The Silence of the Last Poet

The Silence of the Last Poet:

Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot,

and the Value of the Classic

Marius Hentea

At a banquet to commemorate the Oxford Union Society’s fiftieth anniver-sary, held in the Corn Exchange, Oxford, on the evening of October 22, 1873, Arnold, a former president of the society, responded to the toast to “Literature, Science, and Art.” Since the hour was past midnight, he said only a few words which the newspapers did not report. — “Three Public Speeches of Arnold’s, 1873 – 1877”

This is the hour for which we waited —

This is the ultimate hourWhen life is justified.The seas of experienceThat were so broad and deep,So immediate and steep,Are suddenly still.You may say what you will,At such peace I am terrified.There is nothing else beside. — T. S. Eliot, “Silence”

Your path is poetry, your goal is beyond that of poetry. — Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil

Modern Language Quarterly 71:3 (September 2010)

doi 10.1215/00267929-2010-013 © 2010 by University of Washington

I wish to thank Homi K. Bhabha for comments on an earlier draft of this essay and Brian Reed for his helpful reviewer’s comments. I am grateful to the Virgil Society’s assistance in providing information about its history. Marshall Brown has been an exemplary editor throughout, and I give him my deep thanks. All translations are mine unless noted.

298 MLQ September 2010

Londoners on Monday, October 16, 1944, had several ways to greet the tide of welcome weekend news, which included the Allied advance

into Aachen, the liberation of Athens, Rommel dying in a “motor- car accident,” and the Home International at the Empire Stadium, Wemb-ley, where ninety thousand cheered England’s 6 – 2 trouncing of Scot-land. Even if V- 1 and V- 2 bombs were flying faster than sound, one was almost thoroughly divorced from Henry Green’s insistence, in his remarkable memoir, Pack My Bag (1940), on “we who must die soon.”1 The “five years of boredom and destruction” was winding up, for D- Day had been a success, with Calais conquered and Paris free again.2 If not lured away to Blackpool, where the Seventy- sixth Annual Trade Unions Congress was opening, or to Torquay, in Indian summer dreams at the self- proclaimed “Riviera of Devon,” London had plenty on offer. At the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, W. J. Rose gave a “sur-vey of Polish literature, sixteenth to nineteenth century” — at the time, no one could foresee Mickiewicz’s valiant sons and daughters being bartered away by Churchill’s napkin disproportions. University Exten-sion lecturer Charles Johnson was at the National Gallery for “English landscape painting in the eighteenth century,” whisking Londoners to a world where homes were eyesores. At the British Museum, John Rams-bottom would enlighten folk on “edible fungi” (so popular that the lecture was repeated on Wednesday and Friday); given rationing, why not search for roots? Margot Fonteyn was dancing again now that the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company had returned to London, and, with pro-ceeds to benefit the Hospital of Women, Soho Square, the Haymarket Theatre put on Hamlet with John Gielgud in the title role: although one critic was unmoved by the “dead and chilling perfection” of his techni-cal mastery, Gielgud’s Hamlet was widely applauded.3 For those staying in, the 10:45 Home Service radio play was Married to a Genius: Vivienne Eliot, in Northumberland House, the private asylum holding her, may have wanted to avoid that, having lived through it already, and it is likely

1 Henry Green, Pack My Bag: A Self- Portrait (London: Hogarth, 1979), 143.2 Cyril Connolly, “Comment,” Horizon, December 1944, 367.3 James Redfern, “The Theatre,” Spectator, October 27, 1944, 383. On Gielgud’s

memories of performing Hamlet during the war, playing “dead” on stage while bombs were going off, see Gielgud: An Actor and His Time, with John Miller and John Powell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 121.

Hentea Arnold, Eliot, and the Value of the Classic 299

that Thomas Stearns did. For that Monday night (and not the prior Sat-urday afternoon, as the Times mistakenly announced, no doubt leading some to wander aimlessly in an alley off Drury Lane, “hardly a place to be associated with the Muses,” with such signs as “To the Mortuary” and “To the Cleansing Station”), Eliot was giving a lecture.4 The week-end news was propitious for his presidential address before the Virgil Society: Aachen, the seat of Charlemagne, restorer of the holy Roman order, had been retaken. This day had been chosen because of Virgil’s birthday, “on, or near the Fifteenth of October,” a day Charles- Augustin Sainte- Beuve says has long been “religiously celebrated.”5

