own interest. However, both Chevrillon and Eliot are both motivated by the desire to boost the morale of fighting men during war. Stevens provides an extract from Lemercier’s letters as an epigraph for each poem, which then paraphrases the sentiment of the extract; most poems also comment on the epigraph. The very first poem sets the tone of ridicule of the wartime sanctification of sacrifice and death. Lemercier has just joined the army and is looking forward to the adventure: “7 septembre: ... Nous sommes embarqués dans l’aventure, sans

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aucune sensation dominante, sauf peut-être une acceptation assez belle de la fatalité” [7 September ... We are embarked on the adventure, without any dominant feeling, except perhaps a quite beautiful acceptance of a bad outcome.] Lemercier was an enlisted man, a sergeant, so Stevens titles the poem “Common Soldier.” It sets the ironic tone of the sequence by presenting Lemercier’s naïve acceptance of his Catholic and patriotic upbringing with ironic detachment: No introspective chaos ... I accept War, too, although I do not understand. And that, then, is my final aphorism. I have been pupil under bishop’s rods And got my learning from the orthodox. I mark the virtue of the common-place. I take all things as stated – so and so Of men and earth: I quote the line and page, I quote the very phrase my masters used. If I should fall, as soldier, I know well The final pulse of blood from this good heart Would taste, precisely, as they said it would. Although Stevens makes no comment in this poem, his ironic detachment from the naïveté of the sentiment is inescapable. The poems from the sequence reprinted in the second edition of Harmonium lack the epigraphs and any other indication of their connection to Lemercier and the First War. These omissions render them even more cryptic than they were in the context of the sequence. The first of them, “Death of a Soldier,” (xi in Opus Posthumous) had no title as published in Poetry. It mocks the notion of redemptive sacrifice: Life contracts and death is expected, As in a season of autumn. The soldier falls. He does not become a three-days personage, Imposing his separation, Calling for pomp.

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Death is absolute and without memorial, As in a season of autumn, When the wind stops. The missing epigraph is from Lemercier’s letter of 5 March: “La mort du soldat est près des choses naturelles.” [The death of a soldier is an almost natural thing.] The first strophe restates the epigraph in English, followed by the sardonic observation that dead soldiers, unlike Christ, do not rise again: “He does not become a three-days personage.” The last two strophes, then, represent a rejection of Lemercier’s touching Catholic faith. The sentiment that “Death is absolute and without memorial” contrasts with the easy optimism of “Sunday Morning,” where death is characterized as “the mother of beauty.” The difference between the treatment of death in “Sunday Morning” and “Lettres d’un soldat” marks the watershed in the perception of death that the horrors of the First War represents. Poem iii, entitled “Anecdotal Reverie,” was not included in Harmonium. It is perhaps the most uncompromisingly anti-war poem of the sequence. Its epigraph, from the letter of 22 October, is unusually bloodthirsty: “Ce qu’il faut, c’est reconnaître l’amour et la beauté triomphante de toute violence.” [What is necessary is to recognize love and triumphant beauty in all violence.] The poem is broadly allegorical. It describes a crowd of blind men on a street engaged in ordinary daily activities. Stevens introduces a speaker into this scene: Am I to pick my way Through these crickets? – I, that have a head In the bag Slung over my shoulder? I have secrets That prick Like a heart full of pins. Permit me, gentlemen, I have killed the mayor, And am escaping from you. Get out of the way! (The blind men strike him down with their sticks.)

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The blind crowd must represent the French people who are blindly following their leaders into disaster. The speaker with the mayor’s head in a bag is more difficult to construe, but a reasonable candidate would be the military and civilian leaders who had decapitated the nation in their single-minded pursuit of the war. The final, parenthetic, line seems to suggest some sort of uprising against authority – which had of course happened in Russia in October 1917. “Negation,” ix in Opus Posthumous with the same title, is the second poem retained in Harmonium. It speaks – uncharacteristically for Stevens – of divine indifference to human suffering. Its epigraph is from Lemercier’s letter of 15 January: “La seul sanction pour moi est ma conscience. Il faut nous confier à une justice impersonnelle, indépendante de tout facteur humain, et à une destinée utile et harmonieuse malgré toute horreur de forme” [The only justification for me is my conscience. We must put our confidence in an impersonal justice, independent of all human factors, and in a useful and harmonious destiny despite every present horror.] In a Humanist spirit, the poem mocks Lemercier’s pious belief in an “impersonal justice”: Hi! The creator too is blind, Struggling toward his harmonious whole, Rejecting intermediate parts, Horrors and falsities and wrongs; Incapable master of all force, Too vague idealist, overwhelmed By an afflatus that persists. For this, then, we endure brief lives, The evanescent symmetries From that meticulous potter’s thumb. This “creator” is a resemblant of Russell’s “Nature, omnipotent but blind,” though more poetic, for he is anthropomorphized as a “vague idealist overwhelmed / By an afflatus,” and as a “meticulous potter” – a reminiscence of the account in Genesis of God fashioning Adam from clay. For Him, human beings are just “intermediate parts, / Horrors, falsities and wrongs” left behind as He struggles toward “his harmonious whole.” Such a god could easily comment at the end of the play – as Russell’s does – “‘Yes ... it was a good play; I will have it performed again’”(Philosophical Essays 60).

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The next poem that Stevens preserves in Harmonium is “The Surprises of the Superhuman,” vi in Opus Posthumous, where it has the same Nietzschean title. Its epigraph is from a letter of November 26: “J’ai la ferme espérance, mais surtout j’ai confiance en le justice éternel, quelque surprise qu’elle cause à l’humaine idée que nous en avons.” [I have a strong hope, but above all, I have confidence in eternal justice, however much it surprises our human ideas.] Once again Stevens mocks Lemercier’s faith in a benevolent God, despite the horrors he faces. The title “The Surprise of the Superhuman” inevitably invokes Nietzsche. It is the only poem of the sequence in rhyming couplets, and the only one that does not begin with a paraphrase of the epigraph from Lemercier. The opening couplet seems to mock Republican France’s egalitarianism: “The palais de justice of chambermaids / Tops the horizon with its colonnades.” The next couplet implies the overthrow of that egalitarian justice in favour of the Nietzschean superman: “If it were lost in Übermenschlichkeit, / Perhaps our wretched state would soon come right.” There is no clear antecedent for “it,” but the most probable candidate is “the palais de justice.” If so, the sense is that the Nietzschean Superman would overthrow egalitarian principles. But the final couplet belies this reading, for now the courthouse is the creature of kings: “For somehow the brave dicta of its kings / Make more awry our faulty human things.” The message would seem to be that Lemercier’s faith in God and State – in “eternal justice” – is misplaced, for that so-called justice is in fact no more than “the brave dicta” of kings. Instead of ameliorating human suffering, they only make it worse: “Make more awry our faulty human things.” “Lunar Paraphrase” (vii in Opus Posthumous) is the last of the poems from “Lettres d’un Soldat” published in Harmonium. It was not among those published in Poetry. The epigraph is from a letter dated “Morning of November 29, during quartering.” The epigraph is longer than most and also more lyrical: “Telle fut la beauté d’hier. Te parlerai-je des soirées précédentes, alors que sur la route, la lune me dessinait la broderie des arbres, le pathétique des calvaires, l’attendrissement de ces maisons que l’on sait des ruines, mais que la nuit fait surgir comme une évocation de la paix.” [How beautiful it was yesterday. Shall I tell you of the previous evenings, when, while on the road, the moon painted the embroidery of trees for me, the pathos of Calvaries, the softening of those houses one knew to be in ruins, but which the night made rise like an evocation of peace.]

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As in the first two poems discussed, Stevens’ first line restates the theme of Lemercier’s letter: “The moon is the mother of pathos and pity,” and uses that line as book ends for the poem, repeating it after the following lines: When, at the wearier end of November, Her old light moves along the branches, Feebly, slowly, depending upon them; When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor, Humanly near, and the figure of Mary, Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter Made by the leaves, that have rotted and fallen; When over the houses, a golden illusion Brings back an earlier season of quiet And quieting dreams in the sleepers in darkness – Stevens goes well beyond Lemercier’s mere suggestion of Calvary, by evoking the crucified Christ and His mother as at the Nativity: “When the body of Jesus hangs in a pallor, / Humanly near, and the figure of Mary, / Touched on by hoar-frost, shrinks in a shelter.” He then returns to Lemercier’s letter with the image of ruined houses bathed in moonlight, evoking a time of peace. It is perhaps not surprising that Stevens and Harriet Monroe agreed to exclude this poem (Letters 205), since its ironic representation of Lemercier’s sentimental Christianity could give offense – especially while the war was still in progress. By 1931 wartime passions had subsided sufficiently to let these antiwar poems see the light of day in the reissue of Harmonium – albeit without any clear connection to the First War. Whatever motivated Stevens or Monroe to suppress some of the poems, it is clear that the sequence expresses an anti-Christian Humanism much more strident than the mild ridicule of the woman in “Sunday Morning.” But such Humanist ridicule of Christianity does not persist in Stevens’ poetry. I do not know if Stevens read the war poems of Siegfried Sassoon, a genuine combatant and war protestor, whose poems express the bitterness that many felt about the seemingly pointless slaughter of young men in suicidal frontal assaults involving tens of thousands of infantrymen. One of his most anti-clerical and bitter poems is “They”:

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The Bishop tells us: ‘When the boys come back ‘They will not be the same; for they’ll have fought ‘In a just cause: they lead the last attack ‘On Anti-Christ; their comrades’ blood has bought ‘New right to breed an honourable race, ‘They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.’ ‘We’re none of us the same!’ the boys reply. ‘For George lost both his legs; and Bill’s stone blind; ‘Poor Jim’s shot through the lungs and like to die; ‘And Bert’s gone syphilitic: you’ll not find ‘A chap who’s served that hasn’t found some change.’ ‘And the Bishop said: ‘The ways of God are strange!’ (Sassoon, Collected Poems 23–4) Sassoon was a decorated war hero who decided that the war must be stopped. He believed that the killing was senseless, the battles fruitless, the suffering endless. As it happens, Bertrand Russell played a role in Sassoon’s drama as well as in Eliot’s, for Sassoon sought Russell’s help in composing a letter, to be read in parliament, in which he declared sentiments similar to those of the poem. When the letter was read, in July of 1917, the government was appalled. Sassoon’s pacifism was all the more offensive because he was a decorated hero. To save the day, he was declared to be suffering from shell shock and sent to Craiglockhart, a military asylum in Scotland dedicated to the treatment of shell shock sufferers. Wilfrid Owen, another war poet, was a fellow patient. When declared cured, both men returned to the front. Sassoon survived, but Owen was killed in a pointless assault on the last day before the armistice. Sassoon’s poem “They” expresses his disgust with the role that religious leaders played in encouraging young men to go to war, a role that the French, German, Austrian, and Italian clergy played as fully as did the English. Since Sassoon was – like Eliot – a regular at Garsington, Ottoline Morrell’s estate near Oxford, in 1916 and early 1917, and since Sassoon’s letter written with Russell’s collaboration caused a great stir, one would have expected Eliot to be aware of him. However, the only reference to Sassoon that I have found is in a letter to Eleanor Hinkley of 31 October 1917 – months after Sassoon’s public protest. Eliot had been invited by Madame Vandervelde, the wife of a prominent Belgian Socialist politician, to participate in a poetry reading that

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would include Sassoon and his friend Robert Graves among others. The only name Eliot recognized was Sassoon’s: “What a poor lot they are! The only one who has any merit is a youth named Siegfried Sassoon (semitic) and his stuff is better politics than poetry” (Letters 205–6).18 That Eliot was unimpressed by Sassoon’s rather Georgian war poetry is understandable, but his apparent ignorance of Sassoon’s notoriety despite his intimacy with Russell at the time is as good an indication of Eliot’s detachment from the passions of the war as we are likely to find. It is unlikely, then, that Eliot’s anti-Christian posture during the war had anything to do with the unedifying spectacle of religious leaders on both sides appealing to God to bless their troops and procure their triumph in battle. In contrast, Stevens’ “Lettres d’un Soldat” reflects a hostile reaction to the wartime sanctification of military death. Like Sassoon, Stevens regarded such clerical behaviour as deluded at best, and hypocritical at worst. He was aware, however, that it was insensitive to express such views when so many young men were dying on the battle field – not a few being American boys after their arrival in France at the end of June 1917. So, at least, his apology to Harriet Monroe in a letter of 8 April 1918 seems to indicate: “I’ve had the blooming horrors, following my gossip about death, at your house ... The subject absorbs me, but that is no excuse: there are too many people in the world, vitally involved, to whom it is infinitely more than a thing to think of. One forgets this. I wish with all my heart that it had never occurred, even carelessly” (Letters 206). While we do not know to what “gossip” Stevens is referring, it is reasonable to assume that Harriet Monroe’s reaction to Stevens’ apparently flippant comment about the habit of sanctifying death on the battlefield was a factor in Stevens’ decision to omit “Lettres d’un Soldat” from the first edition of Harmonium, and to include only four of the poems – without any clear indication of their connection with Lemercier – in the second edition. It must be admitted that neither poet was especially preoccupied with the war – at least not as a fit subject for poetry. They both seem more concerned with the state of general belief or unbelief in contemporary society. The Eliot poems we have so far examined mock the absurdity of Christian dogma rather than the complicity of Christian clergy in the war, as does “Lettres d’un Soldat.” Even Eliot’s immediate postwar poems – “Gerontion” and The Waste Land – are devoid of explicit reference to the war, though both can be read as reactions to the war. Eliot’s denial that either poem was prompted by the general disillusionment in Western cultural values caused by the war is certainly

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to be believed, but at the same time, it is hardly credible that he was indifferent to the general mood in the immediate postwar. The dilemma of the modern – the issue of belief and unbelief – is most carefully explored in philosophical discourse in which Eliot was well versed. That was not the case with Stevens, who cut short his Harvard education to take a law degree. It was not until late in his career that he began to investigate contemporary philosophical discourse. Unlike Eliot, Stevens has left no trace of an early interest in Bergson, but when he referred to him in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” a talk delivered at Mount Holyoke in August 1943, he approved of the views expressed in a late work, Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1933, trans. 1935), an examination of revealed religion. Taking Bergson’s characterization of religious inspiration as his model, Stevens claims: “We may be certain that in the case of poets, the peers of saints, those experiences are of no less a degree than the experience of the saints themselves. It is a question of the nature of the experience” (Kermode, ed. 674). Stevens seems to be claiming as much for the poet as William Blake, Robert Graves, or Ted Hughes would do. However, his claim is actually the inverse. Instead of claiming the prestige of the saint or prophet for the poet, he would have us believe that the saint or prophet is merely a deluded poet: “If we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called ... if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed ... a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation” (Kermode, ed. 674. My emphasis). Such sentiments are remote from anything Bergson would endorse, but they are entirely compatible with the avowedly Humanist posture Middleton Murry adopts in his debates with Eliot on Humanism: “The perception of reality which forms the basis of literature and plastic art should be the consummation of that conceptual apprehension of reality which is philosophy, and of that emotional apprehension of reality which is religion. To say that poetry is religion without supernaturalism and philosophy without abstraction is a summary statement easy enough to deride ... It is as necessary to a perfect science as it is fundamental to a pure poetry: it is an apprehension of the things which are as they are. What name it is to bear does not greatly matter” (“Concerning Intelli-

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gence” Criterion 6 529–39. My emphasis). And in another of his Criterion articles, Murry deliberately blurs the lines between religion and “Naturalism”: “Because this process of intimate purgation is necessary and inevitable to a naturalism that accepts its own implications, a complete Naturalism can fairly be called religious. But that is not the proper epithet; Naturalism is not religious, but it is completely spiritual. It replaces the hybrid combination of spirituality and morality, which is Religion, by a clean and perfect separation between them. It relegates morals to politics, and purifies spirituality to a quintessence” (“The Detachment of Naturalism” Criterion 9 659). Murry is merely echoing the long-standing Romantic view of poetry articulated severally by Blake, Wordsworth, and Shelley in the previous century – though they all posited a transcendent realm to which poets had access. Eliot was well aware of that provenance for Murry’s views, and had little sympathy with them: “When Mr. Murry makes poetry a substitute for philosophy and religion – a higher philosophy and a purer religion, he seems to me to falsify not only philosophy and religion, but poetry too” (“Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” Criterion 6 343). Stevens, of course does not comment on Murry’s views, but his early use of the term “supreme fiction” in the opening lines of “A HighToned Old Christian Woman,” a poem of 1922, would seem to conform precisely to Murry’s Humanist program: Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. Take the moral law and make a nave of it And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus, The conscience is converted into palms, Like windy citherns hankering for hymns. Stevens’ supreme fiction is of a piece with Russell’s injunction that mankind resolve “to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned,” as well as with Murry’s claim that “poetry is religion without supernaturalism and philosophy without abstraction.” Eliot proved unwilling or unable to live as a “Free Man,” to rest in a condition of uncertainty, without a positive faith. Stevens, in contrast – his alleged deathbed conversion aside – seems to have been quite capable, and even content, to live as a “Free Man.” One of the reasons Stevens could rest content with a Humanist ethic and Eliot could not is to be found in their different attitudes toward sin and transgression. The terms “sin” and “evil” seldom appear in Stevens’

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poetry, prose, or correspondence. Eliot, as already noted, had a very robust sense of sin and a corresponding belief in evil. In the Chorus for The Rock, Eliot speaks of the “perpetual struggle of Good and Evil.” In a swipe at the “immorality” of Humanism, he has the women of the chorus complain that the Church “tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.” Similarly he mocks the utopian dreams of Communists and Fabian socialists like Russell and the Webbs by having the women of the chorus seeking to escape “From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.” Here Eliot reveals his bias – that virtue is the avoidance of sin, the resistance to temptation, as much as, or more than, acts that bring solace, comfort, or joy to others. Further evidence of that attitude is to be found in his May 1927 review of Arthur Symons’ Baudelaire: Prose and Poetry. There Eliot castigates Symons and the whole English aesthetic movement for its inadequate sense of evil: “What is right in Mr. Symons’ account is the impression it gives that Baudelaire was primarily occupied with religious values. What is wrong is the childish attitude of the ‘nineties toward religion, the belief – which is no more than the game of children dressing up and playing at being grown-ups – that there is a religion of Evil, or Vice, or Sin. Swinburne knew nothing about Evil, or Vice, or Sin – if he had known anything he would not have had so much fun out of it” (For Lancelot Andrewes 92). These remarks appeared just a month before his baptism in June of 1927. And as an Anglican, in Second Thoughts about Humanism (1929), he praised T.E. Hulme’s insistence on the reality of sin and evil: “It is to the immense credit of Hulme that he found out for himself that there is an absolute to which Man can never attain.” And Eliot cites Hulme to the effect that the denial of sin is the hallmark of both romanticism and Humanism: “For the modem humanist, as for the romantic, ‘the problem of evil disappears, the conception of sin disappears’” (Selected Essays 490). Stevens’ posture was very different. We have to look far and wide in his discourse to find any direct commentary on the issue of sin and evil. A strong indication that he does not believe in an entity called “evil” operating in human affairs is found in his reaction to Delmore Schwartz’s Vaudeville for a Princess: “To say that only the peasant desires happiness and that the evil man does evil as a dog barks overlooks the idea that the Drang nach den Gut [yearning for good] is really not much different from the Drang nach the opposite. You are fascinated by evil. I cannot see that this fascination has anything of the fascination

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by good. A bird singing in the sun is the same thing as a dog barking in the dark, again, your antithesis between evil on one hand and thought and art on the other involves quite other ideas” (9 October 1950 Letters 693). Stevens’ preference for the celebration of “the good” is perhaps a residue of his early Humanism, but, on the other hand, his rejection of Schwartz’s Humanist notion that art and thought can cure evil is a measure of his distance from that creed. The First World War was not a war in which it was easy to identify evil with one side and good with the other. The propaganda of the combatants certainly portrayed the other side as evil, but when the shooting ended, it was not at all clear where the burden of virtue lay. In that respect the “Great War” was very different from its successor, for the evil of the Nazi regime was clear to all. When the First War ended in 1918, there was a general sense that the world stood at the end of an era, but here was no clear vision of what would follow the collapse of the ancien régime. Although the massive dying had led to an efflorescence of Spiritualism among many of the traumatized survivors, the war tended on the whole to confirm the widespread conviction in Europe that Christianity was bankrupt; that it was not adequate for the twentieth century. While Humanists and Socialists alike welcomed the increased disenchantment with Christianity, many others were troubled by it – Eliot among them. Eliot’s expression of that troubled state of mind and heart in “Gerontion” and The Waste Land made him the accidental spokesman for postwar scepticism. “Gerontion” belongs to the period just at the end of the war when Eliot was under great strain because of several factors: his troubled marriage, his uncertain economic prospects, and – above all, I think – his uncertainty about what belief system would meet his emotional needs. We can date its composition fairly precisely, for he sent a copy of it separately to Mary Hutchinson and to John Rodker in early July of 1919. He told Hutchinson that he did not “feel at all satisfied with it” and contrasted it to “Dans le Restaurant,” “Bleistein with a Baedeker,” “Sweeney Erect,” and “A Cooking Egg” as a “new one” (Letters 311 and 312). He also gave Sydney Schiff a copy, cautioning him in a letter of 21 July 1919: “I don’t want anyone to see it but yourself” (Letters 322). It seems safe, then, to date its composition as May or June 1919. We know that he had intended to use it as a sort of preface to The Waste Land, but was talked out of that plan by Ezra Pound (Letters 505). In a 1958 interview with Helen Gardner, Eliot provided her with a somewhat idealized version of the emotional and aesthetic genesis of

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those poems: “He said that when he came to Europe he became interested in philosophy and did not feel any urge to write poetry.19 Then he began to write little poems in French for amusement, and ‘that,’ he said, ‘got me going again and led to poems like “The Hippopotamus.”’ Pound’s encouragement and the reading he was doing in the minor Elizabethan dramatists led to ‘Gerontion’ and ‘The Waste Land.’ ‘They go together,’ he said, and came out of a blend of personal feeling, experience and new reading’” (Gardner 1958 8). About the only aspect of these remarks that can be taken at face value is that “Gerontion” and The Waste Land belong together. Jewel Spears Brooker once thought that “by the time Eliot finished ‘Gerontion,’ he had become disillusioned with most religious substitutes” (Brooker in Olney 51). But on second thought she comes around to my view, attributing the poem’s negativity to the war: “‘The general grimness in ‘Gerontion,’ often attributed to Eliot’s philosophic negativism, is more directly related to a despondency regarding the history of Western civilization, a despondency shared by the most intelligent and sensitive people of his generation ... The unprecedented catastrophe that led to Versailles had destroyed not only the people and the land, but the culture and institutions of Europe” (Mastery and Escape 101). Unfortunately for Brooker and myself, Eliot has repeatedly denied that “Gerontion” and The Waste Land were prompted by the war, perhaps most categorically in the remark recorded by his brother, Henry Ware Eliot: “Various critics have done me the honour to interpret the poem in terms of criticism of the contemporary world, have considered it, indeed, as an important bit of social criticism. To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life; it is just a piece of rhythmical grumbling” (Cited in the TWL Facsimile 1). While we must take such a private and off-hand remark, reported second hand, with a grain of salt, there is little evidence to support the assumption of its early readers that The Waste Land expresses the disillusionment that the war caused in so many. The despondency of “most intelligent and sensitive people of his generation” was prompted by disillusionment with the prevailing liberal/democratic faith in progress, a faith in which Eliot had never participated. The cultural and political pessimism these poems express has its roots, I believe, in Eliot’s failure to find a faith in a faithless world. In particular, it was his disillusionment with Russell himself and with Russell’s Humanism – in which he had placed so much hope – that prompted the bleak mood of these poems. That “personal grouse” was felt far more acutely by Eliot than

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was the war and its aftermath – though those world historical events cannot be written out of the story entirely. Like virtually all of the poems Eliot wrote during and shortly after the war, “Gerontion” is radically opaque. All that is clear is that the postwar poems address the problem of evil and sin – however tangentially. The epigraph from Measure to Measure introduces a motif of cruel deception, for it is spoken by Duke Vincentio, disguised as a friar, to the young lover, Claudio. The duke himself has condemned Claudio to death for having breached an obscure and seldom applied law governing sexual communication. Claudio’s sin was to have got his fiancée, Juliette, with child. The disguised Vincentio offers the condemned Claudio cold comfort: Thou hast nor youth nor age But as it were an after dinner sleep Dreaming of both. The cruel epigraph contextualizes the reverie of the eponymous “old man,” Gerontion. Eliot’s earlier poetic personae had all been young men who could reasonably be identified with the author. Consequently he took a good deal of criticism for apparently masquerading as an old man when he was only in his thirty-first year. The complaint may seem naïve – or malicious – but his decision to speak through an old man is a departure, and therefore worth noting. Eliot’s generic old man looks back on his life as one without purpose, without issue, and without heroic endeavour: Here I am, an old man in a dry month, Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain. I was neither at the hot gates Nor fought in the warm rain Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, Bitten by flies, fought. Eliot may have been expressing some embarrassment at his own avoidance of combat. A little more than a year after writing “Gerontion,”(20 June 1920), he wrote to Herbert Read – a veteran of combat of about his own age – on Read’s collection of war diaries and poems, Naked Warriors. He had acknowledged receipt of it in March of the previous year (Letters 278), but had not yet offered any comment.

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He was careful to explain to Read, whom he knew only slightly at this date, his own non-combatant status: “Not having had that experience myself – I speak not from extreme age but from the advantage or disadvantage of a C2 rating which kept me out of the army – I have been a disinterested spectator of the struggles of others with war and peace” (Letters 386). After the old man’s admission of his non-combatant status, he turns to complain of his lodgings in lines infamous for their anti-Semitic cast: My house is a decayed house, And the Jew squats on the window-sill, the owner, Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London. It is worth noting that Eliot sent this poem to Sydney Schiff and John Rodker – both of whom were Jewish – for their opinion. It is difficult to decide whether that detail is evidence of Eliot’s spectacular insensitivity to others’ feelings or of his confidence that the “symbolic” nature of the reference rendered it inoffensive. Sydney Schiff, who had largely replaced Russell in Tom and Vivien’s life at this time, was himself a wealthy non-observant Jew. His second wife, Violet Bedlington, was a member of a prominent Anglo-Jewish family and a well-known literary hostess. They kept an apartment in Paris and were friends of Marcel Proust. Schiff had published (in 1919) “Bleistein with a Baedeker,” another of Eliot’s poems that exhibited anti-Semitic sentiments. Schiff accepted it for publication as guest editor of Art and Letters, a journal founded by Herbert Read and Frank Rutter, for which he was the financial “angel.” His response to “Gerontion” has not survived, but there is no indication in Eliot’s acknowledgment of his comments that he registered any objection to the portrayal of Bleistein in the poem: “I am appreciative of your careful study of ‘Gerontion’ and shd be glad always to hear anything further you may have to say about it” (Letters 324). That Schiff did not take offence may simply qualify him for a dismissive characterization as a self-hating Jew, but alternative explanations are possible. The most obvious is that the “Jew” stands as a well-worn synecdoche for the deracinated European financier and war profiteer. Of course, it is impossible for post-Holocaust readers not to find such a synecdoche offensive, but such casual anti-Semitism seems to have been tolerated prior to the Nazi atrocities. Eliot’s Jewish landlord con-

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forms to the cliché of the wealthy Jew, but we should remember that the Jew was also synecdochic of the free-thinking Humanist. Thus Gerontion’s landlord is not just the wealthy Jew, but a post-Christian free thinker, as well as a deracinated cosmopolite.20 A still further possible reading is that the decayed house in which Gerontion resides is to be read as Christianity, which can be thought of as inhabiting a theological house borrowed – though not rented – from Judaism. But even with all of this symbolic moderation of the lines, we are left with an offensive portrayal of the Jew as squatting, as suffering from skin infections (no doubt resulting from poor hygiene), and as being of low social origin – probably born out of wedlock, given that he was “spawned” in an “estaminet,” that is, a tavern. The savagery of the portrayal of the landlord is so egregious, and so like hard-core anti-Semitic portrayals of the Jew, that it is difficult to put that component aside. There is ample evidence that Eliot harboured anti-Semitic sentiments, but he was never a virulent anti-Semite as his friend Ezra Pound became.21 What is of interest for the current discussion is not so much the portrayal of the Jew in the poem as the portrayal of Christianity. Does the poem foreshadow Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism eight years later? Or does it merely express a disillusionment with Humanism as a substitute for Christianity – a disillusionment that might have been occasioned by his discovery of Russell’s misbehaviour with Vivien (if, indeed, he did discover it)? The latter hypothesis is given some credence by the introduction of the motif of sexual transgression – as well as the futility of human existence – through the epigraph from Measure for Measure. Eliot also had considered a passage from the last canto of the Inferno, xxxiii as an alternative epigraph (Inventions 349). In that canto Dante meets the souls of treacherous murderers, among them Friar Alberigo, who had invited his brother and nephew to a banquet so as to kill them for some unspecified offence. The epigraph was: “Ed elli a me: ‘Come ‘l mio corpo stea / nel mondo sù, nulla scïenza porto’.” (ll. 121–2) [And he to me: How my body fares in the world I have no knowledge.] These words are a response to Dante’s query, “Are you dead already?” Alberigo goes on to explain that in some cases the soul descends to Hell even before the body dies. A devil takes over the body for the duration of its time on earth. It is tempting to read this epigraph as an allusion to Russell’s devilish behaviour with Vivien. Like the epigraph from Measure for Measure, it highlights deception and treachery, but unlike it, does not direct the reader toward the futility of life without belief. By substituting Shake-

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speare’s Duke Vincentio for Dante’s Friar Alberigo, Eliot replaces a duplicitous cleric with a cruelly manipulative ruler, as well as introducing the motif of lost faith, which was not suggested by the epigraph from Dante. One plausible – but perhaps excessively biographical – explanation of the egregious animus of Eliot’s portrayal of the Jewish landlord would be that it was prompted by his displeasure at the conclusion of the arrangement he and Vivien had enjoyed with Russell in their joint rental of a cottage at Marlow. In the summer of 1918, Russell finally broke with Vivien – and Eliot could hardly have failed to notice the change in their relationship, especially after Russell informed the Eliots – in August of 1918 – that he no longer wished to continue sharing the rent. He asked them to return his furniture to his London flat, a request they fulfilled – perhaps deliberately – very slowly (Monk Spirit 539 and 544–5). Clearly Russell cannot be the Jewish landlord of the poem. He was neither Jewish, nor the Eliot’s landlord at Marlow. Nonetheless Russell’s withdrawal from the arrangement was precipitate, accompanied by justified bad feelings, and was financially embarrassing for the Eliots – all of which might be seen as feeding Eliot’s bad temper, even though the anger is misdirected toward a convenient scapegoat. On a less autobiographical tack, if the Jewish landlord is taken to symbolize the Hebraic origins of Christianity, the subsequent lines addressing Christian motifs are susceptible of a fully ironic reading: Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!” The word within a word, unable to speak a word, Swaddled with darkness. It has been common to read these lines as foreshadowing Eliot’s conversion eight years later, but I have always been troubled by that interpretation. The Pharisees’ request for a sign in Matthew xii: 38 reflects their denial of Christ’s divinity. It was occasioned by Christ engaging in activities forbidden by the Mosaic Law – performing miracles and dining on the Sabbath. His behaviour scandalized the Pharisees, who accused Him of performing miracles by the power of Satan. Unsatisfied with His answer (which was to challenge the authority of the Mosaic Law), they asked for a sign – confident that it would not be forthcoming; nor was it. Instead of providing a sign Christ castigated them for their lack of faith: “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a

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sign; and there shall no sign be given to it” (Matthew 12: 39). Would it be too much to suggest that Christ’s characterization of his accusers as an “adulterous generation” might have struck a chord with Eliot? The whole passage is derived from Lancelot Andrewes’ Christmas day sermon for 1618. Andrewes’ scriptural text is not Matthew, but Luke 2:12–14: “And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. And suddenly there was with the Angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good-will towards men.” In addition Andrewes cites the unbelief of the Pharisees as recounted in Matthew in the body of the sermon: Signs are taken for wonders. “Master, we would fain see a sign,” that is a miracle. And in this sense it is a sign to wonder at. Indeed, every word here is a wonder. To bring forth an infant; Verbum infans, the Word without a word; the eternal Word not able to speak a word; 1. a wonder sure. 2. And the sparganismoj [Greek: “swaddling”], swaddled; and that a wonder too. “He,” that (as in the thirty-eighth of Job he saith) “taketh the vast body of the main sea, turns it to and fro, as a little child, and rolls it about with the swaddling bands of darkness;” He to come thus into clouts, Himself! (Project Canterbury, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology. Lancelot Andrewes Works, Sermons, I 204) For Andrewes, the “sign” had long preceded the Pharisees’ request, for it was Christ’s miraculous birth that was the sign, rather than those miracles performed by the adult Christ which offended the Pharisees. The lines that follow are not inspired by Andrewes. They invoke Christ’s Resurrection at Easter – albeit a rather late Easter, since the latest possible date for Easter is 25 April – and the Christian communion service, which Anglicans understand as ingesting the body and blood of Christ, magically consubstantiated in the bread and wine by the officiating priest: In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk Among whispers;

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I have never seen any satisfactory gloss on Eliot’s characterization of Christ as a tiger. The handbooks’ reference to Blake’s “Tiger” does not carry conviction. Blake’s tiger is not Christ, but a synecdoche for God’s creation: “Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” Moreover, Eliot’s evocation of the Eucharist is irreverent. It seems designed to remind his readers of Sir James Frazer’s demonstration in The Golden Bough that the Communion Mass is a survival of ritual cannibalism among pagans. We know that Eliot read Frazer as early as 1913,22 and he invoked The Golden Bough – along with Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance – as a work informing the structure of The Waste Land: “To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies.” Although Frazer was cautious about drawing the inference that the Christian mass is a survival of the barbaric and superstitious practice of ritual cannibalism, it is clear that the tendency of his study is to discredit the communion rite. The following is one of the more forthright passages – from the 1922 abridgment of the multi-volume work: It is now easy to understand why a savage should desire to partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. And when the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of his god. Thus the drinking of wine in the rites of a vine-god like Dionysus is not an act of revelry, it is a solemn sacrament. Yet a time comes when reasonable men find it hard to understand how any one in his senses can suppose that by eating bread or drinking wine he consumes the body or blood of a deity. “When we call corn Ceres and wine Bacchus,” says Cicero, “we use a common figure of speech; but do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds upon is a god?” (Frazer, 498–9)23 “Gerontion” follows the sardonic reference to the communion rite with a rather motley collection of communicants:

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by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. It is difficult to be confident of how we are to read these lines. That the names are all non-British (Japanese, Swedish, and German) in an English language poem suggests a cosmopolitan “congregation.” If we assume a degree of bigotry toward the foreign, we would read these lines as implying some debasement of the communion service by the inclusion of all and sundry. In addition, all of the communicants seem to be away from their usual domicile, perhaps engaged in illicit assignations. The whole passage suggest a restless and rootless group – the antithesis of what one normally thinks of as a Christian congregation. But what is perhaps most remarkable about these lines is their opacity. It is impossible to be sure of just what their import is beyond the implication that a unified and uniform Christian Europe is no more. Such a reading is reinforced by the following lines – if the draughty house be read as Christendom, as I believe it should be: Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob. That Gerontion is bereft of ghosts is another ambiguous detail. Presumably the meaning is that he no longer believes in the afterlife. If we read the “draughty house” to be Christianity, that further underlines his unheimlich condition as a modern atheist. The poem then turns to a discourse on history and the lessons to be learned from it, beginning with the query, “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” and enjoining the reader to “think,” to meditate on a catalogue of evils – deception, vanity, and so forth. Intriguingly, Eliot had first assigned the discourse to nature, rather than history. According to Christopher Ricks’ notes in Inventions of the March Hare, the change was not prompted by Pound, who did suggest other emendations. But whether the meditation is on nature or on history seems not to make any difference to what the particular knowledge might be.

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If we read the poem autobiographically, the knowledge might well be Eliot’s discovery of Vivien’s adultery with Russell. On that reading, “nature” would be a more appropriate subject of the meditation, for it is in the nature of humans to be deceptive, ambitious, vain, distracted, sceptical, passionate, weak, fearful, courageous, vicious, heroic, and criminal – all attributes listed in the meditation. The substitution of “history” for “nature” prohibits such an autobiographical reading and preserves the poem’s impersonal generality without the necessity of any other revision. Either Nature or History misleads, deceives, and so forth. Neither Nature nor History provides us with answers to the overwhelming questions that Prufrock feared. The lines express the uncertainty and bewilderment that many felt in the wake of the First World War. If we take Eliot’s remarks that his uncertainty and bewilderment were not directly related to the war at face value, we need an alternate cause for his funk. The breakdown of his flirtation with Humanism in the face of Russell’s behaviour fits the bill. The isolated line that follows the catalogue – “These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree” – must refer to the disillusionment expressed in the catalogue. The “wrath-bearing tree” is surely the tree of knowledge of good and evil in Genesis. Like Adam and Eve, Eliot has lost his innocence. Like Europe generally, he knows there is no god. If we read the following lines as directed toward Vivien, they would apply to Eliot’s discovery of her adultery. The “we” of the lines on such a reading is not a general “we,” referring to all of his contemporaries, but just to himself and Vivien. The lines, then, should not be read exclusively as a prayer, as they usually are, but as a declaration to Vivien – and perhaps to Russell as well – that their relationship was over: I would meet you upon this honestly. I that was near your heart was removed therefrom To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition. I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it Since what is kept must be adulterated? I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch: How should I use them for your closer contact? But Eliot did not break with Vivien for many years, and the last two lines are a better fit for a prayer than for a declaration of an irrevocable breach in a personal relationship. The list of the five senses inevitably suggests the last rites of the Catholic Church in which each of the

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organs of sense is anointed with oil, symbolizing the soul’s renunciation of the flesh as it prepares to meet its maker. Of course, the conflation of human sexual passion and mystic transport has a long tradition in devotional verse. Eliot’s conflation of the failure of sexual passion with the failure of mystic transport – if that is indeed what is going on – is an innovation within that tradition, rather than a flouting of it. The query, “What will the spider do, / Suspend its operations, will the weevil / Delay?” is also less puzzling if the poem is read autobiographically. The spider is a passive predator who simply waits for its victims to fly into its web – as Eliot innocently walked into Russell’s life. The weevil is a parasite that burrows into the seed pod of its host and deposits its eggs. The hatched larvae then eat the flower or seed pod of the plant. No pregnancy resulted from Vivien’s adultery, but Russell certainly contributed to the withering of the Eliots’ marriage. However we read it, the query is obviously a rhetorical question: the spider and weevil will not delay. It is in their nature to behave as they do, and, in addition, they perform a necessary role, since death by one means or another is inevitable. This last point is driven home by a brief catalogue of deceased souls “whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms.” As with the list of communicants, Eliot once again gives proper names: “De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs Cammel.” The draft version, as printed in Inventions of the March Hare, does not have the following lines, which reinforce the bleakness of the fate of the souls of the dead: Gull against the wind, in the windy straits Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn. White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims, Instead it has the cryptic sentence: “We have saved a shilling against oblivion / Even oblivious.” “To save a shilling” is a British expression equivalent to “putting a little aside for a rainy day.” Clearly such a strategy is not an adequate precaution against oblivion. But to what inadequate strategy in the poem does it refer? I suggest that it refers to the various belief systems that mankind has deployed to comfort itself – from pagan worship, through Christianity to Humanism. Such an interpretation is reinforced by the rather awkward pun on “oblivion” in the last two words, “even oblivious.” I take Eliot to mean that mankind has been ignorant of – that is, oblivious to – his true condition, a condition Russell had described so bleakly in “The Free Man’s Worship” in the

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passage quoted in the previous chapter, ending: “only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built (Russell 1917 60–1. My emphasis). But Eliot did not retain this line, concluding instead with the image of a gull hovering “against the wind” above the cold Canadian wastes of the Gulf of St Lawrence or the frigid barrens of Cape Horn at the Southern tip of Chile. The gull symbolizes human souls whirled “in fractured atoms,” precariously sustained by a cunning and deceptive history (or nature). About three months after sending “Gerontion” to Schiff for his opinion, Eliot told John Quinn, “I hope to get started on a poem that I have in mind” (5 November 1919. Letters 344). A month later (18 December) he told his mother his New Year’s Resolution was “to write a long poem I have had on my mind for a long time” (Letters 350). He does not seem to have kept that resolution, for in a later letter he told his mother he needed “a period of tranquillity to do a poem I have in mind” (20 September 1920. Letters 408). We know that Eliot had made a significant start on The Waste Land by early 1921 because Wyndham Lewis reported, in a letter to Sydney Schiff (7 February 1921) that Eliot had showed him “a new long poem (in 4 parts) which I think will be not only very good, but a new departure for him” (quoted by Gordon, Imperfect Life 169). But it wasn’t until December of 1921 that he was ready to show his efforts to Ezra Pound – by then resident in Paris – as he had done with “Gerontion” (Letters 497–9). Eliot thought of “Gerontion” as part of what became The Waste Land, asking Pound if he should print “Gerontion as prelude in book or pamphlet form” (Letters 304). Pound advised against it: “I do not advise printing Gerontion as preface. One don’t miss it at all as the thing now stands. To be more lucid still, let me say that I advise you not to print Gerontion as prelude” (Letters 505). An intriguing link between “Gerontion” and The Waste Land is Fresca, one of the souls “whirled beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear.” She reappears in the draft version of “The Fire Sermon” as a figure rather like Belinda in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, but more literary, reading Richardson, Gibbon, and Giraudoux. The section is written in rhyming couplets in imitation of Pope. We are told that “The Scandinavians bemused her wits” – let’s say Ibsen and Strindberg – and that “The Russians thrilled her to hysteric fits” – plausible Russian candidates are Dostoevsky, Kandinsky, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev. Out of this “chaotic misch-masch potpourri” she writes poetry. She is, in short, an intellectual lady in touch with the latest trends, but not to be taken too seri-

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ously. Eliot’s tendency to misogyny asserts itself as he indelicately follows her to “the needful stool,” and later adds: “Odours, confected by the artful French, / Disguise the hearty female stench.” Before the bath he has her write letters concerned with social dalliance (Facsimile 23). He remarks that “in other time or place” she might have been “a meek and lowly weeping Magdalene,” but in this day and age she could be no more that “a sort of can-can salonnière” (Facsimile 27). Although Fresca did not survive Pound’s blue pencil, Eliot originally devoted some seventy lines to this intellectual lady of easy virtue, who, instead of being baptized a Christian “was baptised in a soapy sea / Of Symonds, – Walter Pater – Vernon Lee.” John Addington Symonds and Walter Pater are well known, but Vernon Lee is not. “Vernon Lee” is the pseudonym of Violet Paget (1856–1935), author of Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), Belcaro (1881), Euphorion (1884), and the satirical novel Miss Brown (1884), among others. Miss Brown caricatures English aesthetic circles, making Paget a poor match for Symonds and Pater. She also wrote a pacifist play – Satan the Waster (1920). Paget was a long-time friend of Lady Ottoline Morrell, and when she returned to London from Italy late in 1914, Ottoline invited her and her young companion, Irene Cooper-Willis, to lunch. Russell joined them and became infatuated with Cooper-Willis. Over Paget’s opposition, he engaged the young woman early in 1915 as his research assistant. As was his habit, Russell very soon made sexual advances to her, which she rejected – as she apparently did with all of the men who sought intimacy with her (Monk Spirit 387–94). Although neither Violet Paget nor Irene Cooper-Willis was in the least like Eliot’s Fresca, it may be that Eliot knew something of Russell’s infatuation with Paget’s friend since her employment as Russell’s research assistant overlapped with the period in which the Eliots shared Russell’s flat. Pound did not think the Fresca section worth retaining, though Eliot thought well enough of it, as he recalled in his Introduction to Faber’s edition of The Selected Poems of Ezra Pound: “Pound once induced me to destroy what I thought an excellent set of couplets; for, said he, ‘Pope has done this so well that you cannot do it better; and if you mean this as a burlesque, you had better suppress it, for you cannot parody Pope unless you can write better verse than Pope – and you can’t’” (18. My emphasis). The other large groups of lines that Pound persuaded Eliot to remove were monologues. The first (more than fifty lines) was an account of an evening of drinking and carousing in London with which the poem would have opened. The second (more than seventy lines),

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an account of sailing era fishermen on the Grand Banks, preceded the brief lines on Phlebas that now constitute Part iv. This is not the place to attempt still another assessment of the wisdom of Pound’s advice. The point I want to make is that the early drafts of the poem expanded the motifs of urban decadence, the degradation of sexual relations, and the absence of God that still mark the poem in its canonical form. If those passages had been retained, it would have been much more difficult to assume a single speaker uniting the poem – as most early readers did. In addition, nineteenth-century America would have been represented, as it no longer is. Instead of the poem appearing to be a quest for some revelation, it would have seemed more like a latter-day Satyricon, that is, a picaresque journey through a disintegrating civilization. The inclusion of Gerontion would have reinforced such a reading – giving him the role of observer that by default Eliot assigned to Tiresias by the expedient of an explanatory note. Pound immediately recognized Eliot’s poem as a great triumph, telling him that he was “wracked by the seven jealousies.” He confided to Felix Schelling, his former teacher at Hamilton College: “Eliot’s Waste Land is, I think, the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900” (Pound, Letters 234 and 248). Unfortunately, Pound never said just what he thought the theme, topic, or message of the poem was. All one can be sure of is that his elisions rendered the poem more “mythopoeic”and less historical. Three rather distinct assessments of the poem have survived in the literature: Pound’s estimate that it fulfills “the modern experiment since 1900,” Eliot’s claim that he was just working out a “personal grouse,” and the original positive reception of it as an expression of the disillusionment and angst of a generation. (I am omitting for the moment the negative reactions – among them Stevens’.) Of course, these assessments are not mutually exclusive. Lawrence Rainey argued in Revisiting The Waste Land that the focus in the subsequent eighty-odd years of commentary on the first and third assessments has been misguided, and I am inclined to agree (48–9). Eliot himself cast doubt on the pertinence of at least the quester aspect of the mythological schema: “It was just, no doubt, that I should pay my tribute to the work of Miss Jessie Weston; but I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail (“The Frontiers of Criticism” in On Poetry and Poets 122). Eliot also vigorously dismissed the hypothesis that the poem expresses the disillusionment of a generation, not only in the remark to

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his brother but also in “Thoughts after Lambeth,” almost a decade after the poem’s publication: “I dislike the word ‘generation,’ which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation,’ which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention” (Selected Essays 368). Although Eliot’s “personal grouse” interpretation cannot be accepted as trumping the other two, it has not been given its due. If we are to take it seriously, the nature of the grouse, and its cause, remain to be specified. The claim I make is that the grouse was Eliot’s disillusionment with Humanism and with Russell as a friend and mentor. Vivien and Eliot were not estranged at the time Eliot wrote The Waste Land. As is well known, she played a role in the poem’s development, seeing it in draft form, and offering suggestions – some of which Eliot accepted.24 My claim is not that the poem reflects Eliot’s dismay at Vivien’s infidelity – of which he may have been unaware – so much as that it reflects his “loss of faith” in the possibility that Humanism might serve as a replacement for Christianity. That disillusionment preceded his conversion by nearly a decade, leaving him in a state of incipient religious despair for many of those years. One aspect of the composition of The Waste Land for which I do not have a good explanation, and which has not received any comment as far as I know, is Eliot’s decision – taken shortly after completing “Gerontion” – to write a long poem.25 There is nothing on record to explain why Eliot thought that whatever it was he had on his mind would require a long poem. He did have the example of Pound’s Cantos as a model – though they were still more or less in embryo – only “Three Cantos” and “Canto iv” having been published by 1919. Still, he did submit his draft to Pound for comments and advice, and the draft does look a little like “Three Cantos,” given the difference between their respective “voices.” Both are monologues – though Pound’s cantos are rather Browningesque, with a single voice ranging over an ill-sorted range of topics. The Ur Waste Land, in contrast, had a series of distinct monologists narrating reasonably self-contained stories. In the same year that “Gerontion” appeared, Pound published the sequence “Homage to Sextus Properties.” But that “translation” of a Roman satirist could not conceivably have served as a model for Eliot to emulate. All three – The Waste Land, “Three Cantos,” and “Propertius” – are sequences, which was very much the fashion of the day.26 Stevens’

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“Sunday Morning” and “Lettres d’un Soldat” are other poetry sequences of the period. It is a fashion that Stevens never abandoned, and to which Eliot returned in Four Quartets. However, The Waste Land is distinct – if not unique – in its use of several speakers without a clear marking of dramatic voices from an over-arching narrative voice. One aspect of the poem that is seldom, if ever, noticed is that The Waste Land celebrates what Kermode calls “the Time Between the failure of God and the birth of a new age.” Kermode borrowed the phrase from Heidegger’s lecture on Hölderlin (Kermode 1980 260), and applied it to Stevens’ poetry, but it fits The Waste Land and Gerontion even more snugly. In the Christian story, the “Time Between” is given a very particular locus – the time between Christ’s death on the cross on Good Friday and his manifestation to the apostles following his resurrection on Easter Sunday. The Gospels contain only a couple of anecdotes about this Time Between. One is Christ’s magical appearance to the apostles on the road to Emmaus “about threescore furlongs” from Jerusalem (Luke 24:15). Although the incident takes place on Easter Sunday, the Apostles do not recognize Christ until he sups with them, at which time “their eyes were opened, and they knew him; and he vanished out of their sight” (Luke 24:31). “What the Thunder Said” opens with an evocation of Christ’s passion and death, invoking the Time Between: After the torchlight red on sweaty faces After the frosty silence in the gardens After the agony in stony places The shouting and the crying Prison and palace and reverberation Of thunder of spring over distant mountains He who was living is now dead. In Matthew’s account, Christ was arrested at night as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane (“the frosty silence in the gardens”), and was taken to the high priest’s palace where he was interrogated. The next morning Pontius Pilate brought Him before the crowd, who cried out “Let Him be Crucified” (Matthew 27:11–26) – (“The shouting and the crying / Prison and palace”). Later in “What the Thunder Said,” Eliot conflates the apostles’ failure to recognize Christ with a modern incident:

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Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman – But who is that on the other side of you? Since the parallel is hardly self-evident, Eliot’s headnote to Section v directs the reader to the Gospel account of the journey to Emmaus. He also provides a note to this passage, identifying the modern incident: “The following lines were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions (I forget which, but I think one of Shackleton’s): it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” By conflating the modern hallucination induced by exhaustion with the Gospel account, Eliot puts both at the same level, leaving his reader unable to tell whether they count as miracles or as hallucinations. From a Humanist perspective, both would be hallucinations; while from a credulous religious perspective, both could count as manifestations of the divine. Since the reader has no means of choosing which reading to adopt, he or she is placed in the same uncertainty as the apostles in their first experience of the Risen Christ. The other incident in the Gospels relevant to this idea of the Time Between is Peter’s thrice-repeated denial of Christ, also in Matthew (69–75). During the Last Supper, Christ told Peter that he would deny him thrice before the cock crew. Peter, of course, indignantly denied that he would ever do such a thing. However, Christ’s prophecy comes true. The denials all take place before Christ’s crucifixion, but after Christ has been arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Peter followed him afar off unto the high priest’s palace, and went in, and sat with the servants to see the end” (Matthew 26: 58). But when a “damsel” asked him if he was one of Christ’s followers, Peter denied it. After he had left the palace, a “maid” confronted him with the same accusation, and he denied it once more. Finally, a group came up to him, saying, “Surely thou also art one of them; for thy speech betrayeth thee. Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew” (Matthew: 69–75).

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There is no direct allusion to this incident in The Waste Land, but no practising Christian would fail to associate the following passage with the story of Peter’s denial of Christ: the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. It has no windows, and the door swings, Dry bones can harm no one.27 Only a cock stood on the rooftree Co co rico co co rico In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust Bringing rain Of course this passage also alludes to the Grail story, and the Chapel Perilous – as Eliot found it in Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. In the stories she recounts, the chapel is empty of human presence, as it is here, but is inhabited by an evil figure – typically an agent of the Devil (175–82). An aspect of that work that few commentators acknowledge is that Weston was a convinced Theosophist. From Ritual to Romance argues that a pagan mystery tradition lies behind the Grail stories, which have confusedly transmitted it disguised with a spurious Christian overlay (186–8).28 This Chapel Perilous incident, she says “is the story of an initiation ... carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical (182. Original emphasis). I have not the least suspicion that Eliot was persuaded by Weston’s Theosophical credulity. The point of incorporating her fantasies in the poem alongside the Christian story was presumably to stress the state of disbelief in which he and his age found themselves – Heidegger’s “Time Between.” There is good reason to read The Waste Land as articulating such a moment – though without Heidegger’s confidence that Being would show itself in a new revelation. In “East Coker” ii, Eliot returns to this notion of the Time Between in a spirit little more optimistic than that of the The Waste Land. Here he invokes Dante’s Commedia, which begins “in a dark wood”: We are only undeceived Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm. In the middle, not only in the middle of the way But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,

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On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold, And menaced by monsters, fancy lights, Risking enchantment. We can be confident that Eliot contemplated writing a long poem for a period of approximately two years, and further that it would articulate a state of doubt or unbelief. In its earliest, draft form The Waste Land had more in common with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Portrait of a Lady” than with Eliot’s more recent satirical poems. Like those earlier poems, the version Eliot showed Pound was primarily a monologue poem with a strong satirical component that paid particular attention to sexual dalliance – although the behaviour of the denizens of The Waste Land draft is somewhat more sordid, and their attitude more cynical, than that of Prufrock or the monologuists of “Portrait of a Lady.” Pound’s editing accentuated the sordidness and the cynicism, but left untouched the “mythical” component – something largely absent from Eliot’s earlier poetry, as well as from Pound’s.29 The armature of the Grail Legend, on which Eliot disposes his observations on life, manners, and religion, is derived from Joyce’s practice in Ulysses. Despite Lawrence Rainey’s scepticism about the authenticity of the mythical method (Revisiting 48–9), there is no escaping its relevance – however factitious it might be – to the construction of The Waste Land out of the fragments Eliot brought to Pound. And it is worth noticing that in his public expression of regret at having appended the explanatory notes to The Waste Land (cited above) Eliot did not renounce the mythical method itself. Both poets had been familiar with Joyce’s practice since December of 1917 when, as foreign editor of the Little Review, Pound began to see episodes of Ulysses. When Pound told his former teacher, Felix Schelling, that he thought The Waste Land was “the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment, since 1900” (Pound, Letters 248), he had in mind primarily himself, Yeats, Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis. Joyce’s example caused Pound to abandon Browning’s Sordello as the structural paradigm for his epic and to attempt a more Joycean structure. About the time he was editing The Waste Land, he had decided to begin the Cantos with the Nekuia from the Odyssey instead of the Browningesque authorial monologue with which he had begun “Three Cantos.” Eliot’s famous praise of the “mythological method” did not appear until his review of Ulysses, in the Dial in November of

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1923, well after the publication of The Waste Land. But he had been reading Ulysses as it came out in the Little Review and commented on it favourably as early as the summer of 1918 – in “Contemporanea” (Egoist 5 June–July 1918). Eliot praised the structure of Ulysses in his “London Letter” for the July 1921 Dial in terms that anticipate his more famous comment of 1923: “The strange, the surprising, is of course essential to art; but art has to create a new world, and a new world must have a new structure. Mr Joyce has succeeded, because he has very great constructive ability; and it is the structure which gives his later work its unique and solitary value” (216. My emphasis). In both of these comments on Ulysses, Eliot stresses that the unexampled novelty of the twentieth-century world requires a novel aesthetic form. Since this posture has been a commonplace of commentary on Modernism ever since, it is worth noting that it is one sharply at odds with Eliot’s Anglicanism and his later poetic practice – not to mention his later promotion of a return to the old dispensation of European Christendom. His championing of Ulysses and his own practice in The Waste Land represent his hope that he and his fellow artists had found a mode that would suffice as a response to the loss of faith – not only in religion, but also in long-established cultural and social modes – which represented for them the modern dilemma. Eliot drew explicit attention to that feature of Ulysses in his Dial review, praising the mythical method as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Eliot produced a steady stream of literary journalism between 1919 and the publication of The Waste Land. Whatever his difficulties with his own and Vivien’s health in these years, he was just as productive as he had been during the war years. No doubt things were somewhat easier for him, since he was no longer saddled with completing his dissertation and the teaching responsibilities he had had from 1915 to the spring of 1919. The striking difference between his poetic activity in the war years and the postwar period was that, following “Gerontion,” he focused on producing a single, major work instead of a scattering of lesser poems. As I have suggested, it is probable that this change was prompted by the vogue for long poem sequences. Largely because of his admiration for Browning, Pound had contemplated a long poem from an early age. As already noted he had published the first (abortive) elements of the poem that became The Cantos as early as 1915. Eliot, in contrast, had looked to the French symbolistes as his models,

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and they produced only short poems, many of them satirical in nature. Moreover, the long poem had been the specialty of the Romantics and the Victorians, the very poets from whom Eliot wanted to separate himself. The Waste Land, then, marked a double watershed for Eliot: it signals the abandonment of his hope for Humanism, and a move away from the short lyric and satirical poem in favour of the long poem constructed on the new rhetorical principle pioneered by Joyce – the mythical method. As it turned out – despite the phenomenal critical success of The Waste Land – Eliot did not exploit this new mode in subsequent poems. Between The Waste Land and Ash-Wednesday he published only “The Hollow Men” and the Ariel poems, none of which exploit the new form. Indeed Ash-Wednesday returned to the Romantic mode of the contemplative lyric – albeit highly inflected by Dante’s example. One of the reasons for his rather slight output in those years was no doubt his preoccupation with the Criterion.30 In the summer of 1921, while The Waste Land was taking its final form, he was in the midst of the negotiations with Lady Rothermere that led to the founding of the Criterion, an ambitious undertaking that would take much of his energy for most of the next fifteen years. His “Commentary” for July 1923 indicates very clearly what prompted him to take on this task. The manifesto has a very Arnoldian ring to it, even to his use of the Arnoldian term “disinterestedness”: “It is the function of a literary review to maintain the autonomy and disinterestedness of literature and at the same time to exhibit the relations of literature – not to “life,” as something contrasted to literature – but to all the other activities, which, together with literature, are the components of life” (I 421). Committed as Eliot was to the notion of “impersonality” in literature, the “other activities” whose relation to literature he intended the Criterion to illuminate would certainly not be the personal trials and tribulations of authors. As the articles in the journal amply illustrate, they would be the cultural, political, philosophic, and scientific issues confronting the men and women of the time. Central among those issues was the search for a philosophy or faith which would provide a compass for a civilization that many saw as adrift in uncharted seas.31 Nothing Stevens wrote ever enjoyed the huge success of Eliot’s Waste Land, but, on the other hand, neither did he experience the philosophical and personal turmoil that Eliot did in the years following the Great War. Stevens’ life went on quite smoothly during and after the war. Like

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most Americans he was well insulated from the horrors of the trenches – never being exposed to first-hand accounts such as Eliot heard from his brother-in-law, nor losing friends and acquaintances, as Eliot did in Jean Verdenal. Perhaps the greatest disruption Stevens experienced in those years was the birth of Holly in July of 1924. This is not to say that he was complacent and untroubled by what Eliot called the modern dilemma. But it was not reflected in disruptions in his personal life. In addition, Stevens had no mentor to whom he looked for guidance, and hence was not disappointed by him as Eliot was by Russell.32 Although nine years older than Eliot, like him Stevens had published almost nothing prior to the outbreak of war in August of 1914.33 However, he published poems regularly in literary journals during and after the war, collecting them in Harmonium in 1923, the year after The Waste Land. As we have seen, he suppressed “Lettres d’un Soldat” his principal effort to deal with the war in poetry. The only Harmonium poem that employs the word “war” is “Le Monocle de mon Oncle,” first published in Poetry in December of 1918. It is primarily concerned with Stevens’ approaching fortieth birthday. The reference to war is metaphorical, suggesting that his poetry has an intensity – and perhaps also a fatality – comparable to the experience of men in battle: In verses wild with motion, full of din, Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure As the deadly thought of men accomplishing Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate The faith of forty, ward of Cupido. (ix) There is no hint in this poem of the sort of shock and distress that approving readers found in The Waste Land. “Le Monocle de mon Oncle” (first published in Harmonium in 1923) is somewhat less playful than its title would lead one to expect. It is structured around the Humanist scepticism that also animates “Sunday Morning,” although it is darker. The opening poem mockingly addresses the Virgin Mary, irreverently altering a few of the attributes found in her litany.34 “Mother of heaven, regina of the clouds, O sceptre of the sun, crown of the moon, There is not nothing, no, no, never nothing, Like the clashed edges of two words that kill.”

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And so I mocked her in magnificent measure. Or was it that I mocked myself alone? I wish that I might be a thinking stone. The sea of spuming thought foists up again The radiant bubble that she was. And then A deep up-pouring from some saltier well Within me, bursts its watery syllable. This ridicule of the Virgin, although reflecting a Humanist bias against entrenched superstition, is mitigated by the query “Or was it that I mocked myself alone?” and the nostalgia for “the radiant bubble that she was.” Such ambivalence about religious symbols is characteristic of Stevens’ poetry whenever he addresses them. However, for the most part, “Le Monocle de mon Oncle” is a lament for the failing of passion that a man approaching middle age commonly feels. Certainly it is not at all concerned with the passing of an era or with disillusionment. The Stevens poem that is most often compared to The Waste Land is “The Comedian as the Letter C.” Indeed, Hi Simons called it Stevens’ Waste Land. And Roy Harvey Pearce, in 1961, considered it “a kind of reply to The Waste Land (Longenbach 88–9). However, James Longenbach has rejected that reading, preferring Kermode’s new critical assessment of it as a “sustained nightmare of unexpected diction.” There is good reason to reject Pearce’s notion that it is a response to The Waste Land, since Stevens had finished “Comedian” before he had read Eliot’s poem. In striking contrast to the long gestation of The Waste Land, the origin of “Comedian” was highly contingent. Stevens was prompted to write it by the announcement of the Blindman Prize. The Dial prize, which was awarded to The Waste Land, was in fact invented to satisfy Eliot’s demands for more than the $150 that Thayer first offered him.35 Stevens told Harriet Monroe, in a letter of 21 December 1921 that he had “been churning and churning”on a poem he planned to enter for the prize (Letters 229). He got it in on time, but the prize was awarded to Grace Hazard Conklin (Martz 4–5). The poem he submitted, now printed in Opus Posthumous as “From the Journal of Crispin,” was rewritten over the summer of 1922. Since The Waste Land was first published in the first issue of the Criterion in October of 1922, and in the Dial the next month, there is no possibility that “The Comedian as the Letter C” could have been a reply to The Waste Land.36 Nonetheless, “Comedian,” a poem of some length, was written at about the same time as The Waste Land, competed for a poetry prize,

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and, like The Waste Land, takes issues of history and culture as its theme. Its failure to win the Blindman Prize was perhaps an omen of its relative lack of success. Joseph Riddell’s comment a half century ago is no less valid today than it was then: “‘Comedian’ is an engaging tour de force which has baffled more critics than it has satisfied” (93). Any discussion of it must begin with Hi Simons’ article, “‘The Comedian as the Letter C”: Its Sense and its Significance,” which Stevens read and approved. On reading the essay he told Simons: “What you have said is correct, not only in the main but in particular, and not only correct but keen” (Letters 350). Even though Stevens did quibble over some details, we cannot ignore his general approval of Simons’ interpretation. Even by 1940, Simons notes, at least eight distinct interpretations of the poem had been published – all of which he found to be “mutually contradictory” (97). According to Simons, the poem “tells both how a representative modern poet tried to change from a romanticist to a realist and how he adapted himself to his social environment.” His reading is quite closely autobiographical, interpreting Crispin’s life story as parallelling Stevens’ poetic and intellectual development to 1923 and culminating in an “‘indulgent fanaticism’ and skepticism” (98). Although Stevens does not reject outright Simons’ autobiographical reading, he does indicate that the pattern of Crispin’s life is typical of all men, not just himself: “I suppose that the way of all mind is from romanticism to realism, to fatalism and then to indifferentism back to romanticism all over again” (Letters 350). While accepting the pattern that Simons sees in the poem, Stevens does not accept his autobiographical slant, seeing it as a general cultural pattern common to “all mind.” Moreover, he does not (in 1940, at least) think of the poem as coming to rest at any particular point in the cycle, implicitly rejecting Simons’ view that the poem comes to rest in an “indulgent fanaticism and skepticism” – or at least he rejects the supposition that he has stopped there. It seems to me that Simons’ focus on the undeniable autobiographical aspects of “Comedian” deflects attention from the general cultural and historical references of the poem, which are equally undeniable. Criticism of “Comedian” following Simons has continued to stress its autobiographical aspect. Thus, its critical reception has been the inverse of that of The Waste Land, criticism of which long neglected its personal aspects in favour of its cultural and historical import. Clearly, “Comedian” is not

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autobiographical in the sense that Wordsworth’s Prelude is. Indeed, no details of Crispin’s life correspond to Stevens’ life. If we have an account of the “growth of the poet’s mind” (Wordsworth’s characterization of The Prelude) in “Comedian,” it is a growth that is typical rather than specific. It represents the mind of Europe as it left behind not only the land, but also its culture and civilization – in particular, Christianity. (Of course, such a characterization of the European settlement of the New World is not at all historically accurate.) Just as Wordsworth recounts his spiritual and intellectual growth through a dialectic operating between “Nature” and “Civilization,” so “Comedian” recounts the dialectic between the Judæo-Christian illusion that man is God’s steward on earth and the Darwinian perception that he is “a native in this world” – as Stevens puts it years later in poem xxviii of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (first published in Poetry 52 in May 1937). Stevens’ comments on his motives for writing a long poem are – as always – somewhat mischievous; nonetheless, they are remote from suggesting any personal motives such as Eliot claimed were the germ of The Waste Land: “I know that people judge one by volume. However, having elected to regard poetry as a form of retreat, the judgment of people is neither here nor there. The desire to write a long poem or two is not obsequiousness to the judgment of people. On the contrary, I find that this prolonged attention to a single subject has the same result that prolonged attention to a senora has according to the authorities. All manner of favors drop from it” (Letters 229). Even though “Comedian” is scarcely marked by a despairing sense of disillusionment, Stevens does describe poetry generally as “a form of retreat” – thinking, no doubt, of a withdrawal from the world so as to attend to spiritual matters, rather than a military retreat. He told Ronald Latimer a dozen years after writing “Comedian” that Crispin was a “profitless philosopher,” that is, one inclined to speculation, but whose speculations lead to no solutions. “Life, for him,” he continued, “was not a straight course; it was picking his way in a haphazard manner through a mass of irrelevancies. Under such circumstances, life would mean nothing to him, however pleasant it might be” (Letters 293). Crispin, then, is as disillusioned as the denizens of Eliot’s Waste Land, though not as despairing. He is, in effect, the “free man” celebrated by Russell. In contrast to the speakers in The Waste Land, Crispin appears to be comfortable in his disillusionment. But Stevens sees him as hollow – just like Eliot’s Hollow Men:

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He was in this as other freemen are, Sonorous nutshells rattling inwardly. His violence was for aggrandizement And not for stupor, such as music makes For sleepers halfway waking. (ii 115–19) For Stevens, the choice, then, was not between ignorant and muddled superstition and rational clarity of thought, as it was for Russell. Stevens’ dilemma lay between a violent aggrandizement and a “stupor, such as music makes” – that is, between the Humanist’s faith in “progress” however disruptive and the believer’s faith in an imagined world of beauty and justice. Moreover, Crispin is not as indomitable in his freedom as Russell would have his free man be. Frightened by thunder out of the West, Crispin, here, took flight. An annotator has his scruples, too. He knelt in the cathedral with the rest, This connoisseur of elemental fate, Aware of exquisite thought. (iii ll. 163–7) Crispin is said to be an “affectionate emigrant” who finds “a new reality in parrot-squawks.” The motif of transplantation is evident – although it is not clear to me why he places Crispin in Yucatan instead of Connecticut. Perhaps it is simply to emphasize the radical change of environment; Connecticut is not nearly so unlike Western Europe as is Mexico. In any case, Crispin is not sufficiently emancipated from European mythology to risk the wrath of an angry God, should He exist. He chooses to adopt the protective colouring of a believer – just in case! And Stevens seems to endorse his caution, noting that “The storm was one / Of many proclamations of the kind, / Proclaiming something harsher than he learned.” We are not told just what it was that he had learned, but – once again – his intellectual freedom is stressed: “His mind was free / And more than free, elate, intent, profound.” Although free, Crispin’s mind is not autonomous, for he was “studious of a self possessing him, / That was not in him in the crusty town / From which he sailed.” The “crusty town from which he sailed” is a town in Europe and he has acquired in the New World a “self” that he lacked in the Old World.

