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Inheriting Eliot
American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 2001 by Rector, Liam
Where is the work of T. S. Eliot these days? Is his work being taken up by the generations of poets coming up? And, moreover, what's the situation for inheriting Eliot among his grandchildren and his latter-day great-grandchildren?
Once upon a time there no doubt was what Delmore Schwartz called the literary dictatorship of T. S. Eliot, a dictatorship whose orthodoxies entranced, captivated, defined, refined, and terrified his children. My sense now is that the Eliot juggernaut in America has been overtaken, in the land of the living, by the influence of Wallace Stevens, a line Harold Bloom has traced well behind Stevens and on forward into the land of Ashbery. It's a powerful, imaginative, linguistically talented, and romantic lineage. Eliot's orthodoxies overturned and by now in many quarters almost ignored, it's a perfect time to be reading and inheriting Eliot without the terror.
Not many poets have the trust funds they so richly deserve, and the main vein of inheritance for poets is the poetry of the past, the poetry of those who came before, the poetry poets now read, internalize (even memorize), and move on with. "The words of a dead man/ Are modified in the guts of the living," wrote Auden in his elegy to Yeats, and in this reading, eating, remembering, and stomaching we imagine and so go on to enact what our futures might be as poets, what our future poetry might become. Something moved us to animacy and emulation in the first place, in some Scene of Instruction, some Falling in Love and Going Down within the vast conformity and insane tribal democracy of language, in First World. We're born, come to fruition, and wither: that's the story. And within those three vast (and short, and swinish, and basically unknowing) movements, we inherit. We also pass on.
Critics do not determine the canon; writers do. Critics may judge the contest, explain, interpret, historicize, and other things (such as writing their spiritual autobiographies in an orgy of belletrist aesthetics), but it is the poets who marry each other's work forth, who carry each other's work into renewed greatness, and this happens through the kabuki dance of influence and through the love, bickering, devotion, and battle with the work that we have chosen (and been chosen by) in First World.
The opposite of love is not hate, as Rollo May noted; the opposite of love is indifference. Now that the need to directly hate the dictator has subsided for a moment, who is paying attention to, who is inheriting Eliot's work, and towards what through-line?
I don't think there's any centrality or consensus in American poetry at the moment, and to say things are balkanized is a truism all of us have lived with for a long time, perhaps since the day of Robert Lowell, our last poet of national consensus-in perhaps our last post-Vietnam sense of nation.
In 1973 Harold Bloom gave us The Anxiety of Influence, for which I, for one, am eternally grateful. As Donald Hall has said about the work of Freud, it's as nasty as life itself is, and so is Bloom's notion of influence. A sickness unto death, an influenza, a situation that persists until, as Edgar Allan Poe had it, "the fever called 'Living'/ Is conquered at last." Whether you believe what's written in The Anxiety of Influence or not, whether you see writing as a battlefield or a playground-as a vast, titanic, Oedipal and Electra struggle within the family romance or as a fount gleaned in utter originality from an individual's teeming brain-- Bloom's theory is a force to be reckoned with.
My two heroes in literary criticism, which is something I do to myself when I am lonely for good conversation, have been Harold Bloom and Hugh Kenner. Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era so moved me to tears with the sheer electricity of its intelligence that I moved to study briefly with Kenner while a graduate student in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins in the late 1970s. While I was there Bloom stopped by, and Bloom did blow me away. I hated what he had to say about influence, just as I had first hated what I took to be the orthodoxy of T. S. Eliot. The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference. I -soon recognized in my opposition to Bloom the gale force of rapport, and I took the influence of influence in.
Harold Bloom and Kenner could not be more different, and their work has been a useful and fecund contrary for me ever since. Bloom's scene of instruction is Freudian, while Kenner's world, in keeping with the Pound and Eliot of The Pound Era, is vortextual. To me Bloom's dark world has been an unflinching cauldron of realism itself, while Kenner's sense of vortex has been both enclosure and horizon.
It's always astonished me a bit that Bloom has managed to steer so dear, comparatively, of Eliot and Pound, but the terrain of Bloom's taste has generally been the romantic sublime, and for important reasons in Eliot, including Eliot's sense of impersonality and his penchant for austerely undeluded realism, Eliot's work veers significantly away from romance, as I understand the term. Bloom appears to love personality in literature, as did, say, Walt Whitman-and personality, as we know, is anathema to Eliot.
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