A month earlier Eliot had delivered to the Association of Book-men of Swansea and West Wales a talk titled “What Is Minor Poetry?” While Welsh bookmen could mull over remainders, the Virgil Society called for something grander: “What Is a Classic?” The society existed “to unite all those who cherish the poetry of Virgil as the symbol of the cultural tradition of Western Europe.”6 It would do this by creating “a centre of Virgilian studies, a Virgil library, a Virgilian Press, a fine edition of Virgil . . . a Virgilian play, and so on,” recites the society’s historian.7 Eliot had accepted the position of inaugural president of the society because Bruno Scott James, its founder, was then in poor health. Despite his ill health, Father Bruno had diagnosed an even greater “terrible interior evil” in the modern world (which he avoided: he had “never been to a cinema . . . never owned a wireless . . . and never read a newspaper”).8 He, like Aeneas a founder (Saint Anne’s House in London and Newman College in Naples), describes the Virgil Society’s founding:

4 Times, October 14, 1944; T. G. Williams, The City Literary Institute: A Memoir (London: Saint Catherine, 1960), 23.

5 Knightly Chetwood, “The Life of Pub. Virgilius Maro,” in The Works of John Dryden, ed. William Frost, vol. 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 9; Charles- Augustin Sainte- Beuve, “Etude sur Virgile,” in Oeuvres de Virgile, new ed. (Paris: Garnier, 1859), 1.

6 Virgil Society Constitution, 1952, in British Library, collection Br Library 1879 c2, no. 120.

7 D. W. Blandford, Pentekontaetia: The Virgil Society, 1943 – 1993 (London: Virgil Society, 1993), 19. See as well John Murray, “Roman Virgil,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 34 (1945): 65.

8 Bruno Scott James, The One Thing Necessary (London: Burns Oates, 1943), 3; James, letter of August 22, 1943, quoted in Blandford, 15 – 16.


The first meeting was at Brown’s Hotel, where I hired a private room and invited twelve men to discuss at dinner the plan of the Society. The conversation was urbane and hardly interrupted by the bombs that soon began to fall. Although one of the guests might hesitate a moment when a bomb landed near enough to shake the whole hotel, so that the glasses on the table rattled and the knives and forks jumped, as if the destruction that was showering down had endowed them with a moment’s life.9

Although Eliot was not at that dinner in January 1943, he helped draft the society’s manifesto, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement later that year.10 Eliot provided cachet and visibility: when Italy was liberated in the summer of 1944, he was identified in the Manchester Guardian as “President of the Virgil Society.”11 Like most of its early members, Eliot was very religious and an elitist, which suited Father Bruno, who wished to avoid lowering standards “to the level of the crowd” and envisioned “literary tests” for membership (though he was eccentric enough to hold a joint meeting with the British Beekeepers Association [Blandford, 22]).12

9 Bruno Scott James, Asking for Trouble (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1962), 142. See as well G. Wilson Knight, “T. S. Eliot: Some Literary Impressions,” in T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. Allen Tate (New York: Delacorte, 1966), 252.

10 See Eliot’s obituary by Robert Speaight in Proceedings of the Virgil Soci-ety, 1964 – 65, 76. Blandford provides the invitation list for that dinner at Brown’s Hotel — which included Vita Sackville- West — and also usefully charts out who was there from that list as well as other individuals who may have attended, among them the Welsh poet David Jones (8 – 17). The society’s December 1943 manifesto had seven signatories and was prepared by Eliot and Douglas Woodruff. It was preceded by a Times Literary Supplement editorial, “Homage to Virgil,” which supported the society’s aims. See “The Virgil Society” (letters to the editor) and “Homage to Virgil” (edito-rial), Times Literary Supplement, December 18, 1943, 607. The manifesto notes: “The purpose of the Virgil Society is to bring together those men and women everywhere who are united in cherishing the central educational tradition of Western Europe. Among such persons the love of the poetry of Virgil is most likely to be found; and for such persons he is the fitting symbol of that tradition. Virgil is the poet who has been most studied and loved, uninterruptedly through the centuries. . . . he is the witness to the continuity of our civilization; among the Roman poets he is the one whose work has always been the most appropriate within the Christian educational frame.”

11 “Freeing of Rome,” Manchester Guardian, June 6, 1944, 6. Eliot is paraphrased as saying that “all Europe was indebted to Roman culture. We must not only acknowl-edge our debt to Rome in the past but maintain and multiply it in the future.”

12 Father Bruno admitted that his name on the Virgil Society’s letterhead might give the impression of a “Popeish [sic] Plot”; other members were adamant that there


In wartime, no peace is as fantastic as the imperium romanum, hence Virgil, and even one’s future saints are martial: Father Bruno later became an expert on Bernard of Clairvaux, who had recruited sol-diers for the Second Crusade and whose rival had been Peter Abelard of romantic love fame — the society’s historian speaks of the founding of the society as occurring “in the spirit of a crusade” (Blandford, 16). Refusing to answer to the title of magister (master), Bernard insisted on mater: as a mother never fails to love her children, so too a prelate “nurtures” and “suckles” his charges.13 Eliot’s talk, though, was on the magister, the clear value of the classic. Just as Sainte- Beuve had turned to the classic amid the ashes of 1848, Eliot felt the call as war raged. If poetry survives because of “the instinct of self- preservation in human-ity,” as Matthew Arnold claimed, war questions the worth of the writer’s wares: how grating is the pen scraping against paper or the racket of the typewriter at dawn when military matters define the day.14 Cyril Connolly, writing under a Virgilian pseudonym in 1944, noted that writers “might as well be peeling potatoes.”15 But in the horror of a civi-lization dying night after night, only to be built anew, Eliot found his master in Virgil, “father of the West” and “prophet of Christ.”