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The first section, entitled “The World Without Imagination,” begins with the standard Humanist proclamation: “Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, /The sovereign ghost.” That is to say, the beliefs mankind has entertained are – as Humanists maintain – fables invented by humans. Although the ecological detail that he is “the intelligence of his soil” is not typical of Humanism. Stevens follows that rubric with a comic series of powers that evince the sovereignty of man, “the sovereign ghost”: As such, the Socrates Of snails, musician of pears, principium [“beginning”] And lex. Sed quæritur: is this same wig [“law”; “but let us ask”] Of things, this nincompated pedagogue, Preceptor to the sea? Crispin at sea Created, in his day, a touch of doubt. (i ll. 1–7) According to Genesis, sovereignty was bestowed on man by his creator. Stevens’ “principium” echoes the opening words of Genesis: “In the beginning”– in principium in the Vulgate. A few verses later in Genesis, Man is given dominion over God’s creation: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 27–8). In leaving Europe it seems that Crispin has turned his back on the JudæoChristian view that God had given man sovereignty. But the poet, Crispin’s biographer, doubts that he possesses such sovereignty – as, indeed, does Crispin: [Crispin] ... now beheld himself, A skinny sailor peering in the sea-glass. What word split up in clickering syllables And storming under multitudinous tones Was name for this short-shanks in all that brunt? (i ll. 27–31) The poem never answers the question directly, but Stevens hinted at an answer of what the name “for this short-shanks” might be twenty years later in a letter to Simons: “It is true that the letter C is a cypher for

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Crispin, but using the cypher was meant to suggest something that nobody seems to have grasped. I can state it, perhaps, by changing the title to this: “The Comedian as the Sounds of the Letter C” ... Now, as Crispin moves through the poem, the sounds of the letter C accompany him ... I don’t mean to say that there is an incessant din, but you ought not be able to read very far in the poem without recognizing what I mean. The sounds of the letter C include all related or derivative sounds. For instance, x, tx, and z (12 January 1940 Letters 351–2). The practice of referring to Crispin by the “cypher” of the letter C, inevitably invokes the Jewish practice of avoiding the name of God by a similar cipher, the Tetragrammaton, the four letters comprising the unspeakable name of God – jhvh in the Latin alphabet.37 Christians supply the missing vowels, to produce the name, “Jehovah.” Crispin, of course, is given a determinate name in the poem since he is merely Man, not God. It is only the letter with which his name (as well as Christ’s) begins that is deliberately “split up in flickering syllables.” The polymorphous nature of Crispin’s name rather cryptically reiterates the fundamental Humanist point that God in his infinite variety is the creation of mankind, not the other way around. The world without imagination, then, is a world dominated by doctrine – primarily Christian doctrine in Crispin’s case, but a Rabbinic, Islamic or Hindu doctrine would serve as well. As the doctrine becomes discredited, Crispin is diminished “until nothing of himself / Remained, except some starker, barer self /In a starker, barer world”(i ll. 60–2). In the world from which Crispin is departing “What counted was mythology of self.” He “Became an introspective voyager.” Invoking Kant, Stevens observes: “Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last” (i ll. 68–9). However, Crispin’s introspective discovery would be more properly labelled by the Husserlian sich selbst. Both German phrases can be translated as “the thing itself,” but Husserl’s sich selbst is the introspective, phenomenological certainty with which we experience our own perceptions (our “phenomenology”), as opposed to the actuality (the ding an sich) of external reality, which, Kant believed, we can only infer but never know. Crispin is a post-Kantian, then, freed from the romantic illusion that the world his consciousness projects is the veritable world: free From the unavoidable shadow of himself That lay elsewhere around him. Severance

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Was clear. The last distortion of romance Forsook the insatiable egotist. (i ll. 73–7)38 He now sees plain and true, like Russell’s free man: The sea Severs not only lands but also selves. Here was no help before reality. Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new. (I ll. 78–80) Part iv, “The Idea of a Colony,” inverts the opening lines of the poem, “man is the intelligence of his soil, /The sovereign ghost,” declaring instead that “his soil is man’s intelligence.” The inversion marks the difference between the Judæo-Christian belief that man has been made sovereign over God’s creation and the post-Darwinian belief that man – like all “creation” – is the product of his environment. Instead of being creatures created by God together with the birds and beasts over which we were given dominion, we are equal with the birds and the beasts. A corollary is that the Europeans, transplanted into the New World will be transformed by their new environment, creating a new human type and a new culture and society to go with it. Accordingly, “lex, rex and principium,” that is the law, the king, and the “beginning” of the Old World, are now cast off in the New: Nota: his soil is man’s intelligence. That’s better. That’s worth crossing seas to find. Crispin in one laconic phrase laid bare His cloudy drift and planned a colony. Exit the mental moonlight, exit lex, Rex and principium, exit the whole Shebang. Exeunt omnes. (280–1) By discarding the “principium” Stevens means that Americans (both South and North) have cast off the imagined or mythical beginning that animated European culture as found either in Genesis or in the Gospel According to John: “In principio verbum erat” (“In the beginning was the word”). The new man in America, then, is post-Christian, and perhaps a Humanist. Of course, history belies this account of the settlement of the Americas, which was motivated for the most part by

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national rivalries, Christian piety, and a lust for wealth. But Stevens leaves no doubt that his meaning is much as I have suggested: Here was prose More exquisite than any tumbling verse: A still new continent in which to dwell. What was the purpose of his pilgrimage, Whatever shape it took in Crispin’s mind, If not, when all is said, to drive away The shadow of his fellows from the skies, And, from their stale intelligence released, To make a new intelligence prevail? (ii ll. 286–94) Stevens’ poetic account of European migration to the New World as the sluffing off of the Christian skin of the Old World has some historical plausibility – although we must collapse the chronology a good deal and regard the rise of Unitarianism and Humanism as the fulfilment of the European settlement of America. Of course such a fulfilment applies only to that part of North America which became the United States of America – the only part that citizens of that nation typically count as “America.”39 Stevens not only collapses the chronology of events but he also omits any reference to the violence that marked American history from the so-called French and Indian War, to the recent (1916) excursion by General Pershing into Mexico in a vain search for Pancho Villa. Setting aside the question of historical accuracy or adequacy, Stevens leaves no doubt that Crispin is a refugee from the debunked beliefs of the Old World, including, it seems, faith in progress: Shrewd novitiates Should be the clerks of our experience. These bland excursions into time to come, Related in romance to backward flights, However prodigal, however proud, Contained in their afflatus the reproach That first drove Crispin to his wandering. He could not be content with counterfeit, With masquerade of thought, with hapless words That must belie the racking masquerade, With fictive flourishes that preordained

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His passion’s permit, hang of coat, degree Of buttons, measure of his salt. Such trash Might help the blind, not him, serenely sly. (353–66) “Bland excursions into time to come” are those Utopian dreams in which Europe has indulged itself since the Enlightenment, the most consequential of which is Marxist Communism. The “backward flights” are surely the nostalgic dreams of such men as William Morris, G.K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc, who regarded the medieval world as a viable model for a modern society. Eliot might be included in that group, though not at this date. The “counterfeit,” “masquerade of thought,” and “hapless words” suggest European political and social practices and their justifications – royal and aristocratic regimes together with their pomp and ceremony. “The Comedian as the Letter C” extends “The Journal of Crispin” with two new sections: iv, “A Nice Shady Home,” and v, “And Daughters with Curls,” both of which describe a domesticated Crispin settled in America. These sections give some credence to an autobiographical reading of the poem – though Stevens had one daughter and Crispin has four. But whatever autobiographical component there might be, Crispin remains an allegorical figure representative of America. In the opening lines of “A Nice Shady Home” we learn that Crispin is falling away from philosophical realism: Perhaps if discontent Had kept him still the prickling realist, ... he might have come To colonize his polar planterdom And jig his chits upon a cloudy knee. But his emprize40 to that idea soon sped. (383–91) Given this disillusionment, the poem asks if Crispin is to give up his dream: Was he to bray this in profoundest brass Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems? Was he to company vastest things defunct With a blubber of tom-toms harrowing the sky? Scrawl a tragedian’s testament? Prolong His active force in an inactive dirge,

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Which, let the tall musicians call and call, Should merely call him dead? Pronounce amen Through choirs infolded to the outmost clouds? (417–25) These lines – like most in the poem – are difficult to construe. “Arointing,” for example, is a very obscure verb. The OED has an entry for “aroint,” but is uncertain of its meaning, guessing that it means “avaunt!” or “begone!” in the imperative. That meaning would fit the context. Shakespeare uses it twice, in both instances as an injunction to a witch: “Aroint thee, Witch the rumpefed Ronyon cries” (Macbeth i iii) – itself not a model of clarity. So Crispin is asking if he should renounce and bury his dreams. In the event, he does not; he builds his cabin, plants his trees, and marries: And so it came, his cabin shuffled up, His trees were planted, his duenna brought Her prismy blonde and clapped her in his hands, The curtains flittered and the door was closed. Crispin, magister of a single room, Latched up the night. He is unafraid of the “quotidian [that] saps philosophers”: “Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves, / The tomtit and the cassia and the rose, /... / While he poured out upon the lips of her / That lay beside him, the quotidian / Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner” (464–74).41 Insofar as Crispin’s choices represent Stevens’ choices, “The Comedian as the Letter C” is certainly an anti-Waste Land, even though its composition was almost exactly contemporaneous with that of The Waste Land and therefore cannot be a response to it. The more relevant question for this study is whether it is a pro- or an anti-Humanist poem. Certainly Crispin’s realism is compatible with Humanism, as is his rejection of “racking masquerades” and “fictive flourishes.” His return to “social nature” in part v, “And Daughters with Curls,” also supports a Humanist reading of “Comedian.” In order to explore the different solutions that Stevens and Eliot survey to resolve the issue of belief, we need to explore the very different paths they pursued in the immediate postwar years. Eliot sought to influence the course of events through his editing of the Criterion and his own articles. Perhaps as a consequence, his poetic output declined markedly.

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Stevens similarly paused in his poetic output, but did not take on the role of a public intellectual as Eliot did. Both men were taking stock as they sought some resolution to the intractable social, religious and cultural issues that all thoughtful people of their generation had to face. But having written a dissertation on the idealist philosophy on F.H. Bradley, Eliot was exceptional among his fellow poets and artists. He came to the question of belief in an almost professional manner. Stevens had no such formal engagement with the issue of belief, nor is there any clear evidence that he sought a determinate belief, as Eliot did.42 However a concern with something “beyond ourselves” (as he puts it in “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly”) was a preoccupation from his late adolescence, and is a constant theme in his poetry. In contrast to Eliot’s clear-cut adoption of Anglican Christianity, Stevens’ views underwent a long development and articulation without passing through any stage of radical revision – at least none that I can identify. As early as 1 August 1899, two months before his twentieth birthday, Stevens confided to his journal that he “would sacrifice a great deal to be a Saint Augustine,” but lamented that “modernity is so Chicagoan, so plain, so unmeditative” that there is no room for a twentieth-century St Augustine. It is tempting to speculate why he picked St Augustine instead of St Francis or some other saint. I do not think he had in mind the fact that Augustine was a convert to Christianity (from Manichaeanism). More likely it was Augustine’s role as a great explainer of, and apologist for, Christianity in what was still a pagan world. In any case, Stevens’ entire poetic career can be characterized as an effort to explain his “vision” of poetry and the transcendent to a largely sceptical and materialistic world – which is presumably what he meant by “Chicagoan.” Chicago, which was one of the fastest growing cities in the world in the late nineteenth century and boasted the world’s first skyscraper in 1885, is presumably a metonymy for the brash, aggressive, and commercial. Its reputation as a centre of violent crime belongs to the later, Prohibition, period. In the same entry Stevens considers how a man such as himself could lead a righteous life in a world in which divine providence has been displaced by the Darwinian struggle for survival: “We must come down, we must use tooth and nail, it is the law of nature ‘the survival of the fittest’; providing we maintain at the same time self respect, integrity and fairness. I believe, as unhesitatingly as I believe anything, in the efficacy and necessity of fact meeting fact – with a background of the ideal” (My emphasis). He adds to this rather bleak view an unqualified statement

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of belief in some sort of transcendent realm: “I’m completely satisfied that behind every physical fact there is a divine force. Don’t therefore, look at facts, but through them” (Letters 32). This almost Swedenborgian conviction repeatedly causes Stevens to draw back from the Humanism that most of his Harvard contemporaries would have casually adopted. In 1906, by then an articled lawyer, Stevens was still bemoaning the loss of faith in his diary, and affirming a conviction that there must be something “beyond ourselves” – as he had done seven years earlier: Nature is a fine thing; but the average human mind and spirit are confusing beyond measure ... I wish that groves still were sacred – or, at least, that something was: that there was still something free from doubt, that day unto day still uttered speech, and night unto night still showed wisdom. I grow tired of the want of faith – the instinct of faith. Self-consciousness convinces me of something, but whether it be something Past, Present, or Future I do not know. What a bore to have to think all these things over, like a German student, or a French poet, or an English socialist! It would be much nicer to have things definite – both human and divine. One wants to be decent and to know the reason why. (Letters 86–7. My emphasis) Stevens never lost his desire for belief that these remarks evince or his distaste for being obliged “to think all these things over.”

ilemma stern Culture

4 Rethinking Western Culture

Eliot regretted the failure of the belief that had permeated European and American culture, but he did not evidently share Stevens’ distaste for having “to think all these things over,” and persisted in a search for an unqualified belief. Like many converts, once baptized, Eliot led a much more pious and dutiful religious life than most of his fellow Anglicans. He apparently needed a degree of certainty that, as he told Montgomery Belgion,1 his study of Bradley had not provided. Early in 1940 Belgion sent Eliot an article on the philosophy of the Harvard philosopher Harold Joachim that prompted Eliot to reminisce on his years as a philosophy student: To read an essay which recalls to me the Bradleian terminology, in which I have not thought for so many years, is a reminiscence which, at this distance, becomes a curious experience of the past. I experience that baffling feeling which I always found so exhausting in the youthful days when I attempted to practise philosophy – which I can only describe as a kind of awareness of subtilities [sic] and refinements and qualifications hovering in the corner of my eye, which I could never quite focus: accompanied by the suspicion that if I could focus them, there would be a further area of qualification again, flickering on the periphery. A sort of infinite regress, which gave me a despair of philosophy for myself. (Letter of 16 February 1940. Herbert Read Collection. University of Victoria. My emphasis) Whereas Stevens contrived to survive philosophically in a world of contingent belief, Eliot admitted to suffering from a kind of cognitive

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vertigo in the face of such a mise en abîme. It was, he says, this unwillingness to rest in passionate uncertainty that led him into the Anglican church – or at least into “theology”: “But the point that interested me, for myself, in reading the essay in question, was to find the ‘conations’ [i.e., will & desire] of pursuit beginning to operate again automatically, with the same failure of energy and faith in ability to follow up the beginnings. There was perhaps at bottom an admission that following them up would require a sacrifice of other activities which I was not prepared to sacrifice. If I could have given myself up completely to this kind of speculation, I suppose I should have become a sort of minor Husserl or Heidegger. Theology, as setting some limits to the ventures of the mind, is, I feel, a more satisfactory avocation” (Same letter. My emphasis). Needing something that set “some limits to the ventures of the mind,” Eliot found it in “theology.” By “theology” he means belief, not the formal study of the divine, an enterprise he never attempted – unless one counts Four Quartets as theology. Given the considerable body of literature postulating affinities between Stevens and both Heidegger and Husserl, it is worth pursuing Eliot’s casual remark that he might have become a minor Husserl or Heidegger to see if we can tease out just what he meant. I do not know how well informed Eliot was on Heidegger’s career, but it is difficult to imagine that he had in mind Heidegger’s role as an apologist for Nazism – one that led him to be banned from teaching by the French épuration committee. He more likely had him in mind as a student of Husserl, whose 1913 Ideen earned him the rank of the principal modern heir of Hegelian idealism, succeeding Bradley. If Eliot had been cogitating on his career thirty years still later, he might well have compared himself to Hans Georg Gadamer or Jacques Derrida – either of whom could be described as “a minor Husserl or Heidegger.”2 Indeed in T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy, Manju Jain has argued for an affinity of the views of Eliot’s teacher Josiah Royce with Heidegger and his followers – especially Gadamer, and Derrida. Although I think it is an error to conflate the Eliot of Royce’s seminar with Heidegger and his followers,3 it is worth bearing in mind that the philosophical concerns of the young Eliot – in particular on the issue of belief or doubt – were very much those that exercised Husserl and Heidegger and their phenomenological or existential4 followers: Sartre, Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Derrida (different as they are from one another). Husserl placed empirical knowledge in doubt. Heidegger – more truly a disciple of Nietszche than of Husserl – called into question

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communicable knowledge of any sort, including Husserl’s knowledge of the sich selbst. And, like Eliot, Heidegger was famously hostile to Humanism.5 But, in contrast to these contemporary philosophers, neither of our poets challenged the validity of empirical, scientific knowledge. Instead, they sought to sidestep it – Eliot with the revealed religion of Christianity, and Stevens with the poetic imagination. Despite the lack of any evidence that either Eliot or Stevens read, or even mentioned in any substantive way, either Husserl or Heidegger, there is a considerable body of literature attributing phenomenological meaning to Stevens’ poetry. Most of it is motivated by a desire to co-opt Stevens as a precursor of deconstruction or postmodernism. Eliot does not seem to have attracted so much attention of this sort. Indeed the supposed phenomenological cast of Stevens’ poetry is deployed in the battle of reputations that has waged for some decades over who is the pre-eminent English language poet of the twentieth century (the usual candidates are Eliot, Stevens, and Pound, though Yeats has his devotees). The failure of Eliot’s poetry to yield to phenomenological readings is seen by some as a failing that gives the palm to Stevens. While the critical attention that Heidegger has received from Stevens scholars is intended either to demonstrate an affinity of Stevens’ poetry with Heidegger’s philosophy or to discredit claims to such an affinity, my intent is different. I want to place Heidegger alongside Eliot and Stevens in hopes that by comparing the three of them we can come to a better understanding of the problem of belief that all three faced. As the principal philosophical influence on literary figures in the postwar world – both as the avatar of French existentialism, and then of its successors, deconstruction and postmodernism – Heidegger’s views merit some consideration in the context of those of the early Eliot and Stevens. This comparison will also provide a useful corrective to the common view that literary modernism is the very antitype of the “postmodern.” The earliest allegation of affinities between Stevens and Heidegger that I have found is Marjorie Buhr’s article in the April 1970 number of The Wallace Stevens Newsletter. On the evidence of the letters discussed below, Buhr alleges that Stevens was “interested” in Heidegger and summarizes Heidegger’s celebration of esotericism (which Stevens allegedly shares) in his Hölderlin essay: “For Heidegger the poet has the more exalted position [than the philosopher] since he is the namer of gods and the essence of things. Because Being lives only in experience

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and cannot be driven into conceptual and scientific traps, we must turn to the language of poetic vision to find reality and Being” (11). While this is a reasonable summary of Heidegger’s belief, it is not easily accommodated to Stevens’ position. For Stevens, poetry is heuristic, not revelatory as it is for Heidegger; that is to say, poetry points the way toward some truth, but does not contain it. It is for that reason that Stevens speaks of “fiction” rather than “vision,” as so many of his poetic predecessors would have done. Thomas Hines’ view in his 1976 book The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens: Phenomenological Parallels with Husserl and Heidegger is that Husserl’s technique of “phenomenological reduction” is equivalent to Stevens’ notion of “decreation” (85–6), and that Stevens shares with Heidegger a focus on the disclosure of Being – though he denies any mystical tendencies in either man (121–2). Hines refers to Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art,” and the “Letter on Humanism,” but he does not give much emphasis in the book to Heidegger’s view that “language is the house of Being.” In the much briefer discussion in a 1977 article, Hines put greater emphasis on Heidegger’s theory of language: “When Stevens writes that ‘a poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words’ and continues this line of thought by concluding that ‘poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words’ [na 32–3], he is expressing an idea of the function of poetic language and its relation to Being that is very similar to Heidegger’s concept of the essence of poetry” (WSJ 1 57). But Heidegger would have been scandalized by Stevens’ remark. In Heidegger’s view Being is not inserted into language by the poet but resides in language and is occasionally revealed in poetry. The “things that do not exist without words” cannot be aspects of Being, since for Heidegger Being is the ground of all existence. J. Hillis Miller’s application of Heidegger to Stevens (also in 1976) is not only surreptitious, but is also entirely different from that of Hines. For him it is the undecidability of meaning and the presence of aporiae and mises en abîme in Stevens’ poetry (11–16) that is the mark of its phenomenological posture. Instead of attributing these views to Heidegger, Miller invokes Derrida and “deconstruction” (28). Clearly, Miller has his Heidegger second hand. Nonetheless, the presence of such terms as alethia and the opposition of Grund to Abgrund (20) are echt Heidegger. Despite its dubious argument, B.J. Leggett justly says of Miller’s article: “It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Miller’s reading in Stevens criticism. It is consistently cited in commentaries on ‘The Rock,’ almost always approvingly” (Leggett 1998 114 n2).

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One of the products of Miller’s hints is Douglas Aimet’s article of 1981 which glosses the aphorism from Adagio, “Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense,” by appealing to Heidegger’s belief that Dasein (the self) is embedded in Sein (Being) in such a way that Dasein can be faithful (“authentic”) to Sein or unfaithful (“inauthentic”). He admits that “Wallace Stevens did not know Heidegger in any way that can be construed as influence,” but nonetheless accepts the founding assumption adopted by Hines and Miller that “the mutual illumination of the two is striking” (71). An article by Paul Naylor (WSJ 12 198]) challenges Hines’ argument that Stevens’ poetry “advances” from a Husserlian perspective toward a Heideggerean one. Like Hines he concedes that Stevens likely knew nothing of Husserl, but claims instead that “a ‘supreme fiction’ and a ‘pure phenomenology’ or that terms such as ‘fiction’ and ‘ambiguity’ ... fill an analogous role in each thinker’s search: they provide the method and the goal of that search.” Despite Legget’s judicious “deconstruction” of Miller’s founding article in his 1998 WSJ article, scholars have continued to allude to the affinities between Stevens and Heidegger as being established and available for casual exploitation in commentaries whose focus is elsewhere. An instance is Gyorgi Voros’ 2001 WSJ article comparing Stevens and A.R. Ammons in which Stevens’ “outcry of stanza my stone” is interpreted in the light of “the Heideggerian notion of dwelling, and the poem as a chamber or a home” (165). Indeed, Rosa Anca, in another WSJ article of the previous year (2000), points to a theologian’s use of Stevens’ poetry as a help in understanding Heidegger’s difficult philosophy. It serves as an instance of the now embedded view that Stevens’ poetry expresses the same phenomenological or existential philosophy as Heidegger. She also cites Melita Schaum’s Wallace Stevens and the Critical Schools, which “shows that Stevens has been a favourite with just about every critical school or theoretical trend” (Anca 210). Unlike Stevens, Eliot has not been much linked with Heidegger. There are certainly fewer grounds – even superficial grounds – for the attribution of affinity than there are with Stevens, even though, like Heidegger, Eliot became a prominent polemicist against Humanism. But while Christianity and phenomenology both oppose secular Humanism, the former is committed to a transcendent deity, while Heidegger is an unrepentant immanentist. And we remember that it was Bergson’s immanentist tendencies that Eliot found unacceptable.

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Both Eliot and Heidegger confronted the dominant ideology of their day – and ours – scientific materialism, or what its opponents called “naturism.” “Naturism” seeks to explain human behaviour by natural laws – whether physical, biological, economic, or psychological. Heideggerean phenomenologists believe that human nature – and by extension history – cannot be explained by the merely human, but by something beyond the human, something immanent in nature. Jews and Christians, in contrast, believe that these phenomena cannot be explained without appeal to something transcendent – not just of the human, but of nature itself. Paul Elmer More adopts this latter position in his response to Humanism in America, a 1930 collection to which Eliot contributed the essay “Religion without Humanism.”6 Shortly after his baptism in June 1927, (in the 1928 essay “The Humanism of Irving Babbitt”) Eliot resoundingly dismisses the notion that Humanism can serve as a substitute for religion. One of the standard claims of Humanism is that the wisdom of the founders of religions (such as the Buddha, Lao Tze, Christ, and Mohammed) and of philosophers (such as Socrates, Plato, and Confucius) could be incorporated into Humanism (Selected Essays 474). Eliot rejected that claim, insisting that Humanism could claim no higher status than a watereddown, secular version of religious insight. For him – as for Irving Babbitt – “the humanistic point of view is auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point of view” (Selected Essays 480). A year later (1929), Eliot published “Second Thoughts about Humanism” in response to the criticism of the first essay by the Humanist Norman Foerster. Here Eliot adopts a more aggressive stance, warning that it is “Humanism’s positivistic tendencies that are alarming” (Selected Essays 482). He is quite savage, keying on Foerster’s rather careless appeal to the Comtean claim that scientific advances have rendered religion obsolete – the same claim Robertson made in Modern Humanists. Eliot’s ultimate put-down of the Humanist posture is his assertion that “Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them” (485). This remark contrasts strongly with Eliot’s earlier hostile assessment of Collingwood and others who made similar claims for the necessity of Theism in the reviews he wrote while under the influence of Russell and Maurras, discussed in chapter two. Stevens would not, I think, have disagreed with Eliot’s remark, since his view was that poetic fictions are rather like scientific hypotheses; they are tentative formulations based on experience, but always subject to revision or rejection in the light of new experience. Such a view is an

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application to religious belief of pragmatist principles.7 Stevens’ assertion, “I am a native in this world / And think in it as a native thinks,” in poem xxviii of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is based on such a faith. On these grounds there is a good chance that the poet’s fictions will reflect the fundamental nature of existence, and not just what Stevens calls “reality,” the quotidian experience of l’homme moyen sensuel. The poet’s fictions are shaped by the same forces that shape the world – forces that Stevens believes transcend the world. On this he is in agreement with Christians, and in disagreement with Heidegger, for whom the forces that shape the world are immanent in it. Stevens largely avoids talk of the supernatural. The nearest he comes to it in his poetry is talk of heaven, and he is invariably dismissive of the notion of an afterworld where rewards can be collected. An exemplary instance is “Of Heaven Considered as a Tomb,” published in Poetry in 1921 as one of the group “Sur Ma Guzzla Gracile,” in which he mocks the notion that we enter a paradise after death: What word have you, interpreters, of men Who in the tomb of heaven walk by night, The darkened ghosts of our old comedy? Do they believe they range the gusty cold, With lanterns borne aloft to light the way, Freemen of death, about and still about To find whatever it is they seek? Or does That burial, pillared up each day as porte And spiritous passage into nothingness, Foretell each night the one abysmal night, When the host shall no more wander, nor the light Of the steadfast lanterns creep across the dark? Make hue among the dark comedians, Halloo them in the topmost distances For answer from their icy Élysée. Although Stevens did not share Eliot’s Christian faith in the reality of a supernatural realm, like Eliot he rejected psychoanalytic reductionism.8 He managed throughout his career to evade the “either/or” that Eliot offered Foerster: “There is no avoiding the dilemma: you must be either a naturalist or a supernaturalist.” Stevens’ avoidance of that stark choice is what makes his poetry so subtle – a subtlety that some perceive as confusion or muddle-headedness.

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“Religion without Humanism,” Eliot’s contribution to the Foerster collection, attempts to restore relations between Christians and Humanists by conceding that religion needs Humanism to keep it from the excesses of ecclesiastical sclerosis on the one hand, and dogmatic sclerosis on the other. But he does not yield anything on belief, conceding only the need for the discipline of sceptics in the midst of believers – a residue, no doubt of his earlier Humanism. He closes the essay with the remark cited above, “poetry is poetry, and not science or religion,” and he adds the opinion that pure poetry may be “something less than poetry” (Foerster 109). Because of his concern with religion and belief, it is not always recognized that, unlike Marxists and Postmodernists, Eliot accepted the validity and authority of the empirical sciences. That acceptance is clearly expressed in the January 1915 correspondence with the physicist Norbert Wiener discussed in chapter two. There Eliot conceded the validity of scientific knowledge, while at the same time suggesting a Stevens-like strategy of side-stepping science in art: “Now the world of natural science may be unsatisfying, but after all it is the most satisfactory that we know, so far as it goes. And it is the only one which we must all accept. One cannot, of course, hope to separate Reality from Value. Some philosophies are only a play upon this ambiguity of the word Reality. In a way the most valuable is the most real, and the beauty of a work of art is in this way more real to me than its ultimate (or relatively ultimate) physical constituents” (Letters 80). Essentially, then, Eliot adopts here the quasi-mystical Romantic view that the emotional cathexis of the work of art renders it valuable, and that its value is not simply a fleeting pleasure, but something “more real” than mere quotidian empirical experience. Such a view presents him with difficulties after his conversion – difficulties that he never entirely surmounts. Foreshadowing his own career choice, Eliot tells Wiener “that the lesson of relativism is: to avoid philosophy and devote oneself to either real art or real science.” And in his continuation he anticipates Richard Rorty, a celebrated American follower of Heidegger (via Gadamer).9 Eliot attributes his Rortyan perception to Santayana: “For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life.” But he admits that Wiener’s kind of philosophy is very different: “You have the logic, which seems to me of great value.” It is the kind of philosophy that Russell and Frege practised, which became dominant for much of the twentieth century, and a philosophy – as we have seen – that Eliot briefly tried to master.

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Although Eliot conceded the authority of empirical science – unlike Marxists, Heideggerean phenomenologists, and existentialists – after his break with Russell he tended to treat empirical science as the antagonist of art. For example, in his Criterion “Commentary” for 24 April 1924, he took issue with the following remark of Russell’s: “Until ‘culture’ has made its peace with science it will remain outside the main current of events, feeble and querulous, sighing for the past. The world that science has been making may be disgusting, but it is the world in which we have to live; and it condemns to futility all who are too fastidious to notice it” (ii 232–3). Objecting to “the arrogance of the man of science,” Eliot contradicted Russell’s observation, complaining that “The man of letters or the man of ‘culture’ of the present time is far too easily impressed and overawed by scientific knowledge and ability; the aristocracy of culture has abdicated before the demagogy of science” (Criterion ii 233). Throughout his later career Eliot was consistent on this point. He concedes the authority of science in its own realm, while at the same time insisting on the parallel authority of the arts within their realm. After his conversion he was obliged to place revealed religion above both, a necessity that rendered the Romantic view of art as revelatory no longer accessible to him. Stevens was much less well informed about philosophical issues than Eliot, but like him, insisted on the incapacity of science to answer the questions that interested him as a human and an artist. An instance of his scepticism about science can be found in his gloss on canto xiv of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” in a letter to Hi Simons. The lines in question are: First one beam, then another, then A thousand are radiant in the sky. Each is both star and orb; and day Is the riches of their atmosphere. The sea appends its tattery hues. The shores are banks of muffling mist. One says a German chandelier– A candle is enough to light the world. It makes it clear. Even at noon It glistens in essential dark.

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At night, it lights the fruit and wine, The book and bread, things as they are, In a chiaroscuro where One sits and plays the blue guitar. (xiv ll 134–66) Stevens’ gloss: “I don’t know that one is ever going to get at the secret of the world through the sciences. One after another their discoveries irradiate us and create the view of life that we are now taking, but, after all, this may be just a bit of German laboriousness. It may be that the little candle of the imagination is all we need. In the brilliance of modern intelligence, one realizes that, for all that, the secret of the world is as great a secret as it ever was. And then too, the world has its own appearances in the light of the imagination. Imagination compared to reason. Rather a catholic view of it” (Letters 363. My emphasis). Stevens’ rejection of “German chandeliers” would seem to support a lack of interest in – or perhaps a distrust of – the intricacies of philosophical argument, here characterized as “German laboriousness.” By characterizing his own view as “catholic,” Stevens probably had in mind the Roman Catholic teaching about “mysteries” – that is, doctrines that offend rationality, such as the virgin birth, the Trinity, and transubstantiation.10 This letter puts into question Hines’ reading of “Blue Guitar” in The Later Poetry of Wallace Stevens as an expression of a Husserlian phenomenological posture on the grounds that it evinces a distrust of sensory or empirical evidence (75–84). In “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (read at Princeton in May 1941, just a year later than Eliot’s letter to Belgion), Stevens expressed the rather Heideggerian-sounding sentiment that “words are thoughts and not only our own thoughts but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking ... A poet’s words are of things that do not exist without the words” (Kermode, ed. 663). As we have seen, Heidegger held a superficially similar view of language, which he expressed most uncompromisingly in the “Letter on Humanism.” There, Heidegger famously characterized language as “the house of Being”; and added, “in its home man dwells” (Heidegger 1977 193). “Letter on Humanism” is Heidegger’s public reply to a letter from Jean Beaufret asking him to articulate his response to Jean Paul Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism (Paris: Nagel, 1946). Although Sartre (and Beaufret) based their existential posture on Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit,

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Heidegger is not at all sympathetic to Sartre’s claim that his philosophy is compatible with Humanism. (A distressing sidebar to the “Letter on Humanism” is that Beaufret has since been revealed as an anti-Semite and holocaust denier.11) Heidegger’s opposition to Humanism takes an idiosyncratic form modulated by his phenomenology. He places it in a long historical perspective: “The first humanism, Roman humanism, and every kind that has emerged from that time to the present, has presupposed the most universal “essence” of man to be obvious. Man is considered to be an animal rationale ... This essential definition of man is not false. But it is conditioned by metaphysics” (Heidegger 1977 202). When Heidegger complains that Humanism is “conditioned by metaphysics,” Heidegger means that it is conditioned by all of Western philosophy and science since Socrates’ “humanistic” privileging of sophrosyne, that is, the injunction to “know thyself.” For Heidegger, “metaphysics” is a term of condemnation, not commendation. In this respect Heidegger is following Nietzsche, who held Socrates responsible for introducing “Apollonian” self-awareness into Western thought. For Heidegger, the emphasis on sophrosyne entails a misplaced trust in self-consciousness – what he and his followers call the cogito, in an allusion to the hated Cartesian a priori: “Cogito ergo sum.”12 Heidegger rejects Humanism for much the same reasons that Eliot and Stevens do: because it does not admit the mysterious, the ineffable, and the irrational. By “empty scepticism” he means the sceptic’s doubt of any experience that exceeds or escapes reason. Stevens calls this excess or surplus “the irrational” in his late talk “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (1957): “What I have in mind when I speak of the irrational element in poetry is the transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet from which poetry springs” (Kermode, ed. 781). Stevens’ “irrational” is quite compatible with the notion of “embodiment” articulated in the late work of Merleau-Ponty (another phenomenologist). But for Stevens, the “sensibility of the poet” is not a mystical sensitivity to noumenal impulses as it is for Heidegger; it is simply his capacity to pay attention to the goings on of his body in a circumambient environment of which it is a part, and to which it is attuned – as Darwin explained – through millennia of random adaptations. Nearly a decade earlier – in “The Noble Rider” – Stevens complained: “We have been a little insane about the truth. We have had an obsession” (Kermode, ed. 663). This, too, is a sentiment we can find in Heidegger, who inveighed tirelessly against what he regarded as the Western obsession with an expressible truth. Heidegger’s preference was a more

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Nietzschean “felt truth,” which he called alethia, a Greek term he translates as “unconcealment,” stressing the involuntary and revelatory nature of its manifestation. He finds the term in Parmenides in a phrase he translates (here translated from his German) as “the untrembling heart of unconcealment.” In a kind of catechism, Heidegger asks himself what that means, and answers: “It means unconcealment itself in what is most its own, means the place of stillness which gathers in itself what grants unconcealment to begin with” (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic Writing 387). Similar accounts of passive knowledge are standard fare in mystical writing. Despite frequent denials by his admirers, there is little doubt that Heidegger’s thought licenses mysticism, even if he himself had no “experiences.” I think much the same could be said for Stevens, except that he focuses on the surface of things, leaving their depths to take care of themselves. For example in “Two or Three Ideas” (delivered at Mount Holyoke College on 28 April 1951) he asks: “Why should a poem not change in sense when there is a fluctuation of the whole of appearance? Or why should it not change when we realize that the indifferent experience of life is the unique experience, the item of ecstasy which we have been isolating and reserving for another time and place, loftier and more secluded?” He answers: “There is inherent in the words the revelation of reality a suggestion that there is a reality of or within or beneath the surface of reality. There are many such realities through which poets constantly pass to and fro, without noticing the imaginary lines that divide one from the other” (Opus Posthumous 265. Stevens’ emphasis). Unlike Heidegger, Stevens does not claim any “truth,” or “unconcealedness,” to the glimpse “within or beneath the surface of reality.” Indeed, by his persistent use of the term “reality” for the surface, he stresses the primacy of the sensible world, while still expressing faith in the possibility of other “realities” showing through ordinary reality. Perhaps the most salient difference between Heidegger’s phenomenology and Stevens’ poetic creed is the plurality of the revealed world that he permits. For Heidegger, Being is single: Alethia is Being (Sein) revealing itself to Being-there (Dasein). As he puts it, “Unconcealment is, so to speak, the element in which being and thinking and their belonging together exist” (388). Stevens does not seem ever to have read Heidegger – though that awkwardness has not discouraged the production of a considerable literature articulating their resemblances. There is no mention of

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Heidegger in Stevens’ correspondence or published prose until very late in his life, and even then, there is no indication that he ever got around to reading him. The earliest mention I have found is in a letter of 19 July 1952 to Paule Vidal, the daughter of his Paris art dealer. He expressed a wish to learn more of Heidegger’s views on Hölderlin’s poetry: “Heidegger, the Swiss [sic] philosopher, has written a little work dealing with the poetry of the German poet, Hölderlin. I have no idea of the title and there is no place here in Hartford where I can find out. I am extremely eager to have a copy of this, particularly if there is a French translation. But I should rather have it even in German than not have it at all. Can you find it for me? Heidegger is a professor at the University of Fribourg and there may be some bookseller at Fribourg from whom you can inquire” (Letters 758). Stevens had no doubt completely forgotten that Mesures, Henry Church’s journal, to which he subscribed, had published a French translation of the Hölderlin essay (“Hölderlin et l’essence de la poésie”) on 15 July 1937 (119–44). His memory lapse would suggest that Stevens had no interest in either Hölderlin or Heidegger at that date. Nor was he well informed about Heidegger in 1952, for Heidegger was German, not Swiss, and he taught at the University of Freiburg in Bavaria, not Fribourg in Switzerland. Moreover, Heidegger was banned from teaching after 1945 because of his Nazi affiliations. Stevens seems to have known nothing of all this. Apparently no one corrected his misapprehensions, for more than two years later (29 September 1954), he asked Peter Lee, who had been travelling in Europe: “Are you returning to Fribourg or have you returned? Have you been able to see or hear Heidegger? Does he lecture in French or in German?” (Letters 846).13 It was probably Hölderlin rather than Heidegger that interested Stevens in the 1950s. He had told Thomas McGreevy in a letter of 6 May 1948 that he had read “a few pages of Groethuysen’s chapter on Hölderlin in his Mythes et Portraits” the night before (Letters 596), and noted that Groethuysen “speaks of the nostalgie du divin, (which obviously is epidemic in Dublin).” This nostalgia is certainly a feature of Hölderlin’s poetry, as well as of Groethuysen’s, but Heidegger is not needed to draw attention to such an attribute of Hölderlin’s poetry. Another indication of Stevens’ interest in Hölderlin is that he had ordered Victor Hammer’s limited collector’s edition of Hölderlin’s Poems 1796–1804 in January 1948. But when he received it, he wrote Hammer, praising the book rather than the poetry it contained (2 June 1950, Letters 681).

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He could possibly have come across a paraphrase of Heidegger – also in French – in Thierry Maulnier’s Introduction to French Poetry, a book Stevens recommended to José Rodriguez Feo on 2 March 1945. Here is what Maulnier says: “Heidegger says that the further one strays from nature and from poetry, the more one seeks to define it as a reality shared by different poets, because by this route one is condemned to achieve no more that the commonality of poetry. The critic reaches in the poet, [and] the poet reaches in himself the essence of poetry only insofar as they know how to move forward in a realm where the essential does not coincide with the most general, but with the most interior”14 (My translation). Disregarding the accuracy of this summary of Heidegger’s view, the sentiment expressed might well have appealed to Stevens, but I have not found any evidence that he took special notice of the passage. It is certainly not my intention to add to the literature claiming that Stevens anticipated postmodern postures – still less that Eliot did. It is nonetheless true that issues of belief, truth, and knowledge were as central for Stevens and Eliot as they were for Heidegger, and Sartre and their postmodern successors. Stevens and Eliot chose different routes than their near contemporary, Heidegger (1889–1976) to circumvent the scepticism that they inherited, and certainly a different route from the radical scepticism of postmodernism.15 Nonetheless, philosophical scepticism was a problem for all of them. There also exists a considerable literature alleging an affinity between Stevens and Nietzschean-inspired deconstruction. In contrast to the case with Heidegger, there is good evidence that Stevens knew a little of Nietzsche. However, he uncompromisingly rejected Nietzsche’s cognitive scepticism. When Henry Church (who admired Nietzsche) suggested (in a letter of 19 April 1943) that Stevens would agree with the sentiment expressed in Nietzsche’s Aphorism 34,16 Stevens was quick to disabuse him of that opinion: The Fiktion of Aphorism 34 is the commonplace idea that the world exists only in the mind. So considered it is an unreal thing, in which logic does not have a place. ... This is quite a different fiction from that of the notes, even though it is present in the notes. (April 21 1943 Huntington, was 3512) We shall return to this important unpublished letter in the discussion of Ramon Fernandez in the next chapter.

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The only feature that the “philosophy” of Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Stevens, and Eliot shares is hostility to the dominant creed of monistic materialism – whether in the belligerent form of Marxist dialectic or as found in the physical sciences. This antipathy is shared by Modernism and postmodernism, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Yeats, Eliot, Pound, and Stevens all took exception to science’s rejection of anything spiritual, anything transcendent of the physical. In addition, they all resisted the bifurcation of human experience into two independent realms – rational and emotional – the strategy adopted by I.A. Richards, and the new criticism that followed his lead.17 Postmodernism, in contrast, embraces the scepticism of empirical science, but takes exception to its positivism, that is, the claim that – in Richard Rorty’s term – “incorrigible” knowledge is possible. In a nutshell, modernism confronted scientific certainty with the shield of belief, whereas the postmodern attacks it with the sword of uncertainty. Men such as Stevens, Eliot, and Heidegger were anxious to preserve belief in something beyond the empirical evidence of our five senses. They thought humanity needed to aspire to some end greater than physical comfort and pleasure. They were not content to swim in the dominant current of belief in which they found themselves – an unreflective hedonism characterized by contentment with the possession of good health, satisfying work and companionship, the latest gadgets, a comfortable house, a fashionable car, and so forth. All three of these men led quite comfortable lives from this perspective – though Eliot and Heidegger both suffered serious personal disruptions. They all needed a belief in something “beyond ourselves,” but each followed his own distinct route, largely in ignorance – or disregard – of the solutions chosen by the others. And all three regarded Humanism’s accommodation with scientific positivism as an inadequate solution to the crisis of belief.18 Eliot’s dissertation (finished in April 1916) was directly concerned with the issue of knowledge of the world – as its title, Knowledge and Experience, indicates. It contains no mention of either Nietzsche – the godfather of the postmodern – or Husserl. (Of course there is no mention of Heidegger, who – a year younger than Eliot – had completed his own dissertation only three years earlier, in 1913.) What I want to demonstrate in the following pages is that the epistemological posture that Eliot adopted in his dissertation is quite similar to that which animates Stevens’ entire canon. The fundamental component of Stevens’ view is that we make the world we know out of our pre-cognitive experience of a

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world we do not comprehend. To put it another way, Stevens’ whole project is based on the axiom that the “world” presented to the mind is not a ready-made datum, but a construct based on a reality independent of us. Since the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, academic philosophy had been preoccupied with epistemology, whose task is to determine the exact nature of the relationship that holds between human knowledge and reality, the Kantian ding an sich. It was this epistemological bias of philosophy that Heidegger set himself to overturn with his focus on ontology – that is, the determination of the nature of being, as opposed to determination of the nature of knowing. Eliot’s dissertation is well within the epistemological orbit: “The process of development of a real world, as we are apt to forget in our theories, works in two directions; we have not first a real world to which we add our imaginings, nor have we a real world out of which we select our ‘real’ world, but the real and the unreal develop side by side. If we think of the world not as ready made – the world, that is, of meaning for us – but as constructed or constructing itself ... at every moment, and never more than an approximate construction, a construction essentially practical in its nature: then the difficulties of real and unreal disappear” (Knowledge and Experience 136. My emphasis). Following Bradley (and Kant) Eliot argues that the “world” is a construct generated out of a reciprocal relation between mind – or “soul,” as Eliot prefers to say – and an external reality. In this remark, Eliot rejects Kant’s dualism of knower and known in favour of Bradley’s monism in which the knower and the known are part of an embracing whole. As we have seen, Bradley preferred to speak of the knower as a “finite centre,” thereby drawing attention to its status as a part of a greater whole, the Absolute. Eliot’s view in the dissertation that the distinction between real and imaginary cannot be strictly maintained – though he doesn’t deny that they are distinct – is compatible the opening lines of “The Idea of Order at Key West”: She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

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To think of the singer as a Bradleyan finite centre, resonating, as it were, to the vibrations of the sea does no violence to the poem. However, the poem goes beyond Eliot’s paraphrase of Bradley in that it asserts that the singer and its auditors understood the inhuman voice of the sea. The idea that we are “natives” in the world, and therefore capable of understanding it at a visceral as well as an intellectual level is a constant component of Stevens’ theory of everything, and an idea that he shares with Heidegger. However, Heidegger’s ontological position is not clearly monistic. Although he regards human beings (Dasein) and Being (Sein) as of a piece, the physical world – Existenz in his jargon – obscures and hides Sein. Bradley is rigorously monistic, but less inclined toward mysticism than Heidegger. For the latter, Sein is an actor in the epistemological exchange, “unconcealing” itself to an appropriately receptive Dasein. Bradley’s Absolute, in contrast, is simply the totality of existence, it has no features except those possessed by its components, and it has no agency. Eliot’s abandonment of Bergson in favour of Bradley seems to have been motivated by what he called Bergson’s “weakling mysticism.” Bergson’s vitalism is also monistic, but like Heidegger’s Sein, his élan vital plays an active role, directing evolutionary development. Eliot judges Bergson’s view to be mystical because it assigns agency to a supernatural entity, and “weakling” because – in contrast to Heidegger – Bergson does not permit any communication between the élan vital and human beings; we are simply its product. Another theorist of non-rational cognition with whom Eliot was familiar is Lévy-Bruhl, whose Les Fonctions Mentales he cites in his dissertation and elsewhere.19 Lévy-Bruhl’s view is that primitive cultures enjoy a “participation mystique” with their environment and especially with one another – a capacity that he says civilized people have lost. (It is not difficult to see the germ of Eliot’s theory of “dissociation of sensibility” in Lévy-Bruhl’s hypothesis – but there are many other candidates for the honour.) Lévy-Bruhl’s hypothesis is purely epistemological – without any appeal to the ontological monism of Bradley and Heidegger. As his title suggests, all his hypothesis requires is the notion that there is more than one way for the mind to grasp the world. The “reflexive” modelling of our knowledge of the world that Eliot adopts in his dissertation is shared by practically every speculative thinker of the period. “Reflexivity” is the view that what we regard as

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knowledge of the world is in fact a joint product of our sensorium and nervous system on the one hand, and the stimuli provided by the world on the other hand. Such a view is compatible both with William James’ pragmatism and Bergson’s vitalism – different as they are20 – and even with Russell’s positivism. In all cases our knowledge is contingent and mutable, an artifact of an inconstant environment, though creatively adaptive to it. Stevens’ notion that one can create a fiction that is worthy of belief fits into this general schema. The phenomenologists explicitly set themselves against this prevailing “epistemological” view, in favour of the view that we – and our knowledge – are a product of the world, are caused by it.21 Pragmatists, along with Bergson, believe that we can understand the world just because we are a product of it, but they do not believe that our understanding is caused by the world as Husserl and Heidegger do, although in very different ways. Husserl’s Ideen are true much as Plato’s “archetypes”are true; Heidegger’s Dasein, in contrast, participates in Sein only if the deliberative, rational mind is put in abeyance. Neither Eliot nor Stevens would go so far. Stevens permits the individual consciousness considerable creative freedom in its adaptation to the world. Eliot, however, would not admit so much autonomy to the individual. A parenthetical remark that I elided from Eliot’s sentence cited above draws attention to this aspect of his position: (“for I am careful not to talk of the creative activity of the mind, a phrase meaningless in metaphysics”). Eliot does not elaborate, but “the creative activity of the mind” is presumably a meaningless phrase because, on a metaphysical view, there can be no addition to creation by the finite creatures within it, hence the human mind cannot have a creative role. If that is so, Eliot’s remark is a fussy qualification, for none of the thinkers under consideration would claim that the human up-take of the world constitutes an addition to the world. On their view human cognition simply orders those fragments of the world that it assimilates. Such an ordering can reasonably be described as “creative” if the resulting order is novel. Surely that is what Stevens meant by his comment on the dust jacket of Ideas of Order: “this book ... is primarily concerned with ideas of order ... as, for example the dependence of the individual, confronting the elimination of established ideas, on the general sense of order, the idea of order created by individual concepts” (Kermode, ed. 997). Hence it may be that there is no serious disagreement. Eliot would surely concede that the mind can transform or reformulate raw data

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into a coherent and intelligible “world.” It is in such a spirit that we should take the aphorisms from Adagia (which are among the most extreme claims Stevens makes for art): “Metaphor creates a new reality from which the original appears to be unreal.” Another, more “poetic,” aphorism declares: “The mind that in heaven created the earth and the mind that on earth created heaven were, as it happened, one” (195 and 201). By “creation,” then, we should take Stevens to mean “transformation of the given,” rather than creation ex nihilo.22 If we read Stevens’ poetry alongside Eliot’s thesis on Bradley we can see that Stevens and Eliot were not very far apart at that stage in Eliot’s journey toward Anglicanism. Stevens’ poetry and Eliot’s dissertation address the same epistemoligical issue – the relation between a knower and the known. And both approach it from an ontological perspective – that is to say, both speculate that there is in fact no real separation between knower and known, between mental and physical, but only an operational one. Here is Eliot in the dissertation: “Cut off a ‘mental’ and a ‘physical’ world, dissect and classify the phenomena of each: the mental resolves into a curious and intricate mechanism, and the physical reveals itself as a mental construct. If you will find the mechanical anywhere, you will find it in the workings of the mind; and to inspect living mind, you must look nowhere but in the world outside. Such is the general doctrine to which my theory of objects points” (154). Since knower and known are part of the same single reality, there is no principled means of discriminating between what the knower brings to her exchange with the world, and what the world brings to that exchange. As a consequence, Eliot suggests a modelling of the relation between knower and known (mind and object) very similar to Nietzsche’s “perspectivist” and even more similar to the phenomenologist MerleauPonty’s emphasis in his later work on the role of the body. When we engage in an acquaintance with the world, Eliot says, “The real situation is rather that we have ... a felt whole in which there are moments of knowledge ... We perceive an object, we will say, and then perceive it in a special relation to our body” (156. My emphasis). The “felt whole” is what Bradley calls “experience,” that is, a unified sensibility in which “thought” and “feeling” are simultaneously operative – a state that Eliot famously found to have been lacking since the Protestant Reformation. Though Eliot’s formulation is much drier and more abstract than Stevens’ poem, it seems quite compatible with the opening lines of “Key West” cited above. A little later in the dissertation Eliot reiterates the point in terms even more similar to “Key West”:

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We can only define the thing as known and the knower as knowing, and yet both things and knower imply a transcendence of these limitations, a transcendence which has no end. While we cannot, it thus appears, “know knowing,” [that is to say epistemology is not possible] what we can do is to describe in a general way the process of transition and development which takes place when there is an organism which is a part of the world and yet is capable to a certain degree of contemplating the world. (156, My emphasis) In the expression “a transcendence which has no end,” Eliot is invoking Bradley’s Absolute, the single totality that embraces everything but which is itself unknowable and logically incapable of completion since that would render it finite. It is perhaps this feature of Bradley’s thought that Eliot described to Belgion as “a sort of infinite regress, which gave me a despair of philosophy for myself.” For Eliot the mise en abîme of that regress is to be evaded at all costs – not celebrated as it is by avatars of the postmodern. Stevens seems to have shared Bradley’s sense of the ultimately ungraspable nature of reality – and to have had an intuitively monistic view of it. He addresses the question – more allegorically than philosophically – in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud, Serenely gazing at the violent abyss, Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space, Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny, Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight, Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied? (“It Must Give Pleasure” viii) Stevens not only inverts the cathexis of the term “abysmal,” when he speaks of the angel plucking “abysmal glory” on his strings, but he also adopts the angel’s perspective. The abyss holds no terrors for the angel, who “needs nothing but deep space,” and Stevens asks rhetorically if he, the poet, is not just as fearless: “Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied?” His point would seem to be that if human beings can imagine a

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frightening abyss, they can just as easily imagine an angel to master it. It is this sort of confidence in the therapeutic power of the imagination that most markedly separates Stevens from Eliot. We find Stevens consorting with the abyss again in the rather idiosyncratic dialogue poem “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” which is reminiscent of some of Yeats’ dialogue poems. St John represents the other-worldly perspective,23 while “Back-Ache” represents the worldly perspective. Back-Ache reckons that the mind is the “terriblest force of earth,” but St John admonishes him, observing that “The world is presence and not force. / Presence is not mind.” Thus the poem portrays the transcendent perspective as denigrating mind in favour of the world, or “presence”; and the incarnate perspective bowing down before mind as “force.” St John goes on to celebrate the sensible world in a way very familiar to readers of Stevens’ poetry, and then draws the conclusion: My point is that These illustrations are neither angels, no, Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo, Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings. They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss Between us and the object, external cause, The little ignorance that is everything, (ll. 19–24. CP 437) “The dumbfoundering abyss / between us and the object” is just that mise en abîme that Hillis Miller celebrates in Stevens’ poetry as a sign of his postmodern sensibility. But Stevens himself does not celebrate it. Instead, he seeks means to deal with it, and the means presented in this poem are the same as in virtually every Stevens poem – celebration of the glory of sensory, corporeal experience. Such celebration is not found in Eliot’s poetry – not even when, as a Bradleyan, he might well have found it philosophically possible. That Eliot does not “celebrate” as Stevens does is surely a consequence of the differences in their personalities more than their distinct life experiences, their philosophical predilections, or the profundity of their vision of the world. Of course, Stevens’ reputation initially suffered from the perception that he is too celebratory, too cheerful to be taken seriously. Now that “jouissance” is in vogue, his reputation is in the ascendency. Eliot’s reputation, in contrast, was initially founded on the bleakness of his vision – a bleakness that his readers thought reflected

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the bleak condition of the world in the early twentieth century. Hence Eliot’s turn to religion was widely seen as a retrograde step, a return to superstition prompted by a failure of nerve in the face of the abyss. Now neither his early bleakness, nor his later piety suit contemporary tastes. It seems to me that such judgments ignore the sincerity, passion, and intelligence that both poets brought to the dilemma of modernism – the dilemma of how to deal with a world in which the old certainties have vanished. Stevens put that dilemma more succinctly and perspicuously than any other poet of his generation in “Of Modern Poetry:” “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” The poet/actor is: A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. “Of Modern Poetry” was published in May 1940. It was probably written after the Franco-British declaration of war on Germany in 1939 but obviously before the French surrender on 22 June 1940. The context of war accounts for the line and a half: “It has to think about war / And it has to find what will suffice.”24 However, the examples provided by the poem of what will suffice are just the sort of thing that Stevens’ detractors seize upon: “It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing.” Eliot, writing in the same year, tentatively seeks consolation in a similarly trivial – though more anthropologically portrayed – human activity: In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie – A dignified and commodious sacrament. (East Coker i)

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But when Eliot returns to such physical, worldly consolations in Part iii, he finds them wanting: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning. The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry, The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony Of death and birth. The sentiment these lines express – that these earthly pleasures point the way to “the agony of death and birth” – is a bleak vision of the human condition that is almost diametrically opposed to Stevens’ more cheerful vision. Of course, the views Eliot expressed in Four Quartets are not those he held at the time of his doctoral dissertation thirty years earlier, which are quite compatible with the cognitive relativism of the mature Stevens. Eliot’s youthful relativism occupies a halfway house between empiricism and solipsism. It was Bradley`s position – or at least Eliot thought it was, for he cited a dangerously solipsistic-sounding passage from Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, as a gloss on line 411 of The Waste Land:“Dayadhvam: ‘I have heard the key / Turn in the door once, and turn once only.’” Here is the Bradley passage that Eliot cited: “My external sensations are no less private to my self than are my thoughts or my feelings. In either case my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and, with all its elements alike, every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it ... In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul”(306). These sentences articulate Bradley’s “doctrine of finite centres,” which Eliot believed bore “very striking similarities” to Leibniz’s theory of monads (146). They emphasize the radical isolation of the sentient individual imprisoned in his own perspective. In the dissertation, however, Eliot was anxious to rescue Bradley from the charge of solipsism.

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One way out is pragmatism’s hypothesis of converging views, that is, the belief that approximately accurate “pictures” of an inaccessible reality are successively replaced (through empirical investigation and theoretical elaboration) by progressively more accurate “pictures” – although without ever attaining a complete and accurate picture of the ding an sich.25 When Eliot speaks, in the following citation, of a “higher” viewpoint, he is not speaking of a transcendent insight. What he means is that conflicting viewpoints may be subsumed in a “higher” one that accommodates them all: “The point of view (or finite centre) has for its object one consistent world, and accordingly no finite centre can be self-sufficient, for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself ”(147–8. My emphasis). Eliot’s use of the term “soul” instead of “mind” is a little jarring for contemporary readers, but is employed, I believe, to include the somatic and emotional aspects of human experience as well as the mental. But his point is clear enough – that through our own life experiences we each construct for ourselves a world that is consistent (and presumably coherent) – “one consistent world.” The focus of the passage cited is on the interdependence of finite centres, rather than on their relation to the world at large. Each individual confronts alternate, “jarring and incompatible,” worlds through interaction with other “souls” or minds. This openness to other viewpoints means that Bradleyan souls are not Leibnizian monads. The labour of the philosophical mind – as opposed to the mind of l’homme moyen sensuel – is somehow to accommodate its own world to that of other minds, “to interpret other souls to ourself.” Finally, the shock of encountering alternate viewpoints causes the mind/soul to examine its own viewpoint – “to interpret ourself to ourself.” These remarks are more elucidatory of the lines “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison” than the Bradley citation Eliot provides for readers of The Waste Land. Given the unsorted collection of disjunct cultural “viewpoints” jumbled together in The Waste Land, it is plausible to read these lines as endorsing philosophical relativism, rather than as a morbid contemplation on suffering and loss – as they have usually been read.

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The “relativism” that Eliot adopted in his dissertation, then, requires of the individual soul – or finite centre – that it engage in a delicate balancing act between its own view and the multiple views of other souls as the final paragraph of Eliot’s last chapter, entitled “Solipsism,” makes clear. There, he notes: “We need to be reminded [that] we have no direct (immediate) knowledge of anything: the ‘immediately given’ is the bag of gold at the end of the rainbow. Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say ‘this we know’” (156). He concedes that “without externality there is no knowledge” (157), but rejects the notion that the “external world” can be known positively and incorrigibly by the mind/soul. He insists that what we know is our mental state, not the external world: “If the object is only my state both object and I must be strangely transmuted, for I only know myself in contrast to a world” (157). Subtle to a fault, Eliot admits the contrary modelling of knowledge: “And it will be equally true to say that I am only a state of my objects” (152. My emphasis), that is to say, the individual “soul”or finite centre is not an independent observer of its mental states (“my objects”), but a product of them.26 The first option is very close to Husserl’s phenomenology, central to which is the claim that what we know is the sich selbst, that is, our mental phenomena. We know them directly, without mediation, as opposed to the Kantian ding an sich, which we can know only inferentially from physical phenomena. The mental entities are, for Husserl, autonomous logical entities rather than imagined manifolds – as they must be for Bradley, Eliot, and Stevens. With an assist from Nietzsche, Heidegger gave Husserl’s phenomenology an immanentist turn, replacing the sich selbst with Sein, which Dasein does not know in the Cartesian sense of holding in contemplation, but in which it participates. Bradley is somewhere between Husserl and Heidegger. He is not willing to isolate knowledge from “experience,” as Husserl is, but neither is he prepared to go so far as Heidegger toward an immanentist anti-intellectualism. Eliot’s remark, “if the object is only my state both object and I must be strangely transmuted, for I only know myself in contrast to a world,” could serve as a epigraph for many of the poems in Prufrock and Other Observations, where the personae find themselves irretrievably imprisoned in a Bradleyan finite centre and must attempt to infer the intentions, desires, and fears of the other finite centres among whom they drift. The young man taking leave of a female friend in “Portrait of a Lady” is a case in point:

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“Perhaps you can write to me.” My self-possession flares up for a second; This is as I had reckoned. “I have been wondering frequently of late (But our beginnings never know our ends!) Why we have not developed into friends.” I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark Suddenly, his expression in a glass. My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark. Prufrock is equally incapable of surmounting his “mental states” so as to connect with other “finite centres.” “Portrait” was completed in 1910 and “Prufrock” in 1911, but Eliot did not read Bradley until 1913, so he could not have derived these isolated souls from Bradley. It would seem that Bradley provided Eliot with a philosophical explanation of what he had already observed in his own experience and expressed in poetry. The female denizens of Eliot’s early poetry are as unlike Stevens’ women as they could be. Where the Eliot personae are unable to penetrate the social masks of the women they encounter, Stevens’ speaker in “Sunday Morning” is well able to see into the mind of the dreaming woman in a peignoir, and he understands the lust of the elders ogling the objectified Susanna in “Peter Quince at the Clavier.” And even though the speaker of “Key West” cannot see into the mind of the captivating singer, he understands her transformation of the scene. Where Stevens’ poems stress communication – albeit often imperfect – Eliot’s early poems stress the distance between the speaker and the other, as in the ironically titled “Morning at the Window,” written while he was at Oxford in 1915 and by then very familiar with Bradley: They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens, And along the trampled edges of the street I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids Sprouting despondently at area gates. The brown waves of fog toss up to me Twisted faces from the bottom of the street, And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts An aimless smile that hovers in the air And vanishes along the level of the roofs.

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Critical commentary on the early poems of this nature has stressed the personae’s preoccupation with inaccessible female figures – typically described in a misogynistic way. While those are undeniable features of these poems, they are more fundamentally bleak depictions of Bradley’s belief that, as “finite centres,” we are inescapably isolated from one another. As we have seen, in Bradley’s philosophy each of us – each finite centre – constructs a distinct “world” out of perceptions which are never identical. Whether the goal of philosophy is self-knowledge (sophrosyne) or objective knowledge of the world, such a doctrine leaves us in a kind of cognitive limbo. That is particularly so if we believe, as Eliot does, that “I only know myself in contrast to a world.” The speaker of “Morning at the Window” is “aware” of the “damp souls” of housemaids, and perhaps pities them for their restricted lives, but he does not empathize with them as the speaker of “Sunday Morning”or “Peter Quince” or “Key West” does with the “others” in those poems. The second stanza of “Morning at the Window” is more opaque than the first. The “twisted faces” are presumably those of the housemaids in basement kitchens seen from the street, but the “aimless smile”of the female passer-by with muddy skirts is perplexing. The condition of her skirts may be taken to symbolize some sort of moral stain, or simply the state of the streets, since skirts in those days went to the ankle. Muddy streets and skirts add to the generally squalid nature of the scene. But the aimless smile that, Cheshire cat like, “hovers in the air / And vanishes along the level of the roofs,” far from bringing closure, seems to open a mise en abîme that should please J. Hillis Miller. Although the fog is a “realistic” feature of a London morning in the early twentieth century, its tossing up twisted faces and tearing the smile from a passer-by, is at least metaphorical, if not symbolic. On a naturalistic level, the fog would obscure both the faces and the smile, so we are obliged to read the fog metaphorically as representing the conceptual world of the speaker who must attempt to accommodate these contrasting female presences, “tossing up” the “twisted faces” and sending the “aimless smile” up into the sky like Mary Poppins. We might contrast Eliot’s Cheshire cat smile to Stevens’ Susannah or the singer in “Key West.” The smile is not only disembodied but it also receives the epithet “twisted,” one that is recurrent in Eliot’s early poetry, always with lubricious connotations.27 Certainly the elders in “Peter Quince” are as lewd-minded as one could wish – as indeed is the speaker – but Stevens’ poem is about the successful communication of feelings, in

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contrast to the failure of communication characteristic of the Eliot poems under scrutiny: Just as my fingers on these keys Make music, so the selfsame sounds On my spirit make a music, too. Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna. “The Idea of Order at Key West” is also about communication, although it is less confident about what it is that is communicated – unsurprisingly since the aesthetic feelings expressed and aroused by the singer are more subtle than the erotic feelings aroused by Susannah and the addressee of “Peter Quince.” “Key West” asks whether the singer perceives – in a Wordsworthian manner – a spirit manifested by the sea, or merely expresses her own response to that “externality”: The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. And the question put to Fernandez later in the poem, is precisely the need “to interpret other souls to ourself” to which Eliot referred in the concluding chapter of his dissertation: Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

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Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night. In short, why does the song alter our perception of “externalities”? The striking difference, then, between these early poems of Eliot and those of Stevens is not just that Stevens’ poems are gorgeous, playful, and bright, while Eliot’s are ironic, brooding, and dark – as the early critical consensus observed, to the disadvantage of the “superficial” Stevens. A more substantial difference is that Eliot’s poems are frequently about the failure of communication between finite centres, while Stevens’ are as often about the mystery of successful non-verbal communication between minds or between minds and nature. Eliot’s mode suited an audience traumatized by the shock of the First World War, the Communist Revolution in Russia, the incomprehensibility of modern physics, and the upsurge of the irrational licensed by psychoanalysis. Neurotic, neurasthenic, and bleak poetry was perceived to be realistic and relevant, while cheerful and playful poetry was dismissed as an exquisite expression of escapism. This superficial – not to say malicious – view of Stevens’ poetry has had remarkable staying power. When the Faber edition of Selected Poems finally introduced Stevens to a British audience, the reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement repeated opinions long current in America: “It might seem,” he (or she) wrote, “that this subjective, exquisite poetry, inclining easily to the frivolous, the recherché, the chic, but then as suddenly tending towards the ominous, the superstitious, the mystic wonderland of religious terms divorced from religion, would find a wide and appreciative audience in England today.” However, the reviewer does not expect that to be the case because of the shallowness of Stevens’ ideas: “It helps neither the contemporary poet nor his puzzled, plodding readers to overlook the fact that a great deal of hermetic writing is the result of a refusal on his part to think before he speaks” (“The Poetry of Wallace Stevens” TLS 396). That Stevens’ poetry is difficult to construe can hardly be denied. But to label it “hermetic” implies a deliberate esotericism – such as is undeniably the case with Yeats’ poetry but is certainly not true of Stevens. Militating against the charge of esotericism are the recurrent efforts Stevens has made to explain his poetry in prose and in responses to queries in letters. Truly hermetic poetry would be capable of explication by means of an interpretive schemata such as Yeats’ A Vision or

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Joyce’s schema for Ulysses. But there is no such interpretive schema for Stevens’ poetry – nor for Eliot’s, of course. Stevens’ attempts in late essays to assist his readers lead him to try to elaborate the philosophical principles that he intends the poems to express. The difficulty/obscurity of Stevens’ poetry is, in my judgment, not a consequence of its esotericism but of its great subtlety. The alternative explanation, offered by hostile critics, that the obscurity is caused by the confused and incoherent nature of his philosophy cannot, of course, be brushed aside.28 But my inclination is to the first explanation. Stevens responded many times to readers who found his poetry obscure. In a letter to Harriet Monroe – as Harmonium was going to press and he was feeling uncertain about the merit of the poems in the volume – Stevens did let slip an admission that the alleged obscurity of his poetry was perhaps deliberate: “Only the reading of these outmoded and debilitated poems does make me wish rather desperately to keep on dabbling and to be as obscure as possible until I have perfected an authentic and fluent speech for myself” (Letters 231). But even here he characterized the obscurity of which he half-seriously accuses himself as a strategy designed to protect himself from misunderstanding, rather than intended to mystify or to protect some esoteric message. If we ask why he needed such protection, the answer would be that he was well aware that he had not yet come to a determinate “theory of everything,” even though that was his – perhaps quixotic – goal. Nearly twenty years later, responding to the difficulties Hi Simons’ was encountering in construing his poetry, Stevens admits that successful communication is not his first priority, but denies any deliberate attempt to be obscure. He points out that poetry attempts to articulate thoughts that are perhaps unfamiliar, and therefore difficult: “Sometimes, when I am writing a thing, it is complete in my own mind; I write it in my own way and don’t care what happens. I don’t mean to say that I am deliberately obscure, but I do mean to say that, when the thing has been put down and is complete to my own way of thinking, I let it go. After all, if the thing is really there, the reader gets it. He may not get it at once, but, if he is sufficiently interested, he invariably gets it. A man who wrote with the idea, of being deliberately obscure would be an imposter. But that is not the same thing as a man who allows a difficult thing to remain difficult because, if he explained it, it would, to his way of thinking, destroy it” (Letters 403). Finally, another fourteen years later, in responding to still another reader, he even more strongly asserts the poet’s right to think and express uncommon thoughts:

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“When you say that parts of my book [Collected Poems] baffle you and that you feel as if you did not know English when you read those parts and sit and look into space and despair, content yourself with the thought that every poet’s language is his own distinct tongue. He cannot speak the common language and continue to write poetry any more than he can think the common thought and continue to be a poet. It is not a matter of a great difference but just of a difference and this you know already” (Letters 873). This last remark is distressingly close to the “uncanny” argument often deployed as a criterion for great poetry. On this argument, rebarbative impenetrability is a hallmark of profundity. Of course, such a criterion is an open invitation to charlatanism – either of the poet or the critic, or both. However, the notion that new ideas are initially puzzling is well entrenched in our culture, and no doubt is well founded when applied to such counter-intuitive scientific theories as relativism and string theory, or intricate and subtle philosophic arguments. Aesthetic modernism, of course, attached itself to developments in the sciences, arguing that like them, it was charting new territory, and postmodernism has continued the association – although it now applies not just to works of art. With the advent of deconstruction, impenetrability is now also seen as a virtue in literary criticism as well as in science and the arts. But Stevens claims no cognitive novelty or revelatory features for his poetry. All he claims is that the poet speaks his own language – by which he means his own idiom. The poet needs his or her own idiom, because it is his or her own experience of the world that is expressed in the poetry – not the common experience of everyone, but his or her peculiar, intimate encounter with the world. In Stevens’ view, the poet does not express “what oft was thought,” but rather – as Wordsworth said – the experience of a man “endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm, and tenderness than other men.” The presumption of Wordsworth and Stevens is that if their ruminations are to enlarge the souls of their readers, they must first dislodge the idées fixes in their readers; hence, there must be some initial confusion. Eliot also justifies the difficulty of poetry, but instead of appealing to the novelty or subtlety of what the poetry expresses, as Stevens does, he appeals to the complexity of the contemporary world it represents, or expresses: “It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must

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be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning” (“The Metaphysical Poets” Selected Essays 289). This remark amounts to the claim that since contemporary culture is in a disorganized state, the poetry that reflects it cannot be more transparent or perspicuous than the culture itself. A dozen years later, in After Strange Gods, Eliot changed his ground. It is no longer the complexity of modern civilization that causes the obscurity of poetry, but the nature of the personal experience that is being expressed. Like Stevens he stresses that expression – not communication – is the heart and soul of poetry: “I should say that the poet is tormented primarily by the need to write a poem ... And what is the experience that the poet is so bursting to communicate? By the time it has settled down into a poem it may be so different from the original experience as to be hardly recognisable. The ‘experience’ in question may be the result of a fusion of feelings so numerous, and ultimately so obscure in their origins, that even if there be communication of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what he is communicating; and what is there to be communicated was not in existence before the poem was completed. ‘Communication’ will not explain poetry” (138). Once again, the justification of obscurity is complexity, but he adds the factor that the act of composition is not fully conscious, implying that the understanding of it cannot therefore be fully articulated. Later in the same work, like Stevens, Eliot stresses that the personal nature of poetic expression inevitably occasions some degree of obscurity: “The difficulty of poetry (and modern poetry is supposed to be difficult) may be due to one of several reasons. First, there may be personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way; while this may be regrettable, we should be glad, I think, that the man has been able to express himself at all. Or difficulty may be due just to novelty” (150). It is not clear what Eliot means here by “personal causes.” Given Eliot’s protection of his personal life from beyond the grave, one is tempted to suppose that he had in mind the suppression of embarrassing, wicked, or criminal behaviour or thoughts. Finally, when asked by Donald Hall in a 1957 interview if his poetry was becoming more accessible, Eliot said he thought it was. He

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accounted for the alleged obscurity of his early poetry in much the same way that Stevens did in his letter to Harriet Monroe: The other element that enters into it, I think, is just experience and maturity. I think that in the early poems it was a question of not being able to – of having more to say than one knew how to say, and having something one wanted to put into words and rhythm which one didn’t have the command of words and rhythm to put in a way immediately apprehensible. That type of obscurity comes when the poet is still at the regime of learning how to use language. You have to say the thing the difficult way. The only alternative is not saying it at all, at that stage. (Writers at Work 105) The two poets were in substantial agreement, then, on the matter of obscurity. Both defended it on expressive grounds, that is they maintained that because what they had to say wss subtle, novel, and intricate, the poetry must appear difficult. The implied justification was that novelty is itself a value. So to that extent, they are both convinced modernists, since “modern” essentially means nothing other than novel. It is worth noticing that their defence of difficulty was very similar to that of the apologists of postmodernism. However, Stevens and Eliot looked forward to a time when the difficulties of their poetry would disappear in the light of a new cultural and cognitive regime, whereas postmodernism enshrines obscurity as a virtue in itself. In a sense Eliot’s and Stevens’ careers followed inverse curves. Eliot first contemplated a career as a professional philosopher, and then abandoned it for one as a publisher and literary journalist. Although Eliot was first, and always, a poet, philosophy and literary journalism engaged him emotionally and intellectually in a way that was very different from Stevens. Stevens’ work as an indemnity lawyer was completely divorced from his life as a poet. He never contemplated any vocation other than poetry, merely earning his living as a lawyer – conscientiously and efficiently, certainly, but without any sense of vocation. In contrast, Eliot’s activities as editor of the Criterion did arise from a sense of vocation, as he made clear in the manifesto he wrote for the final issue of the first year of publication cited above. When Stevens turned to public lecturing late in life, his motive was to rescue his poetry from the puzzlement it occasioned, even among his sympathetic readers. He read philosophy in order to find the means to

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render his poetry more accessible, or at least better understood. If he had any ambition to make the world a better place, the instrument of that improvement was his poetry, not his prose. Recognizing that his poetry was not being heard, Stevens endeavoured to educate an audience for it. In order to do so, he had first to educate himself in philosophical articulations of the epistemological and ontological issues that his poetry engaged. He was never more than an imperfectly informed amateur in philosophy – as is the case for most of his commentators, including myself. But it is a great disservice to Stevens to suppose that his poetry can be reduced to his prose attempts to explain what it is about – just as it would be a disservice to Eliot’s poetry to reduce it to “a personal grouse” or to Anglican preaching. Eliot was very careful to avoid the trap into which Stevens might be seen to have fallen. He consistently refrained from explaining his poetry, insisting that its sense is co-extensive with its expression. Eliot’s posture here was far closer to esotericism than was Stevens’. This is not to deny that they both believed there is a residue of the inexpressible in poetry; in that respect both poets exhibit a continuity with romanticism. But however romantic or mystical their poetry may or may not be, they were men of their time, and had to deal with their deepest beliefs and experiences in terms available in their day. Where Eliot required some positive belief, Stevens was content – or at least made do – with recurrent attempts to capture his “belief” in his poetry. Even though there is certainly some development and alteration in that articulation, Stevens does not appear to have experienced the serial adoption and rejection of belief systems that characterized Eliot’s development up to his conversion. Stevens and Eliot, then, despite beginning from very similar positions with respect to religious belief, followed very different paths. Stevens’ path was fairly straightforward – a development from Humanistic scepticism toward a belief in a something beyond the human – a belief very similar to Bradley’s’ position – and to Eliot’s at the time he wrote the second draft of his dissertation. In the coming chapter I will examine Eliot’s relationship with Ramon Fernandez, the MexicanFrench essayist invoked in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” as a further window on Eliot’s movement away from Humanism toward Anglicanism. That Eliot and Stevens both responded to Fernandez’s Humanism is a fortuitous circumstance that permits a reasonably focused comparison of their relative postures.

