Modern American Poetry

Introduction 25

heart” in the labor of rejoicing, having indeed constructed something upon
which to rejoice.
That Eliot, in retrospect, will seem the Matthew Arnold rather than the
Abraham Cowley of his age, is the sympathetic judgment of A. Walton Litz.
For motives admitted already, one might prefer to see Eliot as the Cowley,
and some celebrated passages in Four Quartetsare worthy of comparison with
long-ago-admired Pindarics of that forgotten wit, but Arnold’s burden as
involuntary belated Romantic is indeed close to Eliot’s. A direct comparison
of Eliot’s elegiac achievement to Whitman’s or Tennyson’s seems to me both
more problematical and more inevitable. “Gerontion” contrasts unfavorably
to “Tithonus” or “Ulysses,” while The Waste Land, despite its critical high
priests, lacks the coherence, maturity, and experiential authenticity of “When
Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” And yet it must be admitted that Eliot
is what the closing lines of The Waste Landassert him to be: a shorer of
fragments against his (and our) ruins. The phantasmagoric intensity of his
best poems and passages can be matched only in the greatest visionaries and
poets of Western literature. It is another paradox that the Anglo-Catholic,
Royalist, Classical spokesperson should excel in the mode of fictive
hallucination and lyric derangement, in the fashioning of nightmare images
perfectly expressive of his age.
Eliot’s influence as a poet is by no means spent, yet it seems likely that
Robert Penn Warren’s later poetry, the most distinguished now being
written among us, will be the final stand of Eliot’s extraordinary effort to
establish an anti-Romantic counter-Sublime sense of thetradition to replace
the continuity of Romantic tradition. That the continuity now has absorbed
him is hardly a defeat; absorption is not rejection, and Eliot’s poetry is
securely in the canon. Eliot’s strength, manifested in the many poets
indebted to him, is probably most authentically commemorated by the
poetry of Hart Crane, which engages Eliot’s poetry in an agon without which
Crane could not have achieved his difficult greatness. One can prefer Crane
to Eliot, as I do, and yet be forced to concede that Eliot, more than
Whitman, made Crane possible.

HART CRANE

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.