While these phrases came from Theodor Haecker and W. F. Jackson Knight, Eliot’s talk can be read as a disguised commentary on Arnold.16

must be “NO suspicion of religion” in the society’s proceedings (23). Father Bruno in late October 1944 even considered resigning from the society, because “a great idea is always dragged into the mud so soon as it falls into the hands of the crowd” (26).

13 Caroline Walker Bynum, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth- Century Cistercian Writing,” Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977): 257 – 84.

14 Matthew Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960 – 77), 9:188. Hereafter cited as CPW.

15 Palinurus [Cyril Connolly], The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle, rev. ed. (London: Hamilton, 1945), 1.

16 See Theodor Haecker, Virgil, Father of the West, trans. A. W. Wheen (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1934); and W. F. Jackson Knight, Roman Vergil (London: Faber and Faber, 1944), 4. Eliot guided Jackson Knight’s book to publication (incidentally, it applauded Eliot’s “technically very Vergilian poetry” [246]). Jackson Knight was the secretary of the Virgil Society and, with his mother’s help, organized the Exmouth Branch. On the indebtedness of Eliot’s address to Haecker and Jackson Knight see Gareth Reeves, T. S. Eliot: A Virgilian Poet (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), chap. 4. Reeves also usefully notes that Eliot’s Latin teacher at Harvard University, E. K. Rand (whose book on Virgil Eliot reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement in 1929), held


There is an unnerving similarity, so far unappreciated, between “The Study of Poetry” (1880) and Eliot’s address, whose title cuts through to Arnold’s literary master, Sainte- Beuve.17 (“Qu’est- ce qu’un classique?” appeared almost one century before Eliot’s talk on, famously, a Mon-day in October.18 Mondays: the weekend dissipated, one questions what everything is for; one searches for sure bearings. Or perhaps the ori-gin is religious? On Sunday God rests, his masterpiece complete, while Sundays for us are empty time, endless afternoons. Then there is the melancholy of October, time waning and all excellence past.)

Arnold is often a subject of abuse for Eliot:

Upon the glazen shelves kept watchMatthew and Waldo, guardians of faithThe army of unalterable law.19

Yet as Paul de Man notes, “The more radical the rejection of anything that came before, the greater the dependence on the past,” a view Eliot had formulated in 1919 when stating that “awareness of our debt natu-rally leads us to hatred of the object imitated.”20 Naturally, one might

similar views of Virgil as a “prophet of Christ.” Before Eliot’s talk, E. H. Warming-ton had addressed the Virgil Society on March 18, 1944, on a related subject (see “Virgil — Poet and Prophet,” Times, March 18, 1944).

17 Richard Badenhausen sees “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” as the Arnoldian source of Eliot’s talk (T. S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration [Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 220). For a general history of “The Study of Poetry” see Darrel Mansell, “Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Study of Poetry’ in Its Origi-nal Context,” Modern Philology 83 (1986): 279 – 85. For a 1940s view see Harlan W. Hamilton, “Matthew Arnold’s ‘Study of Poetry’ Sixty Years After,” College English 2 (1941): 521 – 30.

18 Charles- Augustin Sainte- Beuve, “Qu’est- ce qu’un classique?” October 21, 1850, in Causeries du lundi, 3rd ed., 15 vols. (Paris: Garnier, 1857 – 72), 3:38 – 55. For an excellent political and literary contextualization see Christopher Prendergast, The Classic: Sainte- Beuve and the Nineteenth- Century Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2007). Prendergast rightly shows the importance of the 1848 revolution to Sainte- Beuve’s view of tradition and the classic. Other useful works include Emerson R. Marks, “Sainte- Beuve’s Classicism,” French Review 37 (1964): 411 – 18; and Antoine Compagnon, “Sainte- Beuve and the Canon,” MLN 110 (1995): 1188 – 99.

19 T. S. Eliot, “Cousin Nancy,” in Prufrock and Other Observations (London: Egoist, 1917), 25.

20 Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criti-cism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 161; T. S. Eliot, “Reflections on Con-temporary Poetry,” Egoist 6 (1919): 39.


21 See C. K. Stead, “Eliot, Arnold, and the English Poetic Tradition,” in The Lit-erary Criticism of T. S. Eliot, ed. David Newton – De Molina (London: Athlone, 1977), 203.