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5 Eliot, Stevens, and “Pale Ramon” Fernandez

Like Eliot, Stevens flirted with Humanism as a response to the modern dilemma, and like him he found it wanting. As we have seen, poems like “Sunday Morning,” “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” and “The Comedian as the Letter C” express a disbelief characteristic of Humanism. The nearest thing to an admission that he was once attracted to Humanism is Stevens’ remark on his disaffection with Arnold in the letter of June 1953 to Barbara Church, cited above. Referring to Arnold’s Humanism, he remarked: “Anyhow, it may be that I don’t belong to that church anymore, or that I don’t care for conversation with that particular set of gods; nor, perhaps, with any” (Letters 780). Because Stevens has not left a trail of his developing and altering opinion in prose as Eliot has, we must look to his poetry for indications of the onset of his disaffection with Humanism. Given the notorious subtlety – not to say evasiveness – of Stevens’ poetry, we must do what we can to contextualize it in the discussions of belief and disbelief contemporaneous with his poetry. I will focus on Ideas of Order, which marked Stevens’ return to publication after more than a decade of relative silence. In particular, I will read the title poem, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” as a rejection of Humanism. While there is no mention of Humanism in the poem, the interlocutor, Ramon Fernandez, was a well-published Humanist. I argue that the poem can be read as a response to the case for Humanism that Fernandez made in the pages of the Nouvelle Revue Française and in Eliot’s Criterion. Serendipitously, Eliot is present as an interlocutor in this discussion, for he not only published Fernandez but also reviewed Messages, a collection of Fernandez’s articles, and even translated one of Fernandez’s Criterion pieces.

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Ideas of Order represents a move away from the Humanist and postChristian posture of the poems discussed in the previous chapter toward a more positive statement of belief – though one still tentatively expressed, and perhaps not fully articulated even in Stevens’ own mind. In this sense, Stevens and Eliot were still on a similar path – though there was an important difference. In the period between his disaffection with Humanism and his adoption of Anglican Christianity, Eliot spilled a good deal of ink debunking the Humanist alternative. Stevens, in contrast, was more concerned to articulate an alternative to both Humanism and Christianity than he was to attack either. “The Idea of Order at Key West,” first published in Ronald Latimer’s journal, Alcestis, in October 1934, is the most intriguing of Stevens’ early attempts to articulate a new faith. There is no strong evidence that Stevens was responding to any particular remarks or arguments by Fernandez, but his presence in the poem provides sufficient warrant, I think for contextualizing the poem within the debate over Humanism in which Eliot and Fernandez participated. Latimer seems to have been the spur that led Stevens to return to the publishing scene after a long absence. He wrote to Stevens in 1933 (over the pseudonym Martin Jay), asking him if he had any poems to submit to Alcestis (Letters 256). Although Stevens had published only thirteen poems between Harmonium (1923) and Latimer’s contact with him, he promptly sent Latimer “The Idea of Order at Key West” together with seven other poems. They duly appeared in Alcestis for October 1934 as “Eight Poems.” When Latimer later proposed that Stevens publish a book of poems, the poet was enthusiastic: “I cannot imagine anything that I should like more. The question is, however, whether I could gather together 50 pages satisfactory to me” (28 November 1934. Letters 271). After looking through the poems he had on hand – no doubt including the twenty poems already published or soon to appear in journals1 – Stevens wrote that they would amount to “no more than 35 pages,” and that “the tone of the whole might be a bit low and colourless.” To repair that tone, he proposed that he “might want to work on the thing, adding, say, 10 or 15 pages, in order to give a little gaiety and brightness” (Letters 272–3). The only poems to appear first in Ideas of Order are, indeed, light, but they don’t reach ten or fifteen pages. They are: “Some Friends from Pascagoula,” “Botanist on Alp (No. 2),” “Winter Bells,” “Mud Master,” and “Anglais Mort à Florence.” The only early poem he included was “Academic Discourse at Havana,” first published in Broom v (November 1923). The volume,

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then, can be considered as potentially representing a new departure for Stevens, a new philosophical viewpoint – or at least one that is newly articulated in the title poem. Despite his cameo appearance in “The Idea of Order at Key West” and his articles in the Criterion, Ramon Fernandez is little known to students of English and American literature. He was born (in 1894) and raised in France. His father, who had been the Mexican ambassador to France, married a French woman and remained in France after his term as ambassador ended. Like Eliot, Ramon Fernandez claimed that his “American heritage” made him “look at Europe with the eye of a foreigner” (De la personnalité 20). He died in 1944 at the age of fifty. Although the circumstances of his death remain obscure, it is thought that he committed suicide after being called before the épuration committee, whose mandate was to investigate and prosecute those who had collaborated with the Nazis during the occupation. Fernandez attracted the committee’s attention because he had continued to publish in the NRF during the occupation, when it was edited by the Nazi sympathizer and collaborator Drieu la Rochelle. (The sitting editor, Jean Paulhan, had resigned after the fall of France.) To publish in the journal during the occupation was to brand oneself a Nazi sympathiser, if not an out-and-out Nazi. There is no doubt that Fernandez’s political affiliation was on the Right. So far as I can determine, neither Stevens nor Eliot commented on Fernandez’s activities during the war, nor on his death. Of course, all of that postdates “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Although Fernandez has drawn very little attention from Stevens’ critics, Joseph Riddell and James Longenbach are important exceptions.2 Unaccountably ignoring Riddell’s earlier discussion of Fernandez, Longenbach argues that his presence in the poem is an allusion to a political scandal in France known as the Stavisky affair, contemporaneous with the publication of “Key West” (we have no firm evidence of the date of composition). Alexandre Stavisky was a Russian emigré in France and a swindler. In 1934 he precipitated a financial and political scandal that shook France. He had sold large numbers of worthless bonds and, following his exposure in December 1933, fled from the authorities. Tracked down in Chamonix in January 1934, he either committed suicide or was killed by the police. The affair led to accusations of cover-up and to riots in the streets. As with all political disputes in France at that time, Communists and Fascists took opposing sides.

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Fernandez weighed in on the Fascist side of the controversy with an open letter to André Gide, a communist sympathizer (NRF April 1934). It began, “You are a communist, and I still am not,” giving the reason that Communism is hostile to Humanism: “The idea of adherence to communism includes, to my mind, a complete acceptance, a total devotion to the cause ... When, like me, one defends a certain humanism, founded on the belief that man is, for man, the highest value, and that humanity will never equal itself insofar as not all men will be humane, one does not know how to permit those who believe exactly the contrary to triumph without running into philosophical disgrace, which is perhaps the most bitter of all disgraces.”3 Of course, he also rejects liberalism, claiming that it was bankrupt: “Liberalism is dead; today it is a worthless cheque, with which you can play only so long as you never try to cash it” [Le libéralisme est mort: c’est aujourd’hui un chèque sans provision dont on ne peut jouir qu’en imagination à condition de ne point passer à la caisse] (704). The letter prompted accusations that he was a Fascist, so he wrote a disclaimer, “I Came Near Being a Fascist,” which appeared in translation in the Partisan Review that autumn (vol. i September-October 1934). Although subsequent events proved the accusation to be well founded, neither Eliot nor Stevens could have foreseen that. Longenbach thinks that the Partisan Review article accounts for the allusion to Fernandez in “Key West” (Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things 161–2). But “Key West” and “I Came Near Being a Fascist” appeared almost simultaneously. While we know that Stevens read The Partisan Review regularly, and journals often hit the news stands well before their cover date, it is difficult to map the Communist-Fascist confrontation over the Satvisky Affair onto “The Idea of Order at Key West” as Longenbach invites us to do. If that affair has any relevance to the poem, it seems to me much more likely that Stevens would have had in mind the NRF article “Letter to André Gide” of the previous April – which Longenbach does not mention – since Fernandez there identifies Humanism as his reason for rejecting Communism. Riddell’s earlier take on Fernandez is closer to my interpretation. Like me, he is sceptical of Stevens’ denials: “If Fernandez is unknown to Stevens, then we are witness to the most astounding instance of critical telepathy in literature” (Riddell 117). However, Riddell assumes an agreement between what he calls Fernandez’s “phenomenological” criticism and the aesthetic articulated by the poem. (Riddell ignores the political component of Fernandez’s career, and also his Human-

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ism.) After citing Fernandez’s comments on impressionism to the effect that we remake in ourselves a unified “psychic equivalent” of “the dislocated and scattered object” that we initially observe, he opines that “The Idea of Order at Key West” might have been written to confirm this passage” (Messages 118).4 A principal difference between Riddell’s reading of Stevens and my own is that he disregards the tension between atheistic Humanism and Stevens’ lean toward some variety of theism, or at least of transcendence. Instead, Riddell reads Stevens’ poetics as characterized by “the stress on the ordering center of mind” (37). I have no quarrel with that assessment, but it does not go far enough. One must ask – as the phenomenologists descending from Hegel certainly do – what is the warrant for that operation of the mind? Hegel found it in a universal Geist, Husserl in Ideen, Heidegger in a mystical communion between Sein and Dasein. But Riddell discredits any tendencies toward transcendentalism, such as those found in Bergson and Santayana, choosing to interpret phenomenology as continuing “the Kantian tradition by seriously qualifying its idealist dimensions and returning the life of forms to its wholly human source” (38–9). In other words, he reads the phenomenologists as Humanists, even though he does not use the term. Riddell is committed to a Humanist reading of Stevens’ poetry – a reading that this study puts into question. Although Stevens denied that he had Ramon Fernandez in mind in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he himself threw some doubt on that denial by his admission that he had read some of Fernandez’s NRF articles – though he has not said which ones. Moreover the denials come nearly twenty years after the composition of “Key West.” The first was in a letter to Bernard Herringman of 1 September 1953 (Letters 798): “Ramon Fernandez was not intended to be anyone at all. I chose two everyday Spanish names.” But – honest to a fault – Stevens qualified the denial: “I knew of Ramon Fernandez, the critic, and had read some of his criticisms but I did not have him in mind.” Six months later he repeated the same disclaimer to his Italian translator, Renato Poggioli (4 March 1954, Letters 823): “When I was trying to think of a Spanish name for The Idea of Order etc., I simply put together by chance two exceedingly common names in order to make one and I did not have in mind Ramon Fernandez. Afterwards, someone asked me whether I meant the man you have in mind. I had never even given him a conscious thought. The real Fernandez used to write feuilletons in one of the Paris weeklies and it is true that I used to read these. But I did not

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consciously have him in mind.” Instead of flatly asserting that he did not have Ramon Fernandez in mind, as in the earlier letter, here he says only that he “did not consciously have him in mind,” and – as if to discourage further inquiry – he belittles Fernandez’s articles as “feuilletons” and the influential NRF as “one of the Paris weeklies,” while admitting that he had, indeed, read them. There is enough ambivalence in Stevens’ denials to justify a closer look at Fernandez’s relevance to “Key West” than it has so far received, and since Eliot also registered his views on Fernandez’s Humanism, Fernandez offers another opportunity to place the two poets in the same context. Although the Stavisky affair may have brought Fernandez to mind for Stevens, a far more likely context for the Fernandez reference in “Key West” is a much earlier (December, 1929) article in NRF, “Poésie et Biographie” (December 1929). It is a response to the principal exponent of the doctrine of pure poetry, the Abbé Bremond. In a review of Fernandez’s Molière, Bremond had denigrated biography in general, on the grounds that pure poetry should be autonomous of an author’s mundane concerns. In his response, Fernandez characterizes pure poetry as an illegitimate spawn of Bergsonism, and as a rhetorical theory disguised as a philosophy. It fails, he argued, to recognize that poetry is an expression, “a spiritual liberation” grounded on the poet’s life. Finally, he accuses Bremond of reducing poetry to “pure mysticism.”5 But the stricture Fernandez applies that is most pertinent to “Key West” is that if Bremond’s pure poetry were achieved, it would be incommunicable: “The doctrine of pure poetry offers us a psychological sense; it expresses precisely a particular ‘response’ to life from which one cannot generalize; it is meaningful only for those who have been led to invent it.” It is precisely the fact that the singer does communicate her sense of the seascape to the speaker and to Fernandez, that he is asked to explain in “Key West”: Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

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Since we know from his statement on the dust jacket that Stevens regarded the poems in The Idea of Order as instances of pure poetry, it seems very likely that it was Fernandez’s rebuttal of Bremond that Stevens had in mind. The challenge thrown out to Fernandez, then, is to explain how the singer’s song transforms the seascape for those who overhear her if, as Fernandez claims, “it is meaningful only for those who have been led to invent it.” Some indication that Stevens may have read “Poésie et Biographie” is to be found in his comments on Bergson in “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” which he presented on 8 December 1936, little more than a year after publishing Ideas of Order. There Stevens characterizes Bremond’s theory as Bergsonian: “M. Brémond proposed the identity of poetry and prayer, and followed Bergson in relying, in the last analysis, on faith.” In fact, Bremond does not attach his views to Bergson, but to F.H. Bradley – of which more later. Stevens may have picked up the erroneous connection from Fernandez, who characterizes Bremond’s theory as Bergsonian in “Poésie et Biographie.” Fernandez’s critique of pure poetry was motivated primarily by a desire to defend his own practice of biographical criticism against Bremond’s strictures. His conclusion stresses this point: “In all human sciences today, from sociology to medicine, consideration of the actual individual history of the subject studied is taking on a more and more important role, which means that all human knowledge tends to become biography.”6 His defence of biography is of a piece with his Humanism, for if all knowledge is a product of the interaction of human beings with the world – as Humanism maintains – then, if we are to assess them, we must know the context in which an individual formulates those views he offers as true. Of course Bremond, a Jesuit priest, was no Humanist. His epistemology permits a direct contact with the spiritual reality behind appearances, and distributes it on a continuum descending from mystic revelation, through prayer, to poetry. (I will return to the topic of pure poetry in the next chapter.) Fernandez contributed to both the Romantic vs Classical and the Humanism vs religion debates that Eliot and Middleton Murry had instigated to boost the circulation of their respective journals – the Adelphi and the Criterion.7 His contributions to the Humanism vs Religion debate in the Criterion begin with “The Experience of Newman” (October 1925). Earlier in that year, Fernandez had published “Lettres Etrangères: Le Classicisme de T.S. Eliot.” in the NRF.8 No doubt this favourable notice of his work brought Fernandez to Eliot’s attention,

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perhaps prompting him to review Fernandez’s collection, Messages, which would have alerted him to Fernandez’s Humanism. Eliot’s October 1926 review of Fernandez and Read paid particular attention to Fernandez’s “La Garantie des sentiments et les intermittences du coeur” [The Guarantee of Feelings and the Fitfulness of the Heart”]. First published in the Nouvelle Revue Française 33 (April 1924), it was a critique of the fiction of Marcel Proust. Eliot praised its opening sentence (which he cited in French):9 “The objections which Proust’s work raises, if considered as a comprehensive analysis of the heart and as revelatory of the depths of our nature, can be – in my opinion – reduced to two essentials: it does not create an hierarchy of values, and it manifests from start to finish no spiritual progress.” Eliot seized upon this remark as “almost incorrigible testimony to the lack of value of Proust ... to his value simply as a milestone, as a point of demarcation between a generation for whom the dissolution of value had in itself a positive value, and the generation for which the recognition of value is of utmost importance, a generation which is beginning to turn its attention to an athleticism, a training, of the soul as severe as the training of the body of a runner” (Review of Messages and Reason and Romanticism, 756). The soon-to-be-baptized Eliot’s assignment of the “dissolution of value” to the previous generation – Proust (1871–1922) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to name two – and of “the recognition of value” to his own generation is a rather hopeful whistling in the dark. Just as many of Russell’s generation as of Eliot’s turned to Christianity – Chesterton among them. Even fewer of Eliot’s generation were drawn to an ascetic “training of the soul” than were drawn to Christianity. Nor does the further distinction that he draws “between the generation which accepts moral problems and that which accepted only aesthetic or economic or psychological problems” carry much conviction. He is, I think, speaking more of himself as he was before his conversion, and as he is now that he has decided to convert, than he is speaking of his own and his parents’ generation. Still, Fernandez provides Eliot with some slim support for his hopeful remarks by finding – in the thought of Cardinal Newman and in George Meredith – an alternative to the nearly solipsistic sentimentality of Proust’s fixation on remembered feelings and sensations: “The procedure described by Newman and Meredith is inverted in Proust: for them, to retain an impression is to transpose a particular concrete experience into mental terms, to sever the spatial and temporal moorings of the experience, and to confer on it the infinite plasticity of a liv-

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ing personality, perpetually in development.”10 Fernandez’s point is that, whereas Proust anchors thoughts and feelings in a particular time and place, Newman and Meredith abstract from the particular, thereby conferring on the experience an “infinite plasticity.”11 According to Fernandez, both authors endorse a fusion of feeling and thought – a mode that Eliot had championed in his pre-Christian celebration of the unified sensibility. However, Eliot does not comment on this aspect of Fernandez’s case. After approving Fernandez’s championing of a “hierarchy of values,” Eliot takes him to task for his relativism, noting that he “is in a sense with Bergson, with the pragmatists, with those who have reached a certain degree of sophistication about ‘the nature of truth’” (753). That this is a position Eliot once held himself would make Fernandez’s fault all the more reprehensible. More to the point, Eliot sees such scepticism as a characteristic of Humanism. “The issue,” he says, “is really between those who, like M. Fernandez ... make man the measure of all things, and those who would find an extra-extra-human measure.” He sets Fernandez against “those who find this measure in a revealed religion,” and with “those who, like Mr. Irving Babbitt and Mr. Read, look for it without pretending to have found it” (755. My emphasis). Eliot notes that Fernandez disregards Newman’s Christianity,12 lumping him together with Meredith: “M. Fernandez likes Meredith, and likes Newman, primarily for the same reason: that they build a moral hierarchy, but that they build it on the fact of one’s own existence as the primary reality” (Eliot’s emphasis), and questions such a reliance on individual personality as a guarantee of ethical behaviour: “And the question, the ultimate question – which I do not pretend to answer – is whether M. Fernandez, by positing personality as the ultimate, the fundamental reality in the universe, is really supporting or undermining that “moral hierarchy” of which he ... is so stout a champion” (754–5. Eliot’s emphasis). Fernandez’s focus on personality is also found in “Poèsie et Biographie,” the piece that Stevens most likely had in mind when writing “Key West.” Of course, Stevens does not share Eliot’s antipathy for personality, believing: “There can be no poetry without the personality of the poet, and that, quite simply, is why the definition of poetry has not been found” (“The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Collected Poems 67–1). And again: “The truth is that a man’s sense of the world dictates his subjects to him and that this sense is derived from his personality, his temperament, over which he has little control and possibly

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none, except superficially. It is not a literary problem. It is the problem of his mind and nerves” (Kermode, ed. 717). (Their disagreement on the role of personality in aesthetic expression might be seen as the root from which all of their other distinctions arise. If Stevens’ poetry can be seen as the display of personality, Eliot’s might be seen as an attempt to disguise, occlude, and protect his personality.) Although “La Garantie des sentiments et les intermittences du coeur” (the article on which Eliot focuses in his review) would serve admirably as a text to which “The Idea of Order at Key West” is a response, it does not fit as neatly as the 1929 “Poésie et Biographie.” Moreover, it appeared in April 1924, nearly a decade before Stevens published “Key West.” (Its reprint in Messages was in 1926.) Another candidate for the spur that prompted the reference to Fernandez in “Key West” is a remark Fernandez made in his hostile review of Arnaud Dandieu and Robert Aron’s polemical book Révolution nécessaire (NRF January 1934). They challenged Marxist atheism, arguing that men and women needed some sense of the spiritual. Fernandez disputes their claim – though from a Humanist rather than a Marxist perspective. Most men, he argues, are totally indifferent to the spiritual, and in any case Dandieu and Aron have failed to define what the spiritual is – something he says they ought to have done before calling for a spiritual revolution. He then turns to a book by Daniel Rops, whose title, The World without a Soul, implies that the world’s soul has fled. Rops argues that we must get it back. Fernandez mocks Rops, asking: “But if the world has never had a soul?”13 “Key West” directly addresses the issue of a World Soul – or Anima Mundi, as Yeats liked to call it – when the speaker asks: Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. Of course, for Stevens, there is no “spirit” of the world, no Anima Mundi, only the world. Even though the term “spirit” appears frequently in his poetry, it always refers to the human spirit. Man is spirit, the world is body – as Stevens puts it in the late poem “Looking Across the Fields and Watching the Birds Fly” (written in 1952): “The spirit comes from the body of the world.” On this point, Stevens is in complete agreement with Fernandez. But, if there is no Anima Mundi and no transcendent realm, Fernandez has no answer when the speaker of

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“Key West” asks him why the song has transformed their perception of the seascape. “Key West” implies an answer to the query in the subsequent lines invoking the “blessed rage for order”: Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. “Portal” is not a word that Stevens uses frequently, but when he does, he always has in mind access to the “other world.” An early occurrence is in “Peter Quince”: “Beauty is momentary in the mind – / The fitful tracing of a portal; / But in the flesh it is immortal.” There it clearly means a doorway between this world and a transcendent world. It is also found – less perspicuously – in “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” xix (Ideas of Order): “An opening of portals when night ends, / A running forward, arms stretched out as drilled. / Act i, Scene 1, at a German Staats-Oper.” Since the poem is a meditation on death, it seems reasonable to assume that the “opening of portals” refers to crossing over from this world to the next. (The analogy of “running forward” as “drilled” in a German Staats-Oper seems to mock the theatricality of our funerary rites.) Perhaps the clearest instance is in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” which suggests that the following words might well be inscribed “above the portal to what lies ahead”: “No longer do I believe that there is a mystic muse, sister of the Minotaur. This is another of the monsters I had for nurse whom I have wasted. I am myself a part of what is real, and it is my own speech and the strength of it, this only, that I hear or ever shall” (Kermode, ed. 680). The notion that we are ourselves “part of what is real” is a constant motif of Stevens’ thought, and hence of his poetry. But he also believes that we can have only fleeting glimpses of the reality in which we are embedded. “Evening Without Angels,” one of the “Eight Poems” with which “Key West” was first published, offers two versions of the query put to Fernandez, and also an answer of a sort: Why seraphim like lutanists arranged Above the trees? And why the poet as

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Eternal chef d’orchestre? Air is air, Its vacancy glitters round us everywhere. Its sounds are not angelic syllables But our unfashioned spirits realized More sharply in more furious selves. The first lines ask why angels obey the directions of the poet as “eternal chef d’orchestre.” The following lines deny the angels any role, asserting that the “sounds” that the poet calls forth “are not angelic syllables” but merely “our unfashioned spirits realized” – that is, instantiated in art. The implied answer, then, is that the angels do not obey the poet, simply because they are mere fictions. Air is air: as far as our perception of it is concerned, air is nothing other than the poet’s imaginings A later strophe repeats the point in somewhat different terms, accounting for the recurrent themes and motifs in literature in a different manner than do archetypalists and surrealists: Let this be clear that we are men of sun And men of day and never of pointed night, Men that repeat antiquest sounds of air In an accord of repetitions. Yet, If we repeat, it is because the wind Encircling us, speaks always with our speech. These articulations of the issue by Stevens unequivocally reject any kind of mystic revelation, but leave unresolved the central question – whether our imaginings are just that, or are genuine glimpses of reality. As we have seen, Eliot’s answer to such a question is unequivocal: “Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them” (“Second Thoughts about Humanism,” Selected Essays 485). (Russell and Fernandez are on the other, Humanist, side of this issue, where Stevens is usually placed as well.) However, Eliot’s position leaves unresolved the problem of what, exactly, counts as a recognition of “supernatural realities.” Obviously mystical experience (if its possibility be granted) would count. Eliot does grant the possibility of mystical experience, but he does not think religious belief can be grounded on it: “No mystical experience in and by itself can be for human beings the guarantee of anything, as it must itself be verified in

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daily life” (Criterion 9 334). In his prose writings Eliot leaves open the question of just how that verification is to be achieved. Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets address the issue, but with such intricate qualification as to leave one still in some uncertainty. Stevens’ position on our relation to ultimate reality is more difficult to ascertain. His challenge to Fernandez indicates that he is not on the Humanist side of the issue, and we have seen his testimony that he was no longer of “that church.” But the closing lines of “Key West,” offered in place of whatever response the Humanist, Fernandez, might have made, do not resolve the issue unambiguously. If we read them as describing the history of human culture, there is nothing puzzling or mystical about them. Humans have throughout recorded history “ordered” the “words of the sea.” We have devised hypotheses to explain the phenomena we observe in nature that are clearly “of ourselves,” and – being abstract – are also “ghostlier” than the more substantial experienced world they order. And our “words” are “keener” in the sense of sharper, more narrowly articulated, than natural phenomena – the noises of the sea. There is nothing in this paraphrase that would distress a Humanist like Fernandez. Even the notion that the words are “of our origins” is perfectly compatible with a Darwinian perspective such as that adopted by Eliot’s Humanist friend J.M. Robertson. On Darwinian grounds, humans – like all other organisms – are adapted to the world in which they find themselves, and therefore quite naturally and materialistically concoct behaviours and hypotheses that successfully accommodate them to the world. Surely this is just what is meant by the opening lines of “Key West”: She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. That the motion of the sea mimics the mind of the singer implies an essential connection between them, a connection that makes science and poetry possible. It is like the “trumpet of Morning” in “Credences of Summer,” which:

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... supposes that A mind exists, aware of division, aware Of its cry as clarion, its diction’s way As that of a personage in a multitude: Man’s mind grown venerable in the unreal. That is to say, the rising sun presupposes an observer who can appreciate its glory. The singer’s song, then, is not to be seen as just a fiction, but as a creative response to something – the sea – with which the singer’s mind has a deep affinity. At the same time, that affinity is not a Nietzschean or Heideggerean mystical participation in which the “World” or Anima Mundi speaks to a mind that has successfully suppressed the selfconscious ego – what Nietzsche called the principium individuationis (that is, “the principle of individuation”): The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. Neither the singer nor her listeners are required to suppress either their self-consciousness or their individuality. Nonetheless, in experiencing the song, they are both transformed. In “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” Stevens speaks of a poem as a representation of an “aspiration,” rather than the more usual “inspiration.” He goes on to say that poetic insight is “not the same, yet not wholly unlike” mystical insight. Like the mystic, the poet is reaching toward something “not ourselves.” When he or she has written an “essential poem,” there occurs, Stevens says, a “transformation,” which “is a thing that communicates itself to the reader.” By way of illustration, he refers to the experience of reading The Faerie Queene “day after day”; eventually, he says, it “comes to possess the reader and ... naturalizes him in its own imagination and liberates him there” (Kermode, ed. 673). Something similar happens with the singer and her auditors – they begin to see the scene as inflected by her imagination, uttered in song.

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Like Fernandez, then, “The Idea of Order at Key West” puts the personality of the singer front and centre. But – typically for Stevens – the poem does not appear to be concerned at all with moral or ethical considerations. (Words such as “sin,” “evil,” and even “moral” occur very rarely in Stevens’ poetry and prose.) Instead of asking the ethical question, “How do we live virtuously?” the poem asks, “To what extent do we invent the world we know?” and “To what extent is our invention controlled, directed, and limited by externalities?” These are epistemological and ontological, not ethical, questions. Of course, the answer we choose for epistemological and ontological questions will have ethical implications – that is just the point of Eliot’s caveat that mystical experience is no guarantee of ethical behaviour. If “our own existence” is “the primary reality,” then what is to save us from ethical relativism, or even solipsism? – a question Eliot had engaged at considerable length in his dissertation. As we have seen, he adopted cognitive relativism, but he concluded that, even though the mind is confronted with “jarring and incompatible” worlds, it is still capable of passing “from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher one which shall somehow include and transmute them.” Even though “each centre of experience is unique,” we can nonetheless posit a transcendent perspective that contains all of those unique experiences (Knowledge and Experience 149). Still, the concession that each individual consciousness assimilates the world in its own manner permits a creative assimilation such as that in which Stevens’ singer engages. Stevens’ concern in “Key West” is with the dynamics of the exchange between knower and known, and between knower and knower – that is, communication between personalities or souls. It is not so much the content of what is known that concerns him, but rather its “phenomenology” – its “feel” – for those experiencing such a transformational assimilation of the experienced world. Eliot is more concerned in his dissertation with the nature of the soul, self, or personality (terms that do not lie down neatly for him) which undergoes the experience: “While one soul may experience within itself many finite centres, the soul itself may be considered in a loose sense as a finite centre. The more of a personality it is, the more harmonious and self-contained, the more definitely it is said to possess a ‘point of view.’ A point of view toward the social world. Wherever, in short, there is a unity of consciousness, this unity may be spoken of as a finite centre. Yet neither the term ‘soul’ nor the term ‘self’ is ever identical with the term ‘finite centre’” (Knowledge and Experience 148).

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It is difficult to be certain just what is at stake in this dance of terms that overlap one another but remain somehow distinct. It is clear that the “finite centre” is the experiencing self. The difficulty is that there must be some entity that precedes and succeeds each experience. (Distinct sorts of experiences apparently count as distinct finite centres.) Hence Eliot and Bradley posit a “soul” as that entity. The newborn infant, let us say, possesses a soul prior to any experience, but there is no implication that the soul precedes birth – as in Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” – nor that it survives death. The soul is simply the logically necessary entity that undergoes experience. The self is doubtless the product of the soul and its experiences, and the personality is the public face of the self. Although Eliot has said that “each centre of experience is unique,” he adds the caveat: it “is unique only with reference to a common meaning” (149). That qualification requires that any individual assimilation of experience must be subsumed under one or another more general meaning, hence the private perceptions and feelings of an individual, or “finite centre,” are never more than contingent, and must be subsumed under some schema: “And inasmuch as the finite centre is an experience, while the self is one aspect in that experience, and again contains and harmonizes several experiences, we may say that the self is both less and more than such a centre, and is ideal. For this reason it is more correct to say that a self passes from one point of view to another ... Thus we may continue to say that finite centres are impervious. Identity we find to be everywhere ideal, while finite centres are real” (149). A “finite centre,” then, is not the experiencing self, but each and every experience undergone by the “self.” And those experiences are “impervious,” that is, they cannot be revised or altered by contemplation or recollection. They are like Wordsworth’s “spots in time,” nuggets of experience which stay with the self unaltered by the passing of time or repeated recollection. If we think of Stevens’ singer as a Bradleyan “finite centre” and of her walk along the shore while singing as representing the harmonization of two experiences, the sound of the sea and her song, then the poem can be read as a rejection of Eliot’s rather Leibnizian and monadic modelling of impervious experiences14 – even though, of course, Stevens could not have had Eliot’s dissertation in mind: If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves;

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If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea. (ll. 21–33) Clearly the experience of the singer and the speaker somehow interpenetrate, thus breaching Eliot’s postulate that “finite centres are impervious.” The singer and the speaker are both affected by the seascape, but the singer utters her experience in her song, thereby altering the speaker’s – and Fernandez’s – experience of the scene. There is a complex dynamic between souls or minds that the epistemology of Eliot’s dissertation would not permit. That the singer’s song expresses her private, inner experience is perfectly in accord with Eliot’s view, but that it alters the private, inner experience of her auditors is not. Despite the contrasting epistemologies expressed in “Key West” and in Eliot’s dissertation, the similarities are as striking as the differences. Both views are relativistic in that they both assume that each individual’s experience of the world is distinct, and therefore that “knowledge” of the world is radically relative to the knower. Such cognitive relativism – or “perspectivism” – was endemic in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy, a circumstance that very much troubled the Harvard philosophy department. Committed to “a religious view of the universe,” the Harvard savants turned to a pragmatic variety of relativism to save it.15 Eliot inherited that relativism, but sought to evade or surmount it – successively discarding Bergson, Bradley, and Russell, until he found a home in Anglican Christianity. Stevens was also discontented with Harvard relativism, but chose a different route to avoid it. He might be said to have attempted to transcend the scepticism that relativism entails by embracing it, and clothing it with the garment of the poetic imagination. As he puts it – most radically – in “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”: “We say God and the imagination are one ... ” (Letters 701 n3). The suspension points are Stevens’ and are perhaps intended to allow for future revision.

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He told the editor of the Hudson Review, where it first appeared, that “the implications of this statement were to follow, and may still.”16 By 1926, when he reviewed Messages, Eliot had put scepticism, relativism, and Humanism aside. But even in 1920, when he was still vacillating between Humanism and Anglicanism, Eliot insisted on a sharp distinction between art and philosophy. He believed that to abandon that distinction would be to substitute emotion for thought – at least in the minds of those who proposed blending art and philosophy: In the work of Maeterlinck and Claudel on the one hand, and that of M. Bergson on the other, we have the mixture of the genres in which our age delights. Every work of imagination must have a philosophy; and every philosophy must be a work of art – how often have we heard that M. Bergson is an artist! It is a boast of his disciples. It is what the word “art” means to them that is the disputable point. Certain works of philosophy can be called works of art ... But this is not what the admirers of Bergson, Claudel, or Maeterlinck ... mean. They mean precisely what is not clear, but what is an emotional stimulus. And as a mixture of thought and of vision provides more stimulus, by suggesting both, clear thinking and clear statement of particular objects must disappear. (“The Possibility of a Poetic Drama” 445. My emphasis. Also The Sacred Wood 66) Stevens was very much on the other side of this divide. In his 1943 Mount Holyoke lecture, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” he endorsed precisely the position that Eliot rejected: “We must conceive of poetry,” he said, “as at least the equal of philosophy,” and as “we expect rational ideas to satisfy the reason” so we expect “imaginative ideas to satisfy the imagination.” The goal of the poet, he added, is to “accomplish a poetry that satisfies both the reason and the imagination.” Somewhat mischievously he continues: “If the end of the philosopher is despair, the end of the poet is fulfilment. Thus, poetry, which we have been thinking of as at least the equal of philosophy, may be its superior. Yet the area of definition is almost an area of apologetics. The look of it may change a little if we consider not that the definition has not yet been found but that there is none” (Kermode, ed. 668). Even through the fog of Stevens’ equivocation, it is clear that he is friendly to the blurring of the lines between philosophy and art – that is, between thought and emotion – that Eliot rejects.

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By 1926 Eliot’s views had hardened still further. In his review of Messages he complains of the claim made by Middleton Murry – following Bergson – that intuition is a special variety of intelligence: “We only complicate our ignorance by calling it ‘intuition,’ and that for anyone who has devoted even a little attention to St. Thomas, or to Aristotle, the term ‘intelligence’ is adequate ... [feelings] may be, and sometimes are, grasped immediately by inspection; and to insist on another faculty, ‘intuition,’ is merely to demand a more potent and thuriferous ju-ju.17 And I think that M. Fernandez, as well as Mr. Read, will be on the side of what we call ‘the intelligence’” (Criterion 4 [October 1926] 757). Stevens does not employ the term, “intuition” to describe the mind’s extra-rational grasp of the world, preferring the romantic term “imagination” for much the same phenomenon. Stevens sets imagination against reason, much as Murry sets intuition against intelligence. In “Imagination as Value” Stevens asserts that “the reason stands between” the imagination “and the reality for which the two are engaged in a struggle.” It is a struggle that “will continue to go on and ... there will never be an outcome” ( Kermode, ed. 729). Stevens does not suppose that the imagination has special access to reality – as Murry assumes is the case for intuition. For example, later in “Imagination as Value” he cites Communism as an instance of a product of the imagination: “Communism is not the measure of humanity. But I limit myself to an allusion to it as a phenomenon of the imagination. Surely the diffusion of communism exhibits imagination on its most momentous scale” (730). Since Stevens is hostile to Communism, it is clear that he does not regard the imagination as immune from error – as Bergsonian intuition is thought to be. Murry’s understanding of intuition was explicitly Bergsonian. The term “intuition” was introduced into philosophy by Kant, for whom it was the repository of the innate categories of time and space from which the reason generated a coherent world out of apparently random phenomena. Although Kantian intuition provided the necessary armature for reason’s construction of a world, it did not provide any insight into its workings. Bergson radically altered the concept, regarding intuition as akin to instinct, that is an innate capacity: “By intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested, self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and of enlarging it indefinitely” (Creative Evolution 194). He goes on to point to the production and appreciation of artworks as evidence that such a faculty as intuition exists and functions in the way he describes.

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Eliot’s disenchantment with Bergson long preceded his debate with Murry. As Paul Douglass points out, as early as 1914, “Eliot came to describe Bergson as ‘a sophist who had invented new sensations from metaphysics.’ And he called Bergson’s ‘time-doctrine’ ‘wholly destructive,’ for in it ‘everything may be admired, because nothing is permanent.’” He even employed the same donnish term that he employs in the Fernandez review a dozen years later: “The potent ju-ju of the LifeForce is a gross superstition.” Part of Eliot’s complaint was that Bergson makes consciousness “half of the dichotomy [between idealism and realism] and also as potentially absolute.” “Bergson’s philosophy,” he stated, “must stand as a kind of pluralism and a kind of realism as well. This is the one side of the case, and this is the side I have chiefly emphasized, because it is the side which I am interested to oppose” (quoted in Douglass 55). The young Eliot’s difficulty with Bergson, then, was that he embeds thought and knowledge in the flux of time and contingency, leaving no place for permanent, incorrigible ideas. It is the same complaint that his friend Wyndham Lewis made in Time and Western Man and many subsequent books. Lewis and Eliot were both more than a little unfair to Bergson in this criticism. Bergson was no more content with a world in which everything is contingent and ephemeral than was Eliot. His élan vital provides a direction and purpose to the perpetual flux – though we cannot know what the goal is. Eliot was not satisfied by such an evasion of relativism, complaining that it leads “toward the absolute,” by which he meant that it offers no genuine theory since the absolute is unknowable. Hence, he rejected Bergsonism as a “weakling mysticism” (Douglass 60–1). Even though he would be much less dismissive of mysticism in 1927, Eliot’s position on this point was much the same then as it was in 1914: “When Mr. Murry makes poetry a substitute for philosophy and religion – a higher philosophy and a purer religion, he seems to me to falsify not only philosophy and religion, but poetry too” (“Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” 344). Murry’s claim that poetry could replace religion as well as philosophy had been expressed in an earlier article, “Romanticism and the Tradition,” where, in a Humanist mode, he celebrated poetry’s liberation of men from the repression of religious dogma: “The modern consciousness begins historically with the repudiation of organised Christianity; it begins with the moment when men found in themselves the courage to doubt the life to come, and to free themselves from its menace in order to live this life more fully. It was necessary that man should come

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to his full stature, and that could only be done, as always, by his standing alone and assuming full responsibility for himself. What he knew to be true, that alone was true” (277. Murry’s emphasis). Fernandez, as a self-declared Humanist, is on the same side of this issue as Murry – though he does not dwell much on the death of God. But he is on Eliot’s side of the intuition/intelligence issue, conceding only an affective and heuristic role to intuition and insisting that, at the end of the day, intuitive and affective “awareness” must ultimately be confirmed by rational thought: “So we always return to this dilemma: either the qualitative intuition is not knowledge, but simply a presentiment of knowledge based on an impression sui generis; or else it tends to justify itself by transforming itself into rational knowledge. In either way, whatever intelligibility there is in the intuition represents the rôle played by discursive intelligence in this intuition” (“A Note on Intelligence and Intuition” 336). Of course, there can be no suggestion that Stevens had these articles and reviews in mind when he wrote “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Their relevance to the poem is simply that they address the same issue as “Key West” – the relation between mind and the outside world. The point I wish to make is that the poem is not idiosyncratic in its concern with that relationship but should be read in the context of contemporary epistemological discussion. The Eliot-Murry-Fernandez exchange is just one instance of that discussion, one that engaged literary figures as opposed to philosophers. I have no reason to believe that Stevens followed this particular exchange – though he might have done. Certainly he was a reader of the NRF and he admitted to having read some of Fernandez’s contributions to that journal. If we read “Key West” with the debates over intuition and intelligence in mind, it becomes, I think, less obscure. Just before turning to Fernandez, the poem attempts to articulate the relation between the song, the singer, and the sea: It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone,

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Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made. (ll. 34–43) These lines assert that the singer has somehow assimilated the external world – represented by the sea – into an artwork. The artwork, then, is jointly a product – to use Fernandez’s terms – of her perceptions and her “cognition.”18 The poem “worries” – like a dog worries a bone – the character of that “cognition,” implicitly posing a series of questions: “Is it intelligence or intuition, reason or imagination?” “Is it reflective or creative?” In the simple dichotomy M.H. Abrams adopted in his justly famous study of the romantic imagination: “Is the mind a mirror or a lamp?” The specific challenge Stevens puts to Fernandez, however, is not to answer those questions but to explain the effect the singer has on those who hear her “ghostlier demarcations” and at the same time see and hear “the words of the sea.” Although Fernandez denied the possibility of communicating the content of Bremond’s pure poetry, he had addressed the issue of communicating feelings in “The Guarantee of Feelings and the Fitfulness of the Heart,” where he defined feeling (sentiment) as “a perpetual possibility of copies [which] conform by the action of a certain pretension, [a] possibility guaranteed by the intuition of an interior resistance.” He added the opinion that therefore “sensory witnesses” are of an “entirely secondary value.”19 Fernandez’s point is that observers accommodate sensory input to pre-existing attitudes and expectations – which he called “the intuition of an interior resistance” or “a pretension.” The singer in “The Idea of Order at Key West” is also seen as transforming “sensory witness” according to her own “pretensions”: It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. (12–17) To this extent, Stevens and Fernandez are in agreement. They both believe – like Wordsworth – in the “mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive” (“Tintern Abbey” ll. 105–7). Although neither would admit to being “romantic” in this belief, the continuity is manifest.

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Fernandez is attempting to carve out a position between what he sees as the mystical tendencies of Bergsonian intuition and the hard-nosed empiricism of scientific culture. In this respect, his position is not unlike Stevens’: “Mystical responses have hardly more significance in my view than sense responses in that I am not convinced of the human capacity to create feelings out of sensations. Because the entire problem is there. One can induce feelings and obey them without any mystical support – provided that one does not call everything that is emotive ‘mystical’ – and one can [also] gild an incurable sensuality with mysticism” (Messages 163).20 Fernandez here puts his finger on the issue that troubles all of the participants in the debate – how to find a place for emotion in cognition without adulterating it. In becoming an Anglican, Eliot adopted the Pauline and Scholastic conception of faith – a strongly felt conviction that accepts divine revelation independent of rational confirmation, or even understanding. Fernandez’s Humanist project is to find a secular alternative to faith, one that would retain the emotional component of a “strongly felt conviction” without any appeal to a transcendent realm or entity. The issue between Stevens and Fernandez, I think, is that Stevens is unwilling to give up the transcendent – even though he is also hesitant to assert it – a feature of his poetry I will explore in the chapter on pure poetry. Stevens would almost certainly have endorsed Cardinal Newman’s definition of faith, which Fernandez cites approvingly in another Criterion essay, “The Experience of Newman”: “Faith is a process of Reason in which so much of the grounds of inference cannot be exhibited, so much lies in the character of the mind itself, in its general view of things, in its estimate of the probable and the improbable, its impressions concerning God’s will, and its anticipations derived from its own inbred wishes, that it will ever seem to the world irrational and despicable; till, that is, the event confirms it” (100–1. My emphasis). These remarks seem to me to be compatible with Stevens’ notion that we can create a fiction that we invest with belief. Fernandez, in any case, interprets Newman’s characterization of faith as justifying a belief in fictions: “Do you not see, do you not feel, that these lines [of Newman’s] acquire their full significance when they mean that belief adds to cognition, passes beyond experience, invents, creates? ... It seems to me that everything becomes clear if we make belief the sign of a disposition to create that which does not yet exist. We are so weak, so imperfectly weaned from Christianity, that we find it hard to conceive a belief which would not put us in relation with an actual, protecting reality; and in order to merit this

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protection we are always ready to humiliate ourselves, to empty ourselves of all our substance, to attribute the merit of our own effort to invisible hands” (101. My emphasis). Stevens – like his singer – certainly has “a disposition to create that which does not yet exist,” and it would be no distortion to regard his poetic career as a struggle with his imperfect weaning from Christianity. As we have seen, he told Hi Simons: “ I ought to say that it is a habit of mind with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion.” And although he conceded that “humanism would be the natural substitute,” he could not rest with it: “The more I see of humanism the less I like it” (9 January 1940. Letters 346). By the same token, he was unwilling, as Fernandez put it, “to attribute the merit of our own effort to invisible hands,” that is, to postulate a transcendent source inspiring the artist – whether the divine or the élan vital. Perhaps Stevens lacked the courage to worship, in Russell’s words, “at the shrine that his own hands have built; [and] undismayed by the empire of chance to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life.” Fernandez makes very much the same recommendation, continuing: “Let us for once have the courage to put nullity in its true place, reality in its true place, to make fulness within us and void around us. Let us examine our scepticism until we discover the root of our faith. What! As soon as I touch the depth of myself I feel myself urged to hope, to will, to believe in a world different from that which surrounds me, in a being different from myself (101. My emphasis). Like Fernandez, Murry also charged in the pages of Criterion that those who clung to Christianity – such as Eliot, Chesterton, and Maritain – lacked the courage of those who faced up to the death of God. The following put-down is based on Auguste Comte’s positivism:21 “I do not wonder that Mr. Eliot finds the world, past and present, distinctly barren if he can admire only that which he believes in ... I may be permitted to commiserate with him on being condemned to live in a world where every advance in present knowledge annihilates some past achievement. For him, alas, the universe of ideas also is ‘red in tooth and claw.’ It must be terribly depressing to live under the perpetual threat of being unable to admire to-morrow what one has admired until to-day” (Murry, “Concerning Intelligence” 532). Murry’s charge of intellectual cowardice in the face of advancing human knowledge was one that Humanists routinely level at religious believers. Eliot did not respond to Murry’s accusation, but his general position was that belief is never absolute but always leaves room for

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doubt. In the pre-conversion Clark Lectures he argued for a culturally inflected understanding of belief: “Belief was a different thing for the thirteenth, for the seventeenth, and for the nineteenth century” (Schuchard, Varieties 222–3). And in “A Note on Poetry and Belief,” written shortly before his baptism, he was still qualifying belief: “doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief” (16). Somewhat surprisingly, it would appear that belief was more important for Eliot than what was believed in. In a Criterion “Commentary” (for April 1933) he contrasted belief with unbelief, indicating a greater respect for erroneous beliefs – such as Communism – than for unbelief or scepticism like that of his Hollow Men and Russell. (His comments were prompted by a consideration of the scepticism of André Gide and Anatole France (the “battle” of which he speaks is the struggle with doubt): The only end to the battle, if we live to the end, is holiness; the only escape is stupidity, and stupidity, for the majority of people, is no doubt the best solution of the difficulty of thinking; it is far better to be stupid in a faith, even in a stupid faith, than to be stupid and believe nothing. For the smaller number, the first step is to find the least incredible belief and live with it for some time; and that in itself is uncomfortable;22 but in time we come to perceive that everything else is still more uncomfortable ... Anatole France had his “philosophy of life,” if you like; but a philosophy of life which involves no sacrifice turns out in the end to be merely an excuse for being the sort of person that one is. I have, in consequence of these reflexions, much sympathy with Communists of the type with which I am here concerned; I would even say that, as it is the faith of the day, there are only a small number of people living who have achieved the right not to be communists. (“A Commentary” Criterion 12 (April 1933) 472–3. My emphasis) While Fernandez’s Humanist willingness to abandon faith in a transcendent reality clearly separates him from Eliot, his retention of unwarranted belief (that is, faith) – even though without a determinate object – brings him in line with Stevens. The belief “in a world different from that which surrounds me” is just what Stevens means by his “fiction,” and it is also what the singer at Key West creates for herself and for those who hear her. Yet, as we have seen, Stevens disassociates himself from Humanism, and “Key West” certainly implies some disagreement

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between himself and the Humanist Fernandez.23 Fernandez’s Humanism cannot explain that the singer’s “fiction” – her song – alters the perceptions of those who hear her, but I think there is more. For Stevens, a fiction is the product of a “transaction” between an individual’s imagination and the external world; that is to say, a fiction is not just an unwarranted belief, but a belief that is occasioned – if not caused – by the mind’s exchange with the world, a world of which it is itself a part. In short, it is like a scientific hypothesis – a formulation based on experience. The scientific hypothesis must be tested to ascertain its adequacy to experience, and it is always subject to revision or abandonment in the light of new information. The poetic fiction is tested only on the pulses of its readers. It cannot be disconfirmed because it makes no claim to truth – as Sir Philip Sidney famously put it in his “defence of Poesie”: “the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” But it can be abandoned in the face of changing cultural norms and beliefs. Stevens insists on this property of poetic fiction in all of his major poetry, but is cautious, and even devious, in his published prose. The plainest statement I have found is in an unpublished exchange with Henry Church mentioned above. In a letter of 19 April 1943 Church cited aphorism 34 (in German) from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: “Why might not the world which concerns us – be a fiction? And to any who suggested: ‘But to a fiction belongs an originator?’ – might it not be bluntly replied: Why? May not this ‘belong’ also belong to the fiction?”24 It is easy to see why Church would expect Stevens to find the sentiment congenial, since it asserts what Stevens is constantly asserting – that the world we know is the world we create, a fiction. But Nietzsche goes further and dismisses as credulous the hypothesis that standing behind the world is an intelligence which has created it, just as a human intelligence stands behind artworks. Stevens bristled at Church’s assumption that he would agree with Aphorism 34, dismissing it as a variety of Humanism: The Fiktion of Aphorism 34 is the commonplace idea that the world exists only in the mind. So considered it is an unreal thing, in which logic does not have a place. Since an Urheber [”originator”] is a projection of logic, it is easy to dispose of him by disposing of logic ... This is quite a different fiction from that of the notes, even though it is present in the notes. We are confronted by a choice of

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ideas: the idea of God and the idea of man. The purpose of the notes is to suggest the possibility of a third idea: the idea of a fictive being, or state, or thing as the object of belief by way of making up for that element in humanism which is its chief defect. (21 April 1943 Huntington, was 3512. “notes” is his Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” My emphasis)25 Stevens quite reasonably takes the Humanist argument to be that we must choose between God and man, and further that the only rational choice is man. But he refuses their either/or, and embraces instead a “third idea,” that of “a fictive being or state” as “the object of belief.” His point seems to be a phenomenological one, that is to say, it is the state of “believing in” that is all-important, not the existence or nonexistence of that in which we believe. As long as our belief is genuinely held, it does not matter if there is a reality conforming to our beliefs. Described in this way, Stevens’ position sounds like solipsism. His “fiction” is not defined by its character of being an invention and therefore not “true.” The truth or falsity of the fiction is not what matters. Its defining characteristic is that it is an “object of belief.” The tacit assumption is that some of our beliefs are true and some are false, but we cannot know incorrigibly which is which. Like pragmatism, then Stevens’ philosophical posture rests on a fundamental agnosticism – not the denial that we can have knowledge of a transcendent reality, but the denial that we can have incorrigible knowledge of anything. Today nearly everyone26 acknowledges that human beings do not have incorrigible knowledge of the world, but only mediated, inferential, and therefore, qualified knowledge. All of our knowledge is, in that sense, a fiction, a constructed picture or manifold. Since we have no incorrigible means of adjudicating between truth and falsehood, we are always at risk of believing what is not true. In this way the sharp line that positivism draws between empirical (scientific) knowledge and emotional belief is breached. Accepting the sceptical view that we cannot know anything incorrigibly, Stevens turns it on its ear. Instead of concluding – as Derrida and his followers do – that since nothing is certain, everything is equally untrue, Stevens concludes that unwarranted beliefs may, after all, be well founded; our fictions might turn out to be true, much as Newman claimed in the passage cited by Fernandez. A Stevensian fiction, then, is not a chimera; it is not a fantasy, but simply an hypothesis or invention. Inventions can certainly be real – like electric toasters – and can be

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useful – also like electric toasters. And, of course, all known human cultures have been based on beliefs – most of which we now consider to have been false. Like the Humanists, Stevens thinks that modern man is condemned to believe in what he knows to be a fiction, a human invention. But, unlike the Humanists, he insists that the poet’s fictions about the transcendent ought to be regarded as approximations of the truth, just like scientific hypotheses. Certainly poetic fictions are founded on experience of the world – “The grinding water and the gasping wind” – just like scientific ones. The difference is that poetic fictions express our emotional and aesthetic relations to the world, not just – indeed, not even – our instrumental relation. Although he is chary of saying so, it is true, I think, that Stevens wants the religious “fiction” (belief) that there is something “beyond ourselves” to be preserved. “A Collect of Philosophy” was an attempt to articulate such a view, but, as he told Barbara Church, he was not happy with it: “I was quite excited about it when I finished it. When I go back to it, it seems slight; and my chief deduction: that poetry is supreme over philosophy because we owe the idea of God to poetry and not to philosophy doesn’t seem particularly to matter” (2 October 1951 Letters 729). In a much earlier talk, “The Irrational Element in Poetry” (read at Harvard on 8 December 1936), he had defined the irrational as “the transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet from which poetry springs” (Kermode, ed. 781). In the spirit of Bergson’s intuition,27 he admitted that the transaction is in some sense “mechanical”: “If each of us is a biological mechanism, each poet is a poetic mechanism. To the extent that what he produces is mechanical: that is to say, beyond his power to change, it is irrational” (784). Fernandez will not go so far. In “La Garantie des sentiments et les intermittences du coeur” he rejects “the mechanical voice of the body”: “It seems very dangerous to begin with the analysis of sensory and affective manifestations of the feelings, which are a single aspect of it, and not the most important; and since one finds these manifestations in many mental disorders, in nearly all nervous disorders, and in that which one might call fainting spells, it follows that they serve as traps much more often than as guides in the study of feeling. Listening to them, we hear only the mechanical voice of the body”28 (My emphasis). Although Stevens never directly addresses the issue of psychopathology, he does draw back from the automatism of the Surrealists mentioned elsewhere in his Harvard address, adding to the remark just cited: “Perhaps I do not mean wholly beyond his power to change, for he might, by an effort

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of the will, change it” (Kermode, ed. 784). The faculty that negotiates the “transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet” is the imagination, as Stevens explains in “A Note on ‘Les Plus Belles Pages’”: “The interrelation between reality and the imagination is the basis of the character of literature.” But that is insufficient. He adds two further features of literature: “the interrelation between reality and the emotions,” which “is the basis of the vitality of literature,” and the interrelation “between reality and thought,” which is “the basis of its power” (Kermode, ed. 867). The implication is that science and philosophy are inferior to literature for they lack emotion, and religion is inferior to literature for it lacks thought.29 Stevens expanded on this theme fifteen years later in “Two or Three Ideas,” where he characterizes the modern dilemma as one of “disbelief” to which the poet alone can respond: “In an age of disbelief, or what is the same thing, in a time that is largely humanistic, in one sense or another, it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style. In his measure to indicate that the figures of the philosopher, the artist, the teacher, the moralist and other figures including the poet, find themselves, in such a time, to be figures of an importance greatly enhanced by the requirements both of the individual and of society” (Opus Posthumous 259–60. My emphasis). Stevens and Eliot are on the same page on this issue. Both believe that belief is necessary if one is to have a healthy society – though Eliot saw the issue in more geopolitical terms than did Stevens. There is nothing on record from Stevens to compare to Eliot’s comment on Neville Chamberlain’s infamous Munich Agreement of September 1938, which sacrificed the Czech Sudentenland to Hitler in exchange for “peace in our time.” Writing just a few months later (March 1939) and before the outbreak of war, Eliot attributed the craven betrayal of the Czechs to the lack of strong belief in Britain and France: The feeling which was new and unexpected was a feeling of humiliation, which seemed to demand an act of personal contrition, of humility, repentance and amendment; what had happened was something in which one was deeply implicated and responsible. It was ... a doubt of the validity of civilisation. We could not match conviction with conviction, we had no ideas with which we could either meet or oppose the ideas opposed to us. Was our society, which had always been so assured of its superiority and rectitude, so

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confident of its unexamined premises, assembled round anything more permanent than a congeries of banks, insurance companies and industries, and had it any beliefs more essential than a belief in compound interest and the maintenance of dividends? (The Idea of a Christian Society 51) Eliot’s reaction to the Munich agreement plainly arose from his conviction that a society needs to believe in something. But he put belief into a socio-political context, observing that the Nazi belief system had rendered Germany strong, while the liberal and sceptical “belief” system of Britain and France had rendered them weak. It must be admitted that these remarks are very like the Fascist and Marxist view that liberal, bourgeois democracies were morally and intellectually bankrupt. Since Eliot contrasts the strong convictions of the Nazis to the lack of belief among the English and French, one might be tempted to accuse him of admiring Nazism. But his point is that a strong belief in something beyond oneself is essential for a strong society. Of course, the nature of the beliefs determines the health or pathology of the society, and Nazi Germany was surely as clear a case of mass pathology as one is likely to find.30 The only reaction from Stevens on the outbreak of war that I have found is in a letter to his Ceylon correspondent, Leonard van Geyzel, of 20 September 1939, about two weeks after Britain and France had declared war on Germany (3 September). He wrote that he felt “a horror of the fact that such a thing could occur.” But, in contrast to Eliot’s indignation, Stevens expressed only an isolationist sentiment: “this time there is an immensely strong feeling about staying out” (Letters 342). Near the end of the year, before the German invasion of France, Stevens cited with approval a remark from a French newspaper: “the primordial importance of spiritual values in time of war,” and he continued to muse on the impact war might have on the practice of poetry: “The ordinary, everyday search of the romantic mind is rewarded perhaps rather too lightly by the satisfaction that it finds in what it calls reality.” The closeness of death, he thinks, might lead a soldier to search for some belief: “But if one happened to be playing checkers somewhere under the Maginot Line, subject to a call at any moment to do some job that might be one’s last job, one would spend a good deal of time thinking in order to make the situation seem reasonable, inevitable and free from question.” He adds: “I suppose that, in the last analysis, my own main objective is to do that kind of thinking” (Letters

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346).31 Stevens’ reaction to the war, then, focuses on the consequences for individuals’ beliefs, as opposed the broader social and cultural issues that concern Eliot. This response is compatible with Stevens belief that it is the role of the poet “to supply the satisfactions of belief, in his measure and in his style,”32 rather than to provide social and political direction (Opus Posthumous 260). We can surmise, then, that it is the “measure,” or rhythm, and style of the singer at “Key West” that transforms the landscape – not only for her, but for all who hear her. As we have seen, the core of Stevens’ challenge to Fernandez is to explain how such a transformation – or recreation – by the singer can also transform the world for the listener. Stevens’ supposition is that there is some over-arching commonality – though not the “world soul” that Fernandez ridicules. The issue in the poem, then, is not so much “How do we create the world we perceive?” as “How is it that the artist can communicate his or her altered consciousness to her audience?” Stevens is confident that she can communicate her experience, but never succeeds in satisfactorily theorizing that communication. One such effort is in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” where he reports on his own sense that his poetry transforms his own experience of the world: when a poet has written a successful poem, “he shares the transformation, not to say apotheosis, accomplished by the poem,” and adds that the experience “teases him with that sense of the possibility of a remote, a mystical vis or noeud vital” (Kermode, ed. 673. My emphasis).33 Fernandez does not address the issue of transformation directly, but he does provide a model for the assimilation of experience in which intelligence is assigned the role of “processing” impressions. For him impressions are registered by the intuition rather than the imagination, where Stevens would place them. The “pretension” of which Fernandez speaks is that evolutionary predisposition of the human mind to accommodate sensory inputs from the world in which it has evolved, which Bergson called “intuition.” “And whence can come,” Fernandez asks, “the pretension of the mind if not from an agreement between it and the impression, of the capacity which we have to think this feeling, to assign to the appropriate laws of the intelligence that impression which leaves us [with] an experience?” (Messages163–4. Original emphasis).34 He assigns a central role to feeling (“sentiment”) in our assimilation of sensory experience: “Feeling, then, is situated on a level of consciousness intermediate between intellectual activity and sense impressions. One cannot say that it is a truth, since it rests on an ineffable

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intuition which cannot test itself by action; but one cannot say either that it is a purely passive state of receptivity since it participates in the activity of the mind and permits it to fulfil its most important function, which is to envisage [concevoir] the future with certainty” (Messages 164. My emphasis).35 As a Humanist, Fernandez needs to find a secular warrant for ethical behaviour. He finds it in an existential-like “being true to oneself”: “Feeling is then above all a response of our entire being, which one can translate indifferently into the language of the intelligence or into that of the sensations but of which our acts are the true signs, the only ones which permit the exact measure of its value” (Messages 164).36 Stevens, in contrast, is mostly indifferent to ethical issues – being content with the ethical imperatives he was taught as a child – but he is unhappy with the secular limitations of Humanism, committed as he is to imagining a world beyond ourselves. Surely that is the point of the question asked early in “The Idea of order at Key West”: Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang. (18–20) The poem never answers this question, even though it worries it through the next twenty-three lines, culminating in the query directed to Fernandez. As we have seen, that question is not about the identity of the “spirit” but rather about the extraordinary effect the song has on the listeners. Stevens closes the poem – frustratingly for the reader – with an apostrophe to Fernandez that is a sentence fragment: Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. (ll. 52–6) It is difficult to know if the “rage for order” belongs to Fernandez and the singer, or to the singer alone. In “The Guarantee of Feelings and the Fitfulness of the Heart,” Fernandez seems to backslide from his normal atheistic Humanism: “Because a true feeling teaches us to think fittingly, as it teaches us how to act well, far from moderating the boldness of the imagination, it

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warms it to the warmth of an ineffable presence which follows it in all of its detours; nothing material guarantees it, but it knows how to guarantee itself by I know-not-what of the eternal, which appears in its smallest manifestations; and one could say that the true feeling, whatever it is, imprints the seal of justice on the most terrible of acts”37 (Messages 165. My emphasis). But Fernandez knows no more of the eternal than does Stevens or the singer, so he too ends his essay with a rhetorical question about the spiritual: “But, I wonder, is it possible to consider man in his reality, in his complete reality, without taking account of his spiritual tendencies, and does not one see that, far from being added to him from outside, like a foreign body which changes nothing of his nature, [the spiritual tendencies] develop, test and modify the most hidden aspects of his nature, that its least aspiration is a sign from which a rather subtle codification would know how to profit, and that finally we do not know well what it is until we know what it wishes to be?” (Messages 168. My emphasis).38 The italicized phrase is very close to the lines: It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard. And the whole passage can stand as a prose version of the epistemological issue engaged in the poem. But I do not think Stevens had this passage in mind. If he had, we would have to interpret the apostrophe as a declaration of agreement between the speaker and Fernandez, as Riddell assumed. But I think it makes more sense to take it as a rebuttal of Fernandez’s put-down of pure poetry in “Poésie et Biographie.” What I hope the reader will take from the foregoing rather intricate discussion is that Ideas of Order marks a maturation of Stevens’ views on religious belief, a maturation that involves an abandonment of Humanism, and that “The Idea of Order at Key West” announces that abandonment. While we cannot date Stevens’ change of view with any precision, it certainly belongs to the period between the wars, and therefore is roughly contemporaneous with Eliot’s conversion. Both men acknowledged Humanism to be the dominant alternative to Christianity in contemporary Western society and both found it unsatisfactory. Where they differ most dramatically is that Eliot turned to an earlier religious accommodation, and Stevens persisted in attempting

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to achieve a secular, aesthetic solution. Part of the underlying cause of the different routes they chose can no doubt be attributed to the different status each of them assigned to ethics and morality, and hence to public and political action. Some insight into that difference can be illustrated by their divergent responses to pure poetry, which I discuss in the next chapter.

try” ilemma Debate

6 The Function of Poetry: The “Pure Poetry” Debate

A middle position between orthodox religious belief and the secular Humanism that Russell preached can be found in the now largely forgotten “pure poetry” movement, which had its brief floruit at about the same time that Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems and Stevens’ Ideas of Order were published. Because it has had little influence on the practice or the reception of poetry in English, it has not attracted much attention in English and American literary studies. Nonetheless, Stevens scholars have taken due notice of Stevens’ declaration on the dust jacket for the second edition of Ideas of Order (Knopf 1936) that it was “essentially a book of pure poetry.” Eliot was also familiar with the notion of pure poetry. He published several articles on the movement in the Criterion and commented on it himself. Pure poetry, then, provides another instance where we can observe Eliot and Stevens discussing the issue of belief under the same heading – albeit independently. One feature of the discussion of pure poetry that will become apparent is that each commentator takes it upon himself (there are no female participants in the debate) to characterize pure poetry in his own way. Only Eliot seems to have taken the trouble to read the Abbé Bremond with any care. Commentators loosely identify pure poetry with one or another of Surrealism, Symbolism, and Romanticism. Even though Bremond had no authority to legislate what is and what is not pure poetry, it was his articulation that prompted the debate, so it would seem only appropriate that commentators should at least indicate where they diverge from his notion of it. Eliot is the most careful of the participants, directing his remarks at Bremond’s central thesis rather than at a straw man of his own choosing.

