'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

The initial, passionately subversive force of the modernist

symbolic act is ever fainter and more distant for the contemporary

reader ... and this not least because the modernist canon

has itself become classical, institutionalized within the university.

. .If it is ideal to deplore . . . the loss or repression of that

original antisocial resonance of the great modernisms, it is on the

other hand a matter of some historical gratification to come upon

a modernism which is still extant and breathing. The neglect of

Lewis is thus a happy accident for us, who can then, as from out

of a time capsule, once more sense that freshness and virulence

of modernizing stylization less and less accessible in the faded

text of his contemporaries. (3) Except for his 1917 to 1919 poetry written under the pressure of Lewis's presence. Eliot's work became an integral part of that canonical modernism from which Lewis was excluded. However, the quatrains exist in a similar "time capsule" as Lewis's work and have the same "freshness" and "virulence." Furthermore, Jameson's sense of Lewis's mechanized language, of its metonymic impulse that Lewis acknowledges yet seeks to contain within larger formal structures, is strikingly apt for the quatrain poems, where the allusive content fissures uncontrollably within a strict rhyme and strophe scheme.

Eliot's criticism of this period repeatedly emphasizes the mechanical technical, professional aspect of writing "good" poetry. The articles he wrote for The Egoist consistently attack the notion of inspiration," which he perceives as a particularly English disease. In "Professionalism or . . .," for example, he takes to task the Times Literary Supplement's criticism of professionalism in the arts, arguing that the "British worship of inspiration . . . in literature is merely an avoidance of comparison with foreign literatures, a dodging of standards" (61). Instead of considering the professional the enemy, Eliot identifies him as the "man of mixed motives" exemplified by the figures of the "Victorian epoch." Contra the TLS, what causes degeneration, decline, decadence, in the arts is "mixed motives": the writing such motives produce is not, cannot be, coherent or ordered since it seeks to be something other than a work of art. He ends the article with an assertion that poetry is hard work, a craft that must be learned in a professional manner: "Technique is more volatile; it can only be learned, the more difficult part of it by absorption. Try to put into a sequence of simple quatrains the continuous syntactic variety of Gautier or Blake, or compare these two with A. E. Housman. Surely professionalism in art is hard work on style with singleness of purpose."

Eliot's attempt to create the "continuous syntactic variety" in the quatrains took time. In the first, "The Hippopotamus" (1917), there is no syntactical run-on between stanzas and, with the exception of the seventh and eighth, they divide up equally: the first two lines of the stanza describe "the hippopotamus" and the last two the "True Church." By the time he wrote "Sweeney Erect" in 1919, however, his technical control was secure. The first stanza divides at the end of the second line, but the repetition of "Paint me" means that it is not an oppositional divide. The second strophe has no division, the third divides after the second line with a full stop, and all three stanzas are end-stopped. The fourth stanza divides at the third line, which ends with a colon, followed by a sentence that runs on into the next stanza, one without any division. The sixth stanza returns to being end-stopped with no oppositional division. The next varies again, since, to be understood, the first line has to be run into the next ("The lengthened shadow of a man / Is history")--until here all the lines are complete clauses in themselves: they could be separated from those preceding or succeeding and still make sense. The eighth stanza then becomes, strikingly, the first to preserve the Gautier "norm," a division into two oppositional halves. With the next two strophes the syntactical running on between them recurs but is made more complex (than that of stanzas four and five, for example) because of our uncertainty as to whether it is the "ladies" who are "observing" or "Mrs. Turner." The final stanza begins with a line containing the heaviest caesura in the poem, and again has no division.(10)