Inheriting Eliot

And "The Waste Land," though I consider it far the lesser of the three poems, is still to me the great poem of Middle-Aged fatality, complicity, breakdown, and finally even responsibility in its ending of Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata; its Give, Sympathize, Control; and in its Shantih shantih shantih, that peace which passeth all understanding. In a world of fragments shored against ruins, and mortality itself is such a beast, "The Waste Land" is even strangely a poem of governance, at the end of the world that is also that lurid reversal into a parenting submission.

And finally "Four Quartets" is, to me, the meditative monument of Old Age, the crown set upon a lifetime's effort, and the great poem of reconciliation, mortality, and a maturity one can not only hope for, but build. It's scorched earth, but it's made the journey and come through.

I once studied briefly with Amiri Baraka and he, surprisingly to me, said that he admired Eliot's poems because "Eliot was never mashed by experience." "Four Quartets" is that poem most unmashed by experience, and most made to last. Its many polymorphous delights include its being a casebook of prosody, but its real achievement is its musically endgame equipoise and its intelligent, credible wisdom.

I don't feel I am working with nor for "the mind" of Europe or even "The West" in my work, even though that too is an inheritance I treasure. "The mind of America" is the mind in which I know I write, and I hear in that mind Dr. Williams also, the Williams of "the pure products of America go crazy." The New Criticism of Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren, the main purveyors of the Eliot orthodoxy among Eliot's sons and daughters, still gives me the creeps, though I do thank them for their worship of the poem on the page, and the dream of a work of art outside the world of history. But nothing is finally outside of history and its gossip, and poetry is our deepest gossip.

Eliot has been for me my most abiding poet, largely because he has been my most countervailent poet. Even as he was high church, a Royalist, and a classicist, I have been the opposite. The opposite of love is not hate; the opposite of love is indifference, and even a countervailent rapport can be finally an utter rapport.

One of the great imperfections of Eliot's life and work, of course, was his anti-Semitism, and perhaps it's this that has put so many off his work. The anti-Semitism is there in the lecture he gave at the University of Virginia, where he said that his ideal society would not be inhabited by too many "free-thinking Jews," and it's there in a few decidedly minor and otherwise flawed poems in his oeuvre. To me there's no excusing that dumb prejudice, and to those who expect perfection in their artists I can only say I hope the judgment of history be not too heavy even upon us. In "Four Quartets" Eliot wrote, "the shame/ Of motives late revealed, and the awareness/ Of things ill done and done to others' harm/ Which once you took for exercise of virtue," which is a humanity which might chasten us all, even the Eliot who finally knew that "humility is endless."