'Where are the eagles and the trumpets?': the strange case of Eliot's missing quatrains - T.S. Eliot

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by Nigel Alderman

T. S. Eliot rated the quatrain poems he wrote between 1917 and 1919 among his best and most important work. Shortly after the publication of The Waste Land, for example, he wrote to his brother, Henry: "I consider my Sweeney poems as serious as anything I have ever written, in fact much more serious and more mature than the early poems but I do not know anyone who agrees with me on this point except William Butler Yeats and Vivienne who have both said much the same thing about them" (Letters 608). Further evidence of his high regard for them can be found in the two selected editions published in his lifetime--the contents of both of which he chose. In the first small selection in 1940 he included "Sweeney among the Nightingales" rather than "Portrait of a Lady," and in the second and fuller selection he made eight years later (which remains the standard selected edition), he included all seven of the English quatrains.(1) However, his opinion has not been endorsed by academic criticism.

One of the most striking aspects of this criticism until recently is the unquestioned and unquestioning organic narrative that is used to chart Eliot's poetic career. In this narrative the quatrains are located between on the one hand the greatness of the two "central" early poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait of a Lady," and on the other the work that is depicted as the fulfillment of his "first period": The Waste Land. Ronald Bush, for example, uses just such an organizing structure, asserting that "the causes of [Eliot's] evolution were there from the beginning" (ix), and spends five pages out of three hundred on the quatrains. Grover Smith uses a similar rhetorical strategy but is prepared to be more blunt about his antipathy toward the poems: "From 1917 to 1919 he based his technique more on Gautier than anyone else. Pound having disastrously encouraged him to study Gautier's Emaux et camees, he set to work being amusing" (38). Periodical criticism shows a similar lack of balance, as essays on the quatrains are few and far between, and those that do exist are normally either short, allusion-hunting pieces or are primarily biographical.

Even while this imbalance appears to be changing in two recent books (Robert Crawford and Kinley E. Roby), the quatrain poems, when they have been considered at all, have generally been portrayed as only useful stepping stones in Eliot's development as a poet.(2) F. B. Pinion is exemplary in this regard: "Though [Eliot's allegiance to Gautier] produced a number of poems which excited the younger generation with their daring and wit, the Gautier period must be regarded as temporizing and preparatory" (85-86). By using the term the "Gautier period," Pinion rhetorically intimates that they were too derivative, influenced only by Gautier. Yet there is also the paradoxical admission that they were perceived in very different terms at the time--they "excited the younger generation with their daring and wit." The use of the word "wit" is particularly problematic here, since critics, including Pinion himself, generally valorize the term by using Eliot's definition of it (which he formulated in some of the theoretical essays he was writing at the time) to explain the power of the later poems, especially The Waste Land.

Indeed, Eliot's assertion in the letter to his brother that no one liked the quatrains apart from himself, his wife, and Yeats is certainly not true, as Pinion points out. Angus Calder, however, is more explicit about whom of the "younger generation" the quatrains "excited," although he too exemplifies the typical critical approach to Eliot's quatrains: "Most of the [new] poems in English were written in quatrains," he writes, "[and] Pound's Mauberley sequence at the same time was largely composed of not dissimilar verses. Their retreat from vers libre towards an erudite formality is an interesting reaction" (45). Calder sets the work of the two poets during this period in opposition to the "reality" of the trenches and postwar "working-class agitation" and so charges "reaction" with a double-edged signification: a conservative recoil from vers libre and a reactionary response to the politics of the time. He then criticizes them for being too artificial, for displaying too much formal ingenuity, for not being "real" enough: "|Art,' or we might say not unfairly, |artiness,' provided a fortress to which they could retreat" (45). After arguing that they were too "art[y]," too arid, Calder asserts that they also reveal Eliot's "routine middle-class WASP anti-semitism" and "right wing political reflexes," which enables him not only to minimize the importance of the sentiments and the quatrains, but also to disown them both on his own behalf, and, even more insidiously, on Eliot's behalf as well (45). Having put the poems in their minor place, Calder in the next sentence reveals that it was these same poems that made Eliot's name: "Eliot's quatrains captivated amongst others the Sitwells . . . and clearly intrigued a major writer, Hugh MacDiarmid ... [who] refers casually to |Burbank' as if the poems were common knowledge, and actually parodies Eliot's already parodic |Sweeney' poems. Extracting witty new life from the quatrain, an easy |traditional' form, Eliot educated the generation of Auden and Betjeman and Stevie Smith, born in the century's first decade" (47). After this extraordinary passage, Calder then blithely says that the poem that Ara Vos Prec was really "about" is and was "Gerontion."