22 Laurence W. Mazzeno, Matthew Arnold: The Critical Legacy (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 1999), 23; see as well Adam Kirsch, “Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot,” American Scholar 67, no. 3 (1998): 65 – 73. Kirsch’s article is the most recent work explicitly comparing Arnold and Eliot; prior to it see Donald J. Childs, “Mrs. Dalloway’s Unexpected Guests: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Matthew Arnold,” MLQ 58 (1997): 63 – 82, which concerns Arnold’s place in the 1920s, as well as Vin-cent Anderson, “Preserving the Faith: An Argument between Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot,” Arnoldian 11, no. 2 (1985): 5 – 15; and Sudhaker Marathe, “Eliot on Arnold: A Reaction,” Arnoldian 11, no. 2 (1985): 16 – 35. Stanley Edgar Hyman’s influential essay on Eliot in The Armed Vision (New York: Vintage, 1955) makes no mention of Arnold, and Lars Ole Sauerberg’s book on the canon also has no mention of Arnold’s influence on Eliot’s ideas of tradition and the classic (Versions of the Past — Visions of the Future: The Canonical in the Criticism of T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom [London: Macmillan, 1997], chap. 3).

23 See Frank Kermode, The Classic: Literary Images of Permanence and Change (New York: Viking, 1975), chap. 1.

note, artists are never grateful, but Eliot made the combat mortal by titling his first book of criticism The Sacred Wood. This ritual, described in The Golden Bough, involves a supreme priest killing off all contend-ers.21 Behind the barbed judgments and vicious attacks — “Perhaps no one has done more to damage Arnold’s reputation than T. S. Eliot,” one can drily state, for no one will disagree — Arnold’s and Eliot’s criti-cal method is similar and their anxiety about democracy and culture is shared.22 Nowhere is this more evident than in their thinking about the classic. Frank Kermode took up this subject but never tied Eliot’s talk with its Arnoldian source, and there is much more to say than what he provisionally suggests.23 For both poet- critics grappled with this fraught term; both chose opposing models (Homer for Arnold, Vir-gil for Eliot) for complex historical and personal reasons; and, most important, both saw the classic threatened by mass culture yet also as a threat itself, because it implied — and here they only hint — a kind of universal silence. The religious dimension of the classic, and its con-nection to duty, is the hidden story in these texts. Far from providing a solid defense of the classic, Eliot undermines its existence by pointing to the duties it imposes on readers and the silence it brings about. The impossibility of any modern work meeting these conditions means that the classic is not so much a hallowed text as a hollow one. The term is so


loaded that it is doubtful that any good can be made of it, which invites us to reject the classic in favor of a greater openness and freedom.

Arnold and Eliot were the defining critics of their times. Both were compelled to poetry, and both effectively abandoned it for criticism. Arnold sees a gift dissipated by years spent traveling third- class to inspect schools, writing pamphlets, and sending letters to the editor. It is “absurd,” he writes his mother, “that all the best of my days should be taken up with matters which thousands of other people could do just as well as I, and that what I have a special turn for doing I should have no time for.”24 This is how M. A., as he signed his letters, described his mission: “I have a conviction that there is a real, an almost imminent danger of England losing immeasurably in all ways. . . . This convic-tion haunts me, and at times even overwhelms me with depression; I would rather not live to see the change come to pass, for we shall all deteriorate under it. While there is time I will do all I can, and in every way, to prevent its coming to pass.”25 How to do this? “Read Franklin once a week,” he jots without irony; “read for self 2 hours daily”; and then the ever- popular “out of bed before 8.”26 Yet from the start he was wracked by a fear of failure, writing in September 1849 that “everything is against one.”27 This everything could well have been within, as a year earlier a doctor had determined that Arnold had inherited his father’s heart defect.28 The sense of time running out and being doomed never left him. In 1858 he announces, “I have no intention to keep preaching in the wilderness.”29 Being a poet is worthless “unless one can devote one’s whole life” to it, yet in unpoetic epochs this is “an actual tearing of oneself to pieces.”30

24 Matthew Arnold to his mother, November 9, 1870, in Letters of Matthew Arnold, 1848 – 1888, ed. George W. E. Russell, 3 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1904), 2:240. Hereafter cited as MA Letters.

25 Matthew Arnold to Miss Arnold, November 1865, in MA Letters, 2:65.26 The Note- Books of Matthew Arnold, ed. Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young, and

Waldo Hilary Dunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), 47, 6. Hereafter cited as Note- Books.

27 The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), 111.

28 Park Honan, Matthew Arnold: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 122.

29 Matthew Arnold to Miss Arnold, February 3, 1858, in MA Letters, 1:79.30 Matthew Arnold to Mrs. Forster, September 6, 1858, in MA Letters, 1:95 – 97.


