Hugh Kenner - The Invisible Poet: T.S. Eliot

Impenetrability! That's what I say!

--Humpty Dumpty.

We may assume that everyone by this time knows who T. S. Eliot is, that it is no longer necessary to testify to his lucidity, that there are as many handbooks as needed, that his religious affiliation is neither a cachet nor a curiosity, that his private life deserves to remain no less private than he has chosen to keep it, and that scholarship has barely omitted to scrutinize a line (unless perhaps "jug jug jug..."). Yet opinion concerning the most influential man of letters of the twentieth century has not freed itself from a cloud of unknowing. He is the Invisible Poet in an age of systematized literary scrutiny, much of it directed at him.

This is partly a deliberate achievement (he is the "impersonal" poet, and also Old Possum), partly the result of chance, but chiefly a consequence of the nature of his writing, which resists elucidation as stubbornly as Alice in Wonderland. Though he became, while still a "difficult" writer, very famous, he was for years the archetype of poetic impenetrability. It was a safe joke only a decade ago to suggest that the BBC maintain its standard of entertain

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ment by having T. S. Eliot cerebrate silently in front of a microphone for ninety minutes. Discussion of the poems, which total fewer than four thousand lines, still slips off into ideas, when it doesn't begin there.

Or it is mesmerized by personality. Here Eliot himself, "a master," Marianne Moore has noted, "of the anonymous," has added considerably to the fun. He can give, for readers and interviewers alike, consummate imitations of the Archdeacon, the Publisher, the Clubman, the Man of Letters in Europe, the Aged Eagle, the Wag, and the Public-Spirited Citizen. He has also written hundreds of publisher's blurbs, many of them, to the suspicious eye, small comic masterpieces. The only role he refuses to play is the Poet. He has been described vying at anagrams with John Maynard Keynes, quoted (aged 69) as intending to take up dancing lessons, discerned composing a letter to the London Times on the subject of Stilton cheese, and variously decried as a snob, a proto-fascist, the nucleus of an insidious authoritarian conspiracy, and "a sick, suffering and defeated personality." It has even been hinted--again by Miss Moore--that he may write detective stories under a pseudonym.

He commands vast influence, partly through moral consistency, partly through inscrutability, partly because, in an academic context, his prose is so quotable. The details of his poetic effects, furthermore, belong to an extremely conventional category: the tradition of the turned aphorism and the weighty line. That they also subvert this tradition is a consideration that has vaguely troubled many readers, who accordingly suppose that the poet and the traditionloving critic are two different men.

These difficulties can be evaded by the methods of the line-by-line commentary. Commentators, one of them has

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noted, tour the Eliot territory in chartered buses. He has innumerable "sources," some acknowledged, some covert. they can be listed. He has images that recur, and their recurrence can be noted. He has also operated, in his later work, so near the border-line of "ideas" that wherever technical commentary fails, paraphrase can readily be trundled in. And salient passages in certain of his essays have provided a generation of literary middlemen with first-rate critical gimmicks. To be sure, when a painstaking explication of one of his poems is laid before him, he is likely to reply that he was not aware of having been so clever, being mainly occupied at the time of writing with matters of assonance, cadence, and congruity; but the hint is not taken.