Making It New: 1900–1945 371epic: a language experiment more radical than anything Whitman ever dreamed of,
the Cantos set within their open-ended structure a poet who is at once a representative
person, a prince, and a pedagogue, a voyager and a visionary, who tells us about
good citizenship and offers us its appropriately heroic model. Whether the Cantos
are a great single poem or a series of magnificent fragments is open to debate. Pound
himself seems to have been undecided: “I am not a demigod / I cannot make it
cohere,” he admitted in Canto CXVI, but then added “it coheres all right / even if my
notes do not cohere.” How much the Cantos are damaged by Pound’s espousal of
Fascism, which led him to be arrested at the close of World War II (he was declared
unfit to stand trial on the grounds of insanity) – that, too, is a deeply serious question.
What is indisputable is that, if there is coherence, it is of a different kind than that to
be found in traditional epics, and that, even if there is not – and even if Pound held
some opinions that were obscene – there is still poetry here that is the fruit of a
lifetime’s experience, and lines that are among the finest in the language.
Pound was an expatriate. He left the United States in 1908 and, apart from the
thirteen years he was in confinement after being declared insane, he spent most of
his life in England, France, and Italy. Despite that, he remained a definitively
American poet. Responding to history in a self-evidently personal and eclectic way,
he insisted, like so many American writers, on inventing a tradition for himself – a
mythology that was his alone, a personal “Kulchur” – out of the wealth of historical
possibilities available to him. The case of T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) is more complex,
and raises the whole question of literary nationalism and nationality – what it means
to call a writer American or British or whatever, especially at times of increasing
internationalism. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot was descended on both sides of
his family from early English settlers in New England. Andrew Eliot emigrated from
the village of East Coker in 1667, and T. S. Eliot’s maternal ancestor Isaac Stevens was
one of the original settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. The memory of
that place from which the Eliot family had departed, over two hundred years before
the poet’s birth, was to inform “East Coker” (1940), the second of the Four Quartets
(1943), where Eliot, realizing that “In the beginning is my end,” returns in imagination
to the home of his ancestors. It was natural that a writer for whom the immanence
of the past in the present was an obsessive theme should register his English and
American Puritan origins in his lines and consciousness; and equally natural,
perhaps, that his Midwestern upbringing should appear so often, though through a
glass darkly, in his work. “A writer’s art must be racial,” Eliot wrote in 1917, “– which
means, in plain words, that it must be based on the accumulated sensations of the
first twenty-one years.” And what we know of his childhood shows that it became
the source of insistent images in his poetry. Close to the family house in St. Louis, for
instance, was a school founded by Eliot’s grandfather and attended by his sisters, and
he preserved a vivid memory of it throughout his life. It had “a high brick wall,” he
later recalled, and “concealed our back garden from the schoolyard”; from the garden
he could listen to the children playing in the yard, and after school hours he could
play in the empty schoolyard himself and even venture into the school. In this, we
have the source for the laughter of hidden children that recurs in Eliot’s poetry. InGGray_c04.indd 371ray_c 04 .indd 371 8 8/1/2011 7:53:51 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 51 AM