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The only extended discussion of pure poetry is Henry Decker’s Pure Poetry, 1925–1930: Theory and Debate in France. As the title indicates, it is not particularly concerned with any connection that either Stevens or Eliot may have had with the movement. Walton Litz’s 1977 article “Wallace Stevens’ Defense of Poetry: La poésie pure, the New Romantic and the Pressure of Reality” relies on Decker for his consideration of the relation between Stevens and pure poetry. As far as I know there is no extended discussion of Eliot’s attitude toward pure poetry. Glen MacLeod’s Wallace Stevens and Modern Art has deservedly dominated recent discussion of the development of Stevens’ mature theory of poetry. Macleod’s thesis is that Stevens’ mature aesthetic grew out of his effort to differentiate his posture from that of the Surrealists. Plausible as his argument is, it disregards the fact that the “pure poetry” debate is prominent in the same texts in which Stevens discusses inspiration and the irrational – hallmarks of Surrealism and pure poetry alike. For that reason one cannot assume, as MacLeod does that Stevens’ appeals to the irrational are evidence of his sympathy with Surrealism, since those remarks can just as well serve as evidence of his sympathy with pure poetry. So far as I have been able to discover, Stevens does not mention pure poetry earlier than 1935. Despite the absence of any earlier mention – and despite the dust jacket remark – he told Ronald Latimer in a letter of 31 October 1935 (which must have been nearly contemporaneous with the writing of the text for the dust jacket) that he had pretty much given up on “pure poetry” and assigned his interest in it to the period of Harmonium, more than a decade earlier: “I remembered that when Harmonium was in the making there was a time when I liked the idea of images and images alone, or images and the music of verse together. I then believed in pure poetry, as it was called” (Letters 288). This must be a bit of retrospective re-labelling, since Bremond’s book La Poésie pure was published in 1926, three years after the publication of Harmonium. La Poésie pure is a compendium of Bremond’s 1925 address to the Académie Française together with a response by Robert de Souza. It is true that Paul Valéry coined the term “pure poetry” in his preface to Lucien Fabre’s Connaisance de la Déesse in 1920, but it had little currency prior to Bremond’s adoption of it. No doubt Stevens’ meaning is that in reading Bremond he found an articulation of a view he had long held, and which had animated the poems in Harmonium. However, his characterization of pure poetry as that poetry which depends on “images

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alone,” or on “images and the music of verse together” bears little relation to what Bremond means by “pure poetry.” Stevens confessed to Latimer in the same letter that he still had “a distinct liking for that sort of thing.” However, he continued: “But we live in a different time, and life means a good deal more to us now-a-days than literature does” (Letters 288). Uncharacteristically for Stevens, in 1935 he believed that the relation of poetry to the world at large was more important than the relation between the poet and his experience, which is the focus of pure poetry. Presumably this change of focus reflected the political, social, and economic troubles of the thirties when the world seemed headed for disaster (as indeed it was). Negatively defined, then, pure poetry was in Stevens’ mind a poetry that is unconcerned with the mundane issues of a particular time and place. Harmonium was put together in 1922 and published in 1923, when neither economic distress nor global conflict worried many in the United States – though things were much more unsettled in Europe. The Communist revolution of 1917 in Russia had led many – including several younger American writers – to believe that the day of capitalism was done. The 1921 Peace of Versailles redrew the map of Europe on the Wilsonian principle of “self-determination” with consequences no one could foresee, but many feared. Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922 led to the fall of the parliamentary government in Italy, and inaugurated what he called the “Era Fascista.” Those who feared Communist revolution – including many in Britain – saw Fascism as the most promising riposte to the Red Menace.1 Signs in Europe were troubling: the Weimar Republic had narrowly survived the Spartacus revolt of January 1919 and Germany was experiencing run-away inflation. Eliot’s Waste Land was better attuned to the spirit of collapse and chaos that those events heralded than were Stevens’ Harmonium poems. The pure poetry debate had not yet begun in 1922. It dates from a talk given by the Abbé Bremond on 24 October 1925 (Decker 2). Stevens may have picked up the term from Valéry’s 1920 preface, or from a reference to it. He told Latimer: “I have read very little of Valéry, although I have a number of his books and, for that matter, several books about him” (5 November 1935. Letters 290). It is more likely that he used the label anachronistically when recalling his views at the time he composed the Harmonium poems. Henry Decker gives the background: “Paul Valéry wrote only one essay specifically devoted to the problem of pure poetry, a short one entitled ‘Poésie pure: Notes pour

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une conférence,’ which he appended to the ‘Calepin d’un poète’ [1933] ... He explains what he had meant in the Avant-Propos of 1920, that he had simply wanted to draw attention to a historical fact and not to elaborate a theory, even less a doctrine ... All literary works, he explains now, contain certain recognizable elements which for the moment he will call poetic; to increase their role is what he understands by the possibility of a “pure” poetry” (47). On this account Valéry seems to have meant little more by “pure poetry” than what Keats meant when he recommended that Shelley “curb” his “magnanimity ... and ‘load every rift with ore’” (16 August 1820, Forman 507). “Pure poetry” then, as Stevens used the term on the dust jacket, probably meant little more than a poetry that is concentrated and intense – as in Pound’s injunction that the imagist poem should “use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation” (Literary Essays 3). These remarks – one public, two private – reveal Stevens’ uncertainty about the suitability of “pure poetry” as a goal in times of public crisis such as the Great Depression and the apprehended global conflict at the time Ideas of Order was being assembled (as noted above, several of the poems were written earlier). In such times, Stevens felt that the poet – like other citizens – had a public duty to serve more practical purposes. Much of his ambivalence, then, can be attributed to his sense of civic responsibility. On the other hand, Stevens resisted the Marxist insistence on social usefulness as a kind of tyranny that restricted the poet’s freedom to be himself. His comment several years later to Henry Church confirms this ambivalence, for he there contradicts his earlier claims to have abandoned pure poetry. Now he contrasts it to Marxism (27 April 1939): “I am, in the long run, interested in pure poetry. No doubt from the Marxian point of view this sort of thing is incredible, but pure poetry is rather older and tougher than Marx and will remain so” (Letters 339. My emphasis). As a faithful reader of Partisan Review 2 Stevens was well aware of the Marxist imperatives for the arts, although, like Eliot, he did not share them. What we have from Stevens, then, is a vacillation between yielding to the imperative of relevance in poetry, and resisting it. Clearly his resistance was too strong for his submission to persist. Not only was Eliot aware of Bremond and his theory of pure poetry but he seems to have been much more engaged with the movement than Stevens was – although as an opponent, not as a sympathizer. For Eliot, the relation of art to religious belief was the central issue rather than the relation of art to society, as it was for Stevens. As I have already

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remarked, Abbé Bremond’s view was that poetry, prayer, and mystic revelation belonged on a continuum, with poetry below prayer, and prayer below mystic revelation. Eliot entered this debate as a fresh convert to Anglicanism and a refugee from Russell’s Humanism. (Russell gave equal status to poetic imaginings and religious prophecy, since he regarded both as therapeutic whistling in the dark.) Despite Bremond’s evident piety, Eliot seemed to regard Bremond’s view as setting one on a slippery slope whose end was sceptical Humanism. As a poet Eliot knew that prayer and poetry were quite distinct. Poems such as “The Hippopotamus” and “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” or even The Waste Land – not to mention his Bolo poems – could not reasonably be placed on a continuum with prayer and mystic insight. If we are to accept Lyndall Gordon’s assertion that Eliot had visionary experiences himself (Gordon passim, and also 74–6, 152–3, 184–5) that may be another reason for his rejecting Bremond’s notion that poetry was a kind of bargain basement mysticism.3 But, even if we dismiss Gordon’s claim, Eliot was certainly willing to consider the possibility of mystical revelation,4 a tolerance that was surely a factor in his conversion. Whether such experiences are merely epiphenomena of abnormal neurological activity or bona fide experiences of the divine is not an issue that literary criticism need address, and Eliot was always careful and ambivalent on the matter. His cautious acceptance of the possibility of mystical vision doubtless underlay his desire to keep poetry and religion separate, and rendered him unsympathetic to Bremond’s project to bring them together. We must assume that, as a Catholic priest, Bremond was as devout a believer as Eliot, but since he was not a poet, he probably lacked Eliot’s intimate awareness of the impurity of poetic inspiration. Stevens, in contrast, was drawn to the idea of pure poetry as a way of retaining the spirit of Romanticism without the label.5 Central to romanticism is its theory of imagination, most famously articulated in Coleridge’s Biographia Litteraria, where Coleridge discriminates between the “primary” and the “secondary,” or poetic, imagination. His primary imagination is essentially Kantian intuition; that is, the human capacity to take sensory inputs and construct a coherent “world.” Coleridge grandly describes this process as “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am.” The poetic or “secondary” imagination is “an echo” of that semi-divine capacity (Coleridge 202). On this view each person invents the world as he or she comes to consciousness. An unstated assumption is that our inventions

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are inflected by the cultural ambience in which we come to consciousness as well as by our physiological endowment. The artist’s special role, on this romantic view, is to reinvent the world as a conscious, experiencing adult; to be, as Shelley put it, among the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Although Stevens recurrently protested that the Coleridgean theory of the imagination is dated, he nonetheless believed that “the imagination is the romantic” (Opus Posthumous 188).6 If Stevens wanted to reinvent the world, Eliot wanted to “save” it. To put it another way, it was not sufficient for Eliot that poetry should articulate a version of the world more suitable to contemporary conditions than the version handed down from previous generations; it must speak the truth. As we have seen, prior to his conversion Eliot was willing to entertain the possibility that the poet could create an object of belief in the manner of Stevens’ supreme fiction. But as an Anglican he became a resolute opponent of such a pragmaticist belief. In responding to comments I.A. Richards had made on The Waste Land, Eliot sarcastically rejected Richards’ version of Russell’s call that mankind “worship at the shrine that his own hands have built”: “We await, in fact (as Mr. Richards is awaiting the future poet), the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something. For those of us who are higher than the mob, and lower than the man of inspiration, there is always doubt; and in doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living at all) on the minds of the men of genius of the past who have believed something” (“A Note on Poetry and Belief,” Enemy [January 1927] 17). It is worth noting that Eliot contrasted wilful belief in a fiction – such as Coleridge’s request that readers of “The Ancient Mariner” exercise a “willing suspension of disbelief” – with doubt, a state midway between sophisticated scepticism and naïve belief. One might have expected him to contrast the wilful entertainment of a fiction with belief, rather than with doubt. Eliot’s choice here of doubt over belief is one of many instances in which he refused to characterize his faith as belief. His reluctance to speak of belief is an index of his lack of incorrigible conviction in the truth of Christianity. Indeed, it is difficult to see how an individual of Eliot’s education and intellect could believe unqualifiedly in Christian doctrine. That is not to say that his Christianity was hypocritical, but rather that it was a hard-fought conviction – as opposed to some charismatic revelation. Stevens’ position was not all that different. Instead of choosing to “live parasitically ... on the minds of the men of genius of the past who

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have believed something,” Stevens – somewhat arrogantly perhaps – decided to “believe” in something that he had created himself. In other words, Stevens was prepared to rank himself among those “men of genius of the past who have believed something” even though he believed only in his own – and presumably others’ – imaginative creations. Stevens’ qualified belief in his own fictions is merely the reverse of the coin, whose face is religious faith. Eliot – perhaps more modestly – decided that being a man of genius was not enough; one must also have a firm other-directed belief. The implication is that his belief was not as firm as was that of men of the past – a constant theme of his criticism since his 1921 review of Grierson’s anthology of the metaphysical poets. In pursuit of the relation between pure poetry – or any poetry – and religion, Eliot published a long two-part article by Jacques Maritain on the subject of pure poetry in the Criterion (January and May 1927). Maritain, a prominent Catholic convert, insisted on the distinction between mystic revelation and poetry.7 And when Bremond’s Prière et poésie was translated, Eliot gave it to Mario Praz to review in the Criterion. Both Praz’s review and Maritain’s articles were unfriendly to Bremond’s argument – though for different reasons.8 Even before Eliot’s attention to pure poetry in the Criterion, the French journalist Paul Souday had written a piece for the New York Times Book Review in 1925 on the lecture at the Académie Française that had inaugurated the debate. He, too, claimed that Bremond had nothing new to offer – especially not to American readers, tracing pure poetry to Edgar Allan Poe and pointing out that Poe’s views had been given currency in France by Baudelaire “in the preface to his translation of ‘Nouvelles Histoires Extraordinaires,’ and in his great study of Théophile Gautier’s ‘L’Art Romantique.’” The provenance that Souday assigns to Bremond’s pure poetry is unchallengeable. But Bremond makes no effort to disguise the fact that he is heavily indebted to the English Romantics, the Victorians, and to Edgar Allan Poe. Indeed, he highlights that provenance in Prayer and Poetry. The core of Bremond’s argument is that we can better understand poetry when we recognize that its modes and sources are the same as those of the mystics: “It is not Shelley’s experience that helps me to know better the experience of John of the Cross, but conversely it is the experience of the saint which makes a little less obscure the mystery of the experience of the poet” (Prayer and Poetry 84). It is this inversion of the more common approach of illuminating mysticism by poetry – rather than the celebration of mysticism itself – that

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Praz finds particularly objectionable in his Criterion piece: “Poetic experience and poetry are the same thing, or, to put it in other words, poetic experience is articulate ... while mystical experience is inarticulate, can only fulfil itself in silence, and whatever communication of it is attempted is not spontaneous, but hiéroglyphique, and in so far as it is merely a translation into a non-congenial medium, is not endowed with the infectious power of the work of art” (Praz 744). Since these remarks are in a review commissioned by Eliot, it is reasonable to assume that he read them though, of course, he may not have agreed with them. Still, as we will see, he echoed Praz’s sentiments when, in the Charles Eliot Norton lectures several years later (published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), he addressed Bremond’s argument directly. Middleton Murry reviewed both Algar Thorold’s translation of Prière et poésie and the untranslated Poésie pure in 1927.9 He and Eliot had been engaged for some time in a public debate on the romantic vs the classical. Murry, of course, defended Romanticism, while Eliot defended Classicism.10 The central point at issue was the respective roles of intuition and intelligence in poetic creation. The same issue dominates Murry’s reviews of Bremond – which are surprisingly silent on the fact that Bremond mentions Murry approvingly in the introduction to Prayer and Poetry and later cites him in support of his own view (Prayer and Poetry 128–31). Murry’s disagreement with Bremond is diametrically opposed to the complaints of Eliot, Praz, and Maritain. While Murry has no difficulty with the notion that poetry can be revelatory like mystic vision, he is unwilling – on Humanist grounds – to concede any value to prayer, and insists on placing the poet above the mystic: “The mystic is but half-way to the perfect poet (as he is but half-way to the perfect Christian). On the other hand, a complete mysticism and a complete poetry are all but identical. Keats’ principle of “beauty in all things” and Eckhart’s vision of “God in all things” are practically indistinguishable. And, in fact, the complete mystic is, invariably, a great poet” (Murry, Adelphi 4 410). I don’t know if Eliot read Murry’s reviews of Bremond, but he was certainly familiar with Murry’s position. The principal issue between them in their romantic/classical controversy was the degree to which religious truth and poetic beauty could be generated and appreciated within the confines of rationality. Murry’s reviews of Bremond highlight the nub of their disagreement – the question of religious authority. For Bremond, Catholic teaching sets limits for personal revelations – whether poetic or mystical. For Murry, poetic intuition is supreme.

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He regards religious revelations of the past as impure versions of poetic insight. That belief informs the excited peroration announcing the imminent birth of a new age of spiritual revelation with which he closes his review of Prayer and Poetry: “We are not going back to religion; we are going forward to it. This is a time when our creativeness is critical; when many minds (in many realms) are at work to discover the implications of their own real experience. They know that they are religious; they know that the religion of to-day [he means Christianity] has no meaning for them; they know that the words that have meaning for them are the words of the poets. In them alone they find that rediscovery of the actual which, I am convinced, will be the religion of the future – the knowledge that we are and the world is. There is no answer to the riddle of the world, save to be able to see the world” (414. Original emphasis). Although Murry’s mode of expression is foreign to Stevens, his confidence that the poet can replace the prophet is not dissimilar to Stevens’ view. The most salient difference is that in his emphasis on intuition Murry seems to believe that the poet has insight into the true nature of noumenal reality. Stevens would not make such a claim. The Maritain article that Eliot translated for the Criterion sets out an opposing position on this point – one much closer to Eliot than it is to Murry and diverges from Bremond’s optimistic opinion that the two views can be reconciled. As already noted, Maritain was also an adult convert – to Catholicism in his case. Eliot was familiar with Maritain’s views, though not entirely in agreement with them.11 Did he perhaps disguise his role as translator of the Maritain article because he did not wish to give it an editorial imprimatur?12 Maritain, Praz, Murry, and Eliot were all quite comfortable with the notion of a supernatural realm and even with the reality of mystical experience. The issue for them was not whether mystical experience is possible – as it was for Souday and most intellectuals of the period – but rather to discriminate between poetic composition and mystical experience. For Bremond poetic composition arises out of an experience that is of the same kind as mystical experience, and hence carries the same warrant as being cognitively valuable, if not fully revelatory. Maritain’s objection to this posture is clear-cut. And it is the same as that adopted by Praz, who cites Maritain to support his argument – though not from this article. Maritain’s article is headed by an epigraph from Plotinus13 in which Plotinus enjoins his readers to shun the pleasures of the flesh and return to the spiritual realm from which we have descended. (Maritain cites

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only the italicized phrases – in untranslated Greek): “Let us flee then to the beloved Fatherland: this is the soundest counsel. But what is this flight? How are we to gain the open sea? For Odysseus is surely a parable to us when he commands the flight from the sorceries of Circe or Calypso – not content to linger for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense filling his days. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come, and There is the Father” (Ennead 1.6.8 as translated by Stephen MacKenna and B.S. Page). The point of the epigraph seems to be that poetry cannot lead to the higher realm because it is mired in the pleasures of the flesh, implying that, as compared to mystic revelations, poetry is compromised. This postulate is thoroughly Platonic – surprisingly for a neo-Thomist: “Ideas precede things,” Maritain insists; “they create them” (7). And, still in the spirit of Plato, he observes that art is thrice removed from the ideal: “With us, the creative idea is not a pure intellectual form, because we are on the lowest level of mind; on the contrary, operating as it does through the organs of the senses, and entangled in matter, the spiritual germ which makes our art fruitful is for us only a little of the divine which we barely glimpse, which is obscure to our own eyes, and raises and irradiates the stuff of sense and the elementary impulses” (“Poetry and Religion” 1: 8). In this Maritain sounds rather like Heidegger on poetry, except that Maritain denigrates poetry as being capable of revealing “only a little of the divine.” It is the divine, not poetry, that he says “irradiates the stuff of sense.” When Maritain turns to the question of pure poetry, his Christianity reasserts itself; he condemns all varieties of “pure” art as usurpations of the divine prerogative: “To command our art to be art in a pure state, by effectively freeing itself from all the conditions of existence in the human subject, is to desire to usurp for it the aseity of God. [“Aseity,” according to the OED, means “underived or independent existence.”] To ask of it to tend to pure art as a curve to its asymptote, without reflecting the servitudes of its human condition, but gaining on them continually by pulling upon created bonds to the extreme limit of elasticity, is to ask of it to realise more fully its radical spirituality. Pride here, magnanimity there, both aiming at the impossible, either madness or heroism” (9. Maritain’s emphasis). This is the core of Maritain’s position on aesthetic “creation,” one he repeats in many places throughout his long, illustrious career. In his view the problem with contemporary art is precisely its pretended usurpation of the divine and prophetic prerogative.

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He illustrates this malaise by reference to Wagner, Nietzsche, Dada, the Surrealists, and Picasso, warning that poetry will lead us astray through its counterfeiting of revelation: “With regard to the order of action itself and of human destiny, what can poetry, as a regulator of the moral and spiritual life, poetry to be realised in conduct, introduce but counterfeit? Counterfeit of the supernatural and the miraculous, of grace and the heroic virtues. Disguised as an angel of counsel, it will lead the human soul astray on false mystical paths. Its spirituality, turned aside from its own direction and proper place, under the guise of an internal drama entirely profane, will give a new issue to the old heresies of the free spirit” (22). For Maritain, then, Stevens’ beloved “fiction” can never be anything other than a counterfeit. Moreover, by invoking “the old heresies of the free spirit,” Maritain invokes the spectre of Nietzschean denial of God, exemplified in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Kurtz, whom Marlowe describes as one who “had kicked himself loose of the earth.” That Eliot agreed with Maritain’s dismissal of pure poetry is suggested by his remarks just a year later in the Preface to the 1928 reissue of The Sacred Wood: “And certainly poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and no more is it religion or an equivalent of religion, except by some monstrous abuse of words” (ix). He echoes Maritain’s sentiments again five years later (1933), in After Strange Gods, where he classifies modern literature – in still another characterization of the modern dilemma – as suffering, on the one hand, from “the limiting and crippling effect of a separation from tradition and orthodoxy” and, on the other hand, from “the intrusion of the diabolic ... in consequence of the same lamentable state of affairs” (57).14 Maritain, however, is willing to enlist literature in the cause of religion. Agreeing with Murry that Europe needs some sort of cultural rebirth, he looks to Christianity rather than to Humanism as the instrument of revitalization. The “miserable state of the modern world, the corpse of the Christian world,” he writes, “makes one long with a peculiar intensity for the rediscovery of a real civilization.” He seems to take comfort in the apprehended collapse of Western democracies in the interwar period: “We should console ourselves because we see, as the world destroys itself, the things of the spirit reassembling their forces where there are people who are in the world and yet not of the world; art and poetry are among them, along with metaphysics and wisdom” (“Poetry and Religion,” 2: 216. My emphasis).

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Although he concedes that art and poetry are “things of the spirit, in Maritain’s view there is no possibility of the arts replacing religion: “Religion alone can help the art of our time to redeem the best of its promises ... For it is only in the theological light that art can advance to final self-knowledge, and cure itself of the false metaphysics that obsess it. By showing us where moral truth and the authentic supernatural are, religion spares poetry the error of thinking it was made to transform ethics and life; protects it against presumption” (218). Maritain believes that the pure poetry movement – which he identifies with Symbolism – has got hold of the wrong end of the stick, and, moreover, has already run its course, being displaced by Christian poetry on the one hand, and Satanic literature on the other: “The search for pure art, as attempted by the symbolists, on which they set such high hopes, is now for art a thing entirely lapsed; it is turned towards Christ or towards Antichrist, towards pure destruction or pure faith; can you not see all that is desire in it dividing itself between these two roads on which it advances torn apart and a prey to the absolute?” (217). He makes an idiosyncratic distinction between poetry (which is redeemable), and literature (which is not): “poetry, is it necessary to point out, is the very opposite of literature.” In literature he finds “all the counterfeits of beauty which make the work a falsehood whenever the artist prefers himself to his work. This impurity is in our art the wound of original sin; it groans with it continually ... Literature puts on the work the grimace of personality. It seeks to adorn God” (16–17. My emphasis). This sentiment must have resonated with Eliot, the theorist of artistic impersonality, although he would hardly have endorsed the blanket condemnation of “literature.” Several years later, in After Strange Gods (1933), speaking of the consequences of the absence of tradition, Eliot’s remarks are remarkably similar to Maritain’s: “What is disastrous is that the writer should deliberately give rein to his “individuality,” that he should even cultivate his differences from others; and that his readers should cherish the author of genius, not in spite of his deviations from the inherited wisdom of the race, but because of them” (33). “The inherited wisdom of the race” is a peculiar locution. No doubt Eliot employs it in lieu of “Christianity.”15 One issue, then, that divides Eliot and Maritain from Murry and Bremond is the status of private revelation. That is the central issue, as well, that divides Roman Christianity from Lutheranism and most Protestant denominations. Eliot’s choice of Anglicanism amounts to a rejection of private revelation, of the “inner light.” But, at the same

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time, as a serious poet, he had to believe that poetry offered more than mere entertainment or a decorative and accessible restatement of “what oft was though but ne’er so well expressed.” It was as important for Eliot as it was for Stevens to have some principled account of what it is of value that the poet brings to the table. And Bremond would seem to have been a likely help. He cites Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (76n), a work Eliot had carefully studied as an undergraduate, and on whom he called as a reviewer for the Criterion.16 However, we have already seen that Bremond cited with approval Murry’s “Romanticism and the Tradition.”17 So, although Bremond’s universe of discourse was one with which Eliot was familiar, it was not one that he found congenial. I have found only two references to pure poetry by Eliot earlier than the Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1932–33 – just a couple of years before he edited Moore’s Selected Poems. The first is an allusion in a bbc talk on John Dryden, broadcast on 11 April 1930. There he says that it is the abstract quality of satire that renders it analogous to pure poetry: “Satire is one of the most abstract branches of poetry; it is when successful a triumph of form; it is as near to that abstraction called pure poetry as any poetry can be” (Listener 2 688.2). In this remark he seems to have Poe, Imagism, or Valéry’s pure poetry in mind rather than Bremond. The second reference occurs during a discussion of religion and humanism. This time Bremond fits, for Eliot mocks the idea that there can be some sort of reconciliation of science and religion through the mediation of poetry: “Every one is happy together; and possibly both parties turn to poetry (about which neither scientist nor theologian knows anything) and say ‘there is truth, in the inspiration of the poet.’ The poet himself, who perhaps knows more about his own inspiration than a psych-analyst [sic] does, is not allowed to reply that poetry is poetry, and not science or religion – unless he or some of his mistaken friends produce a theory that Poetry is Pure Poetry, Pure Poetry turning out to be something less than poetry and thereby securing respect” (“Religion without Humanism” 109. My emphasis). That Eliot associates pure poetry with Humanism is natural and appropriate, despite the fact that Bremond was a Jesuit priest and certainly not a Humanist – even though he invokes Murry’s Humanist arguments as compatible with his own views. When he comes to an extended consideration of Bremond in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), Eliot is less dismissive. He considers only Prière et poésie – in the English translation, Prayer and Poetry – and

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does not refer to the polemical Poésie pure, even though both were published in 1926. He first compares Bremond’s views to I.A. Richards’ behavioural understanding of poetic discourse – to which Eliot is also hostile (Use of Poetry 125). When he returns to Bremond later in the lecture, he characterizes the Abbé’s position – not unreasonably – as “a modern equivalent for the theory of divine inspiration.” “The task of Prayer and Poetry,” he says, “is to establish the likeness, and the difference of kind and degree, between poetry and mysticism”(137–8). His disagreement focuses initially on Bremond’s assertion that “the more of a poet any particular poet is, the more he is tormented by the need of communicating his experience” (Bremond as cited by Eliot 138). It is the notion that the poet is communicating an experience that offends Eliot. He leaves unchallenged Bremond’s claim that mystical and poetic experience belong on the same continuum. The following much-cited passage was prompted by Bremond’s claim that the poet “is tormented by the need of communicating his experience.” Its uncharacteristically rambling and unfocused nature would seem to reflect Eliot’s ambivalence about inspiration: The “experience” in question may be the result of a fusion of feelings so numerous, and ultimately so obscure in their origins, that even if there be communication of them, the poet may hardly be aware of what he is communicating; and what is there to be communicated was not in existence before the poem was completed. “Communication” will not explain poetry. I will not say that there is not always some varying degree of communication in poetry, or that poetry could exist without any communication taking place. There is room for very great individual variation in the motives of equally good individual poets; and we have the assurance of Coleridge, with the approval of Mr. Housman, that “poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood.” (138) Eliot’s objection is curiously inapposite, since Bremond is far from asserting that poetic communication must be perspicuous. Indeed, Bremond explicitly excuses the poet from any need to be lucid or even rational.18 His point is rather that the poet is driven toward some utterance. That the impulse toward poetic utterance should be obscure, and the resultant poetry difficult to construe – as Eliot argues – is perfectly compatible with Bremond’s position.

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That Eliot should be so obtuse on this point is perhaps a consequence of his Bradleyan understanding of experience. In Bradley’s view “experience” is fundamentally inaccessible to the rational consciousness and is therefore incommunicable, as Eliot explained in his dissertation: “Experience, we have been told [by Bradley,] is not co-extensive with consciousness but is wider ... Feeling is more than either object or subject, since in a way it includes both. On the other hand, we must remember that the conscious subject, as a construction, falls partly outside of any whole of feeling. ‘The finite content is necessarily determined from the outside’” (Bradley, Appearance and Reality 407 as quoted in Eliot, Knowledge and Experience 28). Since Bremond’s point is simply that people write poetry in order to express something, the issue of the completeness or lucidity of what is expressed – the success or failure of its communication is quite remote from his concerns. Eliot’s seemingly wilful misconstrual of Bremond speaks to his well-known reluctance to reveal the personal sources of his poetic expression. He is doubly motivated to misconstrue Bremond on this point: first, on the Bradleyan grounds that experience is incommunicable, and second, so as to preserve the privacy of the impulses behind his poetry that are communicable. The notion that poetry communicates at some sub- or supra-verbal level is pretty much at the heart of the romantic aesthetic – an aesthetic infected, in Eliot’s view, by an appeal to the irrational, masked by the euphemism “inspiration.” Bremond’s notion of pure poetry clearly belongs to that romantic aesthetic, the heart of which is the belief in the existence of a noumenal realm to which the poet, like the mystic, has some sort of access. It is that access that Eliot is anxious to deny, while at the same time maintaining that the poet has access to something not accessible to the physical, social, or psychological sciences. He holds to the view, cited above, that “for those of us who are higher than the mob, and lower than the man of inspiration, there is always doubt.” As an Anglican then, Eliot is committed to belief in a supernatural realm, but not to the belief in a private revelation, a belief that animates both Romantic theories of poetic inspiration and charismatic versions of Christianity. By late 1932, when Eliot gave the Norton Lectures, he had behind him a long history of struggle with the issue of special forms of knowing. We have already surveyed his flirtation with Bergson, Bradley, and Russell. We know that he grew up in a Unitarian household where the notion of Christian “grace” – a version of supra-rational inspiration – was anathema, and that he had been drawn to studies of

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mysticism and Eastern religions. With the exception of Russell, these interests and influences all tend in the same direction – toward some account of extra- or non-rational “knowledge.” The most carefully articulated of them, and the one in which Eliot was most deeply steeped, was Bradley’s theory of “experience” as something larger than cognition, and also larger than any individual, but not transcendent of the world. The two most influential non-religious accounts of the pre-rational grounds of poetry during this period were psychoanalysis and behaviourism. During the years of Eliot’s intimacy with him, Russell was persuaded by John B. Watson’s behavioural account of human behaviour, writing in The Principles of Social Reconstruction: “All human activity springs from two sources: impulse and desire ... In all the more instinctive part of our nature we are dominated by impulses to certain kinds of activity, not by desires for certain ends” (12, 13). As we have seen, Eliot took issue with Russell over The Principles of Social Reconstruction. Since we know from other sources that Eliot was hostile to behaviourism, it seems probable that it was the behaviourist cast of that work that he took issue with. In his 1927 review of Bradley’s Ethical Studies, for example, Eliot praises Bradley’s championing of common sense, and remarks in an aside: “The lack of it produces those unbalanced philosophies, such as Behaviourism, of which we hear a great deal.” A little later, he takes a swipe at Watson: “In an unbalanced or uncultured philosophy words have a way of changing their meaning – as sometimes with Hegel; or else they are made, in a most ruthless and piratical manner, to walk the plank: such as the words which Professor J.B. Watson drops overboard, and which we know to have meaning and value” (Selected Essays 454, 455). And in a 1929 review of Paul Elmer More’s The Demon of the Absolute Eliot endorses More’s critique of behaviourism: “Mr. More is naturally opposed to those modern developments of psychology of which Behaviourism is the extreme example and which would reduce ethics to biology” (TLS 21 February 1929). In the 1930s, when Stevens and Eliot were struggling with the issue of poetic cognition and communication, the standard means of claiming some significant content for the arts was to bifurcate cognitive activity into scientific and philosophical cognition – Derrida’s “logocentrism” – on the one hand, and poetic or imaginative cognition on the other. That bifurcation was the solution favoured by Praz, Murry, and – most influentially – Richards. Even Maritain succumbs to this spirit in

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“Poetry and Religion” when he divides letters into poetry, characterized by “divination of the spiritual in the sensible,” and an inferior activity he calls “literature,” which “puts on the work the grimace of personality.”19 In Maritain’s opinion, however, the lofty goal that poetry accepts for itself is proving fatal for modern poets: “Modern art does penance, it wears itself out, mortifies itself, flagellates itself like an ascetic who is mad to destroy himself in order to obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit, and who often remains empty of that which a child has in abundance” (“Poetry and Religion” 18). Like Murry, Maritain retreats to the notion of extra-rational inspiration. Bremond thought he could resolve this bifurcation by postulating a continuity between poetic discourse, prayer, and mystical revelation. But Eliot disagreed. In “Thinking in Verse: A Survey of Early Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” a bbc talk broadcast on 7 March 1930, Eliot insisted on a clear distinction between the impulses that issue in poetry and those that issue in mystical insight. “Mysticism is a gift of grace; you will never become a mystic unless you have the gift.” Poetry, on the other hand, is a skill and aptitude much like any other, and, moreover, one that genuine mystics typically do not possess. By way of illustration Eliot notes that “the mystical treatises of Richard of St. Victor are as dry and abstract as those of the great Indian expositors of mysticism” (“Thinking in Verse” 443). Bremond serves Eliot as a straw man in the Norton Lectures, providing a foil for the poet’s views on inspiration and the communicability of poetic insight. (I suspect that the reference to Bremond rather mystified his audience, few of whom would have heard of him.) Eliot there complains that Bremond attempts “to explain poetry by discovering its natural laws,” and disapproves of such attempts because, he says, they are “in danger of binding poetry by legislation to be observed – and poetry can recognise no such laws” (138). But since Bremond’s view is that each instance of pure poetry is sui generis,20 one has to assume that Eliot had not given Bremond’s arguments for pure poetry serious consideration. Indeed, he seems to be conflating Bremond with Richards, his other, longer-standing, adversary, who does attempt to articulate rules for the reading of poetry on behavioural grounds. Eliot agrees with Maritain that art ought not to present itself as a “counterfeit of the supernatural and the miraculous, of grace and the heroic virtues” (22). But, at the same time, Eliot needs to preserve for poetry some gravitas – even if its “message” is of a non-cognitive nature. Most important, he needs a theory of poetic creation that avoids both

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the behavioural and the Freudian models as well as Bremond’s model of “mysticism light” – all the while maintaining a separation between poetic insight and ordinary conscious, deliberate ratiocination. In order to meet these needs, he finds himself contradicting his earlier rejection of Bremond’s view that poetry communicates. Now in the Norton Lectures, he says, “I agree with Bremond, and perhaps go even further, in finding that this disturbance of our quotidian character which results in an incantation, an outburst of words which we hardly recognise as our own (because of the effortlessness), is a very different thing from mystical illumination. The latter is a vision which may be accompanied by the realisation that you will never be able to communicate it to anyone else, or even by the realisation that when it is past you will not be able to recall it to yourself; the former is not a vision but a motion terminating in an arrangement of words on paper” (145). Mysticism and poetry, then, share the attribute of “effortlessness”; that is to say, the rational consciousness is in abeyance in both cases. The only difference, for Eliot, is that a mystical vision is accompanied by a (conscious?) realization that it is incommunicable while a poetic “impulse” (would Eliot accept this behavioural term adopted by Russell?) terminates “in an arrangement of words on paper.” The difference, then, seems to be that mystical vision is incommunicable and poetic vision is communicable. If we are to rescue Eliot from selfcontradiction, it must be that poetic impulses are not incommunicable after all. The point of disagreement would be reduced to being only that the poet is not driven by the desire to communicate as Bremond believes. However, such a distinction seems little more than a quibble. Eliot concedes “that there is an analogy between mystical experience and some of the ways in which poetry is written,” and as an illustration alludes, in a much-cited passage, to his own experience when composing poetry: “I know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia, may (if other circumstances are favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the condition of automatic writing – though in contrast to the claims sometimes made for the latter, the material has obviously been incubating within the poet, and cannot be suspected of being a present from a friendly or impertinent demon” (144). This account of poetic creation is entirely compatible with either behaviourism or psychoanalysis – neither of which Eliot would be willing to endorse. Aware of this danger, he adopts a debating trick, characterizing such psychological accounts as appealing to “a friendly or impertinent demon.”

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Admitting that he has written poetry in this “inspired” way, Eliot denies that it is the norm for poets or even for himself. Teasingly, he tells his audience that only some parts of his poems have been written in this way, and that as far as he knows, “no critic has ever identified the passages ... [he has] in mind” (146).21 He closes this discussion of poetic creation by appealing to T.E. Hulme as “one voice” which expresses “a view of a different kind” than either Bremond or Richards, citing two passages from Hulme’s essay “Romanticism and Classicism” on the superiority of “the dry classical spirit.” In this way he returns indirectly to the debate of the previous decade between himself and Murry over Classicism and Romanticism. In endorsing Hulme’s view that the “great aim” of the classical writer “is accurate, precise and definite description,” he further distances himself from appeals to the ineffable (Hulme Speculations 132 as quoted 148). For Eliot, then, the issues raised by the pure poetry debate are threefold. First is the matter of the impersonality of poetic expression, a property of poetry on which he had long insisted. He denies that the function of poetry is to communicate the poet’s experience – as Bremond assumes. The second issue is the communicability of mystical and poetic experience. He now concedes that – in contrast to mystical experience – poetic experience is expressed in words. Such a concession is unavoidable, but Eliot still wants to retain some degree of incommunicability for poetry. The third issue is related to the problem of communication – the degree to which poetic expression is rational, or something else. This, too, is an old preoccupation of Eliot’s, going back to the debates with Murry over intuition and intelligence. He takes a less hard line now, admitting that poetry is sometimes written with the reason in abeyance, but he still denies that such a procedure is definitional for poetry. The over-riding issue for Eliot was his need to keep religious belief isolated from poetic expression, and to keep aesthetic experience isolated from mystical experience. In his Humanist phase he mocked religious experience, maintaining an ironic detachment that precluded any contamination of the aesthetic by romantic frisson. As an Anglican, that strategy was no longer available. Now he was obliged to write from the perspective of a believing Christian, but his aesthetic principles did not permit direct expression of that belief in his poetry – for two reasons. In the first place belief is a personal psychological state, and – at least since his Bradleyan phase – Eliot had consistently excluded personality from poetic expression. On the other hand, he could not write

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of the object of his belief, for only a mystic has access to the divine, and he was adamant that the distinction between poetry and mystic insight must be maintained. Holding these views, the Anglican Eliot was trapped in a conundrum insofar as he was a poet, for he risked being constrained to writing only discursive verse arguments like those in the choruses for The Rock. Eliot tackled precisely these question in the Clark Lectures, delivered in January and February 1926 – shortly before his baptism. Now, instead of attempting to keep belief and poetry apart, he argued strenuously for an intimate relation between them, telling his audience that Dante’s poetry was superior to Donne’s and Crashaw’s because his belief was coherent and comprehensive, thanks to its articulation in St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa. Eliot’s underlying premise was that unquestioned belief was no longer possible after the Reformation and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Those developments destroyed the Scholastic world view that had dominated European thought since Aquinas, but they failed to replace it with an alternative coherent and comprehensive world view. He defined his first objective: “to show, if I can, how the acceptance of one orderly system of thought and feeling results, in Dante and his friends, in a simple, direct and even austere manner of speech, while the maintenance in suspension of a number of philosophies, attitudes and partial theories which are enjoyed rather than believed, results, in Donne and in some of our contemporaries, in an affected, tortuous, and often over-elaborate and ingenious manner of speech” (Schuchard Varieties 120. My emphasis). Of course, he is speaking of himself and his contemporaries as much as of Donne and his contemporaries when he speaks of maintaining “in suspension a number of philosophies ... which are enjoyed rather than believed.”22 Prior to his conversion Eliot had been unwilling to play the game of the “ironist” – as Richard Rorty has labelled what Eliot calls enjoying a “number of philosophies.” Satirical poems such as “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” and “The Hippopotamus” do not express an ironic detachment from judgment. Instead, they ridicule Christian belief and practice from a Humanist perspective. Rather than maintaining “in suspension a number of philosophies,” the young Eliot successively adopted and then abandoned different philosophies – Bergson, Bradley, and Russell. The Clark Lectures can be read, I think, as a sort of apologia for his infatuation with Russell’s Humanism. Their proximate goal was to argue that great poetry could not be written in his day

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because – like Donne’s – it was in what Arnold called “a period of dissolution.” Eliot’s true focus was on his own historical period, but his illustrative case was the seventeenth century, and his argument was thoroughly Arnoldian. That he was really speaking of the twentieth century is indicated by his qualification of the loss of belief in the seventeenth century as the loss of unquestioned belief. The qualification was necessary because he could hardly argue that there was a loss of belief in the seventeenth century, as he could have for the twentieth had he been willing to speak directly. The unfortunate consequence, he says, was “the disintegration of the intellect,” a cultural condition which made it impossible to write great poetry. Of course Eliot is not alleging that the age was philosophically incoherent. His point is that it lost the integration of the emotional and intellectual life that he believed had existed during the Mediaeval consensus based on Aquinas. Eliot had run much the same argument eight years earlier in “Tradition and Individual Talent,” calling it then a “dissociation of sensibility.” “Disintegration of the intellect” seems to be little more than a re-labelling. However, now he sees it as a general cultural phenomenon, rather than a problem just for poets. And he has stretched out the temporal frame: “I have indicated a theory of what I call the “disintegration of the intellect.” So far as I am concerned, this disintegration means merely a progressive deterioration of poetry, in one respect or another, since the thirteenth century. If I am right about poetry, then this deterioration is probably only one aspect of a general deterioration, the other aspects of which should interest workers in other fields” (Schuchard Varieties 227). He repeated the same argument, several years later, in the Turnbull Lectures delivered at Johns Hopkins University in January 1933. Although Ronald Schuchard tells us that Eliot mined the Clark Lectures for the Turnbull Lectures (Varieties 233), the gist of the latter is quite different. In the former series, Dante was said to be a great poet because he had an unquestioned and articulate belief. Eliot’s assumption – mostly unstated – is that even though belief is fundamentally a matter of emotional commitment, it nonetheless requires intellectual conviction. Otherwise a believer will suffer “disintegration of the intellect” – or, as we say today, “cognitive dissonance.” In Eliot’s view Dante’s good fortune in having his emotional commitment to Catholic Christianity underpinned by Aquinas’ Summa permitted him to have an integrated intellect in which emotion and reason were in a harmonious

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state. In the Clark Lectures Eliot’s focus was on the failure of the English Renaissance to preserve an integrated intellect, and he now attempts to adumbrate the benefits that accrue from the possession of an integrated intellect. Unhappily even the Anglican Eliot did not enjoy an integrated intellect – nor, in Eliot’s view, did anyone else in the modern world. His conversion and baptism could not in themselves produce a magisterial theology capable of encompassing Darwin, Einstein, Max Planck, and the Gospels, so he remained a victim of that disintegration of the intellect that had troubled Donne and his imitators. He raised the question of the relevance of “French poetry of the seventies and eighties to us and our problems,” but declined to answer, disqualifying himself because of their importance to his own early poetic development: “When I first came across these French poets, some twenty-three years ago, it was a personal enlightenment such as I can hardly communicate. I felt for the first time in contact with a tradition, for the first time, that I had, so to speak, some backing by the dead, and at the same time that I had something to say that might be new and relevant. I doubt whether, without the men I have mentioned – Baudelaire, Corbière, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Rimbaud – I should have been able to write poetry at all. This fact alone renders me unsuitable to be a critic of them ... I cannot but be aware, therefore, that in emphasising their importance for the present, I may be only defending myself” (Turnbull Lectures in Schuchard Varieties 287). But why should he not defend himself? And what do the French Symbolists and the English Metaphysical poets have in common? We have to look to the Clark Lectures for an answer. There he explained that “the real metaphysical poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries springs from the belief in Good and Evil, and consists in a conscious and deliberate contrast and confusion of the moral and intellectual with the non-moral and unintellectual” (211). No doubt he has in mind Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and the poems of Corbière, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud when he speaks of “the real metaphysical poetry of the nineteenth” century. His point is that while those poets had lost all confidence in divine revelation, they retained a sense of evil – something lacking in the poetry of Wordsworth, Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, and the New England “Genteel School.” He seems to be suggesting that it was the diabolism introduced by Baudelaire that made them compellingly interesting. But here he is assessing their influence on him very differently than he had done prior to his conversion. In an essay of 1919, for example,

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he dismissed Baudelaire’s “diabolism” and stressed the stylistic influence that the Symbolists had on him: “The Frenchmen of whom I speak were very seriously occupied with the problem of finding a sincere idiom. Baudelaire more often failed than succeeded; there is nothing permanently interesting about his diabolism; his form is often absurdly antiquated. He is a poet for the poet to study, rather than for the public to read.” He dismisses the content of the Symbolists’ poetry, ranking them – placing Laforgue above Baudelaire, Corbière, and Mallarmé – almost exclusively on rhetorical grounds (“Modern Tendencies in Poetry” in Inventions of the March Hare 403 ff). In the Norton Lectures, Eliot elaborated on this theme of sin and evil, quoting Maritain on the devil from the recently published Art and Scholasticism: “The unconcealed and palpable influence of the devil on an important part of contemporary literature is one of the significant phenomena of the history of our time.” Although Eliot cautiously distanced himself from the remark – “I can hardly expect most of my readers to take this remark seriously; those who do will have very different criteria of criticism from those who do not” (137) – the fact that he cited the remark at all suggests that Eliot is one of those who would take the remark seriously. Indeed, the first Faber edition had the following note to this citation: “With the influence of the devil on contemporary literature I shall be concerned in more detail in another book” (Schuchard, Dark Angel 212–13). However, no such book was forthcoming – unless it was After Strange Gods, where he notes that “the perception of Good and Evil – whatever choice we may make – is the first requisite of spiritual life” (53). He then quoted Maritain’s remark on the limitations of poetry, which, he said, “may be less unacceptable”: “By showing us where moral truth and the genuine supernatural are situated, religion saves poetry from the absurdity of believing itself destined to transform ethics and life: saves it from overweening arrogance.” And he added: “This seems to me to be putting the finger on the great weakness of much poetry and criticism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 137). These remarks amount to an uncompromising rejection of the vatic role that Romanticism assigned to the poet – and that Bremond resurrected – and also the role of ethical teacher that Arnold had assigned him. But if a poet is neither one who sees into the depth of things, nor an avuncular moral guide, of what use or service is the poet? That is a question for which Eliot did not have a ready answer.

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Eliot’s recurrent insistence on the reality of evil sets him aside from virtually all of his contemporaries. Following his remark on the French poets in the Clark Lectures, he added, “In the post-metaphysical poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the contrast and confusion no longer exist, one of the terms has been suppressed” (Varieties 211). The suppressed term, of course, is “evil.” In “The Lesson of Baudelaire” (1921), Eliot had labelled Baudelaire a “deformed Dante” whose greatest achievement was “to arrive at a point of view toward good and evil.” Now he says that Baudelaire “produced” Laforgue, and what he finds “interesting and significant” in Laforgue is “the sacrifice of his art and his mind before an insoluble problem.” The “insoluble problem” is once again the “dissociation of sensibility,” here described as “the relation of feeling and thought” (Varieties 217). Although he saw Laforgue as representing a decline from Baudelaire, nonetheless he commended him for confronting what was for Eliot the fundamental issue: the relation between emotion and intellect, which for him meant a relation of conflicted tension between belief and doubt. Eliot’s effort in the Turnbull lectures to accommodate the argument of the Clark Lectures with his new status as a believing Christian led him into some rather strained assertions. One of the more telling is his statement that the “ultimate purpose, the ultimate value, of the poet’s work is religious” (Varieties 288). So far as I can determine, that is an opinion Eliot never repeats. It seems to conform to Bremond’s understanding of the function of poetry, but that does not seem to have been Eliot’s meaning, since he was careful in the Clark Lectures to discriminate between poets and prophets: “Surely the thinking of the poet should be no more than transposing into poetry the thought of the time which he selects as important to him. Neither Dante nor Donne nor Laforgue did more. They were no prophets; they merely performed the work of integrating thought into life, and so did Lucretius. What happens to a poet who has an original philosophy? Does he not become the victim of those who want their philosophy cheap and without thought, and is he not, like Blake, perpetually a riddle to those who seriously would estimate his greatness as a poet?” (Lecture Four in Varieties 223–4. My emphasis). The italicized remark is echt Arnold, assigning the poet the role of expressing cultural commonplaces in a novel and striking manner. A poet who, like Blake or Stevens, attempts to formulate his own original philosophy risks, Eliot believes, being “perpetually a riddle” to his readers. There is certainly more than a grain of truth in that assessment so far as Stevens is concerned.

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Eliot’s attempt to clarify what he means by the claim that “the ultimate value of the poet’s work is religious” is not a model of perspicuity: “I mean that every stage of society tends to harden into a set of purely social values. Society tends to exert a pressure, such that every poet is either accepted or rejected, according to his fitness to the set of social values of the time” (Varieties 288). Judging by the following, Eliot’s point seems to be that the poet stands above the merely secular interests of his contemporaries: “The artist is the only genuine and profound revolutionist, in the following sense. The world always has, and always will, tend to substitute appearance for reality. The artist, being always alone, being heterodox when everyone else is orthodox, and orthodox when everyone else is heterodox, is the perpetual upsetter of conventional values, the restorer of the real. He may appear at one time to hold one extreme opinion, at another period another; but his function is to bring back humanity to the real” (Varieties 288). I do not see how these remarks can be reconciled with the argument of the Clark Lectures that Dante’s greatness was a consequence of his living in an age of unquestioned orthodoxy and that Donne’s relative failure was a consequence of his living in an age of heterodoxy. Eliot seems to be suffering a relapse into the romantic doctrine of the poète maudit. Perhaps we should read the last sentence as an apologia for Eliot’s philosophical flightiness – for his having bounced from Bergson’s vitalism to Bradley’s idealism, to Russell’s sceptical Humanism, and finally to Canterbury. Intriguingly, the philosophical relativism that Eliot attributes to Donne and to “some of our contemporaries,” corresponds reasonably well to the posture that Stevens adopts in his struggle with the problem of belief in an age of unbelief. Certainly Stevens makes do with “a number of philosophies, attitudes and partial theories” in which he does not believe. And it is also the case that many readers have found Stevens’ style to have the features that Eliot attributes to metaphysical poetry: “affected, tortuous and often over-elaborate and ingenious.” Eliot’s last consideration of pure poetry is in “From Poe to Valéry,” a lecture delivered at the Library of Congress on Friday, 19 November 1948. There he revisits the themes of the Clark and Norton lectures. He proposes to look at Poe “through the eyes of three French poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and especially Paul Valéry.” They are, he says, poets who “represent the beginning, the middle and the end of a particular tradition in poetry.” That phase, he says, “has come to an end with the death of Valéry” (To Criticize the Critic 28–9). The tradition in question is no longer seen in the light of the Metaphysical poets, still

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less in the light of Baudelairean diabolism, but now it is pure poetry: “This process of increasing self-consciousness – or, we may say, of increasing consciousness of language – has as its theoretical goal what we may call la poésie pure.” He does not believe it is a goal that can ever be reached because “poetry is only poetry so long as it preserves some ‘impurity’ in this sense: that is to say, so long as the subject matter is valued for its own sake” (39). We seem to have come full circle, for now pure poetry is assigned the attributes Eliot originally assigned to Symbolism when explaining its initial attraction for him. It is a poetry in which the subject, theme, and message are suppressed in favour of the elements of style, rhythm, and rhetorical display. But this is not at all what Bremond meant by la poésie pure. In Valéry’s case, although the subject matter is not absent, Eliot says it has “a different kind of importance: it is important as means: the end is the poem. The subject exists for the poem, not the poem for the subject. A poem may employ several subjects, combining them in a particular way; and it may be meaningless to ask ‘What is the subject of the poem?’” (39). As before, Eliot believes that this unfortunate tendency arises from a radical scepticism: “It might be thought that such a man, without belief in anything which could be the subject of poetry, would find refuge in a doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake.’ But Valéry was much too sceptical to believe even in art. He had ceased to believe in ends, and was only interested in processes. It often seems as if he had continued to write poetry, simply because he was interested in the introspective observation of himself engaged in writing it” (39–40). Poe, too, suffers from this fault: “He appears to yield himself completely to the idea of the moment: the effect is, that all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed” (35). What has happened is that Eliot has in 1948 re-packaged his old complaints about poetry that does not possess Arnoldian high seriousness as a critique of “pure poetry,” whose practioners are the same old bunch that he admires and fears. Eliot no longer allowed pure poetry to be a reaching toward the noumenal or ineffable, as it is thought to be by both Bremond and Stevens. Now Eliot castigates it as no more than a form of play – an activity in which no assertions are made, or if made, are not believed, or if believed, believed only for the sake of the play. Fifteen years earlier, in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, his criticism was not that pure poetry was playful and vacuous but that it claimed to contain a message of such profundity and truth that it could not be stated otherwise. There he dismissed it as “a modern equivalent for the theory of divine

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inspiration.” Nothing could be further from his complaint in 1948 that it is a poetry de luxe, merely an intellectual and verbal game. Surprisingly – and rather revealingly – Eliot admits: “Within this tradition from Poe to Valéry are some of those modern poems which I most admire and enjoy.” The admission is testimony to Eliot’s participation in the conflicted state – the “disintegrated intellect” – of his culture that he had diagnosed in the twenties and after. But he was unwilling to rest content in that state, describing it as “something which must ultimately break down, owing to an increasing strain against which the human mind and nerves will rebel” (42). His refusal to rest content with a poetry de luxe contrasts strongly with the view of the avatars of the postmodern, such as Derrida and De Man, who see it as representing as an emancipation from “logocentric” constraints. That Eliot would not warm to the all-embracing scepticism of Deconstruction is clear from Notes towards the Definition of Culture, published serially in The New English Weekly during the Second World War, just a few years before “From Poe to Valéry.” There Eliot identified “pyrrhonism” as one of the great threats to Western civilization (the OED defines “pyrrhonism” as “the doctrine of the impossibility of attaining certainty of knowledge; absolute or universal scepticism”) Eliot was careful to distinguish it from scepticism. Speaking of the notion of cultural change or development, he remarks: “One of the features of development, whether we are taking the religious or the cultural point of view, is the appearance of scepticism – by which, of course, I do not mean infidelity or destructiveness (still less the unbelief which is due to mental sloth) but the habit of examining evidence and the capacity for delayed decision. Scepticism is a highly civilised trait, though, when it declines into pyrrhonism, it is one of which civilisation can die. Where scepticism is strength, pyrrhonism is weakness: for we need not only the strength to defer a decision, but the strength to make one” (Notes towards the Definition of Culture 29). In the version of Notes that appeared in Prospects for Christendom (1945) Eliot added after “delayed decision” the clause: “and it [pyrrhonism] is a malady from which we suffer to-day culturally as well as in religion” (quoted in Christopher Ricks, Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot 36). Pure poetry – in this bogus form as a poetry de luxe – then, threatens belief itself, and not just religious belief, but all belief. As we have seen, Eliot is convinced that belief in something is the essential ground of any civilization – even a false belief such as that entertained by Communists. Moreover, he thinks that the quality – the intensity – of belief

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determines the quality of the civilization, as he put it in the Clark Lectures: “The eighteenth century appears much more settled, orderly and positive and confident in some aspects than the seventeenth; but its belief is of a different, I think of an inferior quality to that of the thirteenth century. And mind you, I am not speaking of the object of belief, but of the believing itself” (Schuchard, Lecture Seven, 186). The beliefs of the Age of Enlightenment were inferior not because they were less true than those of the Age of Faith, but simply because they were less intensely held! This is a perilous doctrine for an Anglican, and one not very remote from Stevens. Stevens’ first extended effort to define his relationship to “pure poetry” is a talk he gave at Harvard on 8 December 1936, published as “The Irrational Element in Poetry.” His return to the topic was prompted by John Sparrow’s 1934 study, Sense and Poetry: Essays on the Place of Meaning in Contemporary Verse, which mounts an attack on la poésie pure. That Stevens had Sparrow in mind is confirmed by his reply to his friend Steven T. Mason’s complaint that although he and his wife had enjoyed “Owl’s Clover” “as a piece of music or a lovely picture,” they were quite unable to derive the meaning they had found articulated in a review in the New York Times Review of Books (Lensing 34). Stevens recommended they read Sparrow, adding, “I lectured on this very subject at Harvard on Tuesday afternoon and could give you an earful” (Lensing 46). Stevens did not include “The Irrational Element in Poetry” in The Necessary Angel, suggesting that he was unhappy with it. Walton Litz certainly was, finding it to be “diffuse, rhetorical, and somewhat anxious in tone” (Litz 115). In Glen MacLeod’s judgment it “represents Stevens’ failed attempt to define his exact relation to Surrealism” (MacLeod 62). That Stevens himself was dissatisfied with it is confirmed by a letter to Hi Simons of 18 July 1941: “I shouldn’t know where to find a copy of my paper at Harvard and, if I did know, I should pretend not to, because I was never really satisfied with it and, in any case, don’t care to preach poetry” (Letters 392). Given that “The Irrational Element in Poetry” was Stevens’ first attempt to explain his poetic practice in a public forum, it is not entirely surprising that he became dissatisfied with the result. However, despite what he told Simons five years later, the letter to Mason just days after delivering the talk does not suggest any dissatisfaction with it. So far as I am aware, no one has examined the relation between “The Irrational Element in Poetry” and Sparrow’s polemical attack on the

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obscurity of modernist literature. If we read the lecture as a response to Sparrow, it seems less unsatisfactory. Sparrow is scornful of any claims to a special cognitive role for poetry, and that must have raised Stevens’ ire. In the talk, Stevens praises virtually everything that Sparrow attacks, including the Abbé Bremond. It may well be that Stevens first learned of Bremond and the pure poetry controversy from Sparrow. One small indication of that supposition is that, like Sparrow, he misspells Bremond’s name with an acute accent – “Brémond.” If he did learn of pure poetry from Sparrow, that is another indication that his remark to Ronald Latimore that he believed in pure poetry at the time he was writing the Harmonium poems represents retrospective relabelling. In the preface to Sense and Poetry, Sparrow sketches the migration of the “theory of poetry” from the classical mimetic mode through an Arnoldian “criticism of life” to the aesthete’s view that it should offer “an escape from life” by providing readers with “a pleasure which they cannot find in their life of every day.” (Somewhat idiosyncratically, he skips over the Romantic aesthetic in which poetry transforms our perception of the world.) Sparrow targets what he says is the view current in 1934 “that literature should not describe or criticize life, still less provide an escape from the world, but should somehow epitomize life.” On this view a poem is, he says, thought of as “an expression, as exact as possible, of some phase or moment of experience,” and “the writer’s aim [is] to reproduce or to typify ‘a consciousness’” (Sparrow ix). Sparrow attributes that impressionist aesthetic to the Eliot-inspired F.R. Leavis and to Ezra Pound (x–xiii), and finds its provenance in the privileging of obscurity by the Symbolists: “Mallarmé and Rimbaud are respected as the discoverers of the truth that nonsense has a value of its own, but now that they have given it a certificate in the realm of literature, nonsense is cultivated for reasons very different from theirs” (xiv). Sparrow cites behaviourism as one of the influences that might account for the success of the modern celebration of obscurity and private vision – particularly as espoused by I.A. Richards in his bifurcation of language use into perspicuous scientific discourse and opaque emotional/aesthetic discourse (xviii–xx). “The sole aim of the book,” he says, “is to make as plain as possible in what the obscurity of modern verse consists, and how it differs from orthodox writing in its neglect of the intelligible” (21). He has little to say of Surrealism except to lump it with Dadaism among “the latest inheritors of the symbolist tradition” (102–3).23

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Stevens, too, sets the Surrealists aside: “we are at the moment so beset by the din made by the surrealists and sur-rationalists, and so preoccupied in reading about them that we may become confused by these romantic scholars and think of them as the sole exemplars of the irrational today.” Stevens’ sense of the irrational is more secular than that of the Surrealists – or even Bremond: “What I have in mind when I speak of the irrational element in poetry is the transaction between reality and the sensibility of the poet from which poetry springs” (Kermode, ed. 781). And by “reality” Stevens always means the secular, mundane world of ordinary experience, not the “noumenal” reality that the surrealists pretend to access. His recurrent opposition of imagination and reality derives from his belief that it is the task of the poet to transmute ordinary experience not to transcend it. The task is never completed because “reality” – the ordinary experience of men and women – is constantly undergoing modification by cultural, scientific, and technological development and changing political and religious beliefs. The fact that the underlying physical reality remains essentially unaltered, at least within the human temporal scale, is what permits communication across the ages. Bremond is, of course primarily interested in the relation between poetry and a supernatural “reality.” Because of that difference Stevens is careful to discriminate his position from Bremond’s as articulated in La Poésie pure (not, it should be noted, the work upon which Eliot commented.): “In his discourse before the Academy, ten years or more ago,24 M. Brémond elucidated a mystical motive [for poetry] and made it clear that, in his opinion, one writes poetry to find God. I should like to consider this in conjunction with what might better be considered separately, and that is the question of meaning in poetry. M. Brémond proposed the identity of poetry and prayer, and followed Bergson25 in relying, in the last analysis, on faith. M. Brémond eliminated reason as the essential element in poetry” (Kermode, ed. 785–6). Although Bremond never quite says that poets write in order to find God, he does put poetry on a continuum that concludes in mystical insight: “Tied to the idea of pure poetry is that of inspiration, of the genius which breathes [through the poet], of the supreme and divine facility, a state of grace, which, quite naturally, one can compare to communion with God.”26 Of course, the notion that poets are inspired long precedes Bergson, and it is not clear that Bremond adds much to it. There are some affinities between pure poetry as Bremond presents it and the “doctrine of the image” propounded by Pound and F.S. Flint

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in 1912. In both cases, there is an insistence (as in Poe) that standard poetry tolerates a good deal of dross that is not truly “poetry.” However, inspiration is not mentioned at all by the imagists. Perhaps it was this difference that led Stevens to prefer pure poetry over imagism,27 which he seems to have regarded as the contrary of pure poetry. He explains the difference by an anecdote: He awoke one morning and heard the faint sound of a cat walking on the snow outside his window. It “made on me,” he says, “one of those impressions which one so often seizes as pretexts for poetry ... In such a case, one is merely expressing one’s sensibility ... The poet is able to give it the form of poetry because poetry is the medium of his personal sensibility.” The same sentiment is less gnomically expressed by Ernest Renan in a remark Stevens wrote in his commonplace book: “On écrit de telles choses pour transmettre aux autres la théorie de l’univers qu’on porte en soi” [One writes of such things in order to communicate to others the theory of the universe that one carries in oneself] (Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets 67). Such a view is irretrievably expressive, and to that extent co-ostensive with the Romantic aesthetic – despite Stevens’ frequent protestations that he is not a romantic. Pound defined the imagist poem in a thoroughly impressionistic way, as an attempt “to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (Gaudier-Brzeska 89). Imagism and pure poetry both claim a transformative capability for poetry, but they represent diametrically opposed aesthetics. For the imagist, the world transforms the artist’s perceptions. For Bremond, the poet is inspired by something beyond the world. So it is quite reasonable for Stevens to regard pure poetry’s reach toward the hidden and ineffable as the antitype of imagism’s focus on the surface of things.28 In positing a transformative effect on the reader, imagism and pure poetry both ask a great deal of the reader. Stevens acknowledged this common feature in a letter to Ronald Latimer written a year before he delivered “The Irrational Element in Poetry.” He conflates the two poetic modes as equivalently spare: “Imagism was a mild rebellion against didacticism. However, you will find that any continued reading of pure poetry is rather baffling. Everything must go on at once. There must be pure poetry and there must be a certain amount of didactic poetry, or a certain amount of didacticism in poetry. Poetry is like anything else; it cannot be made suddenly to drop all its rags and stand out naked, fully disclosed” (19 December 1935. Letters 302–3).

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For Stevens, then, imagism was a mode in which poetry drops all its rags and stands out naked. That was not his favourite mode. He was committed to a poetry of delight and colour, as well as to the communication of a deeper meaning than he thought imagism permitted. Bremond’s pure poetry promised such a deeper meaning, but one embedded in a religious belief that Stevens could not fully endorse: “All mystics approach God through the irrational. Pure poetry is both mystical and irrational. If we descend a little from this height and apply the looser and broader definition of pure poetry, it is possible to say that, while it can lie in the temperament of very few of us to write poetry in order to find God, it is probably the purpose of each of us to write poetry to find the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God. One writes poetry, then, in order to approach the good in what is harmonious and orderly. Or, simply, one writes poetry out of a delight in the harmonious and orderly”29 (Kermode, ed. 786). Stevens’ view that “one writes poetry ... to approach the good” is quite compatible with Eliot’s comment that “the ultimate value of the poet’s work is religious” – but, as we have seen, Eliot shies away from granting poetry a religious significance. And it is difficult to imagine Eliot agreeing with Stevens that “one writes poetry out of a delight in the harmonious and orderly.” “Delight” is not a word that crosses Eliot’s lips very often,30 nor are harmony and order conspicuous properties of his poetry. Stevens is struggling to navigate his way between his conviction that poetry speaks out of something distinct from the rational discourse of science and philosophy and the quasi-mystical claims that Bremond makes for poetry: “The pure poetry of M. Bremond is irrational in origin. Yet it communicates so much that M. Bremond regards it as supreme. Because most of us are incapable of sharing the experiences of M. Bremond, we have to be content with less” (786). But when he comes to characterize that “less,” he says that we can “find in poetry that which gives us a momentary existence on an exquisite plane.” That sounds uncomfortably like mystical transport. That impression is reinforced by his asking: “Is it necessary to ask the meaning of the poem? If the poem had a meaning and if its explanation destroyed the illusion, should we have gained or lost?” (786), a remark very much in line with Eliot’s contention in Dante that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood” (8), and with Eliot’s approval of Housman’s opinion that “poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood” (The Use of Poetry 138). Both poets struggle with their consciousness that their poetry expresses experiences that they

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cannot otherwise articulate, but which they are reluctant to attribute – as Bremond does – to a supernatural agency. Stevens’ choice of “irrational” to describe that which poetry expresses is a deliberate avoidance of Bremond’s term “super-rationality,” which implies some sort of mystical insight, or perhaps a Bergsonian intuition. It is also a tacit response to Sparrow’s caustic dismissal of appeals to the irrational in a comment on “Mallarmé and his followers”: “The modern poet who claims to be an inheritor of their tradition writes nonsense not for art’s sake, but for the sake of truthfulness ... Art and intelligibility alike are victims which he must sacrifice in his endeavour to make literature one with life, to make it reproduce an experience, or portray a consciousness, in which the irrational and the inartistic are alike important elements” (xv–xvi). Of course he is not concerned with the irrational in a pathological sense, nor – as the Surrealists are – with dream visions, nor: “with any irrationality provoked by prayer, whiskey, fasting, opium, or the hope of publicity ... What interests us is a particular process in the rational mind which we recognize as irrational in the sense that it takes place unaccountably” (782). One is tempted to take this to mean that “irrationality” in poetry is equivalent to Wordsworth’s belief that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Though he mentions Freud as having “given the irrational a legitimacy than it never had before,” Stevens sees Mallarmé and Rimbaud as “more portentous influences” – presumably because they articulated the irrational in their poetry – if one can speak of such a thing. Bremond and Sparrow – the two men with whom Stevens’ lecture is a sort of colloquy – share a hostility to the Freudian theory of the psyche,31 as well as to Surrealism’s claim that the irrational world of dreams offers a window onto another super-real world. Bremond’s view is that poetry, on the contrary, accesses the concrete and real – something rational thought cannot do because it must abstract: It’s always the same scandal: we are said to sacrifice the precise lights of the reason to the uncertain glimmers of instinct, and by the name “pure poetry” we want to glorify the pathetic, the vague, the dark, the sub-rational, the “obscene chaos” where conscience struggles with the Fiat Lux of understanding. No, a thousand times no! The special knowledge that we are studying amongst poets or mystics is not sub – but is super-rational; a superior reason, more

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rational than the other ... a true poetic experience permits the poet to surpass the order of abstract ideas, or arguments, and to achieve the concrete, the real itself, insofar as one can attain it here below. (Poesie pure 94–5)32 The last clause suggests that by “reality” Bremond has in mind the noumenal reality that lies behind phenomena, and to which we have no sensory access. And despite his disclaimers, his account of poetry’s “special knowledge” is not unlike Bergson’s.33 Stevens will not go so far, deliberately diminishing poetic insight by labelling it “irrational” and declining to attempt any definition of just what he means by that: “Clearly, I use the word irrational more or less indifferently, as between its several senses. It will be time enough to adopt a more systematic usage, when the critique of the irrational comes to be written, by whomever it may be that this potent subject ultimately engages” (Kermode, ed. 792). However, Stevens is not hostile to Surrealism, sympathizing with its recognition of the limitations of the rational mind, which “dealing with the known, expects to find it glistening in a familiar ether.” He does not believe that “the known” is so readily accessible: “What it [the rational mind] really finds is the unknown always behind and beyond the known, giving it the appearance, at best, of chiaroscuro.” Admitting that there are “charlatans of the irrational,” he is careful to exclude the Surrealists from that company: “I should not want to be misunderstood as having the poets of surrealism in mind.” While he finds their technique to be “singularly limited,” he praises it for exhibiting “the dynamic influence of the irrational,” and for being “extraordinarily alive.” In a distinctly un-Eliotic spirit, he commends Surrealism for making “it possible for us to read poetry that seems filled with gaiety and youth, just when we were beginning to despair of gaiety and youth.” And he praises the Surrealists for having made “other forms seem obsolete.” But he modulates this praise by concluding that they “will be absorbed” in “the process of give and take of which the growth of poetry consists” (791). But, at the end of the day, Stevens is not impressed by Surrealism. “The essential fault of surrealism,” he wrote in an undated entry in “Materia Poetica,” “is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination” (Opus Posthumous 203).