While the Note- Books repeatedly quote John about “the need to spread the truth, the duty to do this,” they are equally mindful of Prov-erbs counseling one to develop in silence righteousness. “It is awful to be the mortal vessel of Thy truth,” the Schiller epigraph to Arnold’s Newdigate Prize poem, Cromwell, gloomily announced.31 Arnold was certainly torn, and to read his prose without a sense of a poet’s capitula-tion, the indignity of selecting 365 passages for a Matthew Arnold Birth-day Book, illustrated with a photograph of a very fat dog lumbering up to what was by then a poet only in memory, is to miss an essential color-ing (Honan, 388). One needs “la puissance [du] talent qui [se] réalise,” a phrase from Sainte- Beuve that Arnold copied down in 1856, 1857, 1858, and 1861, but after that it disappears, as if no longer possible and too painful to recall (Note- Books, 2, 3, 5, 12). Of Sainte- Beuve, Arnold feels that “the critic in him grew to prevail more and more and pushed out the poet.”32 This is truer as a self- portrait, for Arnold himself had a poetic gift to push out. Yet his prose bears little evidence of that; noth-ing jars, all is balanced. Serviceable and unimaginative, Arnold’s prose does not contain any trace of the poetry he had abandoned. While the father’s ambition was to dethrone Edward Gibbon, the son wanted nothing less than to “change English ideas.”33 Toward the end, though, not even self- irony can blunt the failure: “I wish I could promise to change my old phrases for new ones.”34

If Arnold was inspecting schools, in the month after The Waste Land’s publication Eliot was writing up a digest of Romanian for Lloyds Bank Extracts.35 A failed marriage, pin- striped City work, lectures, reviews, money troubles: no wonder Eliot felt “completely paralyzed,” telling his mother in February 1924 that he could not make up his mind about his future, so great was his fear of failure: “I have made so many mistakes in the past, that I often feel no confidence whatever in my judgment, and act like a frightened rat.”36 “I am worn out, I cannot

31 Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Meridian, 1955), 19.32 Matthew Arnold, “Sainte- Beuve,” in CPW, 11:107.33 The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Y. Lang, 6 vols. (Charlottesville: Univer-

sity Press of Virginia, 1996 – 2001), 2:209.34 Matthew Arnold, “A Liverpool Address,” in CPW, 10:75.35 T. S. Eliot to his mother, mid- October 1923, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot,

1922 – 1925, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 254 – 55. Hereafter cited as TSE Letters 2.

36 T. S. Eliot to his mother, late February 1924, in TSE Letters 2, 320.


go on,” he tells a patron in Beckettian overtones.37 At the very least, one could say that this age was “a singularly stupid one,” as he told Ford Madox Ford.38 Little consolation this was, though, as the patient on the table could get etherized but not the creator: “It’s interesting to cut yourself to pieces once in a while, and wait to see if the fragments will sprout.”39 What sprouted? The Waste Land Eliot would come to dismiss as “rhythmical grumbling.” His poetic gift, never certain, deserted him after The Four Quartets, and he effectively lived as a “posthumous” poet.40 His criticism, he admits late in his life, was “implicitly defending the sort of poetry that I and my friends wrote.”41 A “Roman Englishman,” as J. M. Coetzee calls him, Eliot for three decades tried to turn Western culture back to its Roman- Christian roots, but this concern with “high civilization” failed.42 Four years before his death, The New English Bible, which he savagely reviewed, sold three million copies, equaling that year’s sales for the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover — cultural signs that a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo- catholic in religion” must have found unhealthy.43 So we have personal poetry and personal criticism left to fester in an increasingly valueless society, all that Eliot tried to reform but could not.

Arnold was the establishment, a rightfully eminent Victorian. He met William Wordsworth and Charlotte Brontë as a boy; Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone read his books; Lady de Rothschild was a corre-spondent. Rugby, Oxford, professor of poetry, the Athaeneum: Arnold

37 T. S. Eliot to John Quinn, March 12, 1923, in TSE Letters 2, 72.38 T. S. Eliot to Ford Madox Ford, October 11, 1923, in TSE Letters 2, 251.39 T. S. Eliot to Conraid Aiken, September 30, 1914, in The Letters of T. S. Eliot,

1898 – 1922, ed. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton, rev. ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 64. Hereafter cited as TSE Letters 1.

40 Gregory S. Jay, T. S. Eliot and the Poetics of Literary History (Baton Rouge: Louisi-ana State University Press, 1983), 129.

41 T. S. Eliot, “To Criticize the Critic” (1961), in To Criticize the Critic, and Other Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991), 16.

42 J. M. Coetzee, Stranger Shores: Essays, 1986 – 1999 (London: Vintage, 2002), 3; T. S. Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 14. Hereafter cited as NDC.

