Inheriting Eliot

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

I've come to think Eliot's notion of pure impersonality was something of a ruse, but a very useful ruse, nonetheless. Art no doubt comes from personal origins, but any work that does not obtain for itself the dimension of the impersonal, the transcendence of the personal, if you will, really does not attain the greatness of a work of art from which and in which readers will find their necessary communion.

In her third book on Eliot, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, Lyndall Gordon extensively rewrote her first two biographies, Eliot's Early Years and Eliot's New Life. In her foreword Gordon writes,

I was driven to this, in part, because I believe that we are now ready to view Eliot from the vantage point of the next century, more detached from the spiritless disillusion of his own time and less beguiled than his contemporaries by his normative masks, with a keener sense of his strangeness, his prejudice, and extremism. The aim, though, is not to reduce Eliot to the level of others in an extremist century, but to follow the trials of a searcher whose flaws and doubts speak to all of us whose lives are imperfect.

Gordon's defining and splendid biography of Eliot is a good place to start on Eliot after taking in the poems. Perhaps because we are now so balkanized and comparatively free of reigning orthodoxies, it is a good, even an innocent time to take up Eliot again. A culture is in reality an aggregate of individuals, not an abstract whole to be subdivided into groups, and Eliot was one hell of an individual. He and his poems were and are in it for The Long Haul, for grandchildren beyond the children, and that calling constitutes, as Eliot wrote, "A condition of complete simplicity/ (Costing not less than everything.)"

LIAM RECTOR'S books of poems are American Prodigal and The Sorrow of Architecture. He directs the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College and lives in the Boston area.

photograph by Tree Swenson