'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

Rather than excluding "Ode" simply because of Vivienne, it seems more likely that Eliot excised it for other personal as well as political reasons. Its full title was "Ode, On Independence Day, July 4th 1918," a title that would clearly have more resonance in America than in England. He was concerned as it was that he would simply be regarded as "disgusting" by American reviewers but in addition he obviously worried about how his mother would react to his work. As he wrote to his brother.

I sent you a few days ago by registered post ... a copy of my

Limited Edition [Ara Vos Prec]. I have not sent this to Mother or

told her about it. I thought of cutting out the page on which

occurs a poem called "Ode" and sending the book as if there had

been an error and an extra page put in.... The "ode" is not in

the edition that Knopf is publishing, all the others are. And I

suppose she will have to see that book. Do you think that

"Sweeney Erect" will shock her? (Letters 363)

In sum, rather than simply looking at the quatrains in relation to either Eliot's career as a whole or in terms of his marriage, it is far more productive to view the poems of 1917 to 1919 as a discrete body of work. Doing so helps elucidate not only Eliot's own writing, but also the period as a whole, for this work, both poetry and criticism, which culminated in 1920 with the publication of Poems and The Sacred Wood, was intended and planned as a significant intervention into the culture of the time. Their form and style, unlike those of the earlier poems and later The Waste Land, were chosen and worked on as a direct critical response to the contemporary artistic and cultural scene.(8) As Eliot remembered in 1959, the form came first: "[Pound and I] studied Gautier's poems and then we thought, |Have I anything to say in which this form will be useful?' and we experimented. The form gave impetus to the content" ("Art" 55). Pound's own earlier reminiscence in the July 1932 Criterion makes the political nature of the intervention much clearer:

[In 1917] two authors, neither engaged in picking the other's

pocket, decided that the dilution of vers libre, Amygism, Lee

Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some

counter-current must be set going. . . . Remedy prescribed:

"Emaux et Camees" (or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and

regular strophes.

Result: Poems in Mr. Eliot's second volume not contained in

his first ... also Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. (590) It is no coincidence that Eliot's first major piece of literary criticism in 1917, "Reflections on Vers Libre," was an attack on Amy Lowell and Imagism. And by June 1917 Pound had engineered it so that Eliot was Assistant Editor of The Egoist and able to review and comment on whatever he liked.

If we take 1921 to 1922 as the annus mirabilis of modernism, after which it was unignorable and rapidly institutionalized in the literary academy, then what is happening between 1917 and 1920 looks very different. It is a space of fluidity and flux, when earlier formations are breaking down and new ones are only just emerging. During these three years Eliot was formulating many of the theoretical ideas that came to underpin the New Criticism, which, paradoxically, ignored not only the creative work he was producing during this period but also much of the work of other writers whom he was influenced by and praised. In particular it ignores the crucial figure of Wyndham Lewis: Tarr was being serialized in The Egoist from 1916 to 1919 and, when it was released as a novel Eliot reviewed it there. Indeed, what Fredric Jameson says about Lewis in the "Prologue" to his Fables of Aggression is strikingly applicable to Eliot's poetry of this period as well. Jameson argues that Tarr can electrify new readers and that its style, its reinvention" of the sentence, demands "new reading habits for which we are less and less prepared" (2).(9) The reason for this, he says, is that "Anglo-American modernism has ... traditionally been dominated by an impressionistic aesthetic" and "the most influential formal impulses of canonical modernism have been strategies of inwardness, which set out to reappropriate an alienated universe by transforming it into personal styles and private languages" (2). As a consequence, "such wills to style have seemed in retrospect to reconfirm the very privatization and fragmentation of social life against which they meant to protest" (2). This is a useful summary of the type of readings the pre-conversion Eliot poems, in particular, have generally elicited. Jameson goes on to argue that, as a consequence of this retrospective, inward, alienated individualistic reading,