43 Robert Sencourt, T. S. Eliot: A Memoir, ed. Donald Adamson (London: Garn-stone, 1971), 226; T. S. Eliot, For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order (London: Faber and Gwyer, 1928), ix. Hereafter cited as FLA.


had it all. (He didn’t, tragically: after two sons had died, he turned to a more devout Christianity “to carry far the new beginning.”)44 Eliot was the St. Louis – born outsider, New Englander in his birthplace, south-erner in New England. In London he was an American in a land of “marmalade and tea at six,” but over the years Missouri Tom no longer called Flemish art “really great stuff” or complained about the “post- putridity” of “small old towns and old things generally.”45 While recall-ing from the distance of an ocean “how barbarous life in America is” and the “immaturity of feeling” there, Eliot says that in England “one remains always a foreigner — only the lower classes can assimilate.”46 This already shows his move inward, and over time he spoke with the right tone, understated and tongue- in- cheek. Eliot would make a fully triumphant entrance by “set[ting] the poets and poems in a new order,” which a lecture on Arnold identified as the task of a culture’s great critic.47

The Sacred Wood opens with Eliot stating that his outright hostil-ity toward Arnold has been tempered by his coming to understand Arnold’s thought within the Victorian age. Yet what follows is hardly reconciliation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is “perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last,” while Arnold is “rather a propa-gandist for criticism than a critic, a popularizer rather than a creator of ideas.”48 Eight years later Eliot beats the same drum: Arnold’s “best phrases remain for ever gibing and scolding in our memory” (FLA, 74). Ideas are reduced to phrases, such as sweetness and light, literature and dogma, touchstones. To believe one of these phrases, that “poetry

44 Matthew Arnold to his mother, December 24, 1868, in MA Letters, 2:183.45 T. S. Eliot, “Interlude in London,” in Inventions of the March Hare: Poems,

1909 – 1917, ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 16; T. S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken, July 19, 1914, in TSE Letters 1, 45.

46 T. S. Eliot to Henry Eliot, July 2, 1919, in TSE Letters 1, 370.47 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criti-

cism to Poetry in England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 100. Here-after cited as UPUC. In October 2009 Eliot was voted Britain’s favorite poet, so there was some validation in these efforts. André Gide, offering Eliot the position of chron-icler of English letters for the Nouvelle revue française, told him that such a column finally would make it impossible “to judge this epoch inferior to Matthew Arnold’s” (Gide to Eliot, December 7, 1921, in TSE Letters 1, 610).

48 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen, 1960), 1.


can save us,” is like thinking that “the wall- paper will save us when the walls have crumbled.”49 In the 1932 – 33 Norton Lectures, Eliot gets per-sonal, asking what had Arnold, “whose youth was so rigorously seized and purged, to do with an abstract entity like the Soul?” (UPUC, 110). “To rescue this word,” Eliot states in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, “is the extreme of my ambition” (15); this, of course, requires wiping the slate clean of Culture and Anarchy. In short, Arnold was a failure: he did not have ideas; he was provincial; he did not read literature as lit-erature but had to import social questions into it; he, most annoyingly, used italics to excess.

There are also nonliterary reasons for Eliot’s distemper. “The most dangerous” move of literary criticism, readers of the Criterion are told in words clearly targeting Arnold, is “the tendency to confuse literature with religion — a tendency which can only have the effect of degrad-ing literature and annihilating religion.”50 God and the Bible says that “a nation’s intellectual place depends upon its having reached the very highest rank in the very highest lines of spiritual endeavour.”51 This is a sentiment that Eliot might share, but with Arnold’s spirituality Eliot can have no truck. The subtitle to Literature and Dogma — which Arnold characterized as “of all my books in prose, the one most important (if I may say so) and most capable of being useful” — denotes a “bet-ter apprehension” of the Bible. This must have irked Eliot: apprehen-sion is separation, a failure to bring the object within, as Arnold’s self- professed intention reveals: “Here, then, is the problem: to find, for the Bible, for Christianity, for our religion, a basis in something which can be verified, instead of in something which has to be assumed.”52 Religion in Saint Paul and Protestantism is credited with “permanent worth and vitality” by its “scientific value” and the “correspondence with important facts and the light it throws on them.”53 Of Arnold’s modernized Bible for Manchester, Eliot did not see belief or faith but

49 T. S. Eliot, “Literature, Science, and Dogma,” Dial 82 (1927): 243.50 T. S. Eliot, “A Commentary,” Criterion, no. 8 (1924): 373. For Eliot’s view of

Arnold in the mid- 1920s see his commentary in Criterion, no. 10 (1925): 161 – 63, which reviews Selections from Matthew Arnold’s Prose, ed. D. C. Somervell (London: Methuen, 1924).

51 Matthew Arnold, God and the Bible, in CPW, 7:48.52 Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, in CPW, 6:141, 150.53 Matthew Arnold, Saint Paul and Protestantism, in CPW, 6:8.


