Inheriting Eliot

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2001 by Rector, Liam

Not many seemed to catch Eliot as a vaudevillian, Eliot as a sly dog, Eliot as what Ezra Pound called "the Possum," and I can see now how impossible it must have been for the children to see this. The sexual timidity and hysteria in the poetry was enough to scare me away as a young man, and I veered countervailently towards the Ginsberg of the time and that other great poem of apocalypse, "Howl."

Quite luckily I happened upon a teacher at the University of Maryland who was a classicist, a Buddhist who chanted The Diamond Sutra quietly to himself on long walks, and he gave me Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, and Pound-the entire core of the Modernist mottle-intravenously. Rudd Fleming (called Red Flaming in Charles Olson's Maximus poems) was a bemused, self-evaporative actor of a teacher who gave us literature by reading it to us, then sitting down, listening to us read what we'd written, and then getting back up and giving us the traditions from which our own writing, largely unbeknownst to us at the time, had come. Fleming had tea with Pound for ten years on Tuesdays at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital when Pound was incarcerated there for mental unfitness on a treason charge-and together Fleming and Pound translated works such as Elektra, which Princeton eventually published and which even saw production in New York recently under the direction of Carey Perloff, daughter of poetry critic Marjorie Perloff, who also taught at Maryland at the time.

Since Fleming was not a poet and had no need to be oppressed by the Eliot orthodoxy as a poet, he was wonderfully free to give us Eliot as a magician of what Rudd called "classical consummations" and "the great endgame of the European mind," and he gave us, the grandchildren, a glorious, even impish Eliot to inherit, an Eliot not at all counter-- vailent to Ginsberg or to the counterculture to which many of us swore allegiance at the time. Rudd gave us "The Waste Land" not as any orthodoxy but as a mode-a montage, a mobile, a collage, and a cubism of many nudes descending many staircases-and as an elliptical mode which had (and still has) horizon as a form for the poets of our time.

In fact, one of the most useful things to me as one of Eliot's grandchild-inheritors is the utter viability of montage form, captured recently and poignantly in books such as Donald Hall's The One Day and Anne Carson's Glass, Irony, & God. It's still coming on strong, in deft hands.

And, beyond that, I'm heartened and buoyed by the three great phases in Eliot's work, enacted and embodied by "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," and "Four Quartets." "Prufrock" seems the great poem of slaying, satirical Youth, as it vivisects and disembowels its aging parent in a portrait of sheer mockery. (I missed the tone of inverted, near-drag queen campiness in my first reading, and to miss this tone and subtext in the poem is nearly to miss all.) Auden said that in his ideal poetry academy one of the main exercises for young poets would be satire. What better way to inhabit a work, internalize it; chew it, and spit it out for your own purposes, clearing space, aesthetic space, for your own work as you go? Aesthetically, it's a little like making love to one parent and killing the other?