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Seven years after his first cautious assessment of Bremond’s notion of “pure poetry,” Stevens unequivocally endorsed the equivalence between poetic and mystic vision in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” (delivered at Mount Holyoke in 1943). He did not mention Bremond or pure poetry, but he did invoke Bergson. “It is certain,” he wrote, “that the experience of the poet is of no less a degree than the experience of the mystic, and we may be certain that in the case of poets, the peers of saints, those experiences are of no less a degree than the experience of the saints themselves. It is a question of the nature of the experience” (Kermode, ed. 674. My emphasis). Although he does not specify what the nature of either poetic or mystic experience is, his subsequent remarks suggest that the difference between them is not very great: If we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea, and that our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called, even if poetry that involves us vitally, the feeling of deliverance, of a release, of a perfection touched, of a vocation so that all men may know the truth and that the truth may set them free – if we say these things and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed ... a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation. This may be a gross exaggeration of a very simple matter. But perhaps that remark is true of many of the more prodigious things of life and death. (Kermode, ed. 674) One could interpret these remarks as expressing a Humanist scepticism that dismisses all talk of the divine and the other world as merely comforting fictions. But they can also be read – as I believe they should be – more positively. In saying that the poet placed God in His seat in heaven, Stevens is certainly acknowledging that God is a creature of the human imagination – “our notions of heaven and hell are merely poetry not so called” – and not the other way around. But what he wants to convey is the prodigious achievement of the poet who “achieved God.” It is a prodigious achievement because it answers a human need: it ennobles mankind, and lifts humanity beyond itself. Earlier in the essay, he had quoted Shelley’s description of poetry in his “Defence of Poetry” as “something divine ... at once the centre and circumference

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of knowledge ... the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds ... [It] arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life” (670). But Stevens cannot go all the way with Shelley’s neoplatonism or Wordsworth’s mystical communion with nature. He needs some means of articulating his sense that “when he is writing, or after he has written, a poem that completely accomplishes his purpose ... he shares the transformation, not to say apotheosis, accomplished by the poem.” By way of support he cites Bergson from Two Sources of Morality and Religion: “The founders of religion, the mystics and the saints ... begin by saying that what they experience is a feeling of liberation” (673): “One may find intimations of immortality in an object on the mantelpiece ... Even if they are only a part of an adult make-believe, the whole point is that the structure of reality, because of the range of resemblances that it contains, is measurably an adult make-believe. Perhaps the whole field of connotation is based on resemblance. Perhaps resemblance which seems to be related so closely to the imagination is related even more closely to the intelligence, of which perceptions of resemblance are effortless accelerations” (688–9). The phrase “intimations of immortality” comes from Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode,” a poem that speaks in a neo-platonic manner of the new born “trailing clouds of glory” as it descends from the spiritual into the material world. But by “structure of reality” Stevens does not mean to invoke a noumenal “reality” that ostensibly lies behind appearances, but just those appearances themselves. They are “an adult make-believe” in the double sense: that the world we know is a construct (“make believe”); and that it is a construct of the reason (an “adult make believe”) rather than the imagination. Part of his point is to place reason and imagination on the same continuum; both rely on resemblance – as opposed to the logician’s requirement of identity. In the late Harvard talk “Effects of Analogy” (1948) Stevens addressed directly the question of just what the poet speaks about. First he divides the experiential world into two realms: the “corporeal” and the “incorporeal.” Others might prefer the labels “sensory” and “mental,” but Stevens’ choice of terms is certainly not careless or accidental. It would seem that he wants to bridge the Cartesian gulf between the mental and the sensory. He adds that the “corporeal world exists as the common denominator of the incorporeal worlds of its inhabitants.” Each of us, then, is a kind of experiential monad, or what Bradley called a “finite centre.” Stevens’ label “incorporeal worlds” evokes

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older, discredited labels such as “spiritual,” which Bradley was anxious to avoid. Nonetheless, both are linked to one another by the common “corporeal world” of sensory experience. The difference between artists and ordinary mortals is that the artist calls into question his or her sensory experience: “If there are people who live only in the corporeal world, enjoying the wind and the weather and supplying standards of normality, there are other people who are not so sure of the wind and the weather and who supply standards of abnormality. It is the poet’s sense of the world that is the poet’s world.” The artist, then, like the schizophrenic, lives in his or her private world, as well as in the “corporeal world, the familiar world of the commonplace.” That world Stevens describes as “our world,” and says that it is “one sense of the analogy that develops between our world and the world of the poet. The poet’s sense of the world is the other sense. It is the analogy between these two senses that concerns us” (“Effects of Analogy” Kermode, ed. 715). Although I have already cited the following passage from Eliot’s essay on Leibniz, it is so apposite to these late remarks of Stevens that it seems appropriate to repeat it here: “The point of view (or finite centre) has for its object one consistent world, and accordingly no finite entre can be self-sufficient, for the life of a soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in the painful task of unifying (to a greater or less extent) jarring and incompatible ones, and passing, when possible, from two or more discordant viewpoints to a higher which shall somehow include and transmute them. The soul is so far from being a monad that we have not only to interpret other souls to ourself but to interpret ourself to ourself” (Knowledge and Experience 147–8). While it is a little misleading to compare the remarks in an academic paper of a twenty-nine-year-old graduate student in philosophy with those of a sixty-eight-year-old poetic lawyer attempting to explain his poetic practice, I think the juxtaposition is helpful. Stevens’ objective is to legitimate what might be regarded as the idiosyncrasy of his poetry. His point is that the very peculiarity of the vision expressed in his poetry is the measure of its value, since it expands humanity’s grasp of its environment – a grasp that is always incomplete and subject to revision. He implies that our common perception of the world is the residue of generations of poetic insight. Eliot`s remark stresses the peculiarity and insularity of each person’s grasp of the world, which he calls “one consistent world.” Given that we each inhabit a distinct individual world, our task as social beings is to engage

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in “the painful task of unifying – jarring and incompatible” worlds. Whereas Stevens sees the artist as someone who articulates his own idiosyncratic vision without any special regard to what others see, Eliot characterizes the artist as someone who attempts to reconcile the conflicting visions of himself and others. The Stevensian artist simply sings his native wood notes wild, like the singer at Key West in confidence that he will be heard and understood – if only by a few. The Eliotic artist strives to break out of his own perceptual prison by somehow incorporating and reducing to order the chaos and anarchy of the multifarious perceptions of others. That must surely be what he meant by his remark in “The Metaphysical Poets,” that “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry” (Selected Essays 281); or earlier, when he described the poet as possessing “a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations” (“Tradition and Individual Talent,” Selected Essays 18). For Eliot, poetry can never be “pure” because it is always engaged in this struggle to incorporate, to accommodate, or to reconcile a cloud of incompatible conflicting and even contradictory perceptions, impulses, and ideas. We have seen that he allows the notion of “pure poetry” to migrate from Bremond’s meaning of a poetry unconcerned with mundane and ephemeral issues to a poetry concerned only with formal and aesthetic issues. There is nothing in Bremond to exclude from poetry the sorts of concerns that preoccupy Eliot, but he is conscious that the poetry he does write does not and cannot possess the kind of gnomic “arrest” that is implied by the notion of pure poetry. Eliot’s poetry is conflicted, sinuous, rebarbative – and even a little uncertain or querulous. Such complexity would seem to exclude the property of “purity,” which implies simplicity and unity. The case is very different for Stevens. For him the notion of pure poetry meant just what Bremond meant – a poetry concerned only with its expression of the poet’s vision, to the exclusion of political, social, economic, philosophical, and religious issues. Since this study has devoted a good deal of space to an articulation of Stevens’ philosophical and religious views, that assessment may cause some surprise and distrust. Of course, I do not mean to suggest that Stevens had no opinions in those areas – or even that they do not surface in his poetry; Stevens would not claim, I think, that all of his poetic production is “pure.” Purity of poetry is a goal not often reached. For Stevens poetic vision is prior to all such concerns, though pertinent to them. That is

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the point of “Anecdote of a Jar.” The poem, like the jar, alters the world it enters, though it does not participate in it: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. This claim for a gnomic influence exercised by art objects is fundamental to Stevens’ understanding of the role of art and underpins his insistence that poetry provide pleasure. That pleasure is the portal through which wisdom enters, as he put it in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet”: “The pleasure [of poetry] is the pleasure of powers that create a truth that cannot be arrived at by the reason alone, a truth that the poet recognizes by sensation. The morality of the poet’s radiant and productive atmosphere is the reality of the right sensation” (Kermode, ed. 679). But Eliot distrusts the pleasure poetry can provide, despite scattered positive comments on the pleasure that can be derived from the reading of poetry.34 In the 1935 essay “Religion and Literature,” for example, he focuses his attention on the “views of life” expressed in the works of different authors, arguing that a benefit of reading literature is the reader’s exposure to a variety of views of life, which will permit the reader’s own personality to assert itself (Selected Prose 102). But he worries about a countervailing and “insidious” influence that may be exercised by literature when it is read simply for pleasure: “I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for “amusement,” or “purely for pleasure” that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is the literature which we read with the least effort that can have the easiest and most insidious influence upon us” (103. My emphasis).

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Eliot, then, finds himself in the awkward position of having to denigrate literature for precisely that feature which most clearly distinguishes it from other forms of discourse – its seductive charm. He is as conscious as anyone that the charm of literature derives from its indirection, its employment of figure and story to convey not just ideas and opinions but also the “feel” of life. As early as his graduate years, he complained of Bergson that he “emphasizes the reality of a fluid psychological world of aspect and nuances, where purposes and intentions are replaced by pure feeling. By the seduction of his style we come to believe that the Bergsonian world is the only world, and that we have been living among shadows. It is not so. Bergson is the sweet siren of adventurous philosophers” (cited by Childs in Lobb 1993 121).

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7 Avoiding the Abyss: Ash-Wednesday and “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

It is frustrating that Eliot nowhere gave any indication of why he had no interest in Stevens’ poetry. Since we have seen him admitting to taking pleasure in Valéry’s poetry despite disapproving its lack of content, and since he confessed in his contribution to the Trinity Review that he liked Stevens’ poetry “so much,” we can surmise that it was not Stevens’ manner or style that occasioned his lack of interest, but rather the substance or themes of his poetry. That circumstance did not prevent Eliot from commenting at considerable length on Valéry’s poetry, carefully articulating the ground for his disapproval. Perhaps the difference is that, unlike Valéry’s poetry, the bulk of Stevens’ would seem to endorse Russell’s Humanist injunction that mankind should “worship at the shrine that his own hands have built.” Or perhaps it was the vitalist component in Stevens’ philosophy – the almost immanentist belief that we participate in a cosmos that we “understand” even though we can only infer its nature from the world we observe – that caused Eliot to shy away from any commentary. Perhaps he was frightened by what he would surely have regarded as pantheistic tendencies in Stevens, as exemplified by the following familiar passage from “Blue Guitar” xxviii: I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks, Gesu, not native of a mind Thinking the thoughts I call my own, Native, a native in the world And like a native think in it.

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It could not be a mind, the wave In which the watery grasses flow And yet are fixed as a photograph, The wind in which the dead leaves blow. Here I inhale profounder strength And as I am, I speak and move And things are as I think they are And say they are on the blue guitar. But Stevens is careful to keep just this side of an immanentist pantheism. Although the speaker thinks in the world “as a native thinks,” he is careful to add that he is “not native of a mind / Thinking the thoughts I call my own,” that is to say, he is not merely a mouthpiece for an Anima Mundi or Heideggerean Being; as with the singer in “Key West,” the poet’s thoughts are his own because the world in which he is a native “could not be a mind.” But it is probably not so much a difference in philosophy that separates the two poets as a difference in temperament. Eliot is irremediably serious, even gloomy. In the ironically titled “Religion without Humanism”(1930), he complains that he “found no discipline in humanism,” none of the discipline of which he thought “the modern world has great need.” However, discipline is something that the irremediably cheery doctrine of Humanism could scarcely supply, since only “those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss.” The clear implication is that there is no – in Stevens’ words – “dumbfoundering abyss” for the Humanist (Humanism and America 110). A few years later, in the “Matthew Arnold” lecture from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism Eliot mocks Arnold’s view that poetry is “at bottom a criticism of life” as being insufficiently cognizant of the horrors mankind must face: “At bottom: that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom. At the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a “criticism of life” ... We bring back very little from our rare descents, and that is not criticism” (Lecture of 3 March 1933 111). He does not say what it is that we bring back, but the epigraph he had planned to use for The Waste Land from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness suggests that it would not be pleasant or reassuring:

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Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of compete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath – “The horror! The horror!” (The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript 3). Stevens has a much lighter take on the abyss. For example, in poem viii of “It Must Give Pleasure”: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud, Serenely gazing at the violent abyss, Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space, Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny, Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight, Am I that imagine this angel less satisfied? (“Blue Guitar”) Stevens’ poet masters the abyss as an angel or eagle does, soaring on the wings of his imagination. In “Saint John and the Back-Ache,” he seems to take it a little more seriously, and jettisons the angel. After listing the various pleasures of eye and ear St John continues: My point is that These illustrations are neither angels, no, Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo, Nor all one’s luck at once in a play of strings. They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss Between us and the object, external cause, The little ignorance that is everything, (Auroras of Autumn) Stevens’ concession that the abyss is “dumbfoundering” gives it more gravity than he granted it in “Blue Guitar,” but still nothing like the horror that Conrad’s Kurtz glimpsed. While Stevens’ more sanguine take on the issue of belief or its absence no doubt derives from a difference in temperament, he contrives to justify it with “philosophical” argument. He ends up philo-

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sophically in a place that is compatible with Alfred North Whitehead’s “process philosophy,” though not at all indebted to it. Whitehead explains his view with an analogy: “The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.”1 Of course, the poet is not required ever to “land.” Put most generally, Stevens’ point is the Bergsonian one that humans are a product of evolution, and therefore “native” in the world – an entirely materialist position. He rejects the immanentist postulate that there is some sort of mental affinity between humans and an enfolding spiritual or mental realm. The poet or the singer is thinking his or her own thoughts in the face of “reality,” the perceived natural world; neither resonates to some cosmic vibration. There is nothing “New Age” about Stevens’ philosophy. What he does constantly assert is that his thoughts – anyone’s thoughts – are guaranteed some degree of validity since they are the thoughts of an organism that has evolved in accordance with the same cosmic forces – whatever they might be – that have constituted the circumambient world.. That Eliot was entirely out of sympathy with any such materialist view is clear. He is never more pointed on this matter than in a letter to Bonamy Dobrée of 17 April 1936: “The doctrine that in order to arrive at the love of God one must divest oneself of the love of created beings was thus expressed by St. John of the Cross, you know ... But the doctrine is fundamentally true, I believe. Or to put your belief in your own way, that only through the love of created beings can we approach the love of God, that I believe to be untrue ... I don’t think that ordinary human affections are capable of leading us to the love of God, but rather that the love of God is capable of informing, intensifying and elevating our human affections, which otherwise have little to distinguish them from the “natural” affections of animals” (Quoted in Tate, 81. Eliot’s emphasis). This fundamentally ascetic posture puts Eliot at loggerheads with Stevens – indeed, with the vast majority of his contemporaries – and accounts for his disapproval of the kind of poetry that Stevens wrote, despite his liking it “so much.” Although he declined to say as much, Eliot almost certainly understood Stevens’ poetry as a poetic expression of either Bergsonian vitalism, or American pragmatism, philosophical postures he had rejected categorically in a graduate paper of 1914, as Donald Childs explains:

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Eliot argued in 1914 that Bergsonians and pragmatists agree insofar as both regard history as a “process in which human purposes are illusory.” The problem with Bergson and James is “their confusion of human and cosmic activity.” Bergson makes everything cosmic, makes everything part of the Life Force. “Bergson denies human values,” Eliot complains; for him, “history is a vitalistic process in which human purposes do not exist.” (1914, 21, 20, 20–1) “The error of pragmatism,” he [Eliot] writes, “is, I believe, exactly the reverse”: “for pragmatism, man is the measure of all things. [It] is a practical philosophy. You choose a point of view because you like it. You form certain plans because they express your character. Certain things are true because they are what you need; others, because they are what you want (1914 20–1). (Childs in Lobb 1993 120) In the same paper, Eliot explicitly dismissed the central tenet of Stevens’ philosophical posture: “It may be true that man does not live by bread alone, but by making fictions and swallowing them alive & whole. This seems to reduce the high cost of living by eliminating living” (Lobb 121). Eliot’s characterizations of Bergson and Pragmatism, as cited by Childs, are caricatures of those philosophical schools. Neither is as simplistic and human-centred as he makes out. For Bergson, human purposes are the finest expression of cosmic purposes; it is that feature that justifies them – much as doing God’s will justifies human behaviour for a Christian. Eliot’s characterization of pragmatism as merely wishful thinking is an even broader caricature. The fundamental principle of Pragmatism is that we cannot know the truth about the world incorrigibly, but must make do with contingent versions of the truth. The test of such contingent versions is that they meet the pragmatic test; that is, that they are not contradicted by experience. Eliot’s later comments on Bergson and pragmatism were less contentious, but – except for the years he came under the influence of Russell’s Humanism – his hostility was consistent. In “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” Stevens acknowledged his affinity with both Bergson and Pragmatism, quoting Valéry’s praise of Bergson as “le dernier grand nom de l’histoire de l’intelligence européenne” [the last great name in the history of European intelligence]. And he cites William James’ praise of Bergson’s Creative

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Evolution to the effect that he felt the same “flavour of persistent euphony” that reading Madame Bovary had given him. Although the praise is ambivalent, Stevens does not seem to have taken it ironically (Kermode, ed. 666–7). Another feature of Stevens’ poetry that Eliot would have disliked is its focus on the process of composition. That he would disapprove is clear from the strictures he applied to the poetry of Valéry – both in published remarks surveyed above, and even more bluntly in a late letter to Herbert Read (1 August 1963). He told Read that Valéry “seemed to write poetry only for the sake of analysing his own mind at work writing poetry,” and considered it to be a “poésie de luxe.” He thought such poetry too easy, contrasting it to his own poetry for which he had “paid through the nose in experience” (Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria. My emphasis). There is little personal pain and anxiety expressed in Stevens’ poetry, and it is undeniably a poésie de luxe in Eliot’s sense of a poetry that reflects on the mind of the poet writing poetry rather than on his life experiences. Stevens does not have a lot to say about Valéry – even though we have just seen him quoting Valéry’s praise of Bergson. In “Effects of Analogy” (1948) he does invoke Valéry as exemplifying the first of two theories of poetry: “One relates to the imagination as a power within him not so much to destroy reality at will as to put it to his own uses. He [the poet] comes to feel that his imagination is not wholly his own but that it may be part of a much larger, much more potent imagination, which it is his affair to try to get at.” To achieve that, Stevens says, he must live “as Paul Valéry did, on the verge of consciousness.” However, such a practice “often results in poetry that is marginal, subliminal” (Kermode, ed. 712). The other theory – the one to which Stevens adheres – makes much grander claims. It considers “the imagination, he says, as a power within him to have such insights into reality as will make it possible for him to be sufficient as a poet in the very center of consciousness.” But the “power” is “within him,” not some external djinn or spirit. So, when Stevens writes in poem xxii of Blue Guitar, “Poetry is the subject of the poem,” he is not thinking of poetry as indulging in Narcissistic self-reference. Far from regarding his own poetry as a poésie de luxe, he believes that it seeks “to create the poetry of the present,” a task which he says is incalculably difficult and is “rarely ... achieved, fully and robustly, by anyone.” For poets like himself, “the central problem is always the problem of reality.” Like the first group of poets (to which Valéry belongs), Stevens’ kind of poets “are also mystics to begin with.

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But all their desire and all their ambition is to press away from mysticism toward that ultimate good sense which we term civilization” (713). We may fairly conclude then, that both Eliot and Stevens sought to reform, renovate, or expand the state of culture and civilization in which they found themselves. And it would seem fair to conclude that their respective goals were founded on the perception that culture and civilization are in need of repair; that they are in a state of crisis. Although they shared this perception with most of their contemporaries in Europe, most others chose ready-made solutions to the crisis – Marxism and its antagonist, Fascism, being the most potent. But there were other options: D.H. Lawrence’s eroticism, Bloomsbury’s mixture of Fabianism and aestheticism, Ezra Pound’s mixture of Fascism and Confucius, David Jones’ Catholicism. In retrospect, all of these “literary” remedies seem rather impotent when viewed from a socioeconomic or political perspective – especially in comparison to the formidable efficacy of Marxism and Fascism to alter (I would say “destroy”) human culture and civilization. Charles Maurras’ Action Française, which we have seen did attract Eliot, was another option. It mixed cultural, religious, and political ideologies, and foundered on its anachronism, opportunism, and racism. Despite the quixotic nature of their enterprises, the poets of Stevens’ and Eliot’s generation were unwilling to accept either the activism or the quietism of the next generation. W.H. Auden’s justly celebrated elegy for Yeats on his death in 1939, just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, expresses such a quietism in denying the efficacy of poetry – to which both Stevens and Eliot were committed: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.”2 Stevens confronted the abyss of unbelief, as well as the even more alarming abyss of false belief by resorting to Whitehead’s “flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization” in the hope that others would land “for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation” in the light of his flights. Eliot chose a different route: a robust, even muscular, embrace of a traditional faith that defined the culture he inhabited and loved. That he saw religious belief as such a heroic undertaking is clear from his remarks in “A Note on Poetry and Belief”: “It takes applications, and a kind of genius, to believe anything, and to believe anything ... will probably become more and more difficult as time goes on. But we are constantly being told how much more difficult in other ways with telephones, wireless, aeroplanes and future inventions to try our

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nerves, life is becoming; and the complication of belief is merely another complication to be put up with” (16). Ash-Wednesday and The Man with the Blue Guitar illustrate the shared reformist zeal of the mature poetry of Stevens and Eliot as well as their contrasting modes and styles. Although both poems illustrate each author’s state of belief at the time of writing, the parallel is imperfect since “Blue Guitar” does not represent a watershed in Stevens’ spiritual or philosophical development as Ash-Wednesday does in Eliot’s. “Blue Guitar” is just a more elaborate and sustained exploration of the same themes that occupied Stevens’ entire poetic career, as he explains on the dust jacket: “The Man with the Blue Guitar ... deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined.” Of “Owl’s Clover,” which precedes “Blue Guitar” in the volume, Stevens says, it reflects “what was then going on in the world, [and] that reflection is merely for the purpose of seizing and stating what makes life intelligible and desirable in the midst of great change and great confusion” (Kermode, ed. 998). He is no doubt alluding to the rise of fascism in Europe and the gathering clouds of war in 1937, when the volume was published. A decade earlier when the first poem in Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday sequence was published – or even in 1930, when the entire sequence appeared – public events were not so pressing. Nonetheless, it is typical of Stevens’ poetry that, despite its self- reflexivity, it does respond to public events – in contrast to the almost hermetically sealed character of most of Eliot’s poetry, and certainly of Ash-Wednesday. Eliot, of course, had lots to say about public events in his prose, whereas Stevens seldom commented on them in his prose. In the dust jacket statement Stevens offers “Blue Guitar” as a poem that might assist his readers in dealing with the public turmoil that everyone faces: “Since this is of significance, if we are entering a period in which poetry may be of first importance to the spirit, I have been making notes on the subject in the form of short poems during the past winter. These short poems, some thirty of them, form the other group, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” from which the book takes its title. This group deals with the incessant conjunctions between things as they are and things imagined. Although the blue guitar is a symbol of the imagination, it is used most often simply as a reference to the individuality of the poet, meaning by the poet any man of imagination” (Kermode, ed. 998). “Blue Guitar,” then, consists of “notes” on “what makes life intelligible and desirable in the midst of great change and great confusion,” and it is “the incessant conjunctions between things

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as they are and things imagined” that fill that need. It must be admitted that as consolatory poetry, “Blue Guitar” cannot be counted a great success. Yeats’ lyrics and Eliot’s Quartets are far more frequently cited to offer comfort in times of distress than is “Blue Guitar” – or, indeed, any Stevens poem. It seems that people do not take much comfort from being reassured that what they believe is not true, but that nonetheless they shouldn’t worry. Ash-Wednesday is a very different sort of poem, being motivated by Eliot’s recent conversion rather than by public events. All the same, it shares with Blue Guitar a sense of “in between,” that I have discussed in connection with The Waste Land and “The Journal of Crispin.” The time “in between” is the period when a belief is uncertainly held.3 Presumably it is that aspect of Ash-Wednesday that led Eliot to insist in a letter of 1927 to William Force Stead (the Anglican priest who baptized him, and Eliot’s confessor) that it was not a devotional poem: “Some damned fool of a Cambridge paper referred to it as devotional poetry, which rather misses the point.” In the same year, Eliot defined devotional poetry in a review of Baudelaire: Prose and Poetry as “religious poetry which falls within an exact faith and has precise objects for contemplation.”4 It would seem, then, that Eliot would not claim exactitude or precision for Ash-Wednesday. In a later letter to Stead, Eliot elaborated on the issue, telling Stead that he had “nourished for a long time,” a theory “that between the usual subjects of poetry and ‘devotional’ verse there is a very important field still very unexplored by modern poets – the experience of man in search of God, and trying to explain to himself his intenser human feelings in terms of the divine goal. I have tried to do something of that in ‘Ash-Wednesday’” (Schuchard and Kojecky 150–1). The “man in search of God” is, perforce, not a man who has found Him. Presumably it is that uncertainty or doubt that disqualifies Ash-Wednesday from being a devotional poem in Eliot’s mind. But, since it was written after Eliot’s baptism, the search for God does not imply doubt of His existence. The search, then, must be for some sort of contact or sign, some experiential confirmation of faith, perhaps even for some sort of mystical, direct experience of divinity. In a March 1930 review, a month before the completed Ash-Wednesday was published, Eliot discriminated between religious and devotional verse: “I call ‘religious’ what is inspired by religious feeling of some kind; and ‘devotional’ that which is directly about some subject connected with revealed religion.” Most people, I think, would reverse

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this categorization, considering devotional verse to be “inspired by a religious feeling of some kind.” On this schema, Ash-Wednesday would qualify as “religious” rather than “devotional.”5 A review of 1932 finds Eliot still gnawing on that bone. His comments suggest that the reason he rejected the label “devotional” for Ash-Wednesday is the uncertainty of his faith at the time of writing: “All poetry is difficult, almost impossible, to write: and one of the great permanent causes of error in writing poetry is the difficulty of distinguishing between what one really feels and what one would like to feel, and between the moments of genuine feeling and the moments of falsity. This is a danger in all poetry: but it is a peculiarly grave danger in the writing of devotional verse ... verse which represents only good intentions is worthless on that plane, indeed, a betrayal. The greater the elevation, the finer becomes the difference between sincerity and insincerity, between the reality and the unattained aspiration.”6 Finally, in a lecture on George Herbert (delivered on 25 May 1938 to the Friends of Salisbury Cathedral), Eliot revealed his great respect for devotional verse, asking his readers to see Herbert as “a man of great intellectual gifts and great psychological insight: and to regard devotional verse like his, not as a pleasant by-path of poetry, but as the highest, if not the most comprehensive that a poet can attempt” (quoted in Schuchard, Varieties 184).7 This, too, suggests that Eliot thought “devotional” too honorific a term for Ash-Wednesday, as well as an inaccurate label. If we juxtapose these remarks with Stevens’ comment in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” cited in the previous chapter, the closeness of the two poets’ concerns is highlighted, while at the same time their resolutions of those concerns can be seen to be almost diametrically opposed: “If we say that the idea of God is merely a poetic idea, even if the supreme poetic idea ... and if we are able to see the poet who achieved God and placed Him in His seat in heaven in all His glory, the poet himself, still in the ecstasy of the poem that completely accomplished his purpose, would have seemed ... a man who needed what he had created, uttering the hymns of joy that followed his creation” (Kermode, ed. 674). Stevens’ cautious adherence to hypothetical statements, coupled with his reiteration of his conviction that poetic invention is the core of religious belief, puts him at irreconcilable odds with the devout believer. On the other hand, his concern with the issue of belief in something “beyond ourselves” aligns him with such searchers after God as the Eliot of Ash-Wednesday.

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Eliot’s use of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, as the title of his first Anglican poem, alerts the reader to his intention that it be read as a search for belief, rather than a celebration of it. Within the liturgical year Lent is a period of waiting for the risen Christ’s manifestation on Easter morning as the Saviour. In that waiting the believer becomes a penitent, denying him- or herself the pleasures of the flesh as a cleansing, preparatory for the manifestation of the Saviour. Lent can be seen as a liturgical equivalent of the dark night of the soul experienced by mystics on their path to enlightenment. While on that path, there is no guarantee that one will ever reach the goal. It is in this sense, of the penitent’s search for a manifestation of divine grace, that Eliot can speak of the poem as expressing “the experience of a man in search of God.” Ash-Wednesday was written over a period of about two and a half years. Part ii – the first published section – appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature for December of 1927, about six months after his baptism on 29 June 1927. It had the title “Salutation.” Part i was the next published, appearing in the spring 1928 issue of Commerce, with the title “Perch’io non spero.” Part iii was published in the same journal, in the Autumn issue of 1929 with the title “Al som de l’escalina.” The last three parts were not published until the whole poem appeared as a separate volume in April 1930. The sequence clearly represents the process of Eliot’s conversion – with all of the uncertainty and distress that accompanied that decision. His conversion was not a sudden revelation like Paul’s on the road to Damascus. It was a slow, deliberate process of inquiry, prayer, and contemplation. “Blue Guitar” was also partly published in a literary journal before appearing in a book, but there was no parallel lengthy gestation – at least none marked by its publication history. Poems ii, ix, xv, xvii, xviii, xxiv, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxi, and xxxiii were published as “The Man with the Blue Guitar” in Poetry Magazine in May 1937, and then the entire sequence appeared in The Man with the Blue Guitar in the same year. Stevens told Ronald Latimer in March of 1937 that “during the winter” he had written “something like 35 or 40 short pieces of which about 25 seem to be coming through” (Letters 316). Holly Stevens identifies these poems as belonging to “Blue Guitar.” We can fairly assume then, that “Blue Guitar” was written reasonably continuously over a period of months rather than years.8 In the same letter, Stevens indicated that the theme of the sequence was the one that dominates much of his poetry: “They deal with the

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relation or balance between imagined things and real things which, as you know, is a constant source of trouble to me. I don’t feel that I have as yet nearly got to the end of the subject.” Not entirely content with that characterization, Stevens tried again: “Perhaps it would be better to say that what they really deal with is the painter‘s problem of realization: I have been trying to see the world about me both as I see it and as it is. This means seeing the world as an imaginative man sees it.” By “the world as it is,” I take him to mean the world as the ordinary man or woman sees it, not some noumenal reality. No more is the “world as the imaginative man sees it” a noumenal reality. Both are imperfect, contingent, and even fugitive. The issue addressed in the sequence, then, is the conflict – or at least the disconnect – between the ordinary, instrumental view of the world in which we all participate, and the multifarious imagined view of which we are all capable. So described, Stevens’ concerns are closer to Wordsworth’s than to Eliot’s. The purpose of the poems in Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth said in the famous 1801 preface, was to “choose incidents and situations from common life and to ... throw over them a certain colouring of imagination whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way.” Wordsworth regarded such a practice not as an arbitrary or capricious exercise of imagination but as a revelatory practice in which the poet could trace “truly though not ostentatiously the primary laws of our nature” in ordinary things.9 Wordsworth’s poetic practice was grounded in the associationist psychology of David Hartley, which articulated the “primary laws” of human nature on Lockean principles. Stevens had no such mentor to guide his speculation – though he searched for one – nor did he have Eliot’s faith in the existence of a higher being.10 What he did share with Eliot was the need for belief, as he explained to Simons, in a comment on Poem iv of “The Greenest Continent”: “If one no longer believes in God (as truth), it is not possible merely to disbelieve; it becomes necessary to believe in something else. Logically, I ought to believe in essential imagination, but that has its difficulties. It is easier to believe in a thing created by the imagination. A good deal of my poetry recently has concerned an identity for that thing” (Letters 370). Perhaps it would have been clearer if Stevens had said his search was for the characteristics, property, or status of “that thing” rather than its identity, since it is difficult to imagine how “a thing created by the imagination” could have an identity. In any case the central issue in “Blue Guitar” is the status of the invented world, as the first poem makes clear:

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The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, “You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.” The man replied, “Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.” And they said then, “But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.” By “shearsman,” Stevens means a tailor, a craftsman who takes an already fabricated material and creates clothing from it by cutting and reassembling the fabric. He does not make the fabric, but finds it “ready-made” as it were. The artist does much the same thing with sensory experience, which also comes “ready-made.” There is also a similarity of posture between a tailor bent over his cloth and a guitarist bent over his guitar – as Stevens explained to his Italian translator, Renato Poggioli (Letters 783–4). The general point insisted upon in the sequence is that life is made up of the externalities of the world – “things as they are” – and our relation to them; that relation is symbolized by the guitarist and his guitar. The tune that the guitarist plays is “beyond us” because the guitar itself (symbolizing the imagination) belongs to “things as they are,” that is, to the world external to ourselves. It is “yet ourselves” because we (that is our volitional selves) can express our thoughts and emotions by means of this humanly fabricated instrument. Thus our “fictions” – guitars, music, poems, and so on – both arise in the realm of “things as they are,” and reflect or represent “things as they are” – yet not without transformation: “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.” Poem v explains that since we can no longer accept the fable of divine revelation, poetry must fill the void: “Poetry / Exceeding music must take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns.” On this point there seems to be nothing to choose between Stevens’ position and Russell’s in “The Free Man’s Worship” that we should invest human inventions with the same cathexis or emotional intensity that society

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had previously invested in religious fables. Stevens’ explanation of these lines to Hi Simons supports such an interpretation: “Here is the right paraphrase,” he wrote; “we live in a world plainly plain. Everything is as you see it. There is no other world. Poetry, then, is the only possible heaven. It must necessarily be the poetry of ourselves; its source is in our imagination (even in the chattering, etc.)” (Letters 360). Notice that implicit in this remark is the understanding that heaven is neither a place nor a state of mind, but rather a desirable state or condition – a paradise – and that human kind needs the vision of such an attractive alternate world. While it is true that “Blue Guitar” twists and turns in an arpeggio of evasiveness, I think there can be little doubt that in sum it recommends that we replace faith in a transcendent realm with a secular faith in “the only possible heaven” represented in art. I want to stress that in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” Stevens is in step with the general movement of Humanism as represented by Middleton Murry, Ramon Fernandez, Bertrand Russell, and Irving Babbitt – though he is at odds with the robust iconoclasm of J.M. Robertson and the hypocritical Catholicism of Charles Maurras. I say this despite the fact that Stevens denied a commonality of view with Humanism in the letter to Simons of 9 January 1940 cited above: “Humanism would be the natural substitute [for religion], but the more I see of humanism the less I like it” (Letters 346). Although this letter was written four years after the composition of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” there is no good reason to suppose that it does not represent his opinion at the time of composition. Despite sharing the Humanist’s conviction that traditional religious beliefs are no longer possible – a conviction that is ubiquitous in his poetry – Stevens is nonetheless dissatisfied with the Humanist solution of worshipping at the shrine his own hands have built. He seems to be stuck on the need to believe in something, as opposed to merely entertaining a fiction on pragmatic grounds. Poem xx of “Blue Guitar” expresses this need in a typically enigmatic manner: What is there in life except one’s ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life? Is it ideas that I believe? Good air, my only friend, believe, Believe would be a brother full Of love, believe would be a friend,

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Friendlier than my only friend, Good air. Poor pale, poor pale guitar ... Fortunately Stevens glossed these opaque lines for Renato Poggioli, his Italian translator: “I apostrophize the air and call it friend, my only friend. But it is only air. What I need is a true belief, a true brother, friendlier than the air. The imagination (poor pale guitar) is not that. But the air, the mere joie de vivre, may be. This stands for the search for a belief” (Letters 793. My emphasis). This need for a true belief separates Stevens from Russell and Humanists generally, whose defining characteristic is that they are content to rest with the stories we tell ourselves even though such stories can never command “true belief.” Stevens’ position can best be described as “romantic” – despite his rejection of the label. In the “The Relations between Poetry and Painting” (read at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1951) he explicitly contrasts Humanism to art: In an age in which disbelief is so profoundly prevalent ... poetry and painting, and the arts in general, are, in their measure, a compensation for what has been lost. Men feel that the imagination is the next greatest power to faith: the reigning prince. Consequently their interest in the imagination and its work is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains. So regarded, the study of the imagination and the study of reality come to appear to be purified, aggrandized, fateful. How much stature, even vatic stature, this conception gives the poet! He need not exercise this dignity in vatic works. How much authenticity, even Orphic authenticity, it gives to the painter! He need not display this authenticity in Orphic works. (Kermode, ed. 748. My emphasis) The vatic status he assigns to the imagination of artist is echt Romanticism. No other period in European history has held such a view of the poet. Certainly, classical poets pretended to be inspired by a Muse, and Milton appealed to the Paraclete to inspire him. But Stevens is not speaking of inspiration; he is speaking of discovery. When he says that the work of the imagination should be regarded “as a vital assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains,” the implication is that the work of imagination (that is, art) bears witness to something beyond the self. Later in the essay, Stevens clarifies his understanding of the vatic role of the artist:

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“Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever yield we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything” (750–1). Such a remark would occasion no difficulty if it came from the mouth of an avowed Humanist, but Stevens insists that his position is distinct from Humanism. What he seems to have in mind is a contrast between the personal and intensely felt revelations of the artistic imagination and the rational convictions with which the Humanist is content. The difference is parallel to that between the mystic and the devout church-goer. The latter does not feel any “vital assertion,” even though the church-goer believes the doctrines of religion just as truly as the ordinary Humanist believes the teachings of science, despite having no understanding of the intricacies of string theory or quantum physics. Although Stevens repeatedly attempts to discriminate his position from that of the Romantics, he just as frequently restates their belief in the power of the human imagination. However, it is true that he does not share Wordsworth’s pantheism, Coleridge’s Anglicanism, or Shelley’s Neoplatonism. The rumour of his baptism in the Roman Catholic faith near the end of his life aside, Stevens publicly maintained an agnostic (not an atheistic) posture throughout his active life. In “Two or Three Ideas,” the talk he gave at Mount Holyoke (also in1951), he reiterated the posture we have found in both “Key West” and “Blue Guitar”: “But the truth about the poet in a time of disbelief is not that he must turn evangelist. After all, he shares the disbelief of his time. He does not turn to Paris [Bergson?] or Rome for relief from the monotony of reality. He turns to himself and he denies that reality was ever monotonous except in comparison” (Opus Posthumous 265. My emphasis). Stevens always comes back to the emotional relation of the individual to the world, especially to a world deprived of divinity. In an intriguingly evasive move, he defines divinity as “the creation of the imagination at its utmost” (“Two or Three Ideas,” Opus Posthumous 266), as opposed to the more typical definitions of divinity as a creator, guarantor of meaning or of beauty, or as a sanction for ethical commandments. Divinity for Stevens is not something apart from humanity, but the product of human interaction with the world – not a projection by the mind onto the world, but an imaginative response to it.

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Such a reading of his belief is supported by Poem ix of “Blue Guitar” and his comment on it: And the color, the overcast blue Of the air, in which the blue guitar Is a form, described but difficult, And I am merely a shadow hunched Above the arrowy, still strings, The maker of a thing yet to be made; The color like a thought that grows Out of a mood, the tragic robe Of the actor, half his gesture, half His speech, the dress of his meaning, silk Sodden with his melancholy words, The weather of his stage, himself. To help Poggioli with his translation, Stevens wrote the following gloss on “the symbol of the actor”: “The imagination is not a free agent [.] It is not a faculty that functions spontaneously without references. In ix the reference is to environment: the overcast blue: the weather = the stage on which, in this instance, the imagination plays. The color of the weather is the role of the actor, which, after all, is a large part of him. The imagination depends on reality” (12 July 1953 Letters 789. My emphasis). A helpful parallel to Stevens’ notion of the poetic fiction is the hypothesis of gravity. It was the product of Newton’s brain, but it was a response to observed phenomena. He projected it onto the behaviour of planets and apples and found that it was good. We still rely on this “fiction,” even though gravity remains unexplained to this day. (It was resisted in Newton’s day because it involves action at a distance, something alien to materialist science. Einstein explained the phenomenon of the apparent attraction between bodies as a “warping” of space, avoiding the heresy of action at a distance.) Stevens sees the artist doing the same thing as Newton. The imagination is stimulated by “things as

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they are” and reformulates them according to its own principles and parameters. It therefore alters our perception and understanding of the world, an alteration which amounts – so far as we can tell – to an alteration of the world itself. Of course, unlike scientific hypotheses, poetic fictions cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed – except (as Keats would say) on the pulses. Late in his life, Stevens found philosophical support for the argument that there is an equivalence between poetic fictions and scientific hypotheses. In “A Collect of Philosophy” (the Moody Lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago on 16 November 1951), he draws attention to the hypothetical nature of scientific theories: “The first word of the philosophy of the sciences, today, is that science has no value except its effectiveness and that nothing, absolutely nothing, constitutes an assurance that the external world resembles the idea that we form of it” (Kermode, ed. 861). He cites Jean Paulhan the editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française on the same page in support of this view. Stevens was in correspondence with Paulhan in the fifties, and apparently had not previously thought of this parallel: “It comes to this that philosophers (particularly the philosophers of science) make, not discoveries but hypotheses that may be called poetic. Thus Louis de Broglie admits that progress in physics is, at the moment, in suspense because we do not have the words or the images that are essential to us. But to create illuminations, images, words, that is the very reason for being of poets” (My emphasis). The contrast between the confident – if convoluted – assertion of Stevens’ poetic doctrine in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and the tentative exploration of Eliot’s belief in Ash-Wednesday could hardly be greater. Shortly after he had written the first section of the first part, (then titled “Perch’io non Spero”), Eliot was still in a very tentative mood. He told Stead: “[I feel] as if I had crossed a very wide and deep river: whether I get much farther or not, I feel very certain that I shall not cross back, and that in itself gives one a very extraordinary sense of surrender and gain” (Letter of 15 March 1928, cited in Schuchard 1999 152). Eliot is celebrating – in the liturgical sense of enacting – an irrevocable change in his life, rather than speculating about its merits, characteristics, or consequences. “Blue Guitar,” in contrast, is an exploration of the human condition rather than a celebration of a change of life. Eliot does not seem very happy about his “new life” – in contrast to Dante in La Vita Nuova, a work Ash-Wednesday emulates. He was not much more cheerful a month later when he wrote to Stead “2 days after Easter”: “If Easter is a season of hope, it is also a season when one wants

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to be given hope ... I do not expect myself to make great progress at present, only to ‘keep my soul alive’ by prayer and regular devotions. Whether I shall get farther, I do not know ... I do not know whether my circumstances excuse my going no farther or not ... I feel that nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs” (10 April 1928, cited in Schuchard 1999 157. My emphasis). Clearly Eliot regarded his conversion as a struggle, a spiritual agon, rather than a sudden, charismatic disclosure. Ash-Wednesday enacts that struggle, which is undergone in solitude.11 “Blue Guitar,” in contrast, is a sort of dialogue – though rhetorically mostly a dramatic monologue – involving the poet and a sceptical audience. If there is to be a conversion it is the audience that might experience it, not the poet. Like St Paul, he is already confident of his belief, and only wishes to persuade others of its merit. Ash-Wednesday is almost a penitential poem; “Blue Guitar” is more like a sermon articulating Stevens’ beliefs – much like Wordsworth’s Prelude, though without the device of autobiography that Wordsworth chose. Stevens’ “faith” involves the celebration of the beauty that the artist creates through an imaginative encounter with “things as they are.” That encounter borders on the ecstatic, if we can think of ecstasy as a continuum running from the erotic ecstasies celebrated in various pagan cults and Gnostic sects through the ecstasies of the saints, and the aesthetic ecstasies celebrated by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy through various diminutions to the minor tingles of the speaker and the elders in “Peter Quince at the Clavier”: Music is feeling, then, not sound; And thus it is that what I feel, Here in this room, desiring you, Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk, Is music. It is like the strain Waked in the elders by Susanna. Of a green evening, clear and warm, She bathed in her still garden, while The red-eyed elders watching, felt The basses of their beings throb In witching chords, and their thin blood Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

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To call such “throbbings” ecstatic is perhaps too emphatic a term, but I can think of no better label for the tinglings, the raising of the hair on the back of the neck, and so forth, that the arts produce in their audience. In the last tercet of “Peter Quince” Stevens conflates sexual excitation with religious transport, supporting my claim that he regards the simple sensual pleasures as of the same kind as more aesthetic transport: Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death’s ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise. “Peter Quince” celebrates the permanence of beauty despite its evanescent instantiation in such fragile vessels as Susanna’s body, and the elders’ lechery. That Stevens describes bodily beauty and the lust it inspires as making “a constant sacrament of praise” is remote from the ascetic renunciation of Ash-Wednesday. “Blue Guitar” has little explicit celebration of beauty, concentrating instead on the relationship between the artist, the world, and the audience. Poem xviii (first published in Poetry 52, May 1937) comes closest of any in “Blue Guitar” to articulating Stevens’ sense of the ecstatic: A dream (to call it a dream) in which I can believe, in face of the object, A dream no longer a dream, a thing, Of things as they are, as the blue guitar After long strumming on certain nights Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand, But the very senses as they touch The wind-gloss. Or as daylight comes, Like light in a mirroring of cliffs, Rising upward from a sea of ex.

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It is not obvious that these lines represent an ecstatic experience, but Stevens’ gloss for Simons, (in a letter of 8 August 1940) leaves no doubt that such was his intention: ”The imagination takes us out of (Ex) reality into a pure irreality. One has this sense of irreality often in the presence of morning light on cliffs which then rise from a sea that has ceased to be real and is therefore a sea of Ex. So long as this sort of thing clearly expresses an idea or impression, it is intelligible language”12 (Letters 360). This “sense of irreality” is the kind of experience Stevens recurrently celebrates, and no doubt experienced. It is something that many of the denizens of his poetry also experience – whether dimly or intensely – from the woman in “Sunday Morning” through the youths and girls in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” and the elders in “Peter Quince” to the poet himself in Poem iii of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”: The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea ... It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end. No such transport is to be found in Ash-Wednesday. “Salutation” – now the second poem in the sequence, but the first published – begins with a startling and gnomic image of mortification: Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull. Although “Salutation” clearly invokes Dante’s Vita Nuova – both in sentiment, and in detail – the imagery of these opening lines is more reminiscent of the Inferno. The leopards consume only the body of the speaker, releasing spirit: God asks, “Shall these bones live?” but there is no answer. Instead “that which had been contained / In the bones,” speaks; asserting that because of the virtues of the Lady, it, together with the Lady, shines “with brightness.” As in Stevens’ “Notes,” the speaker is taken back to “an immaculate beginning,” but in how different a manner. Eliot’s persona has died to the world and hopes to be

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reborn in the spirit. It is the “dissembled” – that is, disembodied – spirit that speaks, and determines to turn its back on the world: And I who am here dissembled Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd. The last clause is very cryptic. By proffering his “deeds to oblivion,” Eliot appears to be renouncing the fame his poetry has brought him. Proffering his “love / To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd” is more opaque. Perhaps he is renouncing any hope of siring children. It seems no great stretch to read “posterity of the desert” to mean no posterity at all. “The fruit of the gourd” is a more problematic phrase, but might be an allusion to Book Four of Jonah. If so, its fruit would be submission to the will of God.13 The hope for redemption in Ash-Wednesday is anguished and painful – so unlike Stevens’ winging “by an unconscious will / To an immaculate end.” The bones then sing to the Lady of the Garden “where all loves end,” reinforcing the theme of renunciation that dominates the entire sequence. The marrow, “that which had been contained / In the bones,” – for some reason construed as plural – rejoice that “We shine with brightness.” Lower down, the empty bones (the body) profess themselves to be content with their abandonment by the marrow (the spirit?): Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other, Under a tree in the cool of the day, with the blessing of sand, Forgetting themselves and each other, united In the quiet of the desert. There is an odd ambivalence in the taxonomy of flesh, bones, and marrow that the poem presents. A dualism of flesh and spirit is standard for Christian thought, but the triadic set of flesh, bones, and marrow is eccentric. Since it is the marrow that speaks – it is no longer in the bones, which are said to be “already dry” – the marrow seems to represent the soul, since it has left the bones as the soul is said to leave the body on death. Eliot’s taxonomy has a precedent in St Paul, who twice speaks of the triad: spirit, soul, and body (1 Thesallonians 5:23 and Ephesians

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4:17–24). The latter occurrence certainly fits the “feeling” of “Salutation,” where Eliot is doing precisely what St Paul recommends: This I say therefore, and testify in the Lord, that ye henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind. Having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart: Who being past feeling have given themselves over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with greediness. But ye have not so learned Christ; If so be that ye have heard him, and have been taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus: That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness. (Ephesians 4:17–24. My emphasis) The Catholic Encyclopaedia cautions that this passage has led to the error of the Trichotomists, that is, bifurcating the supra-physical into soul and spirit.14 This translation obscures the heresy by the use of “mind” instead of “soul.” Of course Eliot’s trichotomy is not St Paul’s. Paul divides the soul into two parts: soul and spirit. Eliot divides body into two parts: bones and marrow.15 Perhaps Eliot was thinking in philosophical rather than theological terms, as when he compared Milton and Dryden to the metaphysical poets in his 1921 review of Grierson’s anthology of metaphysical poets by invoking a triadic view of the human psyche: “Those who object to the ‘artificiality’ of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to ‘look into our hearts and write.’ But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract” (Selected Essays 290). The heart, conventionally the seat of the emotions, is irrevocably put aside in “Salutation”: the bones perhaps represent those other aspects of corporeal sensibility, characterized in the review by the cerebral cortex (mind/soul), the nervous system (emotion/feeling), and the digestive tract (body/appetite). The soul is independent of all aspects of corporeality, but perhaps the Pauline “spirit” is not. Whatever the

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ultimate meaning of Eliot’s cryptic lines might be, they are certainly antipathetic to the sentiment expressed in “Peter Quince”: Beauty is momentary in the mind – The fitful tracing of a portal; But in the flesh it is immortal. “Salutation” was even more bleak in its first version than it is as revised for Part ii of the completed poem. In the litany Eliot had the line “Spattered and worshipped” after “Rose of forgetfulness.” It is difficult to be certain what he had in mind, but the line suggests disapproval of the prominence that Catholic Christianity has given to the Blessed Virgin – though, technically, she is not “worshipped” by Catholics. The same negativity is evinced by another suppressed line, “With worm eaten petals,” which follows “The single Rose” – a designation of the Virgin.16 Finally, Eliot suppressed two lines following “Grace to the Mother”: “For the end of remembering / End of forgetting.” These lines suggest that he longs for a kind of Buddhistic annihilation in “the Garden / Where all love ends.” By the time he came to publish the sequence as a whole, Eliot seems to have mellowed somewhat, and perhaps also to have become less anxious for oblivion. The sense of an irrevocable “turn” or decision in Ash-Wednesday is reinforced by the second published poem, “Perch’io non spero,” now the first poem in the sequence. It rings changes on the line from Cavalcanti’s “Ballata”– “Because I do not hope to turn” – even though the Italian phrase has been suppressed: Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things. The theme is continued in Part iii, which had two alternative titles – both suppressed in the final version: “Som de l’Escalina” and “Jausen lo Jorn.” Both are Provençal phrases taken from Arnaut Daniel’s speech to Dante in Purgatorio xxvi. Dante is nearing the entrance to Heaven. The circle of Purgatory in question is one where souls purge themselves of sexual sins; bisexualism is specifically mentioned (“Nostro peccato fu ermafradito” l. 82).

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Ieu sui Arnaud, que plor e vau cantan; consiros vei la passada folor, ev vei jausen lo joi qu’esper, deman. (Purgatorio xxvi ll. 142–4) [I am Arnaud, who weep and sing as I go. I see with grief past follies and see, rejoicing, the day I hope for before me.] This particular scene had a strong fascination for Eliot. He had taken the title for his 1920 collection of essays, Ara vos Prec, from the next line in the same passage: “Ara vos prec, per aquela valor Que vos guida al som de l’escalina, sovegna vos a temps de ma dolor.” Poi s’ascose nel fuoco che gli affiina. (ll. 145–8) [And so I pray you, by that virtue which leads you to the topmost of the stair – remember my pain from time to time.’ Then he dove back into the fire which refines them.] Part iii articulates Eliot’s tortured rejection of the pleasures of the flesh, ending with the refrain, “Lord I am not worthy.” These are the words spoken by the faithful before receiving communion, acknowledging that although we are all in a state of sin, Christ’s sacrifice has nonetheless redeemed us. The entire phrase is, “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof; speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.” They are the words of the centurion at Capernaum reported by Matthew, asking Christ to cure his servant of an illness. The point of the parable is that the Roman soldier renounced his superior status with respect to a Hebrew subject (Matthew 8. 8). The liturgy substitutes “soul” for “servant.” Since Eliot places himself as in the position of Arnaud rather than that of Dante, he is portrayed as still susceptible to the pleasures of the flesh, though desirous of rising above them. It would of course scarcely be possible for Eliot to imitate Dante’s ascent into Heaven in the twentieth century.17 The parallel aspiration for Eliot – or any believer – would be unquestioned faith, something like the conviction of a born-again or charismatic Christian. Such a state could be expressed poetically, but it is available only to a charismatic

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Christian, and Eliot was certainly not that. His understanding of belief is totally antipathetic to charismatic practices, as his response, contemporary with his baptism, to I.A. Richard’s assertion that The Waste Land expressed the contemporary sense of desolation clearly indicates: “A ‘sense of desolation,’ etc. (if it is there) is not a separation from belief; it is nothing so pleasant. In fact, doubt, uncertainty, futility, etc., would seem to me to prove anything except this agreeable partition; for doubt and uncertainty are merely a variety of belief ”(“A Note on Poetry and Belief”16. My emphasis).18 Eliot goes on in the note (in a passage I have cited earlier) to discuss the complexity of the very notion of belief, and also on its inescapability, concluding: “We await, in fact (as Mr. Richards is awaiting the future poet), the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something. For those of us who are higher than the mob, and lower than the man of inspiration, there is always doubt; and in doubt we are living parasitically (which is better than not living at all) on the minds of the men of genius of the past who have believed something” (17. My emphasis). In this remark, Eliot was not far from the position on belief that Stevens articulates in “Blue Guitar” and elsewhere. Although the note was published just six months prior to his baptism, Eliot insisted on doubt, rather than belief. The Gospels are careful to insist in an egalitarian spirit – as are both Catholic and most Protestant theologies – that belief comes from divine grace, rather than from the superior wisdom of the believer. For Trinitarian Christians, the Holy Ghost, or Paraclete, is assigned the task of distributing such grace. Unitarians, of course, abolish the Paraclete, and with Him, divine grace. Perhaps it is a residue of his Unitarian upbringing that prevents Eliot from seeking such grace, and speaking instead of the witness of “the men of genius of the past who have believed something.”19 Eliot, then, remains a “thinking” believer rather than a charismatic one, and hence remains within the horizon of doubt. In “Blue Guitar” Stevens also longs for belief. Although he calls the adequacy of ideas into question (implicitly rejecting Eliot’s notion that belief requires genius) he does not invoke divine grace, relying on his own resources, as in the lines cited above from Poem xx: “What is there in life except one’s ideas, / Good air, good friend, what is there in life.” He characterizes air as “joie de vivre” suggesting that it stands synecdochically for the world of things as they are and the pleasure one takes in it, a supposition corroborated by Poem xxi:

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A substitute for all the gods: This self, not that gold self aloft, Alone, one’s shadow magnified,20 Lord of the body, looking down, As now and called most high, The shadow of Chocorua In an immenser heaven, aloft, Alone, lord of the land and lord Of the men that live in the land, high lord. One’s self and the mountains of one’s land, Without shadows, without magnificence, The flesh, the bone, the dirt, the stone. Chocorua is a mountain in New Hampshire, one of “the mountains of one’s land.” The last line recalls the triad of flesh, bones, and spirit in Ash-Wednesday ii, but here it is a quaternary: flesh, bone, dirt, stone. The first two belong to the human or animal, the second pair, to the inanimate. The point would seem to be that there is no Cartesian gulf between mind and body, spirit and flesh, but a continuum from inanimate through animate to conscious life. One is tempted to invoke Teilhard de Chardin’s schema of geosphere, biosphere, and noösphere with God beyond all three. When Eliot speaks of “the minds of the men of genius of the past,” he seems to be thinking in terms of the romantic genius, the exceptional individual who can see into the heart of things, who possesses a special sensitivity, as opposed to the analytic skill and penetration characteristic of the scientific “genius.” If so, he and Stevens are on the same page on this point, for in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet” Stevens explicitly endorses the romantic genius (even though he is anxious elsewhere to distinguish his views from Romanticism21): “The genius, because of abnormal ranges of his sensibility, not only accumulates experiences with greater rapidity, but accumulates experiences and qualities of experience accessible only on the extreme ranges of sensibility” (Kermode, ed. 684). This remark is scarcely distinguishable

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from Wordsworth’s characterization of the poet in the 1801 Preface to Lyrical Ballads as “a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm, and tenderness” (Poetical Works 737). If we take Eliot’s remark, “we await, in fact ... the great genius who shall triumphantly succeed in believing something,” at face value, and remember that it was made some six months prior to his conversion, it is reasonable to suppose that such sentiments contributed to his conversion. Given that he shortly thereafter succeeded in believing in Anglican Christianity, such a supposition tempts one to think that “the great genius” Eliot had in mind was himself. But the tone of AshWednesday belies such a thought. There is nothing triumphant about Ash-Wednesday. Indeed, it is characterized by hesitation, remorse, and guilt, and is primarily backward – rather than forward – looking, as the opening line of both Part i (“Because I do not hope to turn again,”) and Part vi (“Although I do not hope to turn again,”) emphatically insist. The only important exception to this tortured nostalgia is Part iv. In the draft version it was given another Dantescan title, “Vestita di Color di Fiamma” (“Robed in the Colour of Flame”). This is Dante’s description of Beatrice as she first appears to him near the end of the Purgatorio, after Dante has met Matilda in the earthly paradise: sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva donna m’apparve, sott verde manto vestita di color di fiamma viva. (Purgatorio xxx 31–3) [girt with olive over a white veil a lady appeared to me, under a green mantle robed with the colour of living flame.] Her appearance is followed by a little scolding of Dante, leading to his confession in canto xxxi: Piangendo dissi: “Le presenti cose col falso lor piacer volser miei passi, tosto che ‘l vostro viso si nascose.” (Purgatorio xxxi ll.34–6) [Weeping, I said: “Present things

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with their false pleasure turned my steps as soon as your face was hid.”] These allusions, however, do not fit the mood and tone of Part iv of Ash-Wednesday, which is more like canto xxviii of Purgatorio, where Dante encounters Matilda in the Earthly Paradise, than it is like the penitential canto xxxi. Eliot recalls the pastoral scene glimpsed through the “slotted window” in Ash-Wednesday iii, although the current scene is dominated by females, instead of the Satyr-like “broadbacked figure drest in blue and green” who “enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.” In Part iv the pagan paradise is modified – somewhat awkwardly and programmatically – into a Christian world, with a silent female figure suggestive of the Virgin Mary, who stands modestly “behind the garden god”: The silent sister veiled in white and blue Between the yews, behind the garden god, Whose flute is breathless, bent her head and signed but spoke no word But the fountain sprang up and the bird sang down Redeem the time, redeem the dream The token of the word unheard, unspoken. Eliot returns to a penitential mood in the last two poems. The suppressed title for Part v is “La Sua voluntade è nostra pace” (His Will is Our Peace”), taken from Paradiso iii 85. It is the act of submission to the will of God required of every Christian believer. Part v echoes the well-known opening of the Gospel according to St John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But Part v is dominated by images of darkness, silence and deserts unrelieved by the Word: Where shall the word be found, where will the word Resound? Not here, there is not enough silence Not on the sea or on the islands, not On the mainland, in the desert or the rain land, For those who walk in darkness Both in the day time and in the night time

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The right time and the right place are not here No place of grace for those who avoid the face No time to rejoice for those who walk among noise and deny the voice. (11–19) Here the poem is less personal than elsewhere, and expresses distress at the world’s failure to hear and heed the Word, rather than expressing the mixture of anxiety and hope of the penitent Eliot. Penitent submission dominates the later sections – an attitude and posture not to be found in Stevens’ more pagan and immanentist imagination. Part vi, the last part, was never given a title. It was first published in 1930 and was probably written almost two years after Part i (first published in the spring of 1928). As already noted, Part vi begins with a reminiscence of the opening line of Part i: “Because I do not hope to turn again.” But Eliot changes the conjunction from one indicating a causal relation to one indicating a subjunctive relation: “Although I do not hope to turn again.” The difference is significant. Now the choice of faith is no longer represented as irrevocable but as freely chosen. Even though the speaker is no closer to the journey’s end than at the beginning of the sequence, the way is certain: Wavering between the profit and the loss In this brief transit where the dreams cross ... This is the time of tension between dying and birth The place of solitude where three dreams cross .... Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden, Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still Even among these rocks, Our peace in His will. (ll. 4–5, 20–1, 25–30) Ash-Wednesday highlights two aspects of Eliot’s piety: his strong sense of sin, transgression, and guilt arising from an ascetic distaste for pleasures of the flesh and a longing for deliverance from these worldly

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entanglements. These ascetic attitudes are characteristic of the Christian mystic – although, as we have seen, Eliot does not permit a blurring of the lines between prayer and poetry on the lines proposed by Abbé Bremond. And we have seen him bristle at a reviewer’s characterization of Ash-Wednesday as a devotional poem, characterizing it instead as “the experience of man in search of God.” For Eliot the world and its temptations block the road to God. For Stevens the world is a blank slate on which the human imagination is free to inscribe any image it pleases, as he has his auditors explain in Poem xxvi: Do not speak to us of the greatness of poetry, Of the torches wisping in the underground, Of the structure of vaults upon a point of light. There are no shadows in our sun, Day is desire and night is sleep. There are no shadows anywhere. The earth, for us, is flat and bare. There are no shadows. Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns, Ourselves in poetry must take their place, Even in the chattering of your guitar. The interlocutors appear to contradict themselves in that they caution the guitar player against praising poetic fictions, but conclude nonetheless – in a characteristic Stevensian posture – that poetry “must take the place of empty heaven.” The paraphrase cited above that Stevens gave Hi Simons ignores this apparent contradiction. The phrase, “torches wisping in the underground” is a little idiosyncratic for Stevens. He does not speak of torches elsewhere in his poetry – though he does speak of the underworld. In “Sunday Morning,” where the woman is denied “the golden underground ... where spirits gat them home,” the underworld is synecdochic of worn out imaginings. To get a sense of Stevens’ notion of the afterlife – toward which Eliot so earnestly strives in Ash-Wednesday – we must turn to Stevens’ two

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elegies: “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” and “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.” “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” as Stevens told Barbara Church, is a meditation on death, following the death of her husband and his friend, Henry Church (on Good Friday, 4 April 1947): “The October number of Horizon is to be an American number. I expect to have a poem in it: ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus.’ This was written in the frame of mind that followed Mr. Church’s death. While it is not personal, I had thought of inscribing it somehow, below the title, as, for example, Goodbye H.C., but it was hardly written before I received Horizon’s letter and as it would not have been easy to talk to you about it at the time, I omitted the inscription” (5 September 1947. Letters 566) Harold Bloom has found “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” to be “not wholly available to even the most prolonged and loving of readings” and “the least accessible of Stevens’ major poems” (Bloom, Wallace Stevens 292). But despite his puzzlement, I think we can find in it some illumination of Stevens’ thoughts about death.22 In this poem he re-imagines the underworld, providing it with candles, though not torches, and peopling it with three figures, two of whom are brothers: “sleep,” and “peace after death”: And a third form, she that says Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there, To those that cannot say good-by themselves. This last, female, figure is surely the surviving bereaved – in Henry Church’s case, his wife, Barbara. The figure is given the properties of a mourner: she that in the syllable between life And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice, Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as My memory ... The continuation, “is the mother of us all, / The earthly mother and the mother of / The dead,” prompted Bloom to identify this figure as “The Mother” – presumably thinking of the Oedipal mother, for he later speaks of “the family romance,” a Freudian cliché (Bloom 282 and 292). He is followed in this idiosyncrasy by most subsequent commentaries. Although she is enfolded into the archetypal female by these

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lines, the reference is surely to Barbara Church. It is excessive to completely occlude the grieving wife as all commentaries I have seen do. While Eliot – by way of Dante – does, as it were, speak of “torches wisping in the underground,” Stevens’ underworld is peopled by echoes or remembrances of the world. He reminds us that “one day / A man walked living among the forms of thought,” but now in death “a likeness of the earth, / That by resemblance twanged him through and through, / Releasing an abysmal melody ... A dazzle of remembrance and of sight.” The sentiment expressed here is much the same as that of “Sunday Morning” written more than thirty years earlier: “Alas, that they should wear our colors there, / The silken weavings of our afternoons, / And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!” Stevens’ afterlife is rather closer to the annihilation of the self in the Underworld than it is to the vision of Beatrice and Paradise that Eliot invokes. Stevens’ deceased is imagined as observing Sleep, the brother of Peace: There he saw well the foldings in the height Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less, Like many robings, as moving masses are We are told that the manifestation of Sleep “Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect, / A diamond jubilance beyond the fire, / That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye.” Having observed this negative or Buddhistic apotheosis, the deceased “Then ... breathed deeply the deep atmosphere / Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air.” These lines read like an attempt to articulate the featureless nirvana that lies beyond the grave – though in Stevens’ case the deceased retains consciousness, but a consciousness of nothing. Having achieved this species of transport – which is more like a Swedenborgian vastation than a Christian beatific vision – the deceased must now confront Peace, the brother of Sleep. This confrontation implies a persistent consciousness in the deceased, and a memory of the world he has left: There peace, the godolphin23 and fellow, estranged, estranged, Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves, The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights, Stood flourishing the world.