54 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940), 59.55 “Religion and Literature,” in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode

(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 101. Hereafter cited as SP.56 Irving Babbitt, The Masters of Modern French Criticism (London: Constable,

1913), 354.57 Other participants included Edith Sitwell, Edmund Blunden, Rebecca West,

C. K. Munro, and A. J. A. Symons. The proceedings were published as Tradition and Experiment in Present- Day Literature: Addresses Delivered at the City Institute (London: Oxford University Press, 1929).

religion judged by calculable value, and “what is worst of all is to advo-cate Christianity, not because it is true, but because it might be ben-eficial.”54 Arnold’s thoughts smacked of Eliot’s Unitarian upbringing, which is what the Anglo- Catholic wanted to escape.

But Arnold is inescapable. His three interests — poetry, education, and religion — Eliot shares fully. Everything is there: the Father, reli-gion; the Son, education; and the Holy Ghost, poetry. Where Arnold tries to keep these separate or as substitutes — religion for education or poetry for religion, all “criticisms of life” — Eliot desires their fusion. To say that religion can be a substitute for education is to breed the unthinking faithful; to make poetry a kind of religion is to displace the proper bounds of religion in society. Arnold had “conduct” — famously, religion affects three- quarters of all human conduct — but Eliot does not leave one- quarter open to nonreligious factors. Religion is a whole, fiction is a whole: “The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not.”55 Because the education that fiction provides is of prime importance, this sets up the need to establish a standard — or rather, to restore those “high and severe standards of taste” that Eliot’s teacher, Irving Babbitt, lamented as lost by modernity, masses, and markets.56

This leads to October 16, 1944, at the City Literary Institute, which Eliot knew from having taken part years earlier in the symposium “Tradition and Experiment in Present- Day Literature.”57 Unlike Sainte- Beuve’s Collège de France lectures on Virgil, canceled for lack of student inter-est, Eliot’s address drew an attentive audience, which doubtless mur-mured its assent when he opened: “The pertinence of asking this ques-tion [what is a classic?], with Virgil particularly in mind, is obvious:


whatever the definition we arrive at, it cannot be one which excludes Virgil — we may say confidently that it must be one which will expressly reckon with him.” This is why: “A classic can only occur when a civili-zation is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind. It is the importance of that civiliza-tion and of that language, as well as the comprehensiveness of the mind of the individual poet, which gives the universality.”58 This is not origi-nal. H. J. C. Grierson, a scholar whom Eliot credited with having done a “service of some importance” by editing an anthology of metaphysical poets, had said as much almost two decades earlier.59 In his 1923 Leslie Stephen lecture, Classical and Romantic, Grierson asserted that classi-cal literature is “the product of a nation and a generation which has consciously achieved a definite advance, moral, political, intellectual” and “is filled with the belief that its view of life is more natural, human, universal and wise than that from which it has escaped”; it is able to “look round on life with a sense of its wholeness, its unity in variety” (Eliot’s comprehensiveness and universality, as well as the significant variety from his introductory words).60

“Every language has its own resources, and its own limitations,” Eliot observes (54). These are historical and reflect society’s develop-ment, and Virgil’s accomplishment is to bring language and society together. It does this through “maturity”: maturity of mind and man-ners, of language, literature, and history. Like F. R. Leavis, Eliot refuses to define maturity, claiming that those who are mature recognize matu-rity in others, while the immature (and here one would not be remiss to read an imperial positioning) cannot see maturity even if it is defined.61 But maturity alone is not sufficient, as reflecting it would only make Vir-gil a “relative” classic, like Goethe or Pope; he is “universal” due to his “comprehensiveness” not only for Latin but for “a number of foreign

58 T. S. Eliot, “What Is a Classic?” in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), 53, 55. Hereafter cited as OPP.

59 T. S. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” in SP, 59. In October 1944 Grierson’s Critical History of English Poetry, coauthored with J. C. Smith, was published by Chatto and Windus.

60 H. J. C. Grierson, Classical and Romantic: The Leslie Stephen Lecture Delivered at Cambridge, 3 May 1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 19.

61 See Michael Bell, F. R. Leavis (London: Routledge, 1988), 98.


literatures” (67). (And “England is a ‘Latin’ country,” Eliot asserts.)62 Virgil shows the “relatedness . . . between two great cultures” and brings about “their reconciliation under an all- embracing destiny” (62). For what literature should have, self- awareness and a sense of what should be, Virgil is the “criterion” for all others: “Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil” (70).

Now let us look at Arnold’s “Study of Poetry.” It was written to intro-duce the four- volume anthology The English Poets. Years earlier Arnold had written of the need for “a guide who will show us, in clear view, the growth of our literature, its series of productions, and their relative value.”63 Now he was to introduce two thousand pages of verse with a singular purpose: to establish standards for the truly excellent.

