were to be imitated, but the new poetry was pushed aside by the war, as can be felt
in the background of ‘Exile’s Letter’ in Cathay and the defence of love in Propertius.
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley traces the stultifying treatment of art and poetry in late
Victorian England, marginalizing Pound’s imaginary poet Mauberley. English
advice to Pound appears inMauberley as ‘Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your
game / And died.’ Pound took his epic Cantos elsewhere. He described them as a
mystery story trying to solve the historical crime of the First World War.The Cantos
offered a model for The Waste Land, but the splendours and delusions of Pound’s
later work lie outside literature of England.T. S. Eliot
T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot(1887–1965) was born in St Louis, Missouri, where his
grandfather had founded a university. The family came from New England, to
which an English ancestor had emigrated in the 17th century. After school in
Boston, and Harvard University, he studied philosophy in Paris, Marburg and
Oxford. In London when war began, he married an Englishwoman and stayed on.
After the success ofThe Waste Land,he edited The Criterion, a review, and joined
the publisher Faber. In 1927 the supposed iconoclast became a British subject, and
proclaimed himself ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic
in religion’. Committing himself to Christianity, he broke with his Unitarian
upbringing.
Eliot’s pre-eminence was first poetic, then critical. In the discipline of English,
established at Oxford in the 1890s but new at Cambridge in the 1920s, there was no
god but Eliot, and the critics I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis were his prophets.
Disciples passed the wor d to the English-studying world. In 1948 Eliot was awarded
the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit.The Waste Land was ‘modern poetry’; his
wartime Four Quartets were revered; his plays ran in the West End.Cats (1981), a
musical based on Old Possum’s Boo k ofPractical Cats (1939), has earned millions,
with lyrics rewritten to turn Eliot’s nonsense for intelligent children into singable
whimsy for tired parents.350 13 · FROM POST-WAR TO POST-WAR: 1920–55
From the left: Ford Madox
Ford, James Joyce, Ezra
Pound and John Quinn
(1923). Quinn, a New York
lawyer, bought the manuscript
of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land. Time & Life
Pictures/Getty images.