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I can only guess that by “shither-shade” Stevens has in mind the shifting, partial shade offered by a deciduous tree such as a maple or plane tree – a reading supported by the preceding phrase, “beam of leaves.” His characterization of peace as the prince of “shither-shade and tinsel lights,” who stands “flourishing the world” suggests a sort of domesticated Anima Mundi or Gnostic Adam Kadmon, or perhaps the Green Man of northern mythology, a supposition supported by the continuation: Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind, Damasked in the originals of green, A thousand begettings of the broken bold.24 This is that figure stationed at our end, Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed Out of our lives to keep us in our death, To watch us in the summer of Cyclops Underground, a king as candle by our beds In a robe that is our glory as he guards. (Collected Poems 434–5) Peace, then, is not just the oblivion that awaits us at death but is also the traces that our life has left in the world: “Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed / Out of our lives to keep us in our death.” The sentiment is not unlike that of the closing lines of “The Emperor of Ice Cream”: Take from the dresser of deal. Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream. The sheet embroidered by the dead woman is a more modest version of “the figure stationed at our end” that is “formed / out of our lives to keep us in our death.” Instead of being the source for, or model of, the multifarious manifestations of the mutable world, like the Anima Mundi, Adam Kadmon

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or the Green Man, Peace is the product of the human imagination, a composite of all the imaginings of mankind. And notice that Stevens once again employs the metaphor of a worked fabric, like the sheet on which the dead woman “embroidered fantails once,” and recalling the shearsman or tailor of “Blue Guitar”: Generations of the imagination piled In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread, In the weaving round the wonder of its need, And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet By which to spell out holy doom and end, A bee for the remembering of happiness. This particular turn is of considerable interest, for it modulates the “oceanic” or immanentist tendency that is never too far away from Stevens’ formulations – as it was not for the nineteenth-century Boston mandarins, most particularly Emerson. The “bee for the remembering of happiness” invokes the sort of collective endeavour common in rural New England known as a “bee” – as in a quilting “bee” or a barn-raising “bee.”25 In such collective endeavours, one does not lose one’s individuality, but at the same time that individuality is submerged in a joint endeavour that will fully occlude individual contributions. It strikes me as a wonderful analogy for the collective nature of culture and civilization, of belief and ideals. It is so much more heimlich than Eliot’s more elitist – though related – notion of tradition articulated in “Tradition and Individual Talent”: “We shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his [the poet’s] work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.” In Eliot’s version the co-operative nature of an individual’s imagination is a kind of co-optation of all that went before him. The Eliotic heir of tradition stands on the shoulders of his predecessors, or to their side, in a sort of splendid renovation of what went before. Both men see the individual as embedded in a collective endeavour, but Stevens’ analogy of the quilting bee leaves the individual entirely occluded, while Eliot’s heir of tradition stands out from his predecessors. The next section describes the third, female, form as “she that says good-bye.” Since “she” stands “on the edges of oblivion,” it is plausible to identify this figure (as I did above) with the bereaved wife. She is portrayed as a sort of anti-Beatrice in that she remains alive, while her

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beloved is deceased, whereas in the Commedia, Beatrice is deceased and Dante is alive. All the same, like Beatrice, she remains a potent presence in the underworld where she “stood tall in self not symbol, quick / And potent, an influence felt instead of seen.” Stevens concludes with the declaration: “This is the mythology of modern death / ... The mind, among the creatures that it makes, / The people, those by which it lives and dies.” In sum, then, Stevens self-consciously departs from standard literary depictions of the world after death – though not without allusions to, and remembrances of, them. Eliot, in contrast, co-opts the Dantescan account of the afterlife to meet his own very different needs. It would be nugatory to assess one approach as superior to the other, but it is nonetheless worth discriminating between them. Following Bloom, the tendency in recent assessments of “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” is to accommodate Stevens’ “modern mythology” to antique and traditional mythologies (see especially Carroll 212–36). It is, of course, virtually impossible entirely to avoid traditional features. The human mind is not that allotropic. In any case, if Stevens had succeeded in being totally original, we could not understand him. “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” stays even further away from the Underworld. It was written for George Santayana, who had encouraged Stevens’ poetic ambitions when Stevens was a young undergraduate at Harvard, but with whom he had not had any relations since. It was published in the autumn 1952 issue of the Hudson Review (one of “Eight Poems”), and was written some time before Santayana’s death on 26 September 1952.26 When Stevens expressed his sorrow at Santayana’s death in a letter to Barbara Church on 29 September, however, he made no mention of the poem: “I grieve to hear of the death of George Santayana in Rome. I knew him well, in Cambridge, when he often asked me to come to see him. This was before he definitely decided not to be a poet. It is difficult for a man whose whole life is thought to continue as a poet. The reason (like the law, which is only a form of the reason) is a jealous mistress. He seems to have gone to his rest at the convent, in which he died, in his sixties [sic], probably gave them all he had asked them to keep him, body and soul (Letters 761–2). It is odd that Stevens would have thought the eighty-five-year-old Santayana was actually younger than his own seventy-three years. Perhaps he was in denial about his own age. Whereas with “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” Stevens tried to imagine the experience of death rather than the nature of the Afterworld, in

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this poem he imagines a man on the margin between life and death. Although Santayana, like Stevens, was an agnostic, Stevens exploits the fact that he resided for the last decade of his life in a convalescent home in Rome run by the Blue Nuns (not a convent). He imagines Santayana as “on the threshold of Heaven,” but instead of gazing upward toward heaven, he is looking back to “the figures in the street” who “Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement / Of men growing small in the distances of space, / Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound.” This “vision” is gnomically characterized as an “Unintelligible absolution and an end –.” So, as with Henry Church, the deceased leaves this earth with regret – or at least with nostalgia, although Stevens now adds the notion of absolution, that is, forgiveness – but for what it is not clear. The poem returns constantly to the mundane circumstances – analogous to the “dresser of deal” in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” – which form the context in which the dying Santayana finds himself: “The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns, / The candle as it evades the sight.” And, surprisingly, he declares that “these are / The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome / A shape within the ancient circles of shapes.” The “shape of Rome” cannot be taken as just the physical city, but must also be the institution of the Catholic Church, which – in the form of the nuns – presides over Santayana’s death, for the poem continues: And these beneath the shadow of a shape In a confusion on bed and books, a portent On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns, A light on the candle tearing against the wick To join a hovering excellence, to escape From fire and be part only of that of which Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible. But still, the poem refuses to look, except metaphorically, beyond the mundane and quotidian: the candle light, “moving transparence of the nuns,” and a “hovering excellence” symbolize “the celestial possible” – all surrounding the “shadow of a shape” of the dying – not dead – philosopher. Since he was still alive at the time of writing, Santayana is imagined as being at death’s door but not yet having passed through:

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Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness, In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive Yet living in two worlds, impenitent As to one, and, as to one, most penitent, Impatient for the grandeur that you need In so much misery; It is presumably this world about which Santayana is said to be impenitent. But he is penitent about the other world, and hence in need of that “unintelligible absolution.” It seems that it is not sin and transgression that are at issue, but the failure of vision to imagine “the grandeur” that we all need when mired “in so much misery.” Nonetheless, we must find that grandeur in the “misery” that flesh is heir to: and yet finding it Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin, Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead, As in the last drop of the deepest blood, As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen, Even as the blood of an empire, it might be, For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome. The implication is that we are all “citizens of heaven,” even though the young and healthy are less aware of that status than the dying – or than poets. Santayana is said to speak “poverty’s speech,” that is, “the profound poetry of the poor and of the dead.” But in fact, he does not speak; surroundings do – the room and the city outside: The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered. The life of the city never lets go, nor do you Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room. Its domes are the architecture of your bed. These mundane sounds and sights provide the “total grandeur” that heaven would provide if there were such a place or state. Instead of Santayana being transported to another place, the place in which he is dying is transformed by the “inquisitor of structures”:

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It is a kind of total grandeur at the end, With every visible thing enlarged and yet No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns, The immensest theatre, the pillared porch, The book and candle27 in your ambered room, Total grandeur of a total edifice, Chosen by an inquisitor of structures For himself. Stevens, too, stops short of death’s door in the poem: For himself. He stops upon this threshold, As if the design of all his words takes form And frame from thinking and is realized. Ash-Wednesday, of course, is about conversion, not death. Nonetheless, Eliot represents his conversion as the renunciation of life, of any hope of joy or pleasure, as if on his deathbed: “In this brief transit where the dreams cross / The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying.” There is no gesture toward the rebirth of Easter that another might have invoked as an entry into a brave new world given meaning by his newfound faith. Instead Eliot’s poem concentrates on the difficulty and pain of the route he has chosen – much as in the contemporaneous “Note on Poetry and Belief” cited above. Indeed, Easter seems absent from Eliot’s Christianity. He seldom invokes it in his prose, and has no poetry explicitly concerned with Christ’s resurrection. The closest he comes is the allusion to Christ’s appearance to the apostles on the road to Emmaus in The Waste Land. In “Little Gidding,” where one might expect an allusion to the Resurrection, we have Pentecost instead – the manifestation of the Holy Ghost seven weeks after the Resurrection. Eliot’s only prose reference to the Resurrection that I have found emphasizes the failure of Christ’s redemption of mankind to alter the human condition, rather than its miraculous transformation of the world that Christians celebrate at Easter: “I think also of the words of Pascal, to be recalled even, and perhaps especially, on the day of the Resurrection: ‘The Christ will be in agony even to the end of the world.’ For sin and evil-doing we cannot abolish; but we can surely labour towards a social justice in this world which will prepare more souls to

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share not only here but in the Resurrection” (“Building up the Christian World” 502). His letter to his confessor, Stead, two days after Easter (10 April 1928) just as he published “Perch’ io non spero,” similarly lacks any sense of celebration: “If Easter is a season of hope, it is also a season when one wants to be given hope ... I do not expect myself to make great progress at present, only to ‘keep my soul alive’ by prayer and regular devotions. Whether I shall get farther, I do not know ... I do not know whether my circumstances excuse my going no farther or not ... I feel than nothing could be too ascetic, too violent, for my own needs” (cited in Kojecky 157). While, even as a Christian, Eliot skirts around Easter and the Resurrection, Stevens is positively dismissive of this central Christian festival. As a still single young lawyer in New York, he mused on Easter in his Journal entry for 30 April 1905. He had been home in Reading for Easter, the previous Sunday – mostly in order to see his fiancée, and future wife, Elsie Moll. On the following Sunday he tells his diary that he feels “a loathing (large + vague!), for things as they are; and this is the result of a pretty thorough disillusionment.” Recalling the Easter service of the previous week, he registers a profound disconnect from the celebration of Easter: “Last Sunday, at home, I took communion. It was from the worn, the sentimental, the diseased, the priggish and the ignorant that ‘Gloria in excelsis!’ came” (Letters 82). Eleven years later, then on the road as a lawyer for the Hartford Indemnity Company, he wrote to Elsie from Miami on Easter Sunday. On this occasion he irreverently contrasted pagan celebrations of spring with the austere Christian rite – although he refrains from the stark contrast between the Christian focus on Christ’s death and the erotic pagan rites of spring: “There is nothing more inane than an Easter carol. It is a religious perversion of the activity of spring in our blood. Why a man who wants to roll around on the grass should be asked to dress as magnificently as possible and listen to a choir is inexplicable except from the flagellant point of view” (Letters 193). Admittedly, Stevens says nothing about the doctrine of the Resurrection, but it seems fair to infer that he found little to admire in it, a supposition supported by “Sunday Morning,” published between the journal entry and the letter (Poetry 1915). There, Stevens unequivocally dismisses the Resurrection, having a voice declare: “The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” And he does invoke in the poem erotic pagan rites, only lightly suggested in the letter to Elsie: “Supple and turbulent, a ring of men /

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Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn / Their boisterous devotion to the sun.” He strikes much the same attitude in “A High-Toned Christian Woman” (1922): “Thus, our bawdiness, / Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, / Is equally converted into palms, / Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm, / Madame, we are where we began.” While Stevens’ rejection of the Resurrection is hardly surprising, it is odd that Eliot should be so cautious about this central Christian dogma – especially since he had no such hesitation about the doctrine of Incarnation. It is surely just as scandalous to the modern sensibility as Resurrection, but it is unequivocally endorsed in “Dry Salvages” v : The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered, and reconciled, [.] In the nearly contemporaneous (1931) introduction to the Everyman edition of the Pensées of Pascal, Eliot explains the necessity of that doctrine for him. “The Christian thinker,” he wrote, “finds the world to be so and so ... and ... by what Newman calls ‘powerful and concurrent’ reasons, he finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse: for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to ‘preserve values’” (Selected Essay 408). So for Eliot, the doctrine of the incarnation – that is, that Christ redeemed the world by entering it – is central to his faith. If further testimony is needed, one can point to the series of Ariel poems celebrating the Incarnation. There are no Easter poems in the Eliot canon – perhaps, as I argued earlier – because he sees mankind as still in the Time Between Christ’s death and his Return. The doctrine of the Resurrection – asserting as it does that the world is redeemed – offends common sense, as well as scientific reason, in the light of the clearly unredeemed state of mankind. Stevens was attracted to the myth of the life of Jesus, but it seems he never regarded it as anything but a myth – at least once he became an adult. In a letter of May 1909 to Elsie, he reported on the mood prompted by a visit to St John’s Chapel in New York and his reading of a

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life of Jesus “last night at the Library.” He does not say which one, but a likely candidate is Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, which treats Christ as a man, rather than a divine incarnation and debunks the miracles attributed to Him.28 In any event, the book he read prompted Stevens to visit the chapel “to see what symbols of that life appeared.” He was disappointed to find only a gold cross, and compares this bareness unfavourably with medieval churches “built by men who felt the wonder of the life and death of Jesus – temples full of sacred images, full of the air of love and holiness – tabernacles hallowed by worship that sprang from the noble depth of men familiar with Gethsemane, familiar with Jerusalem.” He attributes the decline of the church to this loss. Still musing of Christ and Christianity, he returns to the life of Jesus he had been reading in the library. He says: “[It] makes one distinguish the separate ideal of God. Before to-day I do not think I have ever realized that God was distinct from Jesus. It enlarges the matter almost beyond comprehension. People doubt the existence of Jesus – at least, they doubt incidents of his life, such as, say, the Ascension into Heaven after his death. But I do not understand that they deny God. I think everyone admits that in some form or other. – The thought makes the world sweeter – even if God be no more than the mystery of Life” (Letters 139–40. My emphasis). Although Stevens does not mentions the Resurrection as one of the doubtful incidents in the life of Christ, he is clearly registering an important moment in his spiritual life. He has come to realize that renouncing Christianity – which he had apparently done some years earlier – does not require one to renounce God, “even if God be no more than the mystery of Life.” The key word is “mystery.” Although in 1909 he could be reasonably confident that most of Western culture’s traditional beliefs were false, he could not be confident that there were not truths still to be discovered. Those “undiscovered truths” Stevens is content to call “mysteries,” but that is not a term that he uses frequently. It is their contrary, “fictions” that preoccupy him, and sustain him above the “dumbfoundering abyss.” Eliot’s view is very different. Quite apart from the question of his own beliefs, Eliot is of the opinion that Western civilization is so thoroughly imbued with Christian values that it could not survive their extinction. Toward the end of the Second World War, he attempted to articulate his views on culture and civilization in Notes Toward a Definition of Culture. Those “notes” were written over a period of several years, the first components appearing in January and February of 1943, and the latest

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in October 1945 – all in the New English Review. He represents them as his effort to define “culture.” Interestingly, he still sees European culture in a state of decay, much as Julian Benda had done in 1914: “We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were fifty years ago” (19). Eliot’s declared purpose was to articulate the relation between culture and religion, but Eliot feared that the relationship is so subtle as to defy comprehension: “The way of looking at culture and religion which I have been trying to adumbrate is so difficult that I am not sure I grasp it myself except in flashes, or that I comprehend all its implications” (30). Of course, it is not difficult for most observers, who would agree with Matthew Arnold that religion is an aspect of culture and no more – a view Eliot scornfully rejects as “facile” (28). But he admits that the “sort of identity of religion and culture which we observe amongst peoples of very low development” is not possible in advanced civilizations – not only because of the sophistication of such civilized people, but also because a “higher religion is one which is much more difficult to believe”(67).29 In a talk broadcast on German radio in 1948, which he appended to the New English Weekly articles in Notes, he stated his position more bluntly, asserting that he did “not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith ... If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made” (122). Although all of these remarks were made during and shortly after the most destructive war in human history, which came close to destroying what Eliot regarded as Western civilization, he made no direct reference to the war. Perhaps having in mind that his German audience had survived a regime that could be seen as having jettisoned Western civilization, he repeated the point at the end of his talk: “The Western world has its unity in this heritage, in Christianity and in the ancient civilisations of Greece, Rome and Israel, from which, owing to two thousand years of Christianity, we trace our descent ... If we dissipate or throw away our common patrimony of culture, then all the organisation and planning of the most ingenious minds will not help us, or bring us closer together” (123). Eliot returned obsessively to the role religion and poetry must play in the life of society – a role which he believed was essential to preserve

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civilized life. Stevens – perhaps in part because he lived in the safe redoubt of North America – insofar as he was a poet, was unconcerned with the life of society. His task is to sing, and in singing to replace the vacuum left by the loss of belief in the fables that created European civilization: “The theory of poetry is the life of poetry. Christianity is an exhausted culture” (“Adagio” Opus Posthumous 202).

Conclusion

I was initially prompted to undertake this comparative study of Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot by the fact that two men of such similar background, and of comparable achievement in the field of letters, had avoided any sort of relationship, and even much comment on the work and accomplishments of one another. Given the considerable fame of both men, the avoidance had to be deliberate, and if deliberate, it must have had a discoverable motivation. The motivation I found was their contrasting resolutions of the dilemma of the modern: how to write poetry after the “death of God.” As Stevens put it in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”: “The death of one god is the death of all.” In that poem – as in so many others – Stevens articulated his resolution of the dilemma. In place of God, he offered the poet’s recurrent recreation of the “first idea”: The poem refreshes life so that we share, For a moment, the first idea . .. It satisfies Belief in an immaculate beginning And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, To an immaculate end. We move between these points: (Stevens’ suspension points iii ll. 43–7) Here, as elsewhere, Stevens insisted that the “first idea was not our own”(iv l. 64); it belongs to the world, the cosmos in which we are embedded:

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From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days. We are the mimics. (iv ll. 76–9) The last three sections of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” introduce MacCullough, “major man,” as the avatar of a non-existent god, but nonetheless more than mere individual man. His explanation to Hi Simons is perhaps more perspicuous than the poem itself. In any case it nicely sums up his disaffection with Humanism: “The gist of this poem is that the MacCullough is MacCullough; MacCullough is any name, any man. The trouble with humanism is that man as God remains man, but there is an extension of man, the leaner being, in fiction, a possibly more than human human, a composite human. The act of recognizing him is the act of this leaner being moving in on us” (12 January 1943 433–6). There is no question but that Stevens twists himself into knots in an effort to retain the sense of sanctity, the very bedrock of religion, while at the same time abandoning belief in the transcendent. His detractors dismiss those contortions as either genuine confusion or a sort of rodomontade – professing profundity where only confusion exists. As noted in the introduction, more recent commentary has praised that apparent confusion as a celebration of the “uncanny,” that is to say of that aspect of human cognitive activity that is free of the constraints of “logocentrism.” (Non-logocentric discourse is not constrained by such troublesome rules as the law of non-contradiction.) I have shown that Stevens addressed the dilemma represented by the death of God not only passionately but also intelligently. His resolution – subtle, intricate, and “difficult” as it is – is compatible with the mainstream philosophical tradition in the West and not at all compatible with the so-called “Continental” tradition of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger to which Derrida attached himself. The mainstream tradition – C.S. Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are prominent exponents – like Stevens, concedes that human accounts of the way the world is, and the way it works, are “fictions” in the sense that they are human creations. But at the same time, it holds that those fictions have truth value – albeit only approximate, and always open to revision.

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Of course, Stevens’ poetry made no pretense of providing belief system on the analogy of either quantum physics, or the New Age worship of Gea. He was unlike William Blake, W.B. Yeats, or James Merrill in that he did not offer his readers a belief. Instead he celebrated the universal human capacity for belief. The scholarly community has found that posture difficult to accept. It has been much happier with the postmodern faith that play is all that the arts – or, indeed, science – can supply; hence no pretense of sense or wisdom is necessary. On such a view it is an error to attempt to understand a poem; the proper response to an artwork is to celebrate its “uncanniness,” that is to say, its incomprehensibility. Clearly Stevens, who devoted so much effort to explaining his poetry, would not have been happy with such hermeneutic anarchism. Stevens’ avoidance of alternative belief systems was a deliberate and carefully considered response to the death of God. Like Eliot he rejected the dominant alternative belief systems of his day – Humanism and Marxism. Since Marxism is deterministic and Humanism assumes that humans enjoy intellectual and behavioural autonomy, these two belief systems are imperfectly compatible. Nonetheless, they are both atheistic, and many intellectuals managed to embrace both at the same time. Capitalism and atheistic Humanism are more compatible, and in combination might be regarded as the dominant ideology in Western democracies. However, unlike Capitalism, Humanism is incompatible with Royalism, religion, and Fascism/Nazism since all involve some degree of acceptance of the irrational. It is here that matters become tricky, for poetry – indeed, art generally – also involves some degree of acceptance of the irrational. I am not thinking only of the supernatural or noumenal content which has historically animated the arts, but of the emotional and sensual component. However hard-nosed we might become about the supernatural or the noumenal, it is difficult to imagine art purged of emotion and sensuality. Stevens set his cap on this aspect of art, and engaged in a long meditation intended to elevate the “merely” emotional and sensual to a status similar to that which they had enjoyed in the age of faith, when the arts celebrated God’s creation and His incarnation. I do not claim that Stevens brought such a quixotic project to a successful conclusion, but, like Cervantes’ protagonist, he merits our admiration for the attempt. In this respect the postmodern reading of Stevens has some merit. What can be taken from Stevens’ poetry is the joy and splendour of the

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mind at work in rendering the inarticulate and inchoate, articulate and ordered – as Stevens put it himself in “Of Modern Poetry”: “The poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.” Of course, Stevens wanted more than that. Poetry was more than splendid play for him; he believed it to be an echo of cosmic lines of force. In this way he retained the vatic power of poetry without the need of any determinate belief in some transcendent realm or entity. And who is to say that human cognitive achievements are not such an echo? Eliot’s “case” is very different – and less consistent. Nine years younger than Stevens, he was more susceptible to the sentiment that his generation stood at the dawning of a new age that was endemic in America around the turn of the century. Although he never succumbed to boosterism for the “new age” as his friend Pound did, Eliot certainly shared the sense that he and his contemporaries stood on a fault line that separated a thousand years of Western culture from a new, still unformulated, cultural dispensation. And like Pound, but unlike Stevens, Eliot hoped to play a role in formulating that new dispensation. Such a perception of himself and of the age led Eliot inexorably to a consideration of the sorts of questions that must be answered if one is to found a new culture in response to the pressure of new technologies. Stevens laboured under no such ambitions. He shared Yeats’ view of the artist as an observer of, rather than an actor in, the human comedy. And Stevens’ rather sunny personality tended more toward comedy than tragedy, despite the world-scale calamities his generation witnessed. A crucial difference between Stevens and Eliot was their perception of the role of the artist. Despite his self-described classicism, Eliot’s conduct as an artist was much closer to the political and cultural activism characteristic of English artists from the Romantic through the Victorian period – most uncompromisingly exemplified by the thought of Matthew Arnold. Stevens’ conduct, on the other hand, was more like that of a classical artist, who observes and comments on human affairs but stays clear of the arena of action. Because Eliot tried so hard to influence attitudes and events through his prose, he is much more vulnerable to condemnation for his political and cultural views than is Stevens, whose political views were similarly conservative – though republican (in both a partisan and a general sense), not royalist, and were kept largely private. That Eliot was attracted to the proto-fascist movement headed by Charles Maurras and the Action Française is not news. It is easy to con-

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demn Eliot for that sympathy in the light of Fascist and Nazi belligerence and the horrors of the Holocaust. In this study I have tried to mitigate Eliot’s political heresy by pointing out that few in the early nineteen twenties foresaw what was to come. The most virulent opponents of Fascism were the godless Communists, and Eliot could not align himself with them. Nonetheless, Eliot unequivocally rejected Fascism and Nazism – though he clung to the Maurrasian solution of rule by church and crown. Indeed, he reiterated that posture as late as his 1961 Leeds lecture “To Criticize the Critic”: “My religious beliefs are unchanged, and I am strongly in favour of the maintenance of the monarchy in all countries which have a monarchy” (15). Despite his vigorous engagement in political and cultural debate, Eliot’s early – largely satirical – poetry had no discernible political agenda. However, his mid-career poetry – “Gerontion,” The Waste Land, the Sweeney poems, and “The Hollow Men” – can only be read as expressing a cultural critique, though it is difficult to discern a political agenda in them. These sardonic, impersonal, and impenetrable poems were especially admired for their impersonality and irony, rather than for a political message. However Eliot abandoned that mode in the thirties. “Choruses for the Rock” (1934) and Murder in the Cathedral (1935) were overtly political and not nearly so impenetrable. Both works articulated the view found in his prose: that a faith-based morality was mankind’s only hope for a just and equitable society. Such a view cost Eliot the admirers of his early sardonic poetry, and alienated the majority of the intellectual community whose affinities were overwhelmingly either Marxist, Socialist, or Humanist – although it gained him a devoted Anglican audience. I do not carry the consideration of Eliot’s poetry beyond AshWednesday, despite carrying consideration of his prose beyond World War Two, because that poem articulates the struggle of his conversion, and it is the struggle that is of interest in this study of the modern dilemma. The dilemma, to restate it somewhat, is that belief in our culture’s religious traditions had become almost impossible in the light of twentieth-century scientific knowledge, but maintenance of a civilized society is not possible without belief in something “beyond ourselves.” Stevens was apparently content to leave that “beyond ourselves” undefined, though not undescribed – if I may be permitted such a solecism. I have shown that Eliot held much the same view during the period he was writing his dissertation, and in almost daily contact with Bertrand Russell. However, from very early in his life, Eliot was preoccupied with

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the possibility of belief. The word “belief” reappears in his prose like a leitmotif from his dissertation on. In the Clark Lectures (1926) Eliot articulated an attitude toward belief apparently compatible with Stevens’ view: “For several generations, we have been told by philosophers and half-philosophers, that if you cease to believe in Good and Evil, they do not exist ... We have not been so often told, what is equally true, that if we do believe in God and Evil then they do exist” (207). But there are salient differences between Eliot’s attitude and Stevens. Eliot chose a traditional, transcendent entity (God) and a traditional abstract (Evil) as examples of that in which we believe. But Stevens invariably chose pleasant, every day experiences – such as those listed in “Of Modern Poetry”: “It must / Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may / Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.” On the other hand, Eliot is here unmistakably asserting that the act of belief can create the object of belief: “if we do believe in God and Evil then they do exist.” Stevens never goes so far. Nor, to be fair, does Eliot repeat such a sentiment. In Eliot’s Listener series “The Modern Dilemma,” from which I have taken my title, he abandoned his earlier separation between belief and the content of belief. Admitting that the Christian “scheme” seemed to him “the only one which would work,” he conceded: “This is not a reason for believing; it is a tenable hypothesis to maintain that there is no scheme which will work.” But he is unwilling to rest in such scepticism, and chooses belief in Christianity because only there could he find “a place for values which I must maintain or perish ... the belief, for instance, in holy living and holy dying, in sanctity, chastity, humility, austerity” (“Christianity & Communism” Listener [16 March 1932] 383). These remarks not only highlight Eliot’s tendency toward asceticism, but they also reveal a pragmatic bias in his choice of faith. One is obliged to ask what he means by “will work.” The answer is evident from his subsequent comment on the Communist regime of the Soviet Union: “If the Russian scheme ever comes to ‘work’ perfectly with what I call imperfect men, then to me the Russian system will be condemned by its very efficiency” (383). A “scheme” that “works” then, is one that supports an efficiently functioning social, economic, and political system. That Eliot condemned such a hypothetically successful society is rather shocking. It seems that his piety has led him not just to tolerate human suffering as ennobling, but to regard it as a necessary evil – if we are to have a moral society.

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Stevens had much less to say about political solutions, and was even less preoccupied by the sense of evil. When the Socialist poet Delmore Schwartz sent Stevens his newly published volume of poems, Vaudeville for a Princess and Other Poems (1950), Stevens’ response (which I have already cited, but bears repeating) left no doubt about his disinterest in portrayals of evil: “To say that only the peasant desires happiness and that the evil man does evil as a dog barks overlooks the idea that the Drang nach den Gut [yearning for the good] is really not much different from the Drang nach [yearning for] the opposite. You are fascinated by evil. I cannot see that this fascination has anything of the fascination by good” (9 October 1950 Letters 693). And four years later, he reiterated the point, commenting on an exhibition of Dutch paintings from the period of the religious wars in Europe. He is confident that “the ordinary Dutchman had every possible experience of evil in that century. But there is nothing in any one of these pictures ... suggestive even of the existence of evil” (29 November 1954. Letters 852). I think it is fair to say that the striking difference between the belief systems that animate the poetry of Stevens and Eliot, and the tone and manner of that poetry, belies the common assumption of much current scholarship that class, ideology, the means of production, and language determine the nature of artworks. So far as those factors are concerned, they ought to have produced poetry as like as two peas in a pod. Even their early life experiences were similar – though Eliot was a hybrid of Dixie and New England, while Stevens was a pure New Englander. Of course, their life experiences diverged quite sharply after their undergraduate years, and I have argued that Eliot’s disastrous marriage and betrayal by Bertrand Russell were factors in Eliot’s turn to Anglicanism. But such divergences are contingent and cannot easily be brought under the deterministic rules of Marxism or new historicism. The relatively smooth course of Stevens’ personal life is reflected in a canon unmarked by sharp breaks. The more dramatic course of Eliot’s life, on the other hand, is reflected in at least three distinct stylistic phases. That said, if we are to understand their work, we must take account of the “march of events” in which their private lives were embedded – as I have tried to do.

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Notes

introduction 1 In the same letter to Blackmur, Aiken remarked on Stevens’ playfulness, and compared “The Comedian as the Letters C” favourably to The Waste Land: “I haven’t ever seen it suggested in any discussion of Stevens, he’s perhaps the more remarkable humorist in poetry: I mean, he carries humour farther into terms of poetry than has perhaps ever been done. This is something to shout about. Even his titles are like those changeable signs one used to see: they are funny and/or beautiful. Then finally, there is of course the extremely keen critical awareness knocking about everywhere under all this brilliant and delicious meringue of surface. Crispin is fuller of things than The Waste Land, and then some!” Years later he told Stevens that he had wanted to put the whole of “Comedian as the Letter C” in his Random House anthology, but could not convince the publisher (Letters 302). 2 A notable exception to this general neglect is John D. Margolis’ 1972 study, T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development 1922–1939. Margolis not only stresses that Eliot had a Humanist phase, but he goes further and maintains that he never fully abandoned the values and predilections of Humanism: “Though he was uneasy with the secular character of Babbitt’s humanism and was troubled by the ambitions for the movement of such disciples as Foerster, Eliot could never dismiss the New Humanism completely. To disavow Babbitt’s philosophy would be at the least disingenuous; he had absorbed his professor’s ideas so thoroughly that, by now, there was no recanting. He had, however, gone beyond Babbitt’s humanistic traditionalism to religious orthodoxy, and he now felt challenged to bring to bear upon the movement to which he owed so much the insights of his recent development. His approach continued to be that of a sympathetic – indeed, committed – critic” (124–5). Margolis

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Notes to pages 5–10

ignores the influence of Russell, which I believe to have been crucial. My belief is that it was only the Romantic-Classic opposition within the literary and cultural tradition that Eliot took from Babbitt (and Maurras) prior to his reconnection with Russell in 1914. James W. Tuttleton’s 1987 article “T.S. Eliot and the Crisis of the Modern” explores the ubiquity of Humanist sentiment in Eliot’s time and among his teachers, but stresses Eliot’s movement in the opposite direction from his contemporaries – from Humanism toward Christianity. He does not trace the unevenness of that movement, which is a focus of this study. “The Search for Moral Sanction,” Listener 7 (30 March 1932) 446.2. The Harvard milieu has been thoroughly investigated in the context of Eliot’s time there, but not so much for Stevens. For Harvard generally in that period see Bruce Kuklick, The Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts 1860–1930 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977). For Eliot see Manju Jain, T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Frank Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) devotes several pages to a discussion of the Harvard milieu as it impacted on both poets. At least, if he did, Gallup missed it in his Bibliography. It is notable that Jonathan Culler chose not to reprint Stevens’ assessment of Eliot in his edition of the Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology. In addition, Culler’s assessment of Stevens is rather dismissive, suggesting that “perhaps it was during his presidency [of the Harvard Advocate] that Stevens developed the dual sensibility that was to enable him to become both a vastly successful business executive and a major poet” (Culler 1966 xix). Hi Simons wrote to Stevens on 15 August1940 about the Eliot number of the Harvard Advocate, saying that he thought of suggesting that they do a Stevens number for his sixtieth year, but thought better of it: “When the Eliot issue came out in December 1938 I wanted to suggest to the Board that the October 1939 issue celebrate your sixtieth anniversary and the twenty-fifth year since the appearance of your first poem in Poetry. I dropped the notion, feeling that such a suggestion probably would be gratuitous coming from an non-Harvard man” (Huntington, Wallace Stevens Collection). Holly Stevens missed this letter when she edited Stevens’ Letters. Kermode includes it in his selection of letters in Stevens: Collected Poems and Prose. Robert McAlmon, travelling in Europe as a young man, corresponded with Stevens and reported to him (in an undated letter of 1922) on meeting Eliot: “One need not be too egotistically impressionable and broody; Eliot, I fear, is. One can become hardboiled; Rabelais did; so have some others. I don’t think Eliot will last long because one connects audacity, daring, something

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personally a little stronger than the soft haplessness of Eliot. The same despair, hardened, however, is about all that’s left anybody with sense, sensibility, or intelligence, in this industrial luxurious bigoted prohibitionary censuring economic organization that some like to call civilization, but my mind forgot these highly specialized terms about states of mankind” (Huntington, Wallace Stevens Collection). The Huntington does not have Stevens’ replies to McAlmon, but this opinion must have been reassuring at the time. Of course, McAlmon was proven wrong. It is worth noticing that, unlike Stevens and Williams, he accepted the general estimate of The Waste Land as expressing the despair that any sensitive person would feel in 1922. Perhaps one needed to be in Europe to feel that anxiety. 8 Total American casualties were 364,000, of which 126,000 were fatalities. While these are not trivial numbers for a country of not much more than 100 million at the time, they pale into insignificance beside the figures for the European combatants. (In addition more than half the American fatalities were due to the influenza epidemic of 1913/14 rather than combat.) France had 6,160,800 casualties, of which 1,350,800 were fatalities. And this is for a country with only 40 million inhabitants. The British Empire, much larger, had 3,190,235 casualties, of which 903,471 were fatalities. Germany and Austria together suffered 14,162,558 casualties, of which 2,973,700 were fatalities. The almost immediate acceptance of The Waste Land as an expression of postwar angst occurred mostly among Americans. The British were more inclined to be driven toward piety by the immense suffering and were little disposed to celebrate a poem registering the collapse of European Christian civilization. Lawrence Rainey points out that “it received very little media attention: three reviews in the wake of the Criterion publication, a further six after the Hogarth edition – and all but one of the nine were hostile. In the United States, in contrast, there were more than fifty reviews and notices of the poem, more or less equally divided between negative and positive evaluations” (Revisiting The Waste Land 116). 9 Between 1923 and the 1934 publication of “Eight Poems” in Alcestis, Stevens published only ten poems: “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “Red Loves Kit,” “This Sun this March,” “Good Man, Bad Woman,” “Autumn Refrain,” “The Woman who Blamed Life on a Spaniard,” “Snow and Stars,” “Two Poems,” and “The Pleasure of Merely Circulating.” The publication of Ideas of Order in 1935 marked his return as an active poet. While personal factors cannot tell the whole story, his only child, Holly, was born in the summer of 1924, and Stevens was travelling a good deal for his employer in those years.

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10 It is difficult to know just how familiar Stevens was with Eliot’s writing. Robert Moynihan notes in “Wallace Stevens’ Collection, Huntington Library,” Wallace Stevens Journal 20 (Spring 1996) that although Stevens “collected a good deal of T.S. Eliot ... the pages remain uncut if delivered that way” (77). Moynihan lists nineteen Eliot volumes in Stevens’ library, beginning with the 1923 Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land. It seems unlikely that he did not read any of them, but clearly he did not read them all. 11 Ted Hughes takes this assessment much further in his commemorative talk, “A Dancer to God,” delivered on the Centenary of Eliot’s birth (Hughes 22–50) where he argues that Eliot’s poetry belongs in a thaumaturgic tradition. Stevens, I am sure, would not go so far, but I think Hughes’ sense that Eliot belongs to an archaic poetic mode is not alien to Stevens’ perception of the belatedness of his poetry. 12 José Rodriguez Feo bears witness to Stevens’ dislike of Eliot’s poetry: “I remember, on another occasion, when I asked him about Eliot he gave me the impression that he didn’t like Eliot very much. But he said to me that he was a good poet in the sense of the métier, he knew his poetry” (Brazeau 139). 13 Eliot, for his part, borrowed the title from Hugh l’Anson Fausset, The Modern Dilemma (Dent), which he reviewed in the Criterion X “Commentary” for January 1931. He dismissed Fausset’s argument, declaring that in reading it, he was “breathing the same old stuffy atmosphere of Matthew Arnold’s Cloud Cuckoo Land” (312). 14 This is from the first item in the series Eliot published a few years after his conversion (382.2): “The Modern Dilemma,” Listener 7; “Christianity and Communism” (16 March 1932) 382–3; “Religion and Science: A Phantom Dilemma” (23 March 1932) 428–9; “The Search for Moral Sanction” (30 March 1932) 445–6 and 480; and “Building up the Christian World” (6 April 1932) 501–2. 15 “Stevens seems to have accepted, as Royce did, Peirce’s system of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, where Firstness is the conception of being or existing independent of anything else; Secondness is the conception of being relative to, or in reaction with, something else; and Thirdness is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and a second are brought into relation. According to Stevens’ parable, Adam and Eve were the first humanists, because – like Descartes – they conceived the world in their own terms and practiced the attribute of reason in doing so. They had a second earth by construing the first in terms most favourable to themselves. They founded the enlightenment.” (Donoghue 310–11) 16 In a letter to Bertrand Russell responding to comments on The Waste Land that Russell had sent him, Eliot expressed regret for the breach that had

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arisen between them, adding: “I should like to see you very much – there have been many times when I have thought so.” (No precise date given, but 1922. Quoted in Ray Monk 2000 27. Original emphasis).

chapter one 1 In a letter of 19 Nov. 1925 Stevens declined the suggestion that he review W.C. Williams’ In the American Grain for the Dial. (Letters 246). He declined to submit poems on both 8 Dec. 1926 and 3 Sept. 1927 (Letters 248 and 249). Of course, at this time he was not writing either prose or poetry – or at least not publishing any. 2 Leggett (p. 76): “He clearly saw her as the embodiment of a movement in contemporary poetry to which he himself was dedicated, and which he described in the thirties as the ‘new romantic.’ Long before their first meeting she is for him ‘one of the angels’ whose ‘style is an angelic style’ (Letters 290). What she is attempting in poetry ‘is really a good deal more important than what Williams does’” (Letters 278). Her style is “as unique as Gertrude Stein’s and ... makes Miss Stein seem shallow” (Letters 290). She is, in short, a model for the direction of contemporary poetry. And also on p. 82: “Stevens’ three accounts of the contemporary poet for whom he had the highest regard reveal more than anything else the degree to which his reading of contemporary poetry was dictated by his privileging of theory, so that a description of Moore’s verse is always subordinate to a conception of poetry.” 3 David E. Chinitz has given this remark considerable attention in T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide. He disputes the prevailing reading that the passage upholds “the need for an uncontaminated elite art.” On the contrary he believes that it renders “the boundaries between the high and the low more fluid [and affirms] the value of popular culture and ... the possibility of crossover works” (59). His entire book persuasively articulates and defends this thesis. 4 The comment was made in a late letter, responding to Herbert Read’s review of a book by Edgar Wind in which he linked Eliot and Valéry. Eliot bristled at the association: There is one point in your review which makes me writhe however, and that is your association of me and Valéry. I liked Valéry very much as a man and found him congenial company, and I have a photograph of him amongst the other friends above the mantle in my office. But as for his poetry, I always said that he seemed to write poetry only for the sake of analysing his own mind at work writing poetry. His reflections about his own poetry are his justification. I do not think you can bring that charge

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against me! I remember the warm approval of Henri Massis once when I said that I thought that Valéry’s poetry was a poésie de luxe. It seems to me that mine, on the other hand, fills Wind’s condition of being neither “engaged” nor “disengaged”; the best of it I have paid through the nose for in experience. (Letter to Herbert Read, 1 August 1963. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria) 5 Leggett does not take into account the pure poetry movement, which derived from Valéry and from Henri Bremond’s 1926 book, La Poésie pure. Although I believe that Stevens’ thoughts on poetry at this time owe a good deal to Bremond and La Poésie pure, the discussion of that aspect of his assessment of Moore will have to wait until chapter six. 6 The poem was published in Owl’s Clover as “The Greenest Continent” but is not included in Collected Poems. Its subject is the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, begun on 2 October 1935. In December, the Italian general, Badoglio, used gas bombs against Ethiopian forces. The practice was effective and was used many more times by the Italians. The League of Nations proved unwilling to confront Italy over the invasion or the use of gas. For a discussion of the political pressures of the time see Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self 171–83. Eliot’s response to the Italian campaign in “A Commentary” (Criterion 15 [Jan. 1936] 265–9) is tortuously ambivalent, and openly bigoted. He is in no doubt that the Ethiopians are indeed “inferior” to the Italians, but he nevertheless insists that their inferiority does not justify their exploitation – not to speak of wholesale slaughter. He is responding to right-wing opposition in France to the imposition of sanctions by the League of Nations: But in the League of Nations, the constitution of which reflects, I think, the British liberal mentality rather than any other, there is room for a confusion of the religious and the secular. The charge brought by the French intellectuals of the Right, that the League of Nations has put higher and lower civilizations, superior and inferior nations, on the same level, is not without foundation; though we may remind them that it was not Britain that demanded the admission of Abyssinia [to the League of Nations]. There will probably always remain a real inequality of races, as there is always inequality of individuals. But the fundamental identity in humanity must always be asserted; as must the equal sanctity of moral obligation to people of every race. All men are equal before God; if they cannot all be equal in this world, yet our moral obligation towards inferiors is exactly the same, as that towards our equals (268). Of course, such a mundane, and fundamentally temporal, event never finds its way into Eliot’s poetry.

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7 The version of “The Steeple-Jack” now found in The Complete Poems has been revised from the version in Selected Poems. 8 “Mozart 1935” perhaps articulates his meaning. In that poem (discussed below) the pianist is said to play the present on a piano, despite the fact that the music he plays was composed by Mozart in the distant past. 9 The issue of the relation between art and the world is a recurrent theme in Romantic and post-Romantic literature from Shelley’s “Adonis,” through Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott” to Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli,” to name only prominent instances. Stevens’ lack of intimate knowledge of English poetry perhaps renders his intellectual struggle more opaque than it need be. 10 He uses the same term in the review: “It is clear enough ... to say that the romantic in the pejorative sense merely connotes obsolescence, but that the word has, or should have, another sense” (220). 11 Although he is very unsympathetic to Stevens, Denis Donoghue agrees that the issues between Eliot and Stevens – not that they ever debated them – concern reason, faith, and authority (in Shea 303). 12 It is a bit of a digression, but it is tempting to compare the “Chinese jar” of “Burnt Norton” to Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli” and Stevens’ jar in Tennessee in “Anecdote of a Jar.” Whereas Eliot stresses the stillness of the Chinese jar – that is, its persistence – and Yeats stresses the detachment of the lapis lazuli figurine, Stevens stresses the connection between his jar and its surroundings, a connection that arises from its singularity: It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

chapter two 1 Eliot admitted that the debate was motivated partly by a desire to create interest and boost circulation for their respective journals, but in retrospect it is clear that both men were seriously engaged in the issues, and drew others into the debate – which spilled over into the Pure Poetry controversy. See Jason Harding, Criterion 26–43, for a detailed discussion of this exchange and its motivation. 2 James Torrens, S.J. “Charles Maurras and Eliot’s ‘New Life’ PMLA 89 (March 1974) 312–22. We will return to Eliot’s relation with Maurras below. 3 Eliot returned to this declaration in “To Criticize the Critic,” a lecture delivered at the University of Leeds in July 1961, explaining that it was prompted by a visit from his old professor Irving Babbitt. On learning that Eliot “had

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recently been baptized and confirmed into the Church of England,” Babbitt said, “I think you should come out into the open.” As a consequence “the quotable sentence turned up in the preface to the book of essays I had in preparation, swung into orbit, and has been circling my little world ever since” (“To Criticize the Critic” 15). Eliot’s comment in After Strange Gods on the remark in For Lancelot Andrewes does not much clarify matters. It is designed to decouple the political and cultural realms from the religious, while admitting that they are nonetheless related in his personal phenomenology: Some years ago, in the preface to a small volume of essays, I made a sort of summary declaration of faith in matters religious, political and literary. The facility with which this statement has been quoted has helped to reveal to me that as it stands the statement is injudicious. It may suggest that the three subjects are of equal importance to me, which is not so; it may suggest that I accept all three beliefs on the same grounds, which is not so; and it may suggest that I believe that they all hang together or fall together, which would be the most serious misunderstanding of all. That there are connexions for me I of course admit, but these illuminate my own mind rather than the external world; and I now see the danger of suggesting to outsiders that the Faith is a political principle or a literary fashion, and the sum of all a dramatic posture. (27–8) Chesterton’s political and social views were what – together with fellow Catholic convert Hilaire Belloc – he called “distributism.” Distributism owed a good deal to Ruskin. It recommended a return to pre-industrial economic organization in which everyone accepted a collective responsibility for the welfare of everyone else. Like Eliot, Chesterton thought that a successful community must be homogenous in terms of belief. Hence he was openly anti-Semitic for most of his career. His anti-Semitism was not racial, but religious. Like many other Christians, he berated the Jews for stubbornly rejecting the Messiah, who came among them. However, in a letter to the Jewish Chronicle published in September 1933 in the face of Nazi atrocities, he publicly renounced anti-Semitism. Jacques Maritain. “Poetry and Religion,” Criterion 5 (Jan. 1927) 7–21; 5 (May 1927) 214–30. See Gallup for the attribution. A Sermon Preached in Magdalene College Chapel (7 March 1948) 5. It was published as a pamphlet without any further bibliographical identification. Eliot is, of course, referring to Pater’s famous remark, which was the watchword of the aesthetic movement: “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end ... How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in

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their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” (152). 1, 1922–23, no. 2 J.M. Robertson, “Flaubert” 105; 2, 1923–24, no. 6 “Evolution of English Blank Verse” 171; 3, 1924–25: no. 10 “A Naturalistic Theory of Hamlet” 172; no. 11 Review of Sidelights on Elizabethan Drama 456; 4, 1926 no. 2 “On Criticism” 44; 7 1928: no. 1 “Burns and his Race” 33; no. 2 “Burns and his Race” (concluded) 154; 8, 1929 no. 33 “The Scansion of Shakespeare” 635; 9, 1930 no. 35 “Shakespearean Idolatry” 246. Incidentally, in this book Robertson mentions Eliot as having recently come to a more positive assessment of Arnold than he had previously held: “Even as a critic he is so far from being dismissed that one able modern who formerly assailed him, Mr. T.S. Eliot, has latterly paid him new tribute” (105). Robertson was probably thinking of Eliot’s remarks in his Introduction to The Sacred Wood (1920) cited below. Principia Mathematica was written in collaboration with the older Alfred North Whitehead. It was published in three volumes 1910–13. The work was a great success. Its objective was to render logical argument as rigorous as mathematics through the use of symbols instead of words. As it turned out much of the work undertaken in Principia Mathematica – which built on the logic of the Italian G. Peano – had been anticipated by the Danish logician, Gottlob Frege. But Russell and Whitehead were unaware of Frege’s work while writing Principia. Frege is now regarded as the founder of the modern analytic tradition in philosophy (Monk Spirit 152). Eliot’s recollection of his Irish nursemaid is a put-down of the following anecdote that Russell tells in Why I Am Not a Christian: “I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: ‘My father taught me that the question “Who made me?” cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question “Who made God ?” That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause’” (6) . Robertson was a Scot. I suppose Eliot is denigrating his very robust atheism as just a faint survival of fundamentalist Presbyterianism in Scotland, known as Auld Licht. J.M. Barrie’s 1896 Auld Licht Idylls “celebrate” in an amusing manner the decline of that old form of Scottish worship: “There are few Auld Licht communities in Scotland nowadays – perhaps because people are now so well off, for the most devout Auld Lichts were always poor, and their last years were generally a grim struggle with the workhouse.”

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14 Vivien Eliot sometimes spelled her name in the French manner, “Vivienne” as here, and sometimes in the briefer English manner, “Vivien.” I have opted for “Vivien” as briefer and easier to type. 15 For details on the relationship of Vivien and Russell see Carole SeymourJones, Painted Shadow and Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude. 16 Jewel Spears Brooker has noted the importance of Arnold to Eliot’s aesthetic, particularly in the years between 1909 and 1911 (Brooker 1988 44). 17 Kenneth Asher, in T.S. Eliot and Ideology, accuses Eliot scholars of having neglected Eliot’s commitment to Maurrassian views, but there is a long tradition of excellent commentary on that relationship, beginning with Roger Kojecky, T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber and Faber 1971). John D. Margolis’ study, T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual Development 1922–1939 – which was no doubt written before Kojecky’s article appeared. Kenneth Asher’s two useful commentaries on the relationship – T.S. Eliot and Ideology, and “T.S. Eliot and Charles Maurras” – had ample time to consult the earlier works. Asher does, however, add some details of interest. Jason Harding’s, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical networks in Inter-War Britain, while of great value in other ways, adds little to the other studies so far as Eliot’s relation to Maurras is concerned. In defence of Asher’s claim that Eliot scholars have neglected the influence of Maurras, it is true that Lyndall Gordon makes no mention of him in any of her three biographies of Eliot. Nonetheless, Maurras receives at least a mention in most discussions of Eliot’s ideological posture. 18 Letter to Austin Warren, 11 Aug. 1929, quoted in Arthur Hazard Dakin, Paul Elmer More, note p. 269. 19 Margolis: “Perhaps, then, the example of Maurras led Eliot to take the step his French counterpart could not take, and follow his secular classicism to its religious conclusion in Catholicism. In such a case, Paul Elmer More may have been correct in suggesting the large part that Maurras played in Eliot’s conversion” (98). Asher’s view is somewhat different, assigning priority to Maurras’ political ideology: “Politics led Eliot to religion but he rarely acknowledged the political element that constituted a central part of what he understood – and in his writings intended – by his religion” (Eliot and Ideology 9). But I cannot accept Asher’s view that Eliot’s Anglicanism was merely expedient. 20 Maurras was arrested in September 1944, and sentenced to death for collaboration with the German occupiers. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, deprivation of civil liberties, and expulsion from the Académie française. Imprisoned in Riom and then Clairvaux, he was released in 1952 due to illness from which he did not recover.

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21 It is true that Maurras did renounce atheism on his deathbed, and, returning to his natal faith, received the sacraments. It is not clear that Eliot was aware of that “apostasy” to Maurras’ Humanism. 22 Edward Lobb (1981), among others, attests to the importance of Arnold to Eliot’s social criticism, asserting that “Arnold’s definition of criticism might serve as a summary of all that Eliot found permanently useful in his thought” (76). However, he does not – nor does anyone else so far as I have discovered – draw attention to the Anglican Eliot’s felt need to distance himself from Arnold’s Humanism. 23 The Sacred Wood collects Eliot’s earliest essays, the most important of which – and most Arnoldian – is “Tradition and Individual Talent.” Eliot himself looks back on them, however, as “dating from a period when I was somewhat under the influence of Ezra Pound’s enthusiasm for Remy de Gourmont.” He adds: they have come “to seem to me the product of immaturity – though I do not repudiate ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’” (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism 10). Eliot’s taste for cryptic epigraphs can sometimes be helpful. For the introductory essay in The Sacred Wood he chose one from Rémy de Gourmont’s Lettres à l’amazone: “Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort d’un homme s’il est sincère.” (To erect his personal impressions as laws is the great effort of a man if he is sincere.) Although de Gourmont was hardly a Humanist, this particular sentiment is compatible with the Humanist project to replace superstitions with conscious fictions. In the preface to the 1928 reissue, Eliot acknowledges that “at that time” he was “much stimulated and much helped by the critical writings of Remy de Gourmont” (viii). The title also alludes to Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough, whose first volume opens with the priest of Diana skulking about the sacred wood in which her shrine is located, hoping to avoid being assassinated by a would-be successor. Eliot presumably means us to think of successive poets and critics as similarly sanguine heirs to the priesthood of art. Certainly the collection of (mostly previously published) reviews that make up the volume eviscerates his elders. He does not at this time appear to have the “mythological method” in mind by this allusion to Frazer. 24 Lyndall Gordon remarks on the warmth of the relationship of Vivien and Tom with Violet and Sydney Schiff. She sees them as replacing Pound rather than Russell: “Another reason for the special tone of these letters is that Schiff seems to have replaced Pound as Eliot’s mentor when Pound left England towards the end of the Great War. At that point Eliot’s letters confide work plans, and reveal that he was showing Schiff work in progress” (Eliot’s New Life 682).

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Oddly Gordon says almost nothing about the relationship of the Eliots with Russell despite its great intimacy. My supposition that the Schiffs replaced Russell is, I think, more plausible – not only because the relationship followed the break with Russell and preceded Pound’s departure for Paris, but also because, like Russell, the Schiffs gave the Eliots an entrée into English literary circles to which Pound had no access. In addition, the Schiffs had a country house to which the Eliots frequently repaired, as they had done with the country accommodations they shared with Russell. 25 As non-observant Jews and friends and admirers of Marcel Proust, the Schiffs were among the more gilded of contemporary Humanist patrons of the arts. When Scott Moncrieff died in 1936 before completing his translation of Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu Schiff was asked to finish the translation. The Schiffs held a salon in Paris as well as in London. It was at one of their parties that the famously unsuccessful meeting between Joyce and Proust took place. Sydney Schiff also supported Wyndham Lewis with “loans” and purchases of his paintings – though he was ill repaid by the satirical portrait of him in The Apes of God. Eliot published two short stories of Schiff’s in the Criterion: “The Thief” Criterion 1.2 (Jan. 1923) 188–91; and “Céleste” Criterion 2.7 (April 1924) 332–48 – the latter a fictionalized account of Proust’s death. 26 For Eliot’s attitude to pragmatism see: Donald J. Childs, “Risking Enchantment: the Middle Way between Mysticism and Pragmatism in Four Quartets” in Lobb, 107–130. Eliot’s antipathy for pragmatism is not in doubt; as late as 1958, he castigated Herbert Read for a remark that he thought appeared too much like pragmatism (1 April 1958. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). That the young Eliot – rather surprisingly – accepted the Spencerian perception that evolution was synonymous with progress is indicated by his graduate essay for Josiah Royce in which he protests “against the use of the expression “Evolution of Religion”: “The word evolution I believe is currently used with deplorable looseness. The sorts of fact, as I understand it, which can properly be described in terms of evolution are those in which a continuous relation between organic tendency and final environment can be expressed more or less quantitatively, according to a standard of value. We have the right to take human value as the standard for natural evolution, but what standard have we for religion or society?” (Gray 110, mss 1–2). Darwin, of course, made no claim for any goal to the process of evolution, insisting on its randomness, qualified by adaptation to an environment, itself contingent and impermanent. Eliot objects, not to the Spencerian view of evolution, but to its application to religion.

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27 Quoted by Paul Elmer More, in his review of Humanism in America, “A Revival of Humanism.” The Bookman [New York] 72 (March, 1930) 1–11, p. 10. 28 The essay is “Relation between Politics and Metaphysics.” See Douglass 1986, and Childs 1993 in Lobb 1997. 29 Although Einstein’s special theory of relativity was published in 1905, the work of Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg on quantum physics – which introduced indeterminacy into the physicist’s picture of the world – still lay in the future. 30 The first study to examine carefully the import of Bradley’s philosophy on Eliot’s poetry was Anne C. Bolgan’s What the Thunder Really Said. As a graduate student Bolgan stumbled upon Eliot’s forgotten dissertation in the Harvard library and later persuaded him to publish it. As the title implies, her study focuses on The Waste Land. Piers Gray’s T.S. Eliot’s Intellectual and Poetic Development 1909–1922 (New Jersey: Harvester Press 1982) is more general, and places Eliot’s study of Bradley in the context of the anthropological thought of the period to which he was exposed. More recently Jewel Spears Brooker’s Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism re-examines the relationship between Eliot’s philosophical studies and his poetry. While I am indebted to these studies, my perspective is somewhat different since I see Eliot’s engagement with Bradley as modulated by his contemporaneous engagement, both philosophical and personal, with Russell. 31 The following illustrates the tortured subtlety to which the monist must resort to maintain the possibility of knowledge without tumbling into either solipsism or dualism: “It is essential to the doctrine which I have sketched that the symbol or sign be not arbitrarily amputated from the object which it symbolizes, as for practical purposes it is isolated ... No symbol, I maintain, is ever a mere symbol, but is continuous with that which it symbolizes. Without words, no objects. The object, purely experienced and not denominated, is not yet an object, because it is only a bundle of particular perceptions; in order to be an object it must present identity in difference throughout a span of time” (Knowledge and Experience 132. My emphasis). 32 The paper was puckishly titled, “Seems, Madam? Nay, it is,” (Monk, Spirit 115). According to G. Lowes Dickinson, a contemporary of Russell’s and the presiding academic for the cohort of Cambridge undergraduates following Russell, the Apostles was founded early in the nineteenth century by Tomlinson, afterwards bishop of Gibraltar. The meetings normally involved the reading of a paper by a member. During Dickinson’s tenure, the membership was

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largely homosexual. Other elder members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and G.E. Moore. The next cohort included E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. For more on the Apostles, see Cline and Dickinson. This account is based on theirs. 33 He presumably meant destructive of Bradley’s metaphysics. Certainly, despite his claim in the “Conclusion” that he remained in substantial agreement with Bradley, the following statement is in direct contradiction of Bradley’s idealistic monism: “With regard to objects, I have reached the conclusion that all objects are non-mental; and with regard to mental activity, I conclude that we find only physiological activity or logical activity, both independent of, and more fundamental than what we call the activity of mind” (153). Physiological and logical activity are, of course, not equivalent. His general point is that our psychological experience is epiphenomenal, that is, a sort of froth on the more substantial sea of either physiology or logic. If we admit only physiological activity, we are committed to behaviourism – to which Russell was strongly drawn at this time, though I cannot imagine that Eliot was. If we admit only logical activity, we are in agreement with Husserl’s phenomenology. Eliot was familiar with Husserl’s phenomenology, for he alludes to him in his dissertation (138) together with Meinong – both of whom derive from Brentano, regarded as the founder of the phenomenological movement, one which regards mental phenomena as both real and directly accessible. He told Montgomery Belgion many years later (16 Feb. 1940. University of Victoria) that if he had continued in philosophy he would probably have ended up as “a sort of minor Husserl or Heidegger.” (Heidegger began his career as a student of Husserl’s.) 34 “As well as providing them with somewhere to live, Russell gave Eliot the income from £3,000 worth of engineering debentures (as a pacifist, he felt morally obliged to forgo the income from them), helped with their day-today expenses, paid for Vivien’s dancing lessons, and (according to Ottoline) lavished presents on Vivien of ‘silk underclothes and all sorts of silly things’” (Monk Spirit 442). 35 This favourable estimate of Santayana is at odds with what he wrote to Sydney Schiff, a few years later: “I have never liked Santayana myself, because I have always felt that his attitude was essentially feminine, and that his philosophy was a dressing up of himself rather than an interest in things. But then I think one ought to read “Reason in Common Sense” or one other volume. His Athenaeum things were exceptionally bad. He is not quite like any one else. Anyway, I shd. like to know what you think of him” (Aug. 1920. Letters 394).

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36 T.S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion 12 (April 1933) 468–73 p. 473. In this Eliot is in agreement with Roman Catholic teaching. Here is an excerpt from the entry on Idolatry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia: But how many, or how few, of the countless millions of idolaters are, or have been, able to distinguish between the one Creator of all things and His creatures? and, having made the distinction, how many have been perverse enough to worship the creature in preference to the Creator? It is reasonable, Christian, and charitable to suppose that the “false gods” of the heathen were, in their conscience, the only true God they knew, and that their worship being right in its intention, went up to the one true God with that of Jews and Christians to whom He had revealed Himself. “In the day when God shall judge the secrets of men by Jesus Christ ... the gentiles who have not the law, shall be judged by their conscience” (Rom., ii: 14–16). God, who wishes all men to be saved, and Christ, who died for all who sinned in Adam, would be frustrated in their merciful designs if the prince of this world were to carry off all idolaters. 37 As a Bradleyan monist, Eliot denied that one could draw a sharp distinction between the imagined and the real, since all subsisted in the same state of being – perforce, since in monism there can, ex hypothesi, be only one state of being. Here are a couple of salient remarks from Knowledge and Experience: With imaginary objects we come to a class which is frequently, under the name of assumptions, distinguished sharply from objects of belief, both true and erroneous. I cannot feel that this distinction is needed ... any object is real in so far as it is attended to, and that when we assert an error or hallucination, we attend not to the object itself but to the experience. (121) ... the apprehension of an object known to be imaginary does not differ essentially from the apprehension of any other object, unless we have hocus-pocussed an external reality to which ideas are to “conform.” (123) The latter remark, incidentally, is precisely the position Brentano adopts. Both Meinong and Husserl descend from Brentano. That tradition was the principal antagonist to Russell’s logical atomism. Of course, most of us have “hocus-pocussed an external reality.” Most of us, in short, are Aristotelian dualists imagining – however loosely – that mental phenomena and physical phenomena are both real, and that each impinges on the other in some way about which we have not much thought. 38 “Finite centre” is Bradley’s term for the experiencing consciousness. The point of the term is to stress the partiality or limited nature of our consciousness as compared to the field of possible experiences, and also its particularity or singularity as compared to the universality of the Absolute. As the

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citation indicates, the finite centre must be distinguished from the self because it is only the experiencing aspect of the self – its feelings and emotions, abstracted from other features such as memory, volition, and so forth, which go together to make up the complete self. Eliot was not entirely persuaded by the project of Principia Mathematica – the subject of the course he took from Russell at Harvard. He points out early in his dissertation on Bradley that Bradley’s position is in direct opposition to those of Russell and Moore (Knowledge and Experience 29n). Throughout the dissertation, he returns to this conflict. He cites Russell’s list of five theories of knowledge, and comments: “every one of these accounts is ultimately meaningless, owing to the confusion of the practical [Russell’s] with the metaphysical [Bradley’s] point of view” (88). Despite these gestures, Eliot ultimately abandons Bradleyan idealism, and it seems reasonable to suppose that Russell’s influence played a role. When Eliot much later commends Principia Mathematica, in a Criterion “Commentary,” he does so by de-emphasizing its contribution to logic and mathematics, and stressing its importance for rhetorical clarity: “Young people who continue the study of English after they are fifteen or sixteen, ought to learn how the language has been formed, ought to learn something of both historical and comparative grammar, and come to understand how much the work of logicians has done to make of English a language in which it is possible to think clearly and exactly on any subject. The Principia Mathematica are perhaps a greater contribution to our language than they are to mathematics” Criterion 6 (Oct. 1927) 291. Peter Ackroyd, for example, barely mentions Humanism in his 1984 biography, T.S. Eliot. His only mention is to refer to “Babbitt’s humanism,” which, he says, “Eliot was later to criticize,” while discussing Eliot’s undergraduate years at Harvard (36). T.E. Hulme is a more plausible candidate for one whose views led Eliot toward Christianity – if not to Anglicanism. We know that Eliot admired Hulme’s critique of Humanism and insistence on the reality of Original Sin. His views are a more plausible candidate for the spur that led Eliot toward Anglicanism. But – even though he was first exposed to Hulme’s thought in 1916 – I will discuss Hulme’s influence when we come to Eliot’s conversion. Although it was no doubt Russell’s intellect and philosophy that Eliot admired, rather than his personality, Russell was not without appealing personal features. The kindness he showed Eliot by offering to share his flat with the young couple and by assigning Eliot the income from debentures he held for the duration of the war must have been much appreciated.

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43 The reviews and articles are: Theism and Humanism by A. J. Balfour. IJE, 26, (Jan. 1916) 284–9; The Philosophy of Nietzsche by A. Wolf (1915), IJE 26 (April 1916) 426–7; Conscience and Christ: Six Lectures on Christian Ethics by Hastings Rashdall. IJE, 27 (Oct. 1916) 111–12; Group Theories of Religion and the Religion of the Individual by Clement C. J. Webb. IJE, 27 (Oct. 1916) 115–17; “The Development of Leibniz’ Monadism” The Monist 26 (Oct. 1916) 534–56; “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers” The Monist 27 (1915–16) 566–76; Elements of Folk Psychology. Outlines of a Psychology’s History of the Development of Mankind by Wilhelm Wundt. Trans. E.L. Schaub. IJE 27 (Jan. 1917) 252–3; Religion and Science: a Philosophical Essay by John Theodore Merz. IJE. 27 (Oct. 1916) 125; Philosophy and War by Emile Boutroux. Trans. Fred Rothwell. IJE 27 (Oct., 1916) 128; The Ultimate Belief by A. Clutton Brock. IJE 27 (Oct., 1916) 127 [Gallup lists all the others, but missed this review]; Mens Creatrix by William Temple. IJE 27 (July 1917) 542; Religion and Philosophy by R.G. Collingwood. IJE 27 (July 1917); “An American Critic” The New Statesman 7 (24 June 1916) 234 (an unsigned review of Paul Elmer More’s Aristocracy and Justice); “Recent British Periodical Literature in Ethics,”IJE 28 (Jan. 1918) 270–77; “Style and Thought,” a review of Russell’s Mysticism and Logic. The Nation 22 (March 23, 1918) 94–5. 44 Lyndall Gordon has commented on several of these reviews. But where I see evidence of Humanist scepticism in them she sees Eliot expressing a dissatisfaction with a “too tepid, too liberal” version of the Christianity articulated in the books reviewed (109–10). John Margolis has also examined them. He starts from the assumption that Eliot was a Humanist at the time, and finds glimmerings of religious interest (16–21). My reading is closer to Margolis than to Gordon, but differs from both. 45 In his dissertation Eliot cites Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of a primitive participatory mentality that is distinct from the civilized man’s analytic mentality, setting it against Russell’s epistemology: “The theory of Meinong starts from the postulate of the reality of objects – everything that is real is an object. Mr Russell starts apparently from the reality of universals and sense-data, and from these elements late in the order of knowledge he builds up the external world” (105). He appends the following note to “order of knowledge”: “ Cf. ‘...La mentalité des sociétés inférieures ... comporte bien des représentations abstraites, et des représentations générales; mais ni cette abstraction, ni cette généralité ne sont celles de nos concepts.’ Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales, p. 137.” [“The mentality of inferior societies ... includes several abstractions and general terms, but neither this abstraction nor this general term is that of our concepts.”]

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46 Here is Robertson’s uncompromising assessment of Arnold’s behaviour: “In the end we find him not only denying the divinity of Jesus and insisting, with Renan, that miracles do not happen, but profanely deriding the doctrine of the Trinity and explaining that no real meaning can be attached to the name God save ‘Something not Ourselves which makes for Righteousness.’ And all the while he goes habitually to church, regularly takes the Holy Sacrament, turns to the East at the traditional or psychological moment, hymns the Church of England and the most reasonable of Establishments, and pleads unwearyingly for the literary use of the Bible in the school and the home” (Modern Humanists Reconsidered. London: Watts 1927 125). 47 Here is Monk on Russell’s intervention: The weekend that Eliot went to Garsington [April 1917] he was supposed to be sailing back to the United States to sit his postgraduate examinations in philosophy at Harvard. It was an obligation that Russell had helped to get him out of by sending a telegram to Elio’s father saying: “strongly advise cabling tom against sailing under present peculiarly dangerous conditions unless immediate degree is worth risking life.” Eliot’s father professed himself “not greatly pleased with the language of Prof. Russell’s cablegram,” and his mother wrote to Russell to say she was “sure your influence in every way will confirm my son in his choice of philosophy as a life work,” and confirming that she herself had “absolute faith in his Philosophy but not in the vers libre.” For the time being, at least, the intervention had achieved its aim of keeping Eliot in London. (Monk Spirit, 454) 48 Donald Gallup’s suggestion that Appleplex is modelled on Ezra Pound has long been accepted, but the fit is very poor. Pound can hardly be described as someone who “studied the physical and biological sciences.” Russell seems to me a much more plausible candidate. See Donald Gallup, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: Collaboration in Letters. Seymour-Jones also speculates that Russell was the model for Appleplex (Painted Shadow 200–2). The story has not drawn a lot of comment. Christopher Ricks in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice comments on it at some length (115–22) but ignores the biographical context, summing it up as about “being able to be neither comfortable nor altogether uncomfortable with stereotypes” (118). He returns to the story (still Part I), placing the murder “in Gopsum Street” in the context of a murder reported in newspapers (130–2). Kristian Smidt in Poetry and Belief in the Work of T.S. Eliot also discusses it only in terms of its philosophical and religious implications. Both assume that Eeldrop is Eliot, but neither speculates on the identity of Appleplex. And Smidt attributes the opinions of both interlocutors to Eliot.

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49 This remark seems to conflate attitudes of both Bradley and Russell. Bradley, of course, concentrated on the individual (the “finite centre”) as the only ethical agent. Russell, for his part denied that universals had any meaning. In his logic, only definite references to specific entities carry meaning. 50 Seymour-Jones identifies Vivien as the target of the ridicule (Painted Shadow 200–2), but she has no evidence to support the allegation, and it seems unlikely on internal evidence. 51 Being only a little shy of thirty, with an ill wife, and a not terribly robust constitution, Eliot would have had little prospect of being placed in the infantry in the American army. Though his education would certainly have assured him a commission, infantry subalterns had the highest casualty rates of all ranks in the British army. The fate of T.E. Hulme – older than he – and Jean Verdenal, among countless others, would not have been lost on him. 52 Lyndall Gordon suggests that Eliot rather unkindly used the women in his life to feed his poetry: It is curious how each [woman] was absorbed into what seems an almost predetermined pattern. Emily Hale prompted the sublime moments; Vivienne, the sense of sin, as well as providing, throughout the first marriage, the living martyrdom. Later, sensible, efficient Mary Trevelyan served her long stint as support during the years of penitence. For her their friendship was a commitment; for Eliot quite peripheral. His passion for immortality was so commanding that it allowed him to reject each of these women with a firmness that shattered their lives. At the same time, his poetry and plays transformed them as the material of art. As such, Emily and Vivienne became allegorical emblems of vision and horror that take his works to the frontiers of experience, and beyond. (”Eliot and Women” in Bush 1991 20) And Seymour-Jones portrays Eliot as a very inadequate husband indeed. Neither, I think, gives sufficient weight to the degree Eliot may have been damaged by Vivien’s adultery with Russell. 53 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty characterizes the critic as an “ironist” capable of a benign “double talk,” or mimicry. She is “willing to refrain from epistemology – from thinking that there is a special set of terms in which all contributions to the conversation should be put – and ... willing to pick up the jargon of the interlocutor rather than translating it into ... [her] own.” This is the hermeneutic activity, Rorty says, of “imitating models ... of phronesis rather than epistemon” – that is, of thought (or opinion) rather than knowledge (318, 319). Certainly this is not a mode of intellectual conduct that Eliot could have adopted.

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54 Seymour-Jones (Painted Shadow passim) believes that Eliot knew of it from very early in the relationship, and that he tolerated it for economic reasons and to advance his career: “It was Russell’s payment of the Eliots’ everyday bills, as well as the ‘extras’ they both considered essential, which subsidised a life style well beyond their means and enabled them to mix with the Bloomsbury group, many of whose members practised a similar “open marriage” to that of Tom and Vivien ... It was a bohemian ethos in which the Eliots felt comfortable, one in which bourgeois conventions had long ago been abandoned”(154). Whatever Eliot may have suspected of the relationship, it is inconceivable to me that he would have been willing to profit from his wife’s infidelity, as Seymour-Jones implies.

chapter three 1 Lyndall Gordon dates it as prior to January 1915 (Imperfect 540), on the flimsy grounds of Eliot’s mention of Priapism in a letter to Pound of 2 February 1915 (Letters 85). But Eliot is clearly referring to one of the Bolo poems in that letter, complaining that Lewis had declined to print it in Blast. All that can be said for certain of the date is that it was written before September 1916, when it appeared in Poetry – minus the line, “He laughed like an irresponsible foetus,” which Harriet Monroe excised without asking permission (Letters 223). It seems likely that it was written not long before that, because in a letter to Monroe of 7 June 1916 declining to send her “Prufrock,” Eliot offered “Portrait” and “La Figlia che Piange” instead – which we know were written long before – but did not offer “Mr. Apollinax.” In the event, a quartet of poems appeared in the September issue of Poetry entitled “Observations.” It included “La Figlia che Piange,” “Conversations Galantes,” “Morning at the Window,” and “Mr. Apollinax,” but not “Portrait.” The last three appear to be of recent composition, though we have no dates for them. Eliot obviously sent them sometime after 7 June, but the only one mentioned in the letter is the 1911 poem “La Figlia che Piange.” It seems probable that all of these poems were in a drawer, as opposed to being written for the occasion, for he told Conrad Aiken in a letter of 21 August 1916 that he had not written “a line” of poetry (Letters 144). 2 The Fuller identification is Lyndall Gordon’s (Imperfect 29). Valerie Eliot (Letters 483) thinks that Professor Channing-Cheetah is based on William Henry Schofield, a much older Harvard professor. Fuller was only nine years older than Eliot – the same age as Stevens, in fact. Monk, in The Spirit of Solitude, leaves no doubt, that Russell and Eliot did spend a weekend at the country house of Professor Fuller (353). If Eliot led Valerie to believe that it was

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Schofield’s, he must have transposed Schofield onto the Fuller social occasion – a licence that we grant to poets. Monk does not mention that Eliot and Russell first met at Mrs Gardner’s house. Donald J. Childs reports that Eliot himself confirmed that Schofield was the model. (“‘Mr. Apollinax,’ Professor Channing-Cheetah, and T.S. Eliot,” Journal of Modern Literature 13 [March 1986] 172–7.) He notes the irony that Schofield – the archetypal New Englander in ‘Mr. Apollinax’ – was not even an American, but ... a Canadian” (177). However, the identity of the ridiculed Harvard professor is not crucial to my argument. 3 Valerie Eliot prints three letters from Eliot to Mrs Jack Gardner. They are all respectful, and report on his literary activities and the painting scene in London. It is clear that he regarded her as a useful contact at Harvard, and went out of his way to maintain cordial relations. I don’t know if she saw “Mr. Apollinax,” or if she recognized herself in it, if she did see it. 4 The following epigraph is not in Collected Poems, nor in The Little Review, nor in the British edition of Collected Poems 1909–1935. However it is in the corresponding American edition: New York: Harcout, Brace & Co. 1930: “Similiter et omnes revereantur Diaconos, ut mandatum Jesu Christi; et Episcopum, ut Jesum Christum, existentem filium Patris; Presbyteros autem, ut concilium Dei et conjunctionem Apostolorum. Sine his Ecclesia non vocatur; de quibus suadeo vos sic haber. s. ignatii ad trallianos.” [Likewise, let all respect the deacons as Jesus Christ, even as the bishop is also a type of the Father, and the presbyters as the Council of God and the college of Apostles. Without these the name of “Church” is not given. I am confident that you accept this.] The passage is from St Ignatius of Antioch’s epistle to the Turkish city of Tralles. See “Ignatius to the Trallians,” iii.1–2, in The Apostolic Fathers, with a translation by Kirsopp Lake (London: William Heinemann, 1919), i, 215. It is not entirely clear to me what this epigraph adds to the import of the poem. If read ironically, it underlines the extravagant claims the Church makes for its clergy. Eliot apparently decided it was not worth retaining, for this is the only time it is attached to the poem. Certainly it would not fit the later views of the Anglican Eliot. 5 I am not aware that Eliot ever confirmed that he had Gautier’s poem in mind, but the opening lines of his poem – “The broad-backed hippopotamus / Rests on his belly in the mud” – might be thought to echo the opening line of Gautier’s: “L’hippopotame au large ventre.” Beyond that there is scarcely any verbal similarity – though both ridicule piety. However, without the allusion, Eliot’s choice of an hippopotamus as the vehicle of his ridicule seems infelicitous – especially since Eliot does not exploit – as Gautier does – the massive invulnerability of the Hippopotamus to any assault. Moreover,

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Gautier attributes the armour of faith to himself, rather spiking any ridicule of believers. 6 Eliot may have had in the back of his mind the following passage from Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy – a work he knew well (238–9) on a Scottish writer celebrating the fecundity of the British lower classes, which Arnold then mocks: “We move to multiplicity,” says Mr. Robert Buchanan. “If there is one quality which seems God’s, and his exclusively, it seems that divine philoprogenitiveness, that passionate love of distribution and expansion into living forms. Every animal added seems a new ecstasy to the Maker; every life added, a new embodiment of his love. He would swarm the earth with beings. There are never enough. Life, life, life, – faces gleaming, hearts beating, must fill every cranny. Not a corner is suffered to remain empty. The whole earth breeds, and God glories.” Arnold comments: It is a little unjust, perhaps, to attribute to the Divinity exclusively this philoprogenitiveness, which the British Philistine, and the poorer class of Irish, may certainly claim to share with him; yet how inspiriting is here the whole strain of thought! and these beautiful words, too, I carry about with me in the East of London, and often read them there ... And when the story is perfectly revived, the swarming quite completed, and every cranny choke-full, then, too, no doubt, the faces in the East of London will be gleaming faces, which Mr. Robert Buchanan says it is God’s desire they should be, and which every one must perceive they are not at present, but, on the contrary, very miserable. It seems unlikely that the punctilious Eliot would have carelessly substituted “Polyphyloprogenitive” for Arnold’s “philoprogenitive,” so I assume that the emendation was deliberate – if, indeed, he had Culture and Anarchy in mind at all. Moreover, the occasion of Arnold’s use of the term is remote from Eliot’s. In A Student’s Guide the resourceful B.C. Southam identifies an alternate candidate. He points out that Friedrich Strauss used the term “philoprogenitive” in A New Life of Jesus (1865 English translation, ii, 41) “in a discussion of the ‘myth’ that Jesus was ‘begotten’ by the Holy Ghost” (61). This usage is certainly closer to the theme of the poem, but it is still not an occurrence of “polyphyloprogenitive.” 7 B.C. Southam in his Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994 117) speculates that the allusion is to Piero Della Francesca’s “Baptism” in the National Gallery, London. However, Piero does not belong to the Umbrian school, and while his painting does have a hovering dove, neither Christ’s nor John the Baptist’s feet are immersed in water

Notes to pages 106–10

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as they are in Perugino. God the Father is not depicted in either Francesca’s or Perugino’s “Baptism.” Throughout his life Eliot evinces an ambivalence toward mystical visions. For a recent discussion of this ambivalence see Paul Murray, T.S. Eliot and Mysticism. Despite Eliot’s denials, Murray concludes – on the evidence of Four Quartets – that “the vision communicated in his poetry of the Timeless Moment is, I think, an authentic expression of a state of soul that one can only call mystical” (257). That Eliot was interested in the phenomenon of mystical experience cannot be denied, even if it is doubtful – despite Lyndall Gordon – that he had any experiences that he would himself classify as mystical. He did, however, famously compare the involuntary component of literary composition to mystical experience in a review of the Pensées of Pascal: “You may call it communion with the Divine, or you may call it a temporary crystallization of the mind. Until science can teach us to reproduce such phenomena at will, science cannot claim to have explained them; and they can be judged only by their limits” (Selected Essays 405). In the draft version, as printed in Inventions of the March Hare, in place of the lines: “Along the garden-wall the bees / With hairy bellies pass between” Eliot had: “Salmon stretched red along the wall / “Sweet peas invite to intervene / The hairy bellies of the bees.” Presumably he wanted to introduce the salmon for their well-known suicidal spawning run, but the line is difficult to construe, and brings to mind gutted salmon drying along the wall more than spawning salmon swimming upstream. In his 1921 review in Lewis’ Tyro, Eliot bemoaned the lack of myths in his time, which, he says, leads to a fruitless nihilism: “But in our time, barren of myths – when in France there is no successor to the honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien [the plain man whom nothing upsets] and René, and the dandy, but only a deliberate school of mythopoetic nihilism – in our time the English myth is pitiably diminished” (“The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism”). I suggest that he was thinking of his own war-time poetry. I’m not sure what Eliot has in mind as the “English myth,” but he goes on to complain of its “degenerate descendent, the modern John Bull, the John Bull who usually alternates with Britannia in the cartoons of Punch.” I suppose he might have in mind Arthurian legends. We will return to the question of the attitudes of Eliot and Stevens toward the irrational when we come to the question of pure poetry in chapter 5. “There is a difference between them [science and poetry ] and it is the difference between logical and empirical knowledge. Since philosophers do not

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agree in respect to what constitutes philosophic truth, as Bertrand Russell (if any illustration whatever is necessary) demonstrates in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth, even in the casual comment that truth as a static concept is to be discarded, it may not be of much use to improvise a definition of poetic truth” (Kermode 676). 14 Jacqueline Vaught Brogan mentions some of these annotation in a note: “The marginalia of Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism (New York: MacMillan, 1895), now held at the Huntington, reveals Stevens’ interest in very disinterested criticism, since he has marked Arnold’s assertion that ‘Criticism must maintain its independence of the practical spirit and its aims’ (34); yet it also shows Stevens’ interest in the political function of the ‘creative power,’ since he has also marked the passage in which Arnold praises Burke for bringing ‘thought to bear upon politics.’ (n4, 188). 15 A statement such as “I was the world in which I walked,” leaves Stevens open to the charge of solipsism, but the charge is unjustified, for reasons that Eliot himself outlines in his dissertation on Bradley: So far as experiences go, we may be said in a sense to live each in a different world. But “world” in this sense, is not the world with which solipsism is concerned; each centre of experience is unique, but is unique only with reference to a common meaning ... And inasmuch as the finite centre is an experience, while the self is one aspect in that experience, and again contains and harmonizes several experiences, we may say that the self is both less and more than such a centre, and is ideal. For this reason it is more correct to say that a self passes from one point of view to another ... Thus we may continue to say that finite centres are impervious. Identity we find to be everywhere ideal, while finite centres are real. (Knowledge and Experience 149) The consequence of such relativistic idealism is that, although each individual’s awareness is limited and partial, we – each of us – are unaware of that partiality. We each inhabit a world that is experientially distinct and peculiar to each of us, even though the world is external to us and always remains whatever it is. Of course, there is a good deal of overlap between your experience and mine, but there is no way for either of us to know precisely where the overlap fails. As Eliot famously puts the dilemma in Part v of The Waste Land: “We think of the key, each in his prison / Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.” 16 “Finite centre” is Bradley’s term for the experiencing consciousness. The point of using such a term is to stress the partiality or limited nature (finitude) of our consciousness as compared to the field of possible experiences, and also its particularity or singularity (“centre”) as compared to the univer-

Notes to pages 118–35

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sality of the Absolute. As the citation indicates, the finite centre must be distinguished from the self because it is only the experiencing aspect of the self – its feelings and emotions, abstracted from other features such as memory, volition, and so forth which go together to make up the complete self. This sentiment expressed in “Sunday Morning” is akin to Russell’s remarks in his 1910 essay “Mysticism and Logic”: “If we are not to be led into false beliefs, it is necessary to realise exactly what the mystic emotion reveals. It reveals a possibility of human nature – a possibility of a nobler, happier, freer life than any that can be otherwise achieved. But it does not reveal anything about the non-human, or about the nature of the universe in general. Good and bad, and even the higher good that mysticism finds everywhere, are the reflections of our own emotions on other things, not part of the substance of things as they are in themselves” (Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays 28). I do not suggest that Stevens had read “Mysticism and Logic.” My purpose is simply to point out the similarity of Russell’s avowedly Humanist views and those expressed in “Sunday Morning.” Although Sassoon was two years Eliot’s senior, he patronizes him as a “youth” and takes the trouble to note his Jewish ancestry. Sassoon’s father was a nonobservant Jew, but his mother was an Englishwoman. The elder Sassoon abandoned his wife and family for another woman, but continued to support them. Siegfried was raised by his mother as an Anglican and a country gentleman. His correspondence at the time corroborates that he was not writing, but not that he had lost interest in poetry. For example he complained to Conrad Aiken in a letter of 1916: “Of poetry I have not written a line; I have been far too worried and nervous. I hope that the end of another year will see me in a position to think about verse a bit” (Letters 145). This is the same defence that Ron Schuchard offers in “Burbank with a Baedeker.” He is speaking of the infamous remark in After Strange Gods, but in the context of a reading of “Burbank with a Baedeker”: “To Eliot, any large number of free-thinking New Humanists – or any secular humanists, Christian or Jewish – would be intellectually “undesirable,” for in diminishing the role of religion in culture they would threaten the very project of reestablishing a traditional, religion-based culture” (53). However, there is no good evidence that Eliot was committed to “reestablishing a traditional religion-based culture” in 1919 – as he certainly was in, say, 1933. The issue of Eliot’s alleged anti-Semitism is not one that I wish to engage. There is no question that he harboured religious and ethnic prejudices toward Jews – as did most of his class and religious upbringing in the United States in those years. And as a Christian convert who believed that a healthy

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society required a large degree of homogeneity of religious belief, he was ideologically hostile both to practising Jews and (infamously) to free-thinking Jews. All of that must be conceded; what remains at issue is to what extent those predilections and attitudes constitute a culpable ethical failure, one that vitiates his entire literary achievement. It is that question that I wish to put aside. For those interested in the question, the most thorough airing of the matter of which I am aware is the “Special Section: Eliot and anti-Semitism, the Ongoing Debate” in Modernism/modernity 10 (Jan. 2003) 1–70. For the contrasting case of Ezra Pound, I recommend my study Pound in Purgatory. Eliot delivered a paper entitled “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual” on 9 December 1913 in Royce’s seminar (cited at length in Piers Gray 108–74). In it he discusses Frazer’s theories as well as Durkheim’s. In the essay he wrote for Royce in his last year at Harvard (1913–14), “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” Eliot referred specifically to Frazer’s scepticism about the Christian story: “I have not the smallest competence to criticise Dr. Frazer’s erudition, and his ability to manipulate this erudition one can only admire. But I cannot subscribe for instance to the interpretation with which he ends his volume on the Dying God” (cited by Piers Gray 130). But that was not his opinion in 1921. For example, Eliot wrote to Sydney Schiff, in a letter written from the Albermale Hotel at Margate, in November 1921: “I have done a rough draft of part of part iii, but do not know whether it will do, and must wait for Vivien’s opinion as to whether it is printable” (Letters 484). For a detailed account of the chronology of The Waste Land’s composition see Lawrence Rainey, Revisiting “The Waste Land.” Lawrence Rainey’s recent thorough and authoritative study of The Waste Land’s genesis in Revisiting “The Waste Land” disappointingly does not address the question of why Eliot was determined to write a long poem. What his study does show – unequivocally – is that the long poem does not come naturally to Eliot, for his study confirms what has long been known: that The Waste Land was cobbled together from fragments, some written many years earlier. Eliot needed the guidance – or perhaps just the moral support – of Ezra Pound to mould those fragments into a none-too-coherent poem. On the unity of the poem, see especially pages 39–40 of Revisiting. It is outside the scope of this study, but one inspiration for multi-voiced poetry sequences was probably radio drama. Pound invoked that parallel in a letter of 29 November 1924 to his father, explaining how he could navigate The Cantos: “Simplest parallel I can give is radio where you tell who is talking

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by the noise they make” (quoted in my study of Pound’s Cantos, A Light from Eleusis 126; Beinecke, Pound Collection). Although very different in tone, these lines from The Waste Land express the same disillusionment with the Resurrection as the following lines from Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”: “The tomb in Palestine / Is not the porch of spirits lingering. / It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.” Here is Weston’s description of her thesis: “Were Grail romances forbidden? Or were they merely discouraged? Probably we shall never know, but of this one thing we may be sure, the Grail is a living force, it will never die; it may indeed sink out of sight, and, for centuries even, disappear from the field of literature, but it will rise to the surface again, and become once more a theme of vital inspiration even as, after slumbering from the days of Malory, it woke to new life in the nineteenth century, making its fresh appeal through the genius of Tennyson and Wagner” (From Ritual to Romance 188). For a consideration of the relation between The Waste Land and From Ritual to Romance, see my study The Birth of Modernism. Pound’s early poetry had lots of Yeatsian magic and mysticism, but not the Frazerian feature of comparative mythology, which is so important in The Waste Land. Seymour Jones thinks that the strain of a visit from Eliot’s mother and sister, beginning on 10 June 1921, helped to precipitate Eliot’s mental breakdown, leading to his treatment at Lausanne in October. His mother and brother stayed at the Eliots’ Clarence Gate Gardens flat, while Tom and Vivien moved in with Lucy Thayer. “Coming face to face after six years with this formidable matriarch,” Seymour Jones remarks, “was a considerable shock to Tom, banishing the false and sentimental memories of childhood recalled from the safety of England, and reviving the fear and sulky obedience of the years in St. Louis” (281). Adding to the strain was Charlotte Eliot’s refusal “to change her will so that Eliot would inherit his share unencumbered. She insisted on excluding Vivien from any inheritance” (283). For an excellent and detailed account of Eliot’s engagement with the Criterion, see Jason Harding, The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical networks in Inter-War Britain. Terry Eagleton’s brilliant review of Harding’s book puts the purpose and demise of the Criterion as cogently as one could wish: The second depression of spirits gripped Eliot in October 1938, in the wake of the Munich pact between Hitler and Chamberlain. Three months later, the Criterion folded – partly because of the material complications of the advent of war, but no doubt because of its spiritual implications, too. For the war meant that the Criterion’s project to rebuild a cultural

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equivalent of the Holy Roman Empire had collapsed, giving way to an altogether more sinister sort of European empire; and Eliot observed glumly in the final edition of the journal that “the ‘European Mind,’ which one had mistakenly thought might be renewed and fortified, disappeared from view” (Terry Eagleton, “Nudge-Winking”). It is true that Stevens had a fairly close relationship with Santayana while an undergraduate, and there is no doubt that Santayana’s scepticism had some influence on Stevens’ thought and his “belief system.” But there is no evidence that he had the sort of intense attraction to Santayana, followed by repulsion, that we have seen in Eliot’s relation with Russell. Nor, of course, was there any personal grievance between the two men as there was between Eliot and Russell. For Santayana’s influence on Stevens see Milton J. Bates, Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self, passim. Apart from undergraduate poems published in the Harvard Advocate, Stevens’ first published poem was “Carnet de Voyage” – actually a sequence of poems – published in the Trend 8 in September 1914. They were not included in Harmonium. The litany is a prayer, repeatedly asking the Virgin to intercede for the penitent in various guises, that is, with different attributes. The most popular in the twentieth century was the Litany of Loreto, from which the following are taken: “Mother of divine grace, pray for us. / Mother most pure, pray for us. / Mother most chaste, pray for us. / Virgin most prudent, pray for us. / Virgin most powerful, pray for us. / Seat of wisdom, pray for us. / Mystical rose, pray for us. / Tower of ivory, pray for us. / House of gold, pray for us. / Morning star, pray for us. / Refuge of sinners, pray for us. / Queen of Angels, pray for us. / Queen of Martyrs, pray for us.” Eliot complained to Thayer that it had taken him a year to write the poem, and further that he (Thayer) had paid George Moore £100 for a short story, while offering Eliot only $150 for The Waste Land (Letters 515–16). According to a letter to Harriet Monroe of 28 October 1922, Stevens was in the late stages of putting Harmonium together at that date. He registers a lack of confidence in their merit, but there is no hint in the letter (also cited in the previous chapter) that he is revising any of them: “All my earlier things seem like horrid cocoons from which later abortive insects have sprung. The book will amount to nothing, except that it may teach me something ... Only the reading of these outmoded and debilitated poems does make me wish rather desperately to keep on dabbling and to be as obscure as possible until I have perfected an authentic and fluent speech for myself” (Letters 231). Stevens’ first mention of The Waste Land that I have found is a full month later, in a letter to Alice Henderson of November 27, 1922 (Kermode, CP &

Notes to pages 158–61

37

38

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40

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Prose 940) also cited above, in which he declares: “If it is the supreme cry of despair it is Eliot’s and not his generation’s. Personally, I think it is a bore.” Curiously the tss of the Ur “Comedian” submitted for the Blindman Prize suffered a fate very similar to that of The Waste Land tss. It was left at a house in West Hartford where Stevens lived “for some time.” According to the account of her grandson, Reverend John Curry Gay, the landlady occasionally retrieved pages from the Steven’s trash, amongst those pages were nineteen, headed “Submitted for the Blindman Prize,” with the title, “From the Journal of Crispin.” In 1974 the Reverend Curry gave those papers to the Beinecke Library (Martz 4). In contrast to The Waste Land, the published poem is much longer than the one submitted for the prize. The Tetragrammaton is not truly a cipher, since classical Hebrew does not have symbols for vowels, and all words are written without indication of the necessary vowels. The consequence of this lack is a radical ambiguity in Hebrew script that is famously exploited by Kabbalists. The Greeks added the vowels to the Semitic script. It is not, I think, entirely mischievous to contrast these lines describing Crispin’s emancipation from the illusions of the Romantic, represented as his own shadow, to Eliot’s lines from Part i of The Waste Land : Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. (ll. 24–30) The darkness and portentousness of Eliot’s lines contrast starkly with the playful brightness of Stevens’ poem. It would be unfair to include Stevens in this generalization, but he does expunge the single mention of Canada from the poem. The draft version of “Journal of Crispin” read as follows: Crispin “Projected a colony that should extend / From the big-rimmed snow-star over Canada / To the dusk of a whistling south below the south.” Oddly, Stevens situates Crispin in Mexico, the country of the marimba, but for the most part “The Comedian as the Letter C” is about that portion of the New World that now comprises the United States of America – minus Hawaii and Alaska, which were not yet states. Stevens’ use of “emprise” here instead of the more colloquial “enterprise” is a characteristic lexical tic. The most recent use in that sense caught by the OED is Browning’s “Dare first / The chief emprise,” in his 1871 Prince

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Notes to pages 162–6

Hohenstiel-Schwangau: Saviour of Society. The obsolete meaning, “preoccupation, absorption of thought,” whose last recorded use is 1500, fits Stevens’ line better than the current “enterprise’ and is perhaps his intended meaning. 41 My reading of these lines is pretty well the contrary of Hi Simons’ interpretation: “This succession of antitheses between the high things Crispin had projected and the small end to which they came to express the poet’s sense of his character’s failure” (Hi Simons, “The Comedian as the Letter C”: Its Sense and its Significance” 108). My sense is that the “high things” belong to the illusory world Crispin has abandoned in favour of a “real” world. 42 Even if Stevens was, indeed, baptized a Catholic while in hospital, as Father Arthur Hanley claims, there is nothing to mark a point any earlier in his life at which he converted, so we cannot read his poetry in terms of such a change in his belief as we can – and must – with Eliot.

chapter four 1 Montgomery Belgion is infamous as the author of the review of The Yellow Spot, which Anthony Julius erroneously attributed to Eliot in T.S. Eliot, AntiSemitism and Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995 167–70. Jason Harding points out that “it might have been evident to anyone who consulted the index to volume 15 of the Criterion that Belgion had been the author – batch reviews were conventionally signed with initials at the bottom of the last entry, in this case “M.B.” And Harding adds that Belgion’s animus toward Jews “cannot be so easily displaced on to Eliot, still less to a journal as heterogeneous and multivocal as the Criterion” (158). 2 In “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual,” Jain concludes that Eliot adopted a Derrida-like cognitive scepticism in a 1913 seminar paper for Royce, rejecting the cognitive optimism of the pragmatists: “For Pearse and Royce, through the infinite series of interpretations, error is progressively eliminated and a community approaches nearer the truth. For Eliot, interpretation is relative and leads to an endless regress” (147). However, four pages later, Jain contradicts the latter sentence, claiming that “whereas Derrida affirms the endless regress and play of interpretation, Eliot, with his acute sense of the element of error in all interpretation, does not” (151). I endorse Jain’s second position, but not his first. 3 Rafey Habib would not agree. In The Early T.S. Eliot and Western Philosophy he argues: “Eliot’s deployment of irony was derived from certain thinkers in what has been termed a ‘heterological’ tradition of thought, which has emphatically opposed the liberal-bourgeois world-views descended from the

Notes to pages 166–71

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mainstream Enlightenment. This line of thinkers includes Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Husserl, Bradley and the other neo-Hegelian idealists of the late nineteenth century such as Royce and Bosanquet (and, more recently, Foucault and Derrida, whose thought was in some respects anticipated by Eliot)” (5). Habib’s “tradition” is sometimes called the “continental” tradition in philosophy, distinct from the philosophical mainstream, sometimes designated “British empiricism.” Habib follows Richard Rorty’s view that this “heterological” tradition is characterized by irony – a feature noted in Eliot’s early poetry from the earliest reviews. But Habib’s list is a very mixed bag, and a more circumstantial examination of Eliot’s relationship (or lack of it) to those figures does not support Habib’s contention. Certainly Eliot’s Harvard was dominated by neo-Hegelians, as Eliot himself has remarked, but to call Foucault and Derrida neo-Hegelians in the same sense as Josiah Royce was a Hegelian is a stretch. Husserl is generally considered to be the modern founder of phenomenology as a philosophical posture – though it can, of course, be traced to Hegel. His student, Heidegger, accepted the label, but Heidegger’s French followers – most notably Sartre and Merleau-Ponty – called themselves existentialists. As the vogue of existentialism faded in the Anglo-American academy, the term “existential” dropped out, and “phenomenology” has taken its place, although with the ambiguity that it may refer to the quite different thought of either Husserl or Heidegger. Paul Ricoeur, for example, is more a Husserlean than a Heideggerean, whereas the contrary is true for HansGeorg Gadamer – but both travel as phenomenologists. See his “Letter on Humanism” addressed to the French anti-Semite Jean Beaufret, published in 1947 (Basic Writings 193–242). More cites the Harvard Humanist Irving Babbitt to the effect that there is “an element of truth in the assertion of Plato that things human cannot be properly known without a previous insight into divine things” and adds that Babbitt ranges himself “unhesitatingly on the side of the suernaturalists.” But he complains that such views do not “seem to me to meet the clear conviction held by Sophocles or by any other of the great humanists of ancient Greece” (More, “A Revival of Humanism” 9). Stevens’ view is largely compatible with that of Hans Vaihinger, whose The Philosophy of “As if”: A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (1911) appeared in an English translation by C.K. Ogden in1924. However, despite Frank Doggett’s articulation of affinities between Vaihinger and Stevens in Stevens’ Poetry of Thought, there is no evidence at all that Stevens ever read Vaihinger – as Milton Bates pointed out in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (201–2).

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What is clear is that Vaihinger’s views are entirely compatible with American pragmatism, despite his protestations to the contrary. Vaihinger’s careful discrimination of his own position from scepticism, is perhaps of interest in this discussion of Stevens’ views: Scepticism implies a theory which raises doubts or questioning to the dignity of a principle. The Philosophy of “As if,” however, has never had a trace of this attitude ... Fictions are to be distinguished from Hypotheses. The latter are assumptions which can be proved by further experience. They are therefore verifiable. Fictions are never verifiable, for they are hypotheses which are known to be false, but which are employed because of their utility. When a series of hypotheses in mathematics, mechanics, physics, chemistry, ethics or the philosophy of religion are shown in this way to be useful fictions and so justify themselves, surely this does not imply scepticism. The reality of these hypotheses is not doubted; it is denied on the basis of the positive facts of experience. The expression “Relativism” would be more applicable to the Philosophy of “As if” in so far as it denies all absolute points (in mathematics just as in metaphysics) and shows a natural affinity with the theory of relativity both of the past and the present. (xlii) For Vaihinger, then, fictions can only be heuristic or “useful” – in the sense that they offer comfort. Hence his view is on the whole compatible with Stevens’ – though neither man knew anything of the other’s work. 8 He is clear on this point in The Necessary Angel: “The interest in the subconscious and in surrealism shows the tendency toward the imaginative. Boileau’s remark that Descartes had cut poetry’s throat is a remark that could have been made respecting a great many people during the last hundred years, and of no one more aptly than of Freud, who, as it happens, was familiar with it and repeats it in his Future of an Illusion [trans. 1929]. The object of that essay was to suggest a surrender to reality” (Kermode 653). 9 In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, an articulation for an English-speaking audience of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics, Rorty construes the fundamental point of philosophical hermeneutics in the following way: “It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions” (12). He takes the argument a little further in Contingency, irony and solidarity: “A sense of human history as the history of successive metaphors would let us see the poet, in the generic sense of the maker of new words, the shaper of new languages, as the vanguard of the species” (20). And again: “Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses – to cause tingles –

Notes to pages 174–5

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has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage” (152). Oddly, Rorty never cites Stevens in support of his position. On the basis of these views, Rorty concludes that dialectics ought to be understood as literary criticism. His point is that, like the Stevensian poet, the literary critic deals with discourse that he does not believe, that is to say, with fictional discourse. Such an activity can be carried on only by someone Rorty calls an “ironist” (79–80). In this, Rorty is a latter-day philosophical hermeneut, whose central point is that all discourse requires interpretation, and hence the interpretive disciplines must be considered the master disciplines. His source, Gadamer, is explicit about his own membership in the school of philosophical hermeneutics. 10 The Trinity, of course, is the three persons of God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit) conceived as one and indivisible despite its apparent division. This doctrine was strongly asserted at the Council of Nicaea convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 in order to put an end the view of Arius that there was just one, indivisible God. Transubstantiation is the doctrine that the bread and wine consecrated at the Mass are truly and veritably transformed into the body and blood of Christ, despite appearances to the contrary. My presumption is that Stevens regards these “mysteries” as evidence of the Catholic Church’s tolerance of the irrational – a tolerance motivated by a distrust in the sovereign power of human reason, which Stevens shares. 11 Hugo Ott reports on Beaufret’s ideological posture in the preface to Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (8): One of the most important communicators of Heidegger’s thought to French audiences was the late Jean Beaufret of Lyons, who died in 1982, and to whom Heidegger addressed his “Letter on Humanism” of 1946/47. Beaufret is now [1988] in bad odour – and consequently extremely suspect as a correspondent and associate of Heidegger’s – following the publication of some letters written by him to the historian Robert Faurisson (University of Lyons ii), the unspeakable champion of the “Auschwitz lie” thesis. These letters, written in 1978, were published by Faurisson in the journal Annales d’Histoire Révisionniste (No. 3, 1987). They express support for the work that Faurisson is doing, and encourage him to persevere with the same line of research. Ott notes that in a later issue, Faurisson celebrates Heidegger and Beaufret as his predecessors in revisionism, but finds Faurisson’s “appropriation of Heidegger as a pioneer of the ‘Auschwitz lie’ theses to be ‘without justification.’” Nonetheless he believes that “the Beaufret letters do cast a very dubi-

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Notes to pages 175–8

ous light on the whole milieu in which the reception of Heidegger in France has thrived” (9). See “Descartes: Cogito Sum; ‘I’ as a Special Subject,” § 7 of “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics,” in Basic Writings 273–82. See also Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” Writing and Difference 31–63. Derrida’s essay is an attack on Foucault, to which Foucault replies in “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” trans. Geoff Bennington, Oxford Literary Review 4 (Autumn 1979) 7–28. Marjorie Buhr mentions (10) the letter to Lee, and takes it as evidence that Stevens had a strong interest in Heidegger, which justifies her exploration of parallels in their thought. “Heidegger dit qu’on s’égare d’autant plus loin de la nature et de la substance de la poésie qu’on cherche à la définir comme une réalité commune à des poète différents, car on se condamne ainsi à n’atteindre que l’indifférent de la poésie. Le critique n’atteint dans le poète, le poète n’atteint en lui-même l’essence de la poésie qu’autant qu’ils savent s’avancer dans un domaine où l’essentiel ne coïncide pas avec le plus général, mais avec le plus intérieure.” For a discussion of Heidegger’s relation to other contemporary thinkers see Richard Wolin. Although Husserl (1859–1938) was a generation older than Stevens, and still more senior to Eliot, he was still publishing in the 1920s. Stevens was aware of at least one aspect of Husserl’s thought – in contrast to his complete ignorance of Heidegger. In “A Collect of Philosophy” (1951) he cites a letter from Jean Wahl on Husserl’s Méditations Cartésiennes, where Husserl mentions the “inexhaustible infinity of a priori” in our minds. Stevens seizes on this idea: “this enormous a priori is potentially as poetic a concept as the idea of the infinity of the world.” In the same letter Wahl cites the Gnostic definition of God, attributing it to Pascal: “La sphère dont le centre est partout et la circonférence n’est nulle part,” (the sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere). Stevens sees it as “a concept belonging to our category”– that is to the category of poetic ideas. He adds several others: Vico’s ricorso, Nietzsche’s eternal return (Ewiges Wiederkehr), Lequier’s idea of freedom, and Malebranche’s “vérités éternelles” (eternal truths). Stevens reveals that Wahl had also mentioned “in an earlier letter” Novalis, Fichte, Hölderlin, the young Hegel, Shelley “influenced by Plato,” Blake, Mallarmé “influenced by the Kabbala and Hegel.” But he dismisses all of these poets, protesting, “I was not interested in the philosophy of poets but in the poetry of philosophers” (Kermode 860). In a reply (19 April1943) to Stevens’ request for help in the letter of 16 April, Henry Church includes a headnote in German: “Warum dürfte die

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Welt, die uns etwas angeht, – nicht eine Fiktion sein? Und wer da Fragt: “aber zur Fiktion gehört ein Urheber?” dürfte dem nicht rund geantwortetwerden: warum? Gehört dieses “Gehört” vielleicht mit zur Fiktion? Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Aphorism 34. (Huntington was 3415). Leggett gives this translation (37): “Why might not the world which concerns us – be a fiction? And to any who suggested: ‘But to a fiction belongs an originator?’ – might it not be bluntly replied: Why? May not this ‘belong’ also belong to the fiction?” 17 See I.A. Richards’ The Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). 18 Frank Lentricchia’s neo-Marxist assault on Stevens categorically rejects the sincerity of his literary project: “His later poetry is a masochistic form of gourmandizing, deliberately teased out and emptied of satisfaction, a sustaining of overwhelming appetite. At the poetic, if not at the economic, level of existence, he found a way to supply the spirit by resisting consumption: a life of indulgence, a poetics of asceticism tempted” (Lentricchia 62). The animus of this characterization is palpable, and distressingly ad hominem. 19 Note to p. 105: “Cf. ‘La mentalité des sociétés inférieures ... comporte bien des représentations abstraites, et des représentations générales; mais ni cette abstraction, ni cette généralité ne sont celles de nos concepts.’ Lévy-Bruhl, Les Fonctions Mentales, p. 137.” [The mentality of inferior societies certainly includes abstract representations, and general representations; but neither this abstraction nor this generality is that of our concepts.”] Jain points out that Eliot read Lévy-Bruhl for the seminar he took with Josiah Royce: “The works of such philosophers as James, Bergson, and Bradley, and of social scientists such as Lévy Bruhl, represented for Eliot an important nexus of ideas, particularly in their implications for mysticism and irrationalism – which he felt compelled to reject, but which nonetheless gave him a sharpened and poignant awareness of the workings of the human mind” (11). While Eliot ultimately rejected Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of participation Jain notes that he was initially attracted to it and endorsed it in his third seminar paper for Royce (142). Also, in a note in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, Eliot alludes to Lévy-Bruhl’s theory approvingly as a counter to I.A. Richards’ bifurcation of language into scientific and emotive modes (248 n1): “In chapter xxii of Principles of Literary Criticism Mr. Richards discusses these matters in his own way. As evidence that there are other approaches as well, see a very interesting article Le symbolisme et l’âme primitive by E. Cailliet and J.A. Bédé in the Revue de littérature comparée for April–June 1932. The authors, who have done field-work in Madagascar, apply the theories of Lévy-Bruhl: the pre-logical mentality persists in civilised man, but becomes available only to or through

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Notes to pages 182–3

the poet.” For an extended discussion of Eliot’s engagement with Lévy-Bruhl and other anthropologists see Piers Gray, especially chapter 4 pp. 108–42, where he prints excerpts from Eliot’s graduate paper for Royce of January 1914, and offers a general commentary. Lévy-Bruhl is given considerable and respectful consideration in that untitled essay. Eliot later referred to it by the title, “The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual.” 20 Compare Wm. James, Pragmatism 87: “The pragmatistic [sic] view [is] that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma. And Bergson Creative Evolution, 244: “In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things.” Clearly Bergson’s cast of mind tends toward some sort of participation, while James – despite his willingness elsewhere to entertain mystical knowledge – explicitly rejects the notion that the mind communicates with reality. 21 Oddly enough, mainstream Marxist/Communist thought holds a similar view. Of course, the world that determines human thoughts and beliefs in Marxist thought is the human world of the means of production, the “base” on which the “superstructure” or “false consciousness” is built. The classic expression is in Marx’s The German Ideology: “The phantoms formed in the human brain are ... necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.” 22 For example, in “Relations Between Poetry and Painting” (1951) Stevens wrote: “If it [the imagination] merely reconstructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar” (Kermode 744). Coleridge would have had no difficulty in agreeing with Stevens’ remark. In a recent article (“God, Imagination, and the Interior Paramour,”) B.J. Leggett offers a persuasive new reading of the fragment “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” which involves a reinterpretation of Stevens’ view of imagination. Basically he argues that the poem is a celebration not of the

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human imagination, as almost all readers have supposed, but rather of the poet’s participation in a divine imagination. I am inclined to agree. However, so described, Stevens’ view of imagination is not so different from Coleridge’s. Here is Coleridge’s definition from Biographia Litteraria: “The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act or creation in the infinite I am. The secondary imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all its objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.” Stevens’ imagination is more like Coleridge’s primary imagination than his secondary, poetic imagination. 23 It might form a parlour game to attempt to determine which Saint John Stevens has in mind. St John the Divine, author of the Book of the Apocalypse, seems an unlikely candidate, but I cannot think of any compelling reason to choose between St John the Baptist or the mystic St John of the Cross. There are a dozen or more St Johns in the canon to choose from. 24 “Man and Bottle,” published together with “Of Modern Poetry” in Hika 6 (May 1940) leaves no doubt that, despite American neutrality, the war was on Stevens’ mind at this time. 25 Donald Childs sees the conflict between pragmatism and mysticism as the key to understanding Eliot’s conflicted psyche. Here is his conclusion: Despite the disagreement between the Christian Eliot and the pragmatic Eliot – the former convinced that there is an objective Truth, the latter suspecting that there is only subjective truth – the agreement of Eliot the word-bound mystic and Eliot the world-bound pragmatist that the expression of an objective truth is not possible in language ironically leads to the same conclusion: we must construct something upon which to rejoice. In the end, by following Eliot’s opposition of Bergson and James through both the dissertation’s and Four Quartets’ opposition of subject-side and object-side points of view, and by following the opposition in Four Quartets of mystical and pragmatic moments, we can see that Four Quartets does not locate in what are traditionally identified as its mystical moments the “complete simplicity” of an experience of reality-as-essence ... The mystical experience of certainty – within which Eliot was once concerned to discern a hierarchy in terms of a distinction between classical and romantic mysticisms – thus comes to be seen as but one part of human experience, a part of experience always to be supplemented by scepticism (itself a high and

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Notes to pages 189–201

difficult faith), for even classical mystics, the most responsible of religious adventurers, are romantics at heart – if they are human, and especially if they are sons and lovers. (Childs 1999 224–5) I cannot agree with Childs’ characterization of the pragmatist’s truth as a “subjective truth.” There is nothing subjective about the pragmatic test of hypotheses. If they do not stand up to empirical verification, they are discarded. Pragmatism’s insistence that incorrigible truth is unattainable does not justify labelling it “subjectivist,” as Childs does. 26 In short, Eliot rejects what Richard Rorty calls the “specular metaphor” in which the mind is regarded as a mirror of nature (Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature). Rorty presents a pragmatist and phenomenologically inflected view of European philosophy – especially of Heidegger – that the Eliot of the dissertation would have found reasonably compatible. Rorty summarizes his thesis as follows: “The notion of knowledge as the assemblage of accurate representations is optional – that is it may be replaced by a pragmatist conception of knowledge which eliminates the Greek contrast between contemplation and action, between representing the world and coping with it. A historical epoch dominated by Greek ocular metaphors may, I suggest, yields to one in which the philosophical vocabulary incorporating these metaphors seems as quaint as the animistic vocabulary of pre-classical times” (11). 27 In addition to appearing in “Morning at the Window,” the epithet occurs – with a more clearly lubricious meaning – in “Portrait of a Lady,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Conversation Galante,” and “Ash-Wednesday.” Interestingly, “twisted” does not reappear after “Ash-Wednesday.” 28 See Donoghue (“Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot”) 192–6. His view that Stevens’ notion of “major man” in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is “good enough to cut a dash in the poem but, outside the poem good for nothing but mystification,” pretty well sums up his dismissal of Stevens as a thinker. Of course, I do not claim that Stevens has resolved the thorny epistemological, ontological, and theological issues that confront mankind. I only claim that he has confronted them with intelligence, sincerity, and passion.

chapter five 1 Between Latimer’s letter of 1933 and the publication of Ideas of Order, Stevens published another twelve poems, all of which were collected in Ideas of Order. 2 Most commentators have either accepted Stevens’ denial and not speculated on the relevance of Fernandez’s opinions to the poem, or doubted his denial, but then ignored the possible relevance of Fernandez’s speculations.

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Other exceptions are Harold Bloom and Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos. Bloom accommodates Fernandez to his general thesis that Stevens’ poetry can be understood, root and branch, as a dialogue with his romantic predecessors: “Ramon Fernandez is, of course, no Dorothy [Wordsworth], and in spite of some grumpy protestations in Stevens’ letters, he was a modern French critic whom Stevens certainly had read. As a formalist, Fernandez had much in common with Stevens ... and Fernandez was anti-Romantic, being in this a gallic equivalent of Eliot or Tate” (96). Like Riddell, Bloom is uninterested in Fernandez’s Humanism or his right wing political affiliations. De Sousa Santos is not interested in the historical person, but sees him as merely a convenient mask for an insensitive interlocutor. She concludes in “The Woman in the Poem”: “Ramon Fernandez is cunningly made to act the dumb part of a dull, uninteresting, un-responsive witness to the poet’s dread wonder at his own imagining of the woman as the mysterious originating power, infinitely desirable, but definitely alien – and totally out of reach” (150). No one has explored Eliot’s relation with Fernandez – although Longenbach does mention that Eliot published Fernandez in the Criterion and also that he translated him. 3 He gives three reasons why he is not a Communist. The only one relevant to this discussion is the second. As a Humanist, he says he cannot accept Communist class warfare: “La seconde raison, c’est que l’idée d’une adhésion au communisme comporte à mes yeux une action de tous les instants, un dévouement total à la cause ... Quand on défend comme moi un certain humanisme, fondé sur la croyance que l’homme est pour l’homme la plus haute valeur, et que l’humanité ne sera point égale à elle-même tant que tous les hommes ne seront pas humains, on ne saurait laisser triompher les gens qui pensent exactement le contraire sans encourir de déshonneur philosophique qui est peut-être le plus amer de tous les déshonneurs” (704–5). 4 Measures was translated by Eliot’s friend Montgomery Belgion, who has himself been accused of Nazi sympathies. 5 Here is Fernandez’s response: “Ne voit-il donc pas qu’en tâchant de donner son sens humain et dramatique à l’oeuvre d’un poète on veut restituer à cette oeuvre sa richesse et sa profondeur? Ne voit-il donc pas que si la poésie est une libération spirituelle ce n’est pas en rompant ses attaches à la vie qu’on le prouvera, mais au contraire en montrant qu’elle intègre la vie en la surmontant? (“Poésie et Biographie” 825–6) [Does he not see that in

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attempting to render the human and dramatic sense of a poet’s work, one wishes to restore to that work its richness and profundity? Does he not see that poetry is a spiritual liberation that does not breach the connections to life one experiences, but, on the contrary, shows that it integrates life while transcending it.] “Le drame personnel de M. Valéry, et celui de M. Bremond ont eu précisément pour effet les détourner du dramatique, du psychologique, pour les enfermer dans la poésie ou dans la mystique pure. Son point de vue est un point de vue de rhétorique déguisé en point de vue philosophique. (827) [M. Valery’s personal drama, and that of M. Bremond have had precisely the effect of turning them away from the dramatic, the psychological, [and] enclosing them in poetry or in pure mysticism. His point of view is that of rhetoric disguised as philosophy.] 6 “Dans toutes les sciences de l’homme aujourd’hui, de la sociologie à la médecine, la considération de l’histoire concrète individuelle du sujet étudié prend une place de plus en plus importante, ce qui veut dire que toute connaissance humaine tend à devenir biographie” (829). 7 Jason Harding points out in the Criterion that “in 1927 ... both the Criterion and the Adelphi were troubled by commercial exigencies ... A resumption of the controversy between Eliot and Murry, therefore, gave a timely boost to both journals. The classicism and romanticism debate attracted a great deal of attention in the London literary world. Beyond that charmed circle, however, it is unlikely that it attracted many new subscribers to either periodical.” The Romantic-Classic controversy included: Murry, “Towards a Synthesis,” Criterion 5 (June 1927) 294–313; Eliot, Review of Ludovici, Chesterton, and Belloc, Criterion 6 (July 1927) 69–71; Rev. D’Arcy, “The Thomistic Synthesis and Intelligence,” Criterion 6. 3 (Sept. 1927) 210–28; Eliot, “Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” Criterion 6, 4 (Oct. 1927) 340–7; Charles Mauron, “Concerning Intuition” Criterion 6, 3 (Sept. 1927) 220–35. Trans. T.S. Eliot; Ramon Fernandez, “A Note on Intelligence and Intuition” Criterion 6 (Oct. 1927) 332–9. Trans. T.S. Eliot; Murry, “Concerning Intelligence” Criterion 6 (Dec. 1927) 524–33. That controversy was followed by the controversy of Humanism vs religion. Once again Eliot dragooned Murry, Read, and Fernandez to enter the fray, as well as Norman Foerster, G.K. Chesterton, and Philip Richards. Eliot published his own contribution, “Second Thoughts about Humanism” in Murry’s Adelphi (Harding 37–9). The two controversies tended to overlap one another since the notion of intuition – central to Murry’s romanticism – also underpinned his rather spiritual Humanism.

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8 Fernandez refers to this article on “his friend T.S. Eliot” in “Poésie et Biographie.” That reference was perhaps one more reason for Stevens to put a black mark beside Fernandez’s name. 9 “Les objections que soulève l’oeuvre de Proust, considéré comme analyse intégrale du coeur, comme révélatrice du fond de notre nature, peuvent être à mon avis réduites à deux essentielles; elle n’édifie point une hiérarchie des valeurs, et elle ne manifeste de son début à sa conclusion, aucun progrès spirituel” (Messages 147–8). 10 “Le processus décrit par Newman et Meredith s’accomplit chez Proust dans un ordre inverse: garder une impression, pour eux, c’est transposer dans le ton de l’esprit une expérience concrète particulière, couper les amarres spatiale et temporelles de cette expérience, lui conférer la plasticité infinie d’une personnalité vivante en croissance perpétuelle” (159). Fernandez contrasts this approved mode to Proust’s disapproved mode: Pour Proust, c’est fondre entièrement son moi dans l’expérience, le déposer aux points du temps et de l’espace [160] où elle a eu lieu, par suite le découper en morceaux dont chacun est identifié avec une expérience particulière et logé dans un coin du temps qui acquiert ainsi une fixité et une extériorité qui sont des caractères propres à l’espace (Messages 159–60.) [For Proust it is to submerge oneself entirely in the experience, to locate it in particular spots in time and space where it took place, and then to slice it up into pieces, each identified with a particular experience and lodged in a temporal corner, which thus acquires a permanence and exteriority which are properly the properties of space.] (Messages 159–60. My translation. Fernandez’s emphasis.) 11 It is a bit of a digression, but since Wordsworth’s employment of “spots of time” anticipates Proust’s practice, Eliot no doubt would have regarded Proust’s practice as romantic and therefore to be avoided. Curiously, Eliot himself relies on such moments – though he takes great care to “sever the spatial and temporal moorings of the experience.” He famously admits such a practice in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism where Eliot asks: “Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water-mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depth of feeling into which we cannot peer” (181–2). 12 Of course, Cardinal Newman was a Christian, and did not base his morality exclusively on human values. Eliot draws attention to this “problem,” but

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justifies Fernandez’s liberty on the grounds that Newman was one – like himself? – who “tried to believe”: “M. Fernandez is, from a certain point of view, in closer sympathy with Newman than are many of Newman’s Christian or literary apologists; he is in much closer sympathy with Newman in his place and time: with Newman, in fact – and it is a large part – in so far as Newman was not Christian or Catholic. He does not understand, perhaps, that in which Newman believed or tried to believe, but he understands, better than almost anyone, the way in which Newman believed or tried to believe it. And this is a capital difference: a different way of facing the ‘moral’ problem” (753). 13 I have paraphrased Fernandez’s remarks, which are as follows: “Mais si je consulte les hommes, et principalement ceux qui n’exercent pas le métier d’écrire et de penser, je découvre en eux une totale indifférence à la suprématie du spirituel. Le cercle se referme: je ne vois pas comment on en pourrait sortir autrement que par la foi. Reste à se demander ce que c’est que l’esprit. Chacun en parle avec certitude mais serait bien en peine de le définir. Avant de propager une révolution spirituelle, il conviendrait pourtant de savoir pour quoi on va se battre. Quand il intitulait son intéressant essai, Le Monde sans Ame, M. Daniel Rops impliquait dans le titre que l’âme avait fui le monde et qu’il fallait qu’elle lui revînt. Mais si le monde n’avait jamais eu d’âme?” (114). 14 Eliot was quite familiar with Leibniz’s thought, having published two articles on it – “The Development of Leibniz’ Monadism,” Monist 26 (Oct. 1916) 534–6 and “Leibniz’s Monads and Bradley’s Finite Centers,” Monist 27 (1915–16) 566–76 – both reprinted in Knowledge and Experience. In the first article he compares Leibniz’s monadic epistemology favourably to Aristotle’s dualism, though he concedes difficulties for the possibility of science: “It is evident that with the possibility of changes of ‘points of view’ the meaning of prediction becomes hopelessly attenuated. Every moment will see a new universe. At every moment there will be a new series of series; but continuity makes necessary a point of view from which there shall be a permanent series of series of series.” Nonetheless: “Leibniz’ theory of mind and matter, of body and soul, is in some ways the subtlest that has ever been devised. Matter is an arrested moment of mind, ‘mind without memory.’ [Note: “Compare the Bergsonian theory of matter as consciousness ‘running down.’”] By state is not meant feeling, but the monad at any instant of time. In many ways it is superior to that of Aristotle.” That Eliot was still in his Humanist phase in 1916 is evident from the following complaint of Leibniz’s “superstition”: “When he [Leibniz] turns to preformation, to the vinculum substantiale, to the immortality of the soul, we feel a certain repulsion; for with all the curious fables of the Timaeus or the Physics

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and Aristotle’s history of animals, we know that Aristotle and Plato were somehow more secure, better balanced, and less superstitious than the man who was in power of intellect their equal” (Knowledge and Experience 196). The second article explores similarities between Bradley’s idealism and Leibniz’s monadism – as well as Russell’s logic. In this article he cites the Bradley passage also cited in notes to The Waste Land. Stevens also comments on Leibniz, but much later in his life – in “A Collect of Philosophy,” the Moody Lecture he delivered at the University of Chicago on 16 November 1951. There he describes Leibniz’s monadic theory as holding that “reality consists of a mass of monads, like bees clinging to a branch, although for him the branch was merely a different set of monads.” He notes that “Bertrand Russell said that Leibniz’ monads were gods,” dismissing (or praising?) Leibniz as a “poet manqué.” And he notes that “in a system of monads, we come, in the end, to a man who is not only a man but sea and mountain, too, and to a God who is not only all these: man and sea and mountain but a God as well” (Kermode 852–3). While Stevens does not indicate any approval of this consequence of Leibniz’s thought, it does seem to conform to Stevens’ own views – especially as expressed in the contemporaneous work, “The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain.” 15 cf Bruce Kuklick, xx–xxi (My emphasis): The epistemological problems bequeathed by Kant to succeeding generations of philosophers were central for all of these men [Harvard philosophers], even to classic Unitarians like Bowen. The intellectual optimism of the eighteenth century produced a religious philosophy with its basis in British empiricism: the observed universe was benign and evidenced the deity. But Darwin called forth intellectual pessimism, so that after the Civil War religion was defended on a priori, Kantian grounds. Philosophers employed these same grounds to reinterpret the foundations of science as biological advances raised issues that traditional empiricism could not explain. Consequently, Cambridge thought and Harvard Pragmatism, like all forms of pragmatism, had an idealistic character. The truth of a belief was a function of its practical significance. That is, its truth was not independent of the individuals who held it but was relative to the action issuing from it; the objects of which beliefs were true had a relation to individuals and to consciousness.” 16 However, they did not follow – unless we accept B.J. Leggett’s persuasive argument in “God, Imagination, and the Interior Paramour” that we read The Rock as such a continuation. 17 These terms are sufficiently rare to justify a gloss. “Thuriferous” is “that which brings forth incense,” and a “ju-ju” is “an object of any kind superstitiously venerated by West African native peoples, and used as a charm, amulet, or

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means of protection; a fetish.” Eliot later had more tolerance for incense, though not for fetishes. He also invoked “ju-ju” in a 1926 review of J.M. Robertson’s hostile study of Shaw, “Mr. Shaw and ‘The Maid.’” There it is employed in a dismissive characterization of Bergson’s élan vital (“life force”): The more intelligent among those persons who have lost interest in anything that Mr. Shaw says, ought to be glad of some proof that their feelings are justified ... For what issues most clearly from a reading of Mr. Robertson’s book is Mr. Shaw’s utter inability to devote himself wholeheartedly to any cause. To Mr. Shaw, truth and falsehood (we speak without prejudice) do not seem to have the same meaning as to ordinary people. Hence the danger, with his ‘St. Joan,’ of his deluding the numberless crowd of sentimentally religious people who are incapable of following any argument to a conclusion. Such people will be misled until they can be made to understand that the potent ju-ju Life Force is a gross superstition; and that (in particular) Mr. Shaw’s ‘St. Joan’ is one of the most superstitious of the effigies which have been erected to that remarkable woman. (Criterion 4 April 1926 390). At the risk of pedantic overkill, I must point out that our perceptions are already inferences from the sensory stimuli which prompt them. That is to say, we do not see and hear the ocean, but discrete visual and auditory stimuli, from which we construct a perception that we call “the ocean.” By so labelling the perception, we are already modulating it into a concept that has – or is capable of having – a place in a cognitive structure. For an intriguing discussion of the exploration of this issue in Stevens’ poetry, see Sellin, Valéry, Stevens, and the Cartesian Dilemma. Here is the full passage in French: “Dans une récente étude j’ai défini le sentiment: ‘une possibilité perpétuelle de copies conformes par l’action d’une certain prétention, possibilité garantie par l’intuition d’une résistance intérieure.’ Si cette définition est exacte on aperçoit la valeur toute secondaire des témoignages sensibles: les deux éléments essentiels du sentiment sont la résistance intérieure et la prétention ou intention de l’esprit”(Messages 163. My translation. Original emphasis). “Les réactions mystiques ne signifient guère plus à mes yeux que les réactions sensibles tant que je ne suis pas convaincu du pouvoir de l’homme de créer, avec ses impressions, des sentiments. Car tout le problème est là. On peut se former des sentiments et leur obéir sans le secours mystique – pourvu qu’on n’appelle pas mystique tout ce qui est sentimental – et l’on peut plaquer du mysticisme sur une incurable sensualité” (Messages 163). Comte portrayed human culture and civilization as progressing through three principal stages, each being abandoned successively as erroneous. They

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are: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, and the scientific or positive. The last, of course, is not erroneous, and gives us the term “positivism.” Here I believe Eliot is referring to his own flirtation with Humanism. In a rather ill-tempered article, “Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, and the Space between them,” Denis Donoghue accepts the standard view that Stevens was a humanist foe of religion, and adds the canard that he was a rather brainless foe. He ignores Stevens’ protestations against the label and insultingly caricatures his “philosophical position” as follows: “According to Stevens’ parable, Adam and Eve were the first humanists, because – like Descartes – they conceived the world in their own terms and practiced the attribute of reason in doing so. They had a second earth by construing the first in terms most favorable to themselves. They founded the enlightenment” (Shea and Huff 311). Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 37. Church quoted the citation untranslated (was 3415). See note 16, this chapter. Bates agrees that the supposed Nietzschean character of Stevens’ posture on belief and fiction cannot be supported (247–65). Apparently he had not seen the exchange with Church, for he does not refer to it. Doggett cites the passage from Nietzsche as found in Vaihinger (353), but he too is unaware of the exchange with Church. His assessment of Stevens’ philosophical musing is rather dismissive: “As is often mentioned, Stevens uses the poetic ideas of philosophers, but almost always he uses the kind that cannot be identified with a particular system of conjecture or belief; in fact, most of these ideas are so slight, so incipient, that some version of them may be found in almost any general philosophic work of the last two centuries” (108–9). While I agree with Doggett’s last remark, I do not agree that the ubiquity of an idea is a guarantee of its triviality. Nor do I endorse his requirement that for an idea to be taken seriously it must have a “church,” what he calls “a particular system of conjecture or belief.” Charismatic religious believers, of course, do think that they have incorrigible knowledge of religious truth. But that is certainly not true of all believers, and is not true of Eliot. Within the Christian tradition, to have faith means to accept as true, that which you do not know to be true in the normal way. The parable of doubting Thomas is the touchstone for the Christian doctrine of faith. John has him expressing doubt: “The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20: 25–8). Eight days later the

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risen Christ returns: “Then saith he to Thomas, reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust it into my side: and be not faithless, but believing” (John 20: 27). Of course, Thomas is mortified. The incident has a place in the liturgy reminding the faithful that it is more blessed to believe without any direct evidence than to believe with it. Stevens does not seem to have been a keen reader of Bergson – though he does cite him. Nonetheless his position on the relation between reality and imagination is very close to Bergson’s. In Creative Evolution, Bergson provides an account of that exchange entirely commensurate with Stevens: “In a general way, reality is ordered exactly to the degree in which it satisfies our thought. Order is therefore a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself again in things ... In its highest forms, it is more than finality, for of a free action or a work of art we may say that they show a perfect order, and yet they can only be expressed in terms of ideas approximately, and after the event” (244). The view expressed in the following lines from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” xxviii seems entirely compatible with Bergsonian thought: I am a native in this world And think in it as a native thinks, Gesu, not native of a mind Thinking the thoughts I call my own, Native, a native in the world And like a native think in it. “Il semble en effet qu’il soit fort dangereux de commencer par l’analyse des manifestations sensibles et affectives du sentiment, lesquelles n’en sont qu’un aspect, et non des plus significatifs; et comme on retrouve ces manifestations dans beaucoup de troubles mentaux, dans presque tous les troubles de la sensibilité et dans ce qu’on peut appeler en générale les crises de défaillance, il s’ensuit qu’elles servent de pièges bien plus souvent que de guides dans l’étude du sentiment. En les écoutant nous n’entendons que la voix mécanique du corps” (Messages 161. My emphasis). This latter is not a sentiment with which Eliot would readily agree, conscious as he is of the theological tradition. However, Stevens’ view does not necessarily entail disrespect for the long tradition of Jewish and Christian theological speculation – of which he knew little. Rather, his point, I think, is that in the twentieth century extant religious beliefs have all been shown to be erroneous. The lack of thought, then, is really a lack of truth. Despite a considerable literature to the contrary, Eliot’s hostility to both Communism and Fascism is not to be doubted. One of the more recent studies is Kenneth Asher’s T.S. Eliot and Ideology. Asher explicitly aligns himself

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with the earlier assessments of Eliot as a fascist sympathizer that, he says, “begins with John Harrison’s roughly sketched The Reactionaries (1967), reaches a much higher level of sophistication in William Chace’s The Political Identities of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, and builds successfully on Chace’s work in Michael North’s The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound (10). Asher’s claim is the following: “Simply put, it seems to me that from beginning to end, Eliot’s work, including both the poetry and the prose, was shaped by a political vision inherited from French reactionary thinkers, especially from Charles Maurras ... The failure of most other scholarship to acknowledge the centrality of Eliot’s political agenda [!] is not surprising since Eliot himself tended to camouflage it (2–3). Although Eliot’s political conservatism cannot be doubted, and the influence of Maurras is undeniable, I find this whole debunking tradition to be excessively concerned with condemning those views by association, rather than assessing them on their own merits. It should be clear from this study that I think Eliot’s political ideas were at best impractical, and at worst offensive to the very Christian values he professes to espouse. In a 1936 Criterion “Commentary” on H.R.G. Greaves’ Labourite assessment of Reactionary England, Eliot characterized the movement to the right as a consequence of the loss of faith, and of a socio-economic dysfunction in Western democracies during the Depression: “The only reactionaries today are those who object to the dictatorship of finance and the dictatorship of a bureaucracy under whatever political name it is assembled; and those who would have some law and some ideal not purely of this world. But the movement, towards the Right so-called, about which Mr. Greaves is apprehensive, is far more profound than any mere machinations of consciously designing interests could make it. It is a symptom of the desolation of secularism, of that loss of vitality, through the lack of replenishment from spiritual sources, which we have witnessed elsewhere, and which becomes ready for the application of the artificial stimulants of nationalism and class” (15 July 1936 667–8). Earlier in this “Commentary” Eliot endorsed the decision of England and France to stay out of the Spanish Civil War. The desolation “witnessed elsewhere” is doubtless a reference to that war, which pitted Communism (class) against Fascism and Nazism (nationalism). 31 The fact that these remarks amount to his disowning his mockery of Lemercier’s piety in “Lettres d’un Soldat,” is a measure of far how Stevens had come from his early flirtation with Humanism. 32 By “style” Stevens means something stronger than is usually the case – even stronger than Schopenhauer’s view that style is the man: “Style is not

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something applied. It is something inherent, something that permeates. It is of the nature of that in which it is found, whether the poem, the manner of a god, the bearing of a man. It is not a dress. It may be said to be a voice that is inevitable. A man has no choice about his style. When he says I am my style the truth reminds him that it is his style that is himself. If he says, as my poem is, so are my gods and so am I, the truth remains quiet and broods on what he has said” (“Two or Three Ideas” in Opus Posthumous 263). The term “noeud vital” is Bergson’s and designates the knot or cluster within an organism that contains the fundamental vital forces. It is essentially equivalent to the Aristotelian “entelechy,” the mysterious vital force that for Aristotle distinguishes animate from inanimate matter. Vis, of course, is Latin for “force” or “energy.” The belief in entelechy or some such indwelling force in living things persisted as a minor heresy in biology until the discovery of the double helix of dna, a half century ago. “Et d’où peut venir la prétention de l’esprit sinon d’une entente entre celui-ci et l’impression, de la faculté que nous avons de penser ce sentiment, d’accorder aux lois propres de l’intelligence l’impression que nous laisse une expérience?” (Fernandez’s emphasis). “Le sentiment est donc situé sur un plan de conscience intermédiaire entre l’activité intellectuelle et l’impression sensible. On ne peut dire qu’il soit une vérité, puisqu’il repose sur une intuition ineffable qui ne se peut prouver que par l’action; mais on ne peut dire non plus qu’il soit un état de réceptivité purement passive puisqu’il participe de l’activité de l’esprit et le met en mesure d’accomplir sa fonction la plus éminente, qui est de concevoir avec certitude l’avenir.” “Le sentiment est donc bien plutôt une réponse de tout notre être que l’on peut traduire indifféremment dans le langage de l’intelligence ou dans celui de la sensibilité, mais dont nos actes sont les signes véritables, les seuls qui permettent de mesurer exactement sa valeur.” “Loin de modérer l’audace de l’imagination, il la réchauffe à la chaleur d’une présence ineffable qui l’accompagne dans tous ses détours; rien de matériel ne le garantit, mais il sait se garantir lui-même par ce je ne sais quoi d’éternel qui paraît dans les moindres témoignages; et l’on peut dire que le sentiment vrai, quel qu’il soit, imprime le sceau de la justice sur les actions les plus terribles.” “Mais, je le demande, est-il possible de considérer l’homme dans sa réalité, dans toute sa réalité, sans tenir compte de ses tendances spirituelles, et ne voit-on pas que loin de s’ajouter à lui de l’extérieur, comme un corps étranger qui ne changerait rien à sa constitution, elles développent, éprouvent et modifient les parties les plus cachées de sa nature, que sa moindre aspiration est un signe dont

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une graphologie assez subtile saurait tirer parti, et qu’enfin nous ne connaissons bien ce qu’il est que lorsque nous connaissons ce qu’il veut être?

chapter six 1 See Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers. “They [the National Government of Britain] had considerable sympathy and even admiration for the Italian system; less for the German, though they hoped that in time it would mellow and mature along Italian lines; but for the Russian system there was nothing but thinly disguised fear and hatred. Neville Chamberlain, who was so proud of this personal contacts with Hitler and Mussolini, never made any attempt to deal directly with Stalin” (40). 2 When asked by an interviewer if he had read a particular article, he replied: “In Partisan Review? Well, then, I must have read it. I always read it, all of it. An excellent magazine isn’t it? The only exception to the dreary scene.” (Quoted in MacLeod, Wallace Stevens, 92). 3 For a discussion of the literature on Eliot’s alleged mysticism see Donald Childs, T.S. Eliot. Childs argues that Eliot’s “mysticism” is a mark of his proto-deconstructive tendencies, and he provides a Freudian analysis of Eliot’s psyche to account for those tendencies: Yet just as important as the philosophical aspect of my study is its psychobiographical aspect. In any attempt to understand Eliot’s mysticism, an appreciation of the poststructural perspective that Eliot achieved through his study of philosophy at Harvard and Oxford takes us only so far. A fuller understanding requires, on the one hand, an appreciation of the selfdiagnosed mother-complex that he found himself sharing with D.H. Lawrence and, on the other, an appreciation of the visionary experiences that attended the almost pathological misogyny that developed during his troubled first marriage. As much as the turn-of-the-century anti-metaphysical academic mood, Eliot’s lived experiences led him to appreciate the void that was both the medium and the message of his mystical vision. (xix) Childs’ anachronistic characterization of Eliot’s Harvard scepticism as “poststructural” is a common practice in current criticism that I have been careful to avoid. In fact, Eliot’s dissertation is roughly contemporaneous with the publication of Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale in 1916 – which is thought to be the fons et erigo of poststructuralism – though well after the delivery of the lectures on which it is based. (Saussure died in 1913.) So far as I know, Eliot had no knowledge of Saussure’s linguistic theories.

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It is remarks in the dissertation such as the following that inspire Childs’ attribution of affinity with poststructuralism: “We found that the ideal can never be set over against the real absolutely, but tends to run, either forward or back, into the real which it intends, or the real out of which it may be said to be made; for both these reals are after all nothing but itself [the idea’s self] at another stage of development”(57). But this is Bradleyan idealism, not Saussurean structuralism – still less Derridean or De Manian poststructuralism. 4 In the booklet Dante, Eliot attempts to devise an ad hoc theory of mystic vision that would make it epiphenomenal, like dreaming, without stripping it of its revelatory character: “Dante’s is a visual imagination. It is a visual imagination ... in the sense that he lived in an age in which men still saw visions. It was a psychological habit, the trick of which we have forgotten, but as good as any of our own. We have nothing but dreams, and we have forgotten that seeing visions – a practice now relegated to the aberrant and uneducated – was once a more significant, interesting, and disciplined kind of dreaming. We take it for granted that our dreams spring from below: possibly the quality of our dreams suffers in consequence” (15). An even clearer instance is found in “Religion without Humanism”: “There is much chatter about mysticism; for the modern world the word means some spattering indulgence of emotion, instead of the most terrible concentration and askesis ... Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss”(110). Ted Hughes is less cautious than most on the subject of the mystical tendency in Eliot, claiming that he was even more prone to paranormal inspiration than Yeats, but that he resisted it: “In comparison with Yeats, Eliot too looks not a little shamanic. In nervous temperament, and in the known psychological events of his late adolescence and early manhood, he is an even more extreme and characteristic example of the type than Yeats. But in him, the process of becoming aware of his calling was somehow more problematic. It was more agonized and finally more awesome” (Hughes 24–5). I am sure that Eliot would have been scandalized by Hughes’ view of his “shamanic” character. 5 Albert Gelpi, in A Coherent Splendor, regards both Stevens and Eliot as late Romantics. While I am broadly in agreement with that assessment, Gelpi’s structuring of Stevens’ career seems overly schematic. In addition his characterization of pure poetry is a better fit for surrealism: The long course of Stevens’ career, therefore, charts his hesitation between an inclination toward poésie pure and an inclination, as in “Sunday Morning,” toward the “poem of the earth.” Both inclinations represented two sides of a dilemma. On the one hand, spiritless naturalism devolves

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into a dispirited materialism – the malady of the quotidian, the white world of the snow man. On the other hand, poésie pure expresses itself first in the sensuous colors of the imagination – those nightgowns of purple with green rings, those exotic shimmers on the sea surface full of clouds – but its final tendency, as the preceding passage shows, is to merge those colors into the pure whiteness of the “ultimate intellect” – if not Platonic Mind, then at least the abstracted mind of the dreamer lost to the world. Stevens found himself both a materialist manqué and a Platonist manqué (63). This account blunts the subtlety of Stevens’ engagement with the human incapacity to resolve the contrast between the emotionally charged (or imagined) world with the indifferent world of contingent event and accident. To label our involvement in the immediacy of psychological experience “Platonic,” as Gelpi does, seems to me to be an egregious error. The point of the dilemma is that we have direct experience of our emotions and concepts, but only mediated experience of what Gelpi calls “the quotidian,” that is, the phenomenal world of experience. Of course, the aporia cannot be surmounted since the mediation is performed precisely by our emotions and concepts, which – in turn – are prompted by phenomenal appearances. Like Kant, Stevens is confident that there is a noumenal ding an sich behind the phenomena, but – more like Heidegger than Kant – Stevens wants to believe that the noumenal somehow shines through the phenomenal. 6 Stevens does not seem to have been a big reader of Coleridge. He told Elsie in a letter of 12 January 1909 that he had been reading Coleridge until midnight the night before, but found it “heavy work, reading things like that, that have so little in them that one feels to be contemporary, living” (Letters 121). And, many years later, he told Bernard Herringman (21 July 1953): “While, of course, I come down from the past, the past is my own and not something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex is entirely my own even though I see it in others” (Letters 792). He did read I.A. Richards’ Coleridge on Imagination while preparing “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words” (read at Princeton, May 1941), and in “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” he praises Coleridge as a “one of the great figures” of the imagination, but adds that his views are out of date (Kermode 667). 7 Although the translation is credited to F.S. Flint, Eliot translated it himself – which need not imply that he agreed with Maritain’s argument; it may be that he simply could not afford to pay Flint. He told Herbert Read that Maritain’s argument seemed “a little specious and bergsonian.” However, he was sufficiently interested to buy and read Maritain’s Réflexions sur l’intelligence

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et sur sa vie propre. He told Read that although he found it “valuable and significant,” he was “a little disappointed with it” (Letter of 15 Dec. 1925. Herbert Read Collection, University of Victoria). 8 In his brief, hostile review Praz notes that the notion of pure poetry was hardly new. He sees it as deriving from the Bergsonian notion of intuition – although he concedes that Bremond does not use the term “intuition,” and despite the fact that Bremond himself attributes the idea to Valéry. He cites Maritain’s 1927 book Art et scolastique in contradiction of Bremond’s claim that poetry, prayer and mysticism belong on a continuum (Criterion 8 [July 1929] 740–1). 9 Murry reviewed Thorold’s translation in Adelphi 4 (1927 403) and Poésie pure in the Times Literary Supplement (25 October 1928). Murry noted the intensity of the controversy in France, and observed that such a fuss was unimaginable in Britain where poetry was not taken so seriously. I was made aware of these reviews by Albert Gelpi (105 and 115). 10 The debate has been carefully studied by Jason Harding, who argues that the debates were engineered to boost circulation. While admitting that there were genuine differences between the two men, he points out that they remained cordial friends (37–43). The pages of the Criterion were liberally peppered with articles addressing the relationship of poetry and religion. The debaters included Ramon Fernandez, Charles Mauron, and Herbert Read, as well as Maritain, Praz, Eliot, and Murry. A sampling: Herbert Read, “The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry” 7 (April 1923) 246–66; John Middleton Murry, “Romanticism and the Tradition” 2 (April 1924) 273–95; Ramon Fernandez, “The Experience of Newman (to Felix Thumen)” 3, 9 (Oct. 1925) 84–102; Ramon Fernandez, “The Experience of Newman: Reply to Frederic Manning” 4, 4 (Oct. 1926) 645–58; T.S. Eliot, Review of Murry, Wells, Belloc on religion, 5 (May 1927) 253–9; Herbert Read, Review of Whitehead, Religion in the Making 5 (May 1927) 259–63; The Rev. D’Arcy, “The Thomistic Synthesis and Intelligence” 6, 3 (Sept. 1927) 210–28; T.S. Eliot, “Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis” 6, 4 (Oct. 1927) 340–7; Charles Mauron, trans. T.S. Eliot. “Concerning Intuition” 6, 3 (Sept. 1927) 220–35; Ramon Fernandez, trans. T.S. Eliot. “A Note on Intelligence and Intuition” 6 (Oct. 1927) 332–9; John Middleton Murry, “Concerning Intelligence” 6 (Dec. 1927) 524–33; Mario Praz, Review of Pure Poetry, trans. Algar Thorold 8 (July 1929) 740–1; T.S. Eliot, Review of God by M. Murry 9 (April 1930) 333–6; Ramon Fernandez, trans. T.S. Eliot “A Humanist Theory of Value” 9 (Jan. 1930) 228–45.