Poetry, Arnold begins, is “capable of higher uses” and should be “called to higher destinies” (161). But for this “we must also set our standard for poetry high” (162): “For in poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half- sound, true and untrue or only half- true, is of paramount importance. It is of para-mount importance because of the high destinies of poetry” (162 – 63). What are these? Arnold explains: “The best poetry is what we want; the best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can” (163). It will bring out the “spirit of our race” (163) — in other words, give a people maturity.

So opens Arnold’s account of excellence in poetry. In judging excel-lence, two things must be avoided. The first is the “historic estimate” (163). “The course of development of a nation’s language, thought, and poetry, is profoundly interesting” but is not what a classic consists of (163): to avoid what Eliot calls “antiquarianism,” a classic has to speak to more than history. The personal fallacy concerns “our personal affini-ties, likings, and circumstances,” which make us attach “more impor-tance to it [the poem] as poetry than in itself it really possesses, because to us it is, or has been, of high importance” (164). Eliot concurs: this is the provincialism he despises, the relative classic relativized to its small-est radius in the most obnoxiously liberal fashion.

The true estimation of the classic then begins. “Everything depends on the reality of a poet’s classical character,” Arnold states.

62 T. S. Eliot, “Notes,” Criterion, no. 5 (1923): 104.63 Matthew Arnold, “A Guide to English Literature,” in CPW, 8:238.


This is unhelpful, as is the next line: “If he is a dubious classic, let us sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him.” As if classics were mer-chandise, one wants to say — and the commercial analogy holds: “But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best (for this is the true and right meaning of the word classic, classical) . . .” Yes, what then? Well, this: “Then the right thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can, and to appreciate the wide difference between it and all work which has not the same high character.” One must nod at this and what follows: “This is what is salutary, this is what is formative; this is the great benefit to be got from the study of poetry” (165).

Despite slight differences in tone, there are clear echoes in Eliot as Arnold’s “formative” classic (CPW, 9:165) slides into maturity; the “independent criticism of life” is the classic’s comprehensiveness, and the “great contributory stream to the world- river of poetry,” British poetry (CPW, 9:161), is in Eliot Virgil’s “blood- stream” (OPP, 70). And just as Arnold notes that in the best poetry “charlatanism shall find no entrance,” that such poetry is a way to distinguish “sound and unsound” (CPW, 9:162), Eliot employs an Arnoldian touchstone when he says that the “classical standard” is a means of avoiding the “greater error” of “giving the second- rate equal rank with the first- rate” (OPP, 68 – 69).

At the beginning of his talk Eliot notes that classic has a number of col-loquial meanings, and he observes how far the word has fallen when mentioning “a very interesting book called A Guide to the Classics, which tells you how to pick the Derby winner” (53). This might have raised some laughter in the crowd (and it has some allusive qualities in Eliot’s own work, from his inclusion of the Derby as one of the qualities of Englishness to the sinners in The Rock who “walk in the street proud-necked, like thoroughbreds ready for the races”), but, delving farther, one finds that it was not so much of a joke.64 For A Guide to the Classics was published under Eliot’s directorship of Faber and Faber in 1936 (and a revised edition would be published by the same house in 1947, with Eliot no doubt taking delight that the 1945 Derby winner was

64 T. S. Eliot, “Choruses from ‘The Rock’ ” (IX), in Collected Poems, 1909 – 1962 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 181. Hereafter cited as CP.


Dante), and its authors were two young dons, Guy Griffith and Michael Oakeshott. Oakeshott’s Experience and Its Modes, published in 1933, was heavily indebted to F. H. Bradley, Eliot’s doctoral degree topic, and the terms of that work — unity, completeness, experience, coherence, universality — are vital to Eliot, just as Oakeshott’s understanding of “historical experience” seems to align with Eliot’s sense of tradition: “A fixed and finished past . . . is a past divorced from evidence. . . . If the historical past be knowable, it must belong to the present world of experience.”65

A Guide to the Classics bears its classical associations by beginning with Ovid and ending with a Latin quotation. The authors note their ambition: “To a world guided in the main by gossip, we offer the consid-ered results of experience and observation; to a world sunk in supersti-tion, we offer a brief and businesslike account of the rational principles upon which we believe a winning selection may be based.”66 Their task is not altogether different from the one confronting Eliot: “We must fix our minds firmly upon (a) the character of the race, and (b) the character of the horses engaged, and allow nothing else whatever to distract our attention” (Griffith and Oakeshott, 18).67 But whereas Eliot begins by setting his definition of the classic as one that necessarily includes Virgil, Griffith and Oakeshott proceed by elimination: “Pick-ing the Derby winner, we have suggested, may be considered as a pro-cess in which first the horses that cannot win and then the horses that will not win are eliminated from the field, a process which gives us first the horses who can win and in the end the horse who will win” (85). One of the key tests is breeding: “Classic quality is never produced by any but ‘classic’ sires” (26 – 27). This rule must always be followed, but, in general, the authors admit that “we have no infallible receipt . . . for picking the Derