Modern American Poetry

(^344) David Bromwich
inspired accidents that history casts up from time to time to challenge our
determinisms. Of course, this was the outcome Eliot desired all along. But
the readers who first cared for his poetry must have seen the possibility of a
different development.
Suppose that his poetry had been spurned in every quarter of the
literary establishment for a decade or two after The Waste Land.What then?
Eventually he might have found a place among the unassimilables, the
recessive geniuses of English poetry—the company of Collins and Beddoes
rather than Donne and Dryden. There would have been much justice in this.
The author of Prufrock and Other Observationswas felt by his contemporaries
to be an elusive and not an imposing presence. His charm lay most of all in
the relief he offered from importance. Nor did The Waste Landseem at first
a drastic departure from the earlier sources of his appeal. It commanded
respect as an experiment with voices, like “Prufrock” and the Sweeney
poems. To think of it in that light may still be more pertinent than to honor
it teleologically for the qualities it shares with Ash Wednesday and Four
Quartets.The passing characters of the poem—Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides,
the Young Man Carbuncular—these figures were hardly notable for their
continuous gravity. They were phantoms of a mind delicately questing after
sensations, and their aim was “a new art emotion,” to adapt a phrase from
Eliot’s criticism. Their creator appeared to be a poet averse to no stimulus,
however morbid—a cautious welcomer of any experience, however drab—
whose peculiarities of temperament had much to do with the dignity of his
art.
Some of Eliot’s essays of the period lend themselves to a similar
description. “Hamlet and His Problems,” now commonly read as a manifesto
for dramatic objectivity, was a paradox in the vein of The Authoress of the
Odyssey,a fit of character criticism against the character critics. Eliot’s bogus
primerlike title (which could be added to the books on the shelf in
Beerbohm’s caricature of Yeats: Short Cuts to Mysticism, Half Hours with the
Symbols, Reality: Its Cause and Cure, Hamlet and His Problems) mocked the
orderliness of his clinical tone. Even “Tradition and the Individual Talent,”
to a reader who weighed the chemical analogy in the second part as carefully
as the axioms of culture in the first, could seem a late flower of the dandyism
of Poe. These essays were, among other things, deliberate curiosities, out-of-
the-way solutions to problems the reader was meant to see as in no way
impersonal. The solemn reception of Eliot’s criticism in the next generation,
as if it had been written by a more judicious Matthew Arnold, enhanced his
stature in the short run only, and on dubious terms.
I have been trying to convey the susceptible mood in which the young