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11 Although Eliot was familiar with Maritain’s views, he was not in agreement with them. In a characteristic boast presenting itself as modesty – a rhetorical posture he learned from Bradley – Eliot summarized his ignorance: “My knowledge of Aquinas is slight: it is limited to the accounts of Gilson and de Wulf, to two volumes of extracts, one prepared by Professor Gilson, and the other by M. Truc, to two or three books by M. Maritain and modern Dominicans, and to the new edition of the Summa published by Desclée” (“Mr. Middleton Murry’s Synthesis.)” And in a 1926 review, “The Idealism of Julien Benda,” Eliot had some unkind things to say about Maritain: “I have a warm personal admiration for M. Maritain, though it is as much for his saintly character as for his intelligence; but I have never seen a more romantic classicist, or a Thomist whose methods of thought were less like those of Aquinas. His occasional intemperance of language, and his occasional sentiment, hardly qualify him for the philosophical crown which M. Benda is waiting to bestow on someone” (488). 12 Stevens seems not to have been a reader of Maritain. However, they were both speakers at Holyoke in 1943. A decade later (17 March 1953), when Barbara Church mentioned that she was reading Maritain, Stevens asked her if it was “the collection of his Mellon lectures in Creative Intuition” that she was reading, and added, “I have it and have looked at it but have not been able to start reading it yet.” Despite his tardiness in reading Maritain, he remarked, “Maritain is an extraordinary person, who fascinates me” (Letters 773). I have not found any other references by Stevens to Maritain, so it seems a safe bet that he had not read the French Catholic apologist, despite his taste for all things French. 13 I am indebted to Professor Les Murison of the Classics Deptartment of the University of Western Ontario for identifying this passage. The reference that Maritain gave in the Criterion was incomplete. Instead of Enneads i. 6. 8., he gave only Enneads I.8. 14 It is worth noting that Eliot explicitly associates his argument in After Strange Gods with the Classic/Romantic opposition that animated his romantic/ classic debate with Murry, to which the pure poetry debate became attached. Explaining his choice of the term “orthodox,” he wrote: “I wished simply to indicate the connotation which the term tradition has for me, before proceeding to associate it with the concept of orthodoxy, which seems to me more fundamental (with its opposite, heterodoxy, for which I shall also use the term heresy) than the pair classicism-romanticism which is frequently used” (Eliot’s emphasis 21). Eliot’s reduction of “classical” to “orthodox,” and romantic to “heterodox” is a remarkable twisting of standard usage of these terms.

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15 “Race” is a recurrent term in After Strange Gods, culminating in the infamous remark: “reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking jews undesirable”(11). Eliot seems to have been infected by the notion – by no means restricted to Nazis at that time – that distinct human cultures were the expression of particular racial attributes of the populations possessing that culture. It was sufficiently widespread that Edward Sapir devotes an entire chapter (Ten: “Language, Race and Culture”) of his 1921 book, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (New York: Harcourt, Brace) to a debunking of the notion: The man in the street does not stop to analyze his position in the general scheme of humanity. He feels that he is the representative of some strongly integrated portion of humanity – now thought of as a “nationality,” now as a “race” – and that everything that pertains to him as a typical representative of this large group somehow belongs together. If he is an Englishman, he feels himself to be a member of the “Anglo-Saxon” race, the “genius” of which race has fashioned the English language and the “Anglo-Saxon” culture of which the language is the expression. Science is colder. It inquires if these three types of classification – racial, linguistic, and cultural – are congruent, if their association is an inherently necessary one or is merely a matter of external history. The answer to the inquiry is not encouraging to “race” sentimentalists. (Quoted from www.bartleby.com/186/.) 16 Eliot read Underhill’s Mysticism as an undergraduate, and a heavily marked copy of it is to be found in his library (Gordon T.S. Eliot 89). One book she reviewed for Eliot was The Prophet Child by Gwendolyn Plunket Greene. The review appeared in Criterion 15 (Jan. 1936) 309–10. Underhill was favourably impressed by the book, and paraphrases its contents as follows: “‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy,’ and remains there long after we have ceased to notice it; long after the harsh dualism too often taught in the name of religion has succeeded in ‘the curtaining off of this and that from God,’ and so depriving puzzled humanity of one of its simplest means of access to the Eternal Loveliness” (310). It is unlikely that this vaguely Plotinian notion of aesthetic inspiration – reminiscent of Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” – would have appealed to Eliot. Nonetheless his willingness to have such a book reviewed by someone like Underhill attests at least to Eliot’s tolerance of discussions of mysticism. 17 This was a contribution to the extended debate between Murry and Eliot over the nature of classicism and romanticism, which turned on the issue of intuition vs reason. Eliot, of course, argued for classicism and rationality, Murry for romanticism and intuition.

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Murry also reviewed Prayer and Poetry, the English translation of Prière et poésie, in the Times Literary Supplement (25 Oct. 1928). Despite Bremond’s kind words about Murry, he dismisses him as having nothing new to say to English readers. Like Souday, he sees Edgar Allen Poe as a precursor: “The argument had nothing new about it; it had been put forward with insistence by a number of the romantics and by theorists of l’art pour l’art. What distinguishes the movement of pure poetry is an additional step, basing the autonomy of poetry on an analysis of the poetic effect. In this respect Bremond’s campaign in France in the 1920’s was not very different from Poe’s in America three-quarters of a century earlier” (107). 18 The following passage indicates the degree to which Eliot has misread Bremond: En tant qu’animal raisonnable, le poète est lucide ou devrait l’être; en tant que poète, il n’est pas, il ne peut l’être. L’activité rationnelle qui précède, prépare, accompagne et suit l’expérience poétique, ne sera jamais assez lucide. Mais l’expérience; mais l’inspiration elle-même ! ... Fagus dit encore: “ Mais je professe qu’il existe un sens poétique.” Eh! c’est là tout ce que nous demandons. Ce sens, on ne le définira jamais qu’en le distinguant de la pure raison. (La Poésie pure 91) [Insofar as he is a rational animal, the poet is lucid, or ought to be; insofar as he is a poet, he is not, he cannot be. The rational activity which precedes, prepares, accompanies and follows the poetic experience, will never be sufficiently lucid. But the experience, the inspiration itself ! ... Fagus says again: ‘But I maintain that a poetic sense exists.’ That is all that we ask. This sense, one will never define it except in distinguishing it from pure reason.”] Fagus is one of the individuals with whom Bremond engages in a dialogue in La Poésie pure, but he does not provide any further identification – not even a first name. 19 “Poetry, is it necessary to point out, is the very opposite of literature ... Under the name of artistic sophistry ... can be grouped all the counterfeits of beauty which make the work a falsehood whenever the artist prefers himself to his work. This impurity is in our art the wound of original sin; it groans with it continually ... Literature puts on the work the grimace of personality. It seeks to adorn God” (“Poetry and Religion” 16–17). 20 Far from holding that poetry must follow laws, Bremond maintains that the pure poetry component in each poem is unique: La poésie pure étant ce par quoi le poétique se distingue du prosaïque, il va de soi que la réalité mystérieuse qui répond à la notion de poésie pure, doit se retrouver à un degré quelconque dans toute oeuvre vraiment poétique, passée, présente ou future. Chaque poème est une création

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22

23

24

25

Notes to pages 251–62

originale, qu’on n’avait pas vue encore: qu’on ne verra pas deux fois; mais l’idée même de poésie est universelle, comme l’idée d’homme ou d’oiseau. (La Poésie pure 71) [Pure poetry is that by which the poetic is distinguished from the prosaic; it follows that the mysterious reality which answers to the notion of pure poetry must be found to some degree in all truly poetic works, past, present, or future. Each poem is an original creation, which was never yet seen: that will not be seen twice; but the idea of poetry itself is universal, like the idea of a man or a bird.] Surprisingly, Ted Hughes does not cite this well-known passage in support of his argument in Dancer to God that Eliot belongs to a shamanistic tradition of poetic expression. That this condition of disbelief is thought to be definitional of the Postmodern underlines the false dichotomy that contemporary scholiasts postulate between the Modern and the Postmodern. It is certainly true, though, that Eliot resisted the Modern, as he would the Postmodern, since from his perspective they are the same. The cognitive state that Eliot assigns to Donne and his own contemporaries is indistinguishable from that which Rorty attributes to his “ironist.” For a discussion of Rorty’s view, see my article “Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law.” It would take us too far from the subject at hand to pursue the matter, but it is worth noting that Sparrow’s characterization of the nature of Eliot-inspired poetry rides roughshod over Eliot’s own view of his practice. We have seen that Eliot completely rejects Richards’ behavioural theory of poetry, and also Richards’ assessment of his poetic practice – which is expressionistic, not impressionistic. Stevens’ characterization of the work is a little misleading. Bremond’s preface says that the debate between himself and Robert de Souza “began with the lecture which I gave last autumn at the annual public meetings of the Institute” (my translation), but he explains that the text is based on articles he published in Nouvelles Littéraires on 31 October, 7,14, 21, and 28 November; and 5, 12, 19, and 26 December 1825 [obviously a typo for 1925], and 16 January 1926 (9). The first section, entitled “La Poésie Pure”(15–27) is identified as the lecture he gave to the Academy on 24 October 1925. This was not his inaugural address on being elected to the Academy, for he took his seat on 22 May 1924. It is a little odd that Stevens characterizes Bremond as following Bergson, for Bergson is mentioned only once (107–9), and there in the context of readers recommending Bergson to him as one who would support his view. Bremond pleads ignorance of philosophy, but quotes a couple of passages from Bergson.

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It would be more accurate to describe Bremond as following Shelley and Blake. Bremond himself identified the modern “theoreticians” of pure poetry as Edgar Allan Poe, Mallarmé, and Paul Valéry – from whom he borrowed the term poésie pure. But he claims that the tradition goes back to the eighteenth century (15). Perhaps Stevens is recalling Fernandez’s accusation in “Poésie et Biographie” that Bremond was an illegitimate child of Bergson. 26 “A l’idée de poésie pure est alors liée celle d’inspiration, de génie qui souffle, de facilité suprême et divine, un état de grâce que bien naturellement l’on compare à la communion avec Dieu” (71). 27 Stevens did not have much to say about imagism. One aphorism from Adagio – “Not all objects are equal. The vice of imagism was that it did not recognize this” – might be construed as a complaint that Imagism rejected the sublime (Opus Posthumous 187). Another comment is found in his assessment of W.C. Williams (“Rubbings of Reality” Opus Posthumous 244): “Imagism (as one of Williams’ many involvements, however long ago) is not something superficial. It obeys an instinct. Moreover, imagism is an ancient phase of poetry. It is something permanent. Williams is a writer to whom writing is the grinding of a glass, the polishing of a lens by means of which he hopes to be able to see clearly. His delineations are trials. They are rubbings of reality.” The image of “rubbings” – as in images transferred passively from tombstones to paper – once again suggests that Stevens thinks of imagism as fundamentally superficial, not “seeing into the heart of things.” This supposition is further supported by his remark to Hi Simons on “Variations on a Summer Day” (29 Dec. 1939. Letters 346): “In a world permanently enigmatical, to hear and see agreeable things involves something more than mere imagism. One might do it deliberately and in that particular poem I did it deliberately.” 28 The two modes are not as far apart as appears however, since there is a strong Symbolist and Swedenborgian component in Imagism – at least as Pound understands it. For both, the physical world symbolizes a hidden spiritual world, accessible to the poet or visionary through the mechanism of correspondences. Swedenborg imagines a hierarchy of perception: the lowest in vegetable, then animal, then human or spiritual, and finally angelic. Where vegetable perception can perceive only heat, moisture, and light, the animal has the same five senses as humans, but cannot perceive the generalities expressed in language. Finally angelic perception is still higher, exemplified for mortals in artistic expression. Blake illustrates the principle with his remark that whereas to the ordinary man the sun appears much like a guinea, to the man of vision it appears as a host of angels singing loud hosannas.

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29 It is perhaps worth quoting Sparrow on the gulf between Bremond and poetic practice of the day: The difference between Bremond’s theory of pure poetry and the practice of those whom that theory seeks to justify is that the incommunicables that they wish to communicate are of different kinds. Their aim has been to express not the universal, the infinite experience revealed in moments of rare exaltation, when the individual seems to lose his self, but rather the particular, the individual, the unique at the other end of the scale. Speaking broadly, it is true to say that during the last half-century writers have been increasingly preoccupied with the individual; they have tried more and more fully to describe the interior life of their characters, and to represent not a world of feelings and objects viewed by a detached observer, but the impressions of individuals themselves. (Sparrow 100–1) Although Sparrow takes no notice of Stevens, Stevens’ poetic practice falls between these two extremes: a mystical access of the universal and eternal, on the one hand, and the expression of a personal and idiosyncratic perception, on the other. 30 One place where the term does occur several times is in his 1958 introduction to Paul Valéry: The Art of Poetry, and, as in the following remark, it is to denigrate Valéry’s poetry as merely delightful: “We read the essays because, as Valéry himself says, ‘there is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.’ We could almost say that Valéry’s essays form a part of his poetical works. We read them for their own sake, for the delight in following the subtleties of thought which moves like a trained dancer, and which has every resource of language at its command; for the pleasure of sudden illuminations even when they turn out to be feux follets; for the excitement of an activity which always seems on the point of catching the inapprehensible, as the mind continues indefatigably to weave its fine logodaedal web” (xxii). 31 Bremond would sympathize with the view Maritain expressed in his Criterion article, “Poetry and Religion” [Part Two], that the Surrealist mode is Satanic: “The air we breathe is saturated with spiritual ordure, we are returned to the vast night of the pagan agony, in which man is no longer only concerned with his miserable flesh, but with a flesh whipped by the angels of Satan, where nature is wholly clothed in obscene signs, a nightmare which literary Freudism uses everywhere to multiply the obsession. In order to work in such a world without being too defiled, what presumption it would be not to arm oneself with the severest rules of ascetic discipline!” (225). Of course,

Notes to pages 266–71

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Freud’s theory of the subconscious is thoroughly secular, and does not support the view of the Surrealists that the subconscious is a portal to the au delà. For Freud it is simply the repository of suppressed desires that have been disguised by what he calls the “dream work.” 32 (My translation): C’est toujours le même scandale: on pense que nous sacrifions aux troubles lueurs de l’instinct les précisions lumineuses de la raison, et que, sous le nom de poésie pure, nous voulons glorifier le pathos, le vague, l’obscur, l’infra-rationnel, «l’obscène chaos» où se débattait la conscience avant le Fiat Lux de l’entendement. Non, mille fois non! La connaissance particulière que nous étudions chez le poète ou chez le mystique, n’est pas infra, elle est supra-rationnelle; raison supérieure, plus raisonnable que l’autre ... il est encore d’une autre façon, et plus haute, son expérience proprement poétique lui permettant de dépasser l’ordre abstrait des notions, des raisonnements, et d’atteindre le concret, le réel même, comme on peut l’atteindre ici-bas. 33 In Creative Evolution Bergson, too, denigrates the rational intellect as merely the surface of much deeper human cognitive capacity: “In explaining life by intellect, it limits too much the meaning of life: intellect, such at least as we find it in ourselves, has been fashioned by evolution during the course of progress; it is cut out of something larger, or, rather, it is only the projection, necessarily on a plane, of a reality that possesses both relief and depth. It is this more comprehensive reality that true finalism ought to reconstruct, or, rather, if possible, embrace in one view” (59. My emphasis). Even though he does not say it in so many words, it would seem that Stevens holds much the same view. The irrational is for him the residue of human cognition left over after one subtracts the rational. On a mundane level, there is no doubt that our perceptions are not rationally directed or controlled. Reason can only work with concepts. It is true, however, that, barring pathology, the bulk of our concepts bear a principled relation to our percepts – though not – as Rorty has reminded us – an incorrigible one. The work of the poetic imagination on this view is to fashion new concepts that more adequately, or more appropriately represent the world we experience: to function, as Shelley put it, as “unacknowledged legislators.” 34 For example in the 1929 essay “Experiment in Criticism”: “For so long as poetry and fiction and such things are written, its first purpose must always be what it always has been: to give a peculiar kind of pleasure which has something constant in it throughout the ages, however difficult and various our explanations of that pleasure may be” (232).

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chapter seven 1 Process and Reality 7. The Gifford Lectures, The University of Edinburgh, 1927–28. Whitehead was the senior co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica. However, unlike Russell, Whitehead eschewed Humanism and attempted in this work to reconcile philosophy and religion in a manner that Stevens might have found congenial if he had known of it – though Stevens would have substituted “poetry” for “religion” in the following: “Religion should connect the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents. Religion is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes; it is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity” (15). 2 Of course, Auden – like most of his generation – began as a Communist fellow traveller in his youth. But his generation’s “activism” did not at any time suppose that the arts could reform culture and civilization other than as a handmaiden of political movements, that is, as propaganda. 3 Despite Ricks’ expansion on Kenner’s observation that “every noun, verb and adjective [in Ash-Wednesday] pulls two ways” (Eliot and Prejudice 211–14) by examining the recurrence of the adjective “between,” he does not allude to the in-between state represented by the period between Christ’s death and his resurrection, and ritually memorialized in Lent. 4 “Poet and Saint,” Dial 82 (May 1927) 124. 5 “The Devotional Poets of the Seventeenth Century: Donne, Herbert, Crashaw,” Listener 2 (26 March 1930) 552, nos. 1 and 2. Broadcast 21 (March 1930). 6 “Studies in Sanctity: 8 George Herbert” Spectator 148 (12 March 1932) 361. 7 In this Eliot has radically changed his opinion from that expressed in “Religion and Literature,” first published in The Faith That Illuminates, ed. V.A. Demant 1935. He there distinguishes three varieties of “religious literature. The first is literature whose subject is religious – the Bible, and theological works. The second is devotional literature, which he concedes is typically minor, mentioning Vaughan, Southwell, Crashaw, Herbert, and Hopkins (Kermode Selected Prose 98–9). 8 Stevens excluded six of the poems published in Poetry from the book version. They have been printed in Opus Posthumous 101–4. Some (numbered ix, x, and xi in OP) read as rejected versions of poems that were retained, and others as simply rejected poems.

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9 William Wordsworth, “Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads” in the Poetical Works of Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1936) 734. 10 Stevens’ stock answer to queries about his beliefs was to deny any important provenance for them. For example in reply to Bernard Herringman in a letter of 21 July 1953, he refused to say anything about his religious beliefs: “I am afraid that you expect a monumental explanation of my religion. But I dismiss your question by saying that I am a dried-up Presbyterian, and let it go at that because my activities are not religious.” With respect to his derivation from the English romantics, he claims independence: “While, of course, I come down from the past, the past is my own and not something marked Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. I know of no one who has been particularly important to me. My reality-imagination complex is entirely my own even though I see it in others” (Letters 792). I think he deserves to be taken at his word on these matters. That said, the influence of George Santayana cannot be entirely discounted. Lentricchia, for example, claims that Stevens “read and was moved to a lifetime of meditation by [Santayana’s] Interpretations of Poetry and Religion” (Modernist Quartet 4). Nor can we discount the background of the Romantic aesthetic which no twentieth-century poet could escape. 11 Apart from those commentators attracted to Eliot because of his conversion to Anglicanism, most comment on the sequence has slid off the religious aspect of Ash-Wednesday, preferring to consider it in the light of other, more secular concerns. Christopher Ricks’ discussion of it in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice sees it as moving on from “the dreary numbness of the hollow men addicted to their emptiness,” and aspiring “to the spiritual void which may with grace issue in spiritual life” (228), but the burden of his discussion stresses Eliot’s “animosity” toward the world. Louis L. Martz, in an admirably sensitive reading of the poem, including the context of its biblical and liturgical allusions, stresses its relation to Eliot’s marital situation. He points out that the 1930 edition is dedicated “To my Wife.” It is, he says “a dedication that gives particular poignancy to the wellknown echo of Cavalcanti’s lament for his separation by exile from his beloved lady” (Martz in Cowan 189). He pursues this love song theme on the next page: “One may wonder why Eliot, recently converted to the Church of England, should so insistently in the poem echo the Roman liturgy rather than the Book of Common Prayer. But this choice is not ecclesiastical: it is thematic and poetical, a part of the decorum created by the love-poetry of Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch” (190). While Martz persuades me of the relevance of Vivien to the sequence, I remain convinced that it is nonetheless

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primarily a meditation on his conversion. No doubt that conversion exacerbated the tensions already manifest in their relationship, and those tensions are reflected in the poem, as Martz argues. But even he makes no effort to occlude the poem’s focus on the struggle to find belief. 12 Not atypically, thirteen years after the explanation he gave Hi Simons, Stevens gave his Italian translator, Poggioli, a completely different explanation of the last line: “A sea of ex means a purely negative sea. The realm of has-been without interest or provocativeness” (25 July 1953 Letters 783). 13 The gourd reference is rather opaque, but the following passage from the fourth book of Jonah might be relevant. God had sent Jonah to Nineveh to preach to the citizens about their evil ways. They reformed, and God pardoned them – much to Jonah’s annoyance: 5 So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city. 6 And the lord God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd. 7 But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered. 8 And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live. 9 And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. 10 Then said the lord, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: 11 And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than six score thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle. The point of the story would seem to be that forgiveness is a greater principle than vengeance. If Eliot had this passage in mind, “the fruit of the gourd” would be humility and forgiveness. But there is no way of being sure of the allusion. 14 In the entry for “spirit,” the Catholic Encyclopaedia has the following: “In Theology, the uses of the word are various. In the New Testament, it signifies sometimes the soul of man (generally its highest part, e.g., ‘the spirit is willing’), sometimes the supernatural action of God in man, sometimes the Holy Ghost

Notes to pages 295–8

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(‘the Spirit of Truth Whom the world cannot receive’). The use of this term to signify the supernatural life of grace is the explanation of St. Paul’s language about the spiritual and the carnal man and his enumeration of the three elements, spirit, soul, and body, which gave occasion to the error of the Trichotomists” (1 Thess.: 5, 23; Eph.: 4, 23). In the 1918 poem “Whispers of Immortality,” Eliot also invokes the bone and marrow separately. But there is no spiritual or mental component invoked. Speaking of John Donne as “another” preoccupied with death like Webster, he wrote: He knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone. He moves on to Grishkin after a break marked by suspension points, contrasting the temptation of the pleasures of the flesh with the anguish of introspection: Grishkin is nice: her Russian eye Is underlined for emphasis; Uncorseted, her friendly bust Gives promise of pneumatic bliss. Christopher Ricks first pointed out these elisions. He regards their suppression as motivated by a desire to avoid appearing excessively illiberal: “It is not that this song needed to eschew tension, but that the needed tension was that of distance not distaste. Which is why Ash-Wednesday does not accommodate ‘Spattered and worshipped.’ Or ‘With worm eaten petals.’ ‘In a society like ours, worm-eaten with Liberalism, the only thing possible for a person with strong convictions is to state a point of view and leave it at that’ [After Strange Gods 13]: but in Ash-Wednesday, a poem not bent upon society, let alone upon ‘a society like ours,’ such a line as ‘With worm eaten petals’ would feel wormeaten with illiberalism, with animosity” (Eliot and Prejudice 228). His less modest friend, Ezra Pound, did plan an “epic,” The Cantos, which would have articulated a modern equivalent of Dante’s journey amongst the dead, and his ascent into paradise. But that project remained unfinished on Pound’s death. Pound’s Paradiso never amounted to more than a few fragments. Eliot cited the offending remark: “In an essay of very great interest published in The Criterion for July, 1925, Mr. I.A. Richards did me the honour of employing one of my poems as evidence on behalf of a theory he was there expounding. He observed, in a footnote, that the author in question, “by effecting a complete separation between his poetry and all beliefs, and this

388

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without any weakening of the poetry, has realised what might otherwise have remained largely a speculative possibility” (15). 19 Eliot did overcome that Unitarian prejudice against grace, though it is not clear that he felt it had been granted to him. In “Christianity & Communism” (16 March 1932) the first article in the Listener series “The Modern Dilemma,” he declared his “orthodoxy,” while qualifying it as imperfect, implying that he had not received an “infusion” of grace: “In all that I say I shall speak from the point of view of orthodox Christianity. At least, I aim at orthodoxy. For heresy, which consists in emphasising one aspect of the mystery to the exclusion of the other, is a natural tendency of the mind; a complete living orthodoxy is (except through the infusion of exceptional grace) almost impossible to the frail human being at every moment of his life; which is one reason why the Church is necessary” (382). Of course, to rely on such an “infusion” would imply the Lutheran doctrine of salvation by faith alone, a doctrine that renders the Church unnecessary. 20 This may be a recollection of Emerson’s remark in “Self-Reliance,” that “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man ... and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons” (Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher. Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1957 154–5). If so, it is instructive to compare it to Eliot’s ironic allusion to the passage in “Sweeney Erect”: (The lengthened shadow of a man Is history, said Emerson Who had not seen the silhouette Of Sweeney straddled in the sun). Eliot – admittedly not the Anglican Eliot – stresses the bestiality of mankind in the Sweeney poems. Stevens appears to be celebrating something more like his divinity, at least the human capacity to fully realize the wonder of creation, of things as they are. 21 For example in “Imagination as Value” (1949): The imagination is one of the great human powers. The romantic belittles it. The imagination is the liberty of the mind. The romantic is a failure to make use of that liberty. It is to the imagination what sentimentality is to feeling. It is a failure of the imagination precisely as sentimentality is a failure of feeling. The imagination is the only genius. It is intrepid and eager and the extreme of its achievement lies in abstraction. The achievement of the romantic, on the contrary, lies in minor wish-fulfilments and it is incapable of abstraction. In any case and without continuing to contrast

Notes to pages 304–5

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the two things, one wants to elicit a sense of the imagination as something vital. In that sense one must deal with it as metaphysics. (Kermode 727–8) 22 Frank Doggett used “The Owl and the Sarcophagus” to set the theme for Stevens’ Poetry of Thought (11–12). Doggett is not so much interested in articulating the afterworld that the poem postulates as in illustrating his own argument that Stevens’ underlying “thesis” is “that the mind creates forms and personifications, that it humanizes reality in order that it may live on its own terms” (11). For Joseph Riddell: “‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus’ is a parable of the mind’s war with its own nature, a contemplative exercise which verifies and mocks the mythological imagination, and the soothing personae it has created as a stay against mortality” (The Clairvoyant Eye 240). Riddell seems oblivious to the elegiac nature of the poem – a feature that Doggett notes. Neither of them is particularly concerned to draw out the nature of the afterworld, beyond its imagined irreality. Neither Doggett nor Riddell draws attention to the poem’s connection with the death of Henry Church – no doubt because Stevens’ letters were published too late for either scholar to have consulted them. Later discussions of the poem seem to descend from Bloom’s reading (Bloom 281–92). Most take account of its relation to the death of Henry Church. Joan Melville surveys them in “Inventions of Farewell.” Melville does address the nature of the afterlife portrayed in the poem, but her reading and mine scarcely intersect. She is primarily concerned to situate Stevens’ portrayal of the afterlife within a European Christian and Romantic tradition. C. Roland Wagner also takes full account of the poem’s relation to Church’s death in his 1988 paper “Wallace Stevens: The Concealed Self.” Most other recent attention to the poem that I have found tends to read it from a Freudian perspective (Wagner) or a Jungian perspective. One of the more extended is Joseph Carroll’s in Wallace Stevens’ Supreme Fiction (214–36). Carroll follows Bloom’s identification of the female figure with the mother, and also finds it to be “one of Stevens’ most complex and difficult poems” (214). 23 “Godolphin” is not a word known to the OED. Other commentators have not noticed that it is the name of the eponymous hero of Bulwer-Lytton’s 1833 novel Godolphin, who is described in the preface as “the man of poetical temperament, out of his place alike among the trifling idlers and the bustling actors of the world” – a characterization appropriate enough for Stevens’ allegorical figure of Peace. However, I have not found any reference to either Bulwer-Lytton, or the novel by Stevens elsewhere.

390

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24 “Bold” would appear to be a typographical error for “mold.” However, Kermode’s Collected Poetry and Prose also has “bold.” I can’t imagine what “broken bold” could mean in this context, but “broken mold” makes perfect sense. 25 None of the commentaries I have seen picks up on this analogy. 26 Lea Baechler points out in “Pre-Elegiac Affirmations in ‘To an Old Philosopher in Rome’” that Stevens drew on Edmund Wilson’s account of a visit to Santayana in the April 1946 number of The New Yorker. Despite the date of that report, she assumes – as I do – that the poem was written only shortly before Santayana’s death. Like most commentators, Baechler refers to the convalescent hospital run by the Blue Nuns as a “convent.” Her excellent commentary focuses on drawing out the relevance of Wilson’s report and the relationship between Stevens and Santayana, rather than treating the poem as a meditation on death. 27 No doubt the phrase “book and candle” is a deliberate evocation of the bell, book, and candle employed in Extreme Unction, the last rites of the Catholic Church. However, despite dying in a Catholic hospital, Santayana did not receive Extreme Unction (McCormick 504). 28 Renan’s study was the most celebrated. Although first published in 1867, it went through many editions. It is likely that the library owned the English translation published by Matthiesen and Co. in 1901, which was based on the thirteenth edition. The following paragraph from Renan’s preface gives some idea of the tone of the study: At the bottom of all discussion on such matters is the question of the supernatural. If the miracle and the inspiration of certain books are actual facts, our method is detestable. If the miracle and the inspiration of some books are beliefs without any reality, our method is the proper one. Now, the question of the supernatural is determined to us with absolute certainty, by this simple reason, that there is no room for belief in a thing of which the world can offer no experimental trace. We do not believe in a miracle, just as we do not believe in dreams, in the devil, in sorcery, or in astrology. Have we any need to refute step by step the long reasonings of astrology in order to deny that the stars influence human events? No. It is sufficient for this wholly negative, as well as demonstrable experience, that we give the best direct proof – such an influence has never been proved. (xiv) 29 Notes is another of Eliot’s works that has drawn a lot of hostile commentary for its elitist and retrograde political stance. I endorse David Chintiz’s defence of its politics in T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide: “Although Eliot’s

Notes to page 315

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cultural solution in Notes – essentially to shore up the fragments of a class structure that was already, as he understood, failing – is uncompelling, his position seems to me less duplicitous than it does to certain recent critics who believe that Eliot pleads a concern for ‘culture’ as an excuse for political reaction. One might rather suggest, I think, with still better reasons, that it is his concern for culture, however well or ill placed, that explains much of Eliot’s politics. In any case, distress over the loss of subcultural differences in the face of economic and social convergence is hardly a right-wing monopoly” (171).

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Praz, Mario. Review of Pure Poetry. Trans. Algar Thorold. Criterion 8 (July 1929) 740. Rainey, Lawrence. The Annotated Waste Land. New Haven: Yale University Press 2005. – Revisiting The Waste Land. New Haven: Yale University Press 2005. Ricks, Christopher. T.S. Eliot and Prejudice. London: Faber and Faber 1988. – Decisions and Revisions in T.S. Eliot. The Panizzi Lectures 2002. London: The British Library and Faber and Faber 2003. Riddell, Joseph N. The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 1965. Robertson, J.M. Modern Humanists Reconsidered. London: Watts and Co. 1927. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press 1979. – Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. Rosu, Anca. “The Theoretical Afterlife of Wallace Stevens.” WSJ 24 (Fall 2000) 208–21. Russell, Bertrand. Philosophical Essays. London: Longmans, Green 1910. – Principles of Social Reconstruction. London: George Allen and Unwin 1916. – Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays. London: George Allen and Unwin 1917. Schuchard, Ronald. “Eliot and Hulme in 1916: Toward a Revaluation of Eliot’s Critical and Spiritual Development.” PMLA 88 (Oct. 1973) 1083–94. – ed. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace 1993. – Eliot’s Dark Angel: Intersections of Life and Art. New York: Oxford University Press 1999. – “Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture,” Modernism/modernity 10 (Jan. 2003) 1–26. – “Did Eliot Know Hulme? Final Answer.” Journal of Modern Literature 27 (Fall 2003) 63–9. Sellin, Eric. Valéry, Stevens, and the Cartesian Dilemma. Papers on Foreign Language and Literatures 6. Brockport, New York: suny 1975. Seymour-Jones, Carole. Painted Shadow: A Life of Vivienne Eliot. London: Constable and Robinson 2001. Shea, William M., and Peter A. Huff, eds. Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press 1995. Simons, Hi. “The Comedian as the Letter C: Its Sense and Its Significance.” In Brown, Ashley, and Robert S. Haller, eds. The Achievement of Wallace Stevens, 97–113. New York: J.P. Lippincott 1962 [1940].

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Smidt, Kristian. Poetry and Belief in the Work of T.S. Eliot. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1949. Souday, Paul. “Poe and the Theory of Pure Poetry.” New York Times Book Review 29 Nov. 1925. Sousa Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de. “The Woman in the Poem: Wallace Stevens, Ramon Fernandez, and Adrienne Rich.” WSJ 12 (Fall 1988) 150–61. Southam, B.C. A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber 1968. Sparrow, John. Sense and Poetry: Essays on the Place of Meaning in Contemporary Verse. London: Constable 1934. Stevens, Wallace. Papers. Huntington Library, Pasadena, California. Abbreviated here as was. – The Necessary Angel. New York: Vintage Books [1942] 1951. – The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 1954. – Letters of Wallace Stevens. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1970. – Opus Posthumous. Ed. Samuel French Morse. New York: Random House [1957] 1989. – Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujets: Wallace Stevens Commonplace Book. Ed. Milton J. Bates. Stanford: Stanford University Press 1989. – Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Eds. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson. New York: The Library of America 1997. Surette, Leon. A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1979. – The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press 1993. – “Richard Rorty Lays Down the Law.” Philosophy and Literature 19 (Oct. 1995) 261–75. – Pound in Purgatory. Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1999. Tannenbaum, Edward R. The Action Française: Die-Hard Reactionaries in Twentieth-Century France. New York, Wiley 1962. Tate, Allan. T.S. Eliot: The Man and His Work. New York: Dell 1966. Thompson, Neville. The Anti-Appeasers: Conservative Opposition to Appeasement in the 1930s. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1971. The Trinity Review 8 (May 1954). Special issue of the Undergraduate Review of Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut: A Celebration for Wallace Stevens. Samuel F. Morse was the faculty advisor. Tuttleton, James W. “T.S. Eliot and the Crisis of the Modern.” The Modern Age 31 (Summer/Fall 1987) 275–83.

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Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness. New York: Meridian Books [1911] 1960. Voros, Gyorgyi. “Wallace Stevens and A.R. Ammons as Men on the Dump.” WSJ 24 (Fall 2000) 163–74. Wagner, C. Roland. “Wallace Stevens: The Concealed Self.” WSJ 12 (Fall 1988) 83–101. Ward, Leo. “L’Action Française: A Reply to Mr. Eliot.” Criterion 7 (June 1928) 76–90. Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Shelburne. New York: Free Press 1985 [1929]. Williams, William Carlos. The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams. New York: New Directions 1948. Wolin, Richard. The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger. New York: Columbia University Press 1990. Yeats, W.B. The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats. London: Macmillan 1958.

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Index

aesthetic delight, 90, 109, 264, 382n30

in miracles 12, 137, 147, 243, 311,

Alcestis, 200, 327n9

314, 342n46, 390n28; postmodernism

Aquinas, St Thomas, 81, 252–3, 377n11

and 178–80, 380n22; pragmatism and

Arnold, Matthew, 26, 46, 47, 52–3, 56,

367n15; relative 222–6, 257. See also

59–60, 64–7, 82, 93,110–11, 151, 199, 253, 255–6, 261, 274, 315, 320, 328n13, 333n10, 334n16, 335n22, 342n46, 346n6, 348n14 Asher, Kenneth, 60–1, 334n17 & n19, 370–1n30

Pyrrhonism, Religious Belief Belloc, Hilaire, 161, 332n5, 364n7, 376n10 Benda, Julian, 241, 315, 321, 377n11 Bergson, Henri, 49, 75, 80, 87, 167, 169, 182, 188, 203, 207, 215–18, 229, 247, 252, 262, 263, 262, 318, 355n4,

Babbitt, Irving, 33–4, 49, 55, 62–4, 89,

359n19, 360n20, 361n25, 366n14,

170, 207, 286, 325–6n2, 331–2n3,

368n17, 372n33, 375n7, 376n8,

340n40, 355n6; and Maurras, 60, 63,

380n25; élan vital 67, 71, 94, 181, 218,

77–8

222. See also Eliot and Stevens

Bates, Milton J., 112, 330n6, 352n32, 355n7, 393 Baudelaire, Charles, 130, 239, 254–7, 281, 322

Blackmur, R.P., 3, 4 Blanshard, Bland, 318 Bohr, Niels, 337n29 Bolgan, Anne C., 71, 319

Beaufret, Jean, 174–5, 355n5, 357n11

Boutroux, Emile, 79, 81, 321

Beehler, Michael, 16, 393

Bradley, F.H., 5, 7, 60, 65, 67, 75–81, 84,

Belgion, Montgomery, 165, 174, 184, 203, 338n33, 345n1, 363n4 belief, 74–5, 77, 90, 128, 141, 157, 159,

87, 89, 96, 110, 163, 165–167, 180, 183,187–190, 205, 215, 241, 247, 252, 268, 319, 323, 337n30, 338n33,

160, 182, 188, 198, 199, 202, 227–9,

339n37, 340n39, 341n33, 343n39,

275–6, 339n37, 360n21, 369n25; in

348n39, 355n3, 359n19, 366n14,

fictions 221; Middleton Murry on 241;

374n3, 377n11; Appearance and Reality

408

Index

59, 70, 71, 73, 81, 187, 247; Ethical

idolatry 339n36; incarnation 72, 313;

Studies 64, 93, 248; Afinite centre@ 76,

Maritain on 242–5; and Maurras 62–3;

114, 115, 181, 188, 189, 191, 213,

resurrection 311–14; Russell on

214, 269, 339n38, 348n16; idealism

39–58; Stevens’ ridicule of 111–25,

56, 59, 70–4, 78, 80–1, 257, 340, 348,

129–30, 158–62; Time Between

367, 374; Principles of Logic 56 Bremond, Abbé, viii, 204–5, 220, 233–41, 255, 258, 261–3, 262–7, 270, 303, 319, 330n5, 364n5, 379n20, 380n24, 382n29, 382n31, 394; and Middleton Murry 240, 379n17; Eliot=s misreading of 379n18; Stevens on 380n25; on inspiration 244–251, 259,

146–9; and War 126–7, 313, 384n3 Church, Barbara, 108, 111, 199, 226, 304–5, 308, 337n12 Church, Henry, 15, 177–8, 224, 236, 304, 309, 358–9n16, 389n22 civilization, 132, 144, 151, 155, 195–6, 243, 228, 259–60, 279, 314–16, 324, 368n21, 384n2

262, 379n18, 381n26. See also Intu-

class, 346n6, 363n3, 391n21

ition and Mysticism

classicism, 4, 42, 46, 48–9, 60–1, 66, 205,

Brentano, Franz, 338n33, 339n37

240, 243, 245 251, 287, 320, 326n2,

Brooker, Jewel Spears, 50, 132, 319,

334n19, 361n25, 377n11, 376–7n14,

334n16, 337n30 Browning, Robert, 145, 149–50, 254, 353n40 Buchanan, Robert, 346n6 Buhr, Marjorie, 167, 358n13

378n17 Cline, Catherine Ann, 338n32 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 44, 183, 246, 288, 360n22, 375n6, 385n10; Biographia Litteraria 237–8, 320 Collège de France, 6, 67

Carlyle, Thomas, 53

Communism, vii, 13, 39, 45, 74, 130,

Carroll, Joseph, 308, 389n22

161, 193, 201–2, 217, 223, 228, 229,

Chamberlain, Neville, 227, 237n1,

235, 259, 279, 321–2, 361n21, 363n3,

351n31 Chesterton, G.K., 49, 161, 205, 206, 222, 332n5, 364n7

370n30, 384n2 Comte, Auguste, 63, 170, 222, 368n21 consciousness, 15, 80, 87, 90, 95, 158,

Childs, Donald, 70 –1, 94, 272, 276–7,

164, 175, 182, 196, 212–13, 218, 229,

336n26, 337n28, 345n2, 361n25,

238–9, 247, 250, 258, 261, 265, 278,

373n3

299, 305, 317, 339n38, 348n16,

Chinitz, David E., 390n29

366n14; false consciousness 360n21;

Christianity, vii, 5–7, 12, 13–16, 68–9, 91,

subconscious 356n8, 383n31; uncon-

97, 131, 145, 155, 163, 169, 172, 200, 207, 218, 221, 222, 231, 238, 253,

scious 266, 293–4 conviction, 5, 12, 16, 24–26, 68, 94, 96,

294–8, 300–1, 311–12, 314–16, 319,

102, 103, 118, 131, 138, 164, 170,

322, 341n44, 357n10, 369n26,

206, 221, 227, 228, 238, 253, 264,

370n29, 388n19, 389n22; Eliot=s ridicule of 79–83, 101–8, 133–42; and

282, 286, 297 Cooper-Willis, Irene, 143

Index

409

Corbière, Tristan, 254, 255

164; indifference to suffering 123;

Cowan, Laura, 385n11

manifestations of 242, 252, 262, 281,

Coyle, Beverly, 320

283, 285–6, 347n9; of Jesus Christ

Culler, Jonathan, 326n5

136, 314, 342n46; submission to 93;

culture, disintegration of, 46–7, 91, 132,

of Poetry 267–8

173, 195–6, 206, 253, 259, 279,

Donoghue, Denis, 17, 331n11, 369n23

314–16, 320; and Race 378n15. See

Douglass, Paul, 71, 218, 337n28

also Civilization

Dreyfus Affair, 60

Dada, 243, 261

Eagleton, Terry, 351n31

Dante Alighieri, 13, 14, 135–6, 151, 237,

Einstein, Albert, 254, 289, 337n29

252–3, 256–7, 264, 305, 374n4,

élan vital. See Bergson

385n11, 387n17; Beatrice, 300, 305,

Eliot, T.S., reputation 3–4; and Anglican

307–8; Commedia 148, 308; Matilda

Faith, 7, 12, 15, 19, 25, 42, 46–51,

300, 301; Purgatorio 296–7, 300–1; La

60–1, 62–3, 72–4, 77, 81–4, 86, 130,

Vita Nuova 290–1, 293

150, 165–6, 200, 221, 238, 244, 247,

Darwinism 39, 45, 47, 53, 67–8, 71–3,

251–2, 260, 300, 323, 334n19,

155, 159, 163, 175, 181, 211, 254,

340n41; anti-Semitism, 134–136,

276, 336n26, 367n15, 383n33

349–50n21, 354n1; “Apollinax, Mr.”

death, 12, 55, 106, 112, 115–17, 119–22,

98–101; asceticism 11, 106, 276, 291,

127, 133, 171, 187, 209, 292, 304–11,

302–3, 312, 322, 359n18; acquain-

387n15; death of God, 164, 219–22,

tance with Stevens 3; and Bergson 5,

288, 313–14, 317–19

51, 59, 67–72, 89, 169, 271–2, 276–7;

Decker, Henry, 234–5 deconstruction, 167, 178, 195, 259. See also Derrida

on Bergson=s “weakling mysticism” 72, 94, 181; and idealism 166, 218; Maritain on 242–3; meets Russell 76

Dekkers, Odin, 52

Poetry: Ash-Wednesday ix, 151, 211,

Derrida, Jacques, 16, 166–8, 225, 248,

280–91, 293–8, 290–303, 311, 321,

259, 318, 354n2, 355n3, 358n12. See

362n27, 384n3, 385n11, 387n16;

also deconstruction

Bolo poems 50, 98, 237, 344n1; Cho-

diabolism 254–5, 258

ruses for the Rock 39–40, 130, 168,

Dial, the, 21; Dial prize, 153

252, 321, 367n16; “Mr. Eliot=s Sunday

Dickens, Charles, 66

Morning Service” viii, 7, 48, 91, 97,

Dickinson, G. Lowes, 337n32

101, 103–8, 237, 252; Four Quartets 10,

Divine Grace, 249, 298, 387n14

106, 146, 166, 187–8, 211, 281,

Divine Providence, 42, 163, 281

336n26, 347n8, 361n25, (Burnt

divinity, 57, 64–5, 113–14, 147, 177, 267,

Norton), 41–2, 72, 84; (East Coker),

288, 355n6, 388n20; Arnold on

148, 186; Dry Salvages 72, 120, 313;

346n6; belief in 69, consumption of

“Gerontion” viii, 66, 127, 131–42, 144,

138; experience of 237; immanence of

145–6, 150, 321; “Hippopotamus” 48,

410

Index

91, 102, 103, 119, 237, 252, 345n5;

Logic” 51, 55, 70, 96, 349n17; “Note

“The Hollow Men” 25, 154–5, 223,

on Poetry and Belief” 223, 238, 279,

291, 386n11, 321; “The Love Song of

298, 311; Notes Toward a Definition of

J. Alfred Prufrock” 99, 140, 149,

Culture 314, 322; On Poetry and Poets

189–90, 344n1; Murder in the Cathedral

144; Review of Ethical Studies 64;

57, 321; Old Possum=s Book of Practical

Review of the Pensées of Pascal 347n9;

Cats 48; “Sweeney Agonistes” 50;

“Religion without Humanism 170,

“Sweeney Erect” 66, 131, 388n20; The

172, 245, 274, 374n4, “The Romantic

Waste Land, viii, 5, 9–11, 25, 41, 48,

Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the

61, 66, 71, 91, 96–7, 99, 106–7, 114,

Function of Criticism” 347n11; The

127, 131–2, 138, 142, 144–53, 159,

Sacred Wood 54, 65, 66, 88, 216, 243,

162, 187–8, 235, 237–8, 274–5, 281,

333n10, 335n23; “Second Thoughts

298, 311, 321, 325n1, 327n7, 327n8,

about Humanism” 3, 74–5, 130, 210,

328n10, 328–9n16, 337n30, 348n15,

364n7; Sermon Preached in Magda-

350n24, 350n25, 351n27, 351n28,

lene College Chapel 6, 50–1, 67, 77,

351n29, 352n35, 352–3n36, 353n38,

86; “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of

367n14

Seneca” 6, 69, 91–2; “Thoughts after

Prose works: After Strange Gods 196,

Lambeth” 96, 145; Turnbull Lectures

243–4, 255, 332n4, 349n20, 377n14,

253–7; “Two Sources of Morality and

378n15, 387n16; “Building up the

Religion” 128, 268; The Use of Poetry

Christian World” 312; Clark Lectures

and the Use of Criticism 107, 207, 245,

95, 223, 252–4, 256–7, 260, 322; Crite-

255, 258, 264, 274, 335n23,

rion “Commentaries” 60, 61, 62, 74, 151, 173, 223, 330n6, 340n39,

365n11 Eliot, Vivien, 5–7, 19, 40–1, 50, 57–8, 66,

371n30; “To Criticize the Critic” 18,

73, 76–9, 84, 88–90, 95–7, 101, 107,

53, 64, 257, 321, 331n3; Eliot=s Disser-

134 –6, 140, 145, 150, 334n14,

tation 7, 71, 73–5, 78 –9, 163, 179–80,

334n15, 335n24, 338n34, 343n50,

181–4, 187–9 192, 213, 215, 247,

343n52, 344n54, 350n24, 351n30,

321–2, 337n30, 338n33, 340n39,

385n11

341n45, 348n15, 361n25, 373–4n3;

Empson, William, 8

For Lancelot Andrewes 48; “From Poe to

Ethiopia, 31, 330n6

Valéry” 257–9; “The Function of Criti-

evolution. See Darwinism

cism” 42; “The Humanism of Irving

existentialism 10, 87, 166–7, 169, 173–5,

Babbitt” 170; “Idea of a Christian Soci-

230, 355n4

ety” 228; “Introduction to Paul Valéry” 382n30; “Literature of Politics” 63;

Faber, Geoffrey, 53

“Matthew Arnold” 274, “The Meta-

Fabian, 77–8, 130, 279

physical Poets” 196, 270, 295; “The

Fascism, 201–2, 228–9, 234–5, 279–80,

Modern Dilemma” 12, 322, 328n13, 328n14, 388n19; “Mysticism and

319–21, 370n30. See also Mussolini Feo, José Rodriguez, 178, 328n12

Index Fernandez, Ramon, viii, 89, 178, 192,

411

Habib, Rafe, 354–5n3

198, 199–211, 213, 217–26, 229–231,

Haigh-Wood, Vivien. See Eliot, Vivien

286, 323, 362–3n2, 363n3, 363n4,

Harding, Jason, 331n1, 334n17, 351n31,

363n5, 364n7, 365n8, 365n10, 365–6n12, 365n13, 376n10, 381n25 Finite Centre. See Bradley Flaubert, Gustave, 66; Madame Bovary 278 Flint, F.S., 49, 262, 375n7 Foerster, Norman, 170–2, 205, 324, 325n2, 364n7 Forman, Maurice Buxton, 44, 236, 324 Foucault, Michel, 167, 175, 355n3, 358n12 Frazer, Sir James, 138, 324, 335n23, 350n22 & n23 Frost, Robert, 9 Fuller, Benjamin Apthorpe Gould, 98–100, 344n2

354n1, 364n7, 376n10 Hartley, David, 284 Harvard, vii, 6–7, 14, 15, 33, 51, 58–9, 60, 70, 78–9, 98–100, 110, 165–6, 215, 326n4, 340n39, 342n47, 344n2, 345n3, 350n23, 355n3, 367n15, 373n3; Moody Lecture 215, 290 Harvard Advocate 3, 9, 10, 13, 15–16, 32–3, 110–11, 128, 164, 215, 226, 260, 268, 308, 326n5, 352n33 Heart of Darkness, 243, 274–5 Hegel, G.W.H., 56, 166, 203, 248, 318, 355n3, 355n4, 358n15 Heidegger, Martin, viii, 146, 148, 175–6, 189, 203, 212, 242, 274, 318, 338n3, 357n11, 358n13, 362n26, 375n5; and Eliot, 166–7, 169–70, 171–2, 179–82;

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 166, 172, 355n4, 356–7n9 Gallup, Donald, 326n5, 332n6, 341n43, 342n48 Gardner, Helen, 131 Gardner, Mrs Jack, 89, 98–9, 345n2, 354n3

and Stevens 167–9, 170–1, 174, 176–9 Henderson, Alice Corbin, 10, 21, 23, 26, 113, 352–3n36 Herbert, George, 282, 384n6 Heringman, Bernard, 203, 375n6, 385n10 Hines, Thomas J., 168–9

Gautier, Théophile, 102, 239, 345n5

Hitler, Adolf, 227, 351n31, 373n1

Gelpi, Albert, 374–5n5, 376n9

Hulme, T.E., 42, 57, 130, 251, 340n41,

Germany; Eliot in, 19; postwar inflation, 235; Nazism, 228

343n51 Humanism, vii–viii; 340n40, 355n6,

Geyzel, Leonard van, 228

364n7, 384n1; characterized, 46, 58,

Gide, André, 108, 202, 223

76, 158, 170, 175, 221, 225–6, 274,

Gordon, Lyndall, 49–50, 51, 57, 70, 77,

287, 318; Darwinism and 68; Eliot and

79, 90, 99, 105, 107, 142, 237, 245,

5, 6–7, 19, 87, 89–90, 101, 130, 140,

334n17, 335–6n24, 341n44, 343n52,

145, 170, 207, 237, 257, 325–6n2,

344n1, 344n2, 347n9, 378n16 Gourmont, Rémy de, 335n23 Gray, Piers, 337n30, 350n22, 350n23, 359–60n19

366n14; his Humanist reviews, 79–84; Heidegger and 167–8, 174–6; Marxism and 319; Pure Poetry and 245; Stevens and 5–6, 7–8, 17, 45, 108–9,

412

Index

111–18, 119, 123–5, 130–1, 152–3, 157, 162, 199, 222, 224–5, 267, 286–7, 328n15, 369n23, 371n31. See also Arnold, Matthew; Babbitt, Irving;

Leggett, B.J., 23, 29, 329n1, 330n5, 359n16, 360n22, 367n16 Leibniz, 59, 187–8, 214, 269, 366–7n14

Fernandez, Ramon; Foerster, Norman;

Lensing, George S., 260

Maurras, Charles; More, Paul Elmer;

Levenson, Michael, 47

Murry, Middleton; Hulme, T.E.; Rob-

Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 80, 181, 341n45,

ertson, J.M.; Russell, Bertrand Husserl, Edmund, 158, 166, 338n33, 339n37, 355n3 Huxley, Aldous, 53

359–60n19 Lewis, Wyndham, 4, 19, 142, 149, 218, 336n25, 344n1, 347n11 Little Review, 85, 101, 149, 150, 345n4 Litz, Walton, 260, 326

Imagism, 20, 26–8, 32, 236, 245, 263–4, 381n27, 381n28

Lobb, Edward, 70, 335n22, 336n26 Lyons, Leonard, 13

intuition, 217–21, 226, 229–30, 240–1, 251, 265, 368n19, 372n35, 376n8, 378n17 irrational, 17, 109, 174, 175, 193, 205, 221, 226, 234, 247, 260, 262–6, 319, 347n12, 357n10, 359n19

MacLeod, Glen, 119, 234, 236, 260, 373n2 Maistre, Joseph de, 63 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 254, 255, 257, 261, 263, 265, 358n15, 381n25 Margolis, John D., 61, 64, 79, 325n2,

Jain, Manju, 166, 326n4, 354n2, 359n19 James, William, 70, 182, 188, 277, 359n19, 360n20, 361n25

334n17, 334n19, 341n44 Maritain, Jacques, 49, 222, 239–44, 248–9, 255, 382n31 Martz, Louis, 153, 353n6, 385–6n11

Julius, Anthony, 354n1

Marx, Karl, German Ideology 182, 360n21.

Kant, Immanuel, 158, 180, 189, 203,

Mason, Steven T., 260.

See also Communism 217, 237, 367n15, 375n5

Massis, Henri, 329–30n4

Keats, John, 44, 116, 118, 236, 290

Matthews, T.S., 53

Kermode, Frank, 47, 146, 153

Maurras, Charles, 7, 48, 60–64, 66, 67,

Keynes, John Maynard, 338n32

69, 75, 77–8, 82, 89, 170, 279, 286,

Killorin, Joseph, 3.

320–1, 334n17, 334n19, 334n20,

Kojecky, Roger, 334n17 Kuklick, Bruce, 326n4, 367n15

335n21, 370–1n30 McCormick, John, 14, 311, 320n27 Melville, Joan, 389n22

Latimer, Ronald Lane, 22, 23, 31, 43, 200, 234–5, 263, 283, 336n1

Menand, Louis, 47–8 modern dilemma, vii, 4, 13, 15, 18, 40,

Lawrence, D.H., 4, 373n3

75, 77, 150, 152, 199, 227, 243, 298,

Lee, Vernon. See Paget, Violet

321

Index modernism, 20, 46–8, 149–50, 186,

413

Olney, James, 77, 132

260–1, 319; and postmodernism 167,

Others, 3, 28

172, 178–9, 195, 197

Ott, Hugo, 357n11

monism, 70–1, 73, 74, 81, 179, 180–4, 214; 337n31, 338n33, 339n37, 366n14

Paget, Violet, 143

Monist, 59, 341n33

Pater, Walter, 51, 52, 143, 332n8

Monk, Ray, 73, 92, 338n34, 342n47,

Perl, Jeffrey, 46–7

344–5n2 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 51 Moore, G.E., 338n32, 340n39 Moore, George, 352n35 Moore, Marianne, viii, 9. 10, 11, 20–1, 233, 245; Eliot on 24–28, 39; Moore on Stevens 43–4; Stevens on 21–4, 28–33, 34–5 More, Paul Elmer, 49, 61, 170, 248, 334n19, 355n6 Murray, Paul, 347n8 Murry, Middleton, 42, 45, 48, 89, 128–9, 205, 217–19, 222, 243–246, 248, 249, 251, 286, 364n7, 337n14; on Bremond 240–1 Mussolini, Benito, 31, 235, 337n1. See also Fascism Munich Agreement, 227–8, 351n31

Perugino, Pietro, 105, 346–7n7 phenomenology, 158, 166–70, 173–6, 182–3, 189, 202–3, 225, 338n33, 362n26 Planck, Max, 254, 337n29 Poe, Edgar Allan, 239, 258–9, 263, 381n25 poetic communication, 30, 190–4, 196, 204, 212, 220, 229, 240, 246–8, 250–1, 254, 263–4, 347n8, 382n29 Poetry Magazine, 21, 99, 111, 119, 121, 124, 152, 155, 283, 292, 326n5, 344n1, 384n8 Pound, Ezra, 4, 9, 16, 19, 20, 32, 48, 50, 78, 84–5, 88–91, 104–5, 131–2, 135, 139, 142–4, 145, 149, 167, 179, 228, 236, 261–3, 279, 335n23, 335–6n24, 342n48, 344n1, 350n21, 350n25,

Naylor, Paul Kenneth, 169 Nazism, 39, 49, 131, 134, 166, 177, 201, 203, 228, 319, 321, 332n5, 363n4, 371n31, 378n15

350n26, 351n29, 381n28, 387n17 Praz, Mario, 239–241, 248, 376n8, 376n10 Proust, Marcel, 134, 206–7, 336n25, 365n9, 365n10, 365n11

New English Weekly, 259, 315 Newman, John Henry Cardinal, 205–7, 221, 225, 313, 365n10, 365–6n12; experience of 240, 323 Nouvelle Revue Française, viii, 199, 290

Rainey, Lawrence, 144, 149, 327n8, 350n24, 350n25. Rashdall, Hastings, 80 Read, Herbert, 26, 53, 56, 63, 66, 67, 133–4, 165, 239, 240, 278, 329n4,

obscurity in poetry, 8, 20, 43, 108, 133,139, 191, 194, 196–7, 219, 239, 246, 261, 294, 352–3n36, 386n13

336n26, 375n7, 376n10 religious belief, 4–5, 7–8, 11–12, 17–18, 45, 47–9, 53–5, 60, 63, 65, 75, 78–84,

414

Index

92–3, 98, 102–3, 112, 123, 127, 130,

344–5n2, 347–8n13, 352n32, 367n14;

135–6, 148, 162–4, 165–6, 170–221,

“Free Man’s Worship,” 6, 51, 54–60,

223, 227–8, 231, 236–9, 251–3, 256,

67–70, 73–4, 105, 110, 113; Mysticism

259–60, 279–82, 284, 293, 297–8,

and Logic, 70, 96, 359n17; Principles of

316, 318–23, 326n2, 332n4, n5,

Social

349n17, 350n21, 355n6, 370n29,

Reconstruction, 79, 85, 91–6, 248;

385n10, 386n11, 387n18, 390n28;

Principia Mathematica 51, 56, 76–7,

Donne and 91; Existentialism and

276, 333n11, 340n39, 384n1; “Why I

167–9; Mysticism and 210; Newman

Am Not a Christian,” 56, 57, 322

on 221; Russell and 67–8, 71–4; Stevens on 286–7 Renan, Ernest, 46, 82, 263, 314, 342n46, 390n28 Resurrection, 12, 118, 137, 146, 148, 281, 311–314, 357n27 Richards, I.A., 179, 238, 248–9, 251,

Sassoon, Siegfried, 125–7, 349n19 Schiff, Sydney, 65–6, 131, 134, 142, 145, 335–6n25, 336n26, 338n35, 350n24 Schuchard, Ronald, 52–3, 57, 135, 253, 349n20 science, and art, 172–5, 195, 211–12,

261, 298, 359n19, 375n6, 380n23,

227, 245, 247, 264, 288, 290, 319; and

387–8n18

religion, 54, 59, 71, 80–1, 85, 128–9,

Ricks, Christopher, 39, 259, 342n48, 384n3, 385n11, 387n16 Rimbaud, Arthur, 254, 261, 265 Robertson, J.M., 47, 52–54, 56–8, 59, 62,

179, 347n9, 367n15 Sellin, Eric, 368n18 Seymour-Jones, Carole, 342n48, 343n50, 343n52, 344n54

65, 68, 73, 82, 170, 211, 286, 333n13,

Shaw, George Bernard, 368n17

342n46, 368n17

Shelly, Percy Bysshe, 129, 178, 236, 238,

Rorty, Richard, 14, 91, 172, 179, 189, 252, 343n53, 355n3, 356–7n9, 362n26, 380n22, 383n33 Royce, Josiah, 166, 328n15, 336n26, 350n22 & n23, 354n2, 359–60n19

239, 254, 267–8, 288, 331n9, 358n15, 381n25, 383n33 Simons, Hi, 153, 154, 157–8, 173, 194, 222, 260, 263, 284, 286, 293, 303, 318, 326n5, 354n41, 381n27, 386n12

Ruskin, John, 53, 332n5

Smidt, Kristian, 85, 342n48

Russell, Bertrand, viii, 5–7, 14, 19, 45,

Souday, Paul, 239, 241, 246, 379n17

50–2, 64, 71, 73–4, 75–80, 84, 87–100, 99–101, 105, 107–111, 123,

Sousa Santos, Maria Irene Ramalho de, 363n2

126–7, 129–30, 132, 134–6, 140–3,

Southam, B.C., 346n6, 346n7

145, 152, 155–6, 159, 170, 172–3,

Sparrow, John, 260–1, 265, 380n23,

182, 206, 210, 215, 222–3, 233, 237, 247, 250, 252, 257, 277, 286, 318, 323, 325–6n2, 328–9n16, 335–6n24,

382n29 Spencer, Herbert, 53–54, 62, 67–8, 82, 336n26

338n33, 339n37, 340–1n42, 342n47,

Stead, William Force, 281, 290, 312

342n48, 343n49, 343n52, 344n54,

Stein, Gertrude, 43, 329n2

Index

415

Stevens, Holly, 152, 283, 326n6, 327n9

330n6; “Owl’s Clover” 260, 280;

Stevens, Wallace, on Eliot, 3, reputation

“Phases” 97, 111–12, 119; “Sailing

3–4; and Bergson 128, 205, 226,

after Lunch” 22, 35–7, 39, 44; “Sur Ma

265–8, 276–8, 370n27, 380–1n25;

Guzzla Gracile” 171; “Sunday Morn-

383n33; and Humanism vii–viii, 5–6,

ing” viii, 7, 21, 48, 101–2, 109,

7–8, 156–8, 162–4, 198, 199–200,

111–18, 122, 125, 146, 152, 190, 191,

203, 211, 222, 224–5, 227, 231,

199, 293, 303, 305, 312, 351n27,

286–8, 369n23; supreme fiction 7, 8,

374n5; “Variations on a Summer Day”

129, 169, 238; Poetry: “Blue Guitar”

381n27. Prose: Adagio 169, 316,

155–62, 171, 173–4, 273–6, 278,

381n26; “Figure of the Youth as Virile

280–1, 283–92, 298, 307, 370n27; “A

Poet” 110, 128, 207, 212, 229, 375n6;

Collect of Philosophy” 226, 290,

“Irrational Element in Poetry” 175,

367n14; “Comedian as the Letter C”

205, 260–3; Necessary Angel 260,

153–4, 158, 161–2,199, 325n1,

356n8; Opus Posthumous 112,119, 120,

353n36, 353n39, 354n41: “Emperor

123, 153, 384n8; “Rubbings of Real-

of Ice Cream” 293, 306, 309; Harmo-

ity” 381n27; “Two or Three Ideas”

nium, 9, 10, 16, 21, 119, 121–5, 127,

176, 227, 288, 372n32

152, 153, 194, 200, 234, 235, 261,

Strachey, Lytton, 338n32

352n33, 352n36; “From the Journal of

Strauss, Friedrich, 346n6

Crispin” 153; “Greenest Continent”

Surette, Leon, 350n21, 351n26

284, 330n6; “HighToned Christian

surrealism, 99, 210, 226, 233–4, 243,

Woman” 129, 313; Ideas of Order viii, 22–24, 28, 29, 43–4, 182, 199–200, 205, 231, 233, 236, 327n9, 362n1; “Journal of Crispin” 153, 161, 281,

260–2, 265–6, 356n8, 374n5, 382–3n31 symbolism, 20, 71, 151–2, 233, 244, 254–5, 258, 261, 381n28

353n36, 353n39; “The Idea of Order at Key West” viii, 114, 180, 183,

Tannenbaum, Edward, 61

190–3, 198–205, 219–24, 229–31,

Tate, Allan, 276

270, 274, 288; “Lettres d’un Soldat”

Temple, William, 81–2

viii, 97, 119–25, 127, 146, 152,

Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 254, 331n9,

371n31; “Like Decorations in a Nigger

351n28

Cemetery” 209; “Monocle de mon

Thayer, Lucy, 151, 351n30

Oncle” 152–3, 199; “Mozart 1935,”

Thayer, Scofield, 153, 352n35

37–8, 40, 331n8; “Notes Toward a

Thomas, Dylan, 9

Supreme Fiction,” 184, 225, 293,

transcendence, 12, 22, 36, 50, 58, 67, 73,

317–18, 362n28; “Of Heaven Consid-

76, 90, 114, 129, 163–4, 169–70, 179,

ered as a Tomb,” 171; “Old Philoso-

184–5, 203, 208– 9, 213, 221–3,

pher in Rome” 14, 304, 308–11,

225–6, 248, 286, 318, 320, 322

390n26; “Owl in the Sarcophagus”

Trevelyan, Mary, 24, 343n52

304, 308, 389n22; Owl’s Clover 31,

Trinity Review, 273

416

Index

Underhill, Evelyn, 245, 378n16

Woolf, Leonard, 338n32 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 363n2

Valéry, Paul, viii, 3, 24–5, 29, 42–3, 90–1,

Wordsworth, William, 22, 129, 155, 192,

205, 220, 234–6, 245, 257–9, 273,

195, 214, 220, 238, 254, 265, 268,

277–8, 329–30n4, 330n5, 364n4,

284, 288, 291, 299, 365n11, 375n6,

368n18, 376n8, 381n26, 382n30

378n16, 385n10

Van Geyzel, Leonard, 228

World War I, 10, 98, 118, 131, 140, 193;

Van O’Connor, William, 3

casualties 327n8; Britain and France

Verdenal, Jean, 97–9, 152, 343n51

declare war on Germany, 186; the

Verlaine, Paul, 254

United States declares war on Germany and Austria, 88

Ward, Leo, 61–3

World War II: Britain and France declare

Weston, Jessie, 138, 144, 148, 351n28

war on Germany, 186; Stevens’ and

Whibley, Charles, 53

Eliot’s reaction 227–9

Whitehead, Alfred North, 76, 276, 318, 333n11, 338n32, 384n1 Wiener, Norbert, 14, 58–9, 73, 78, 84, 172 Wolin, Richard, 358n14

Yeats, William Butler, 37–9, 41, 50, 149, 167, 179, 185, 193, 208, 212, 274, 279, 281, 306, 319, 320, 331n9, 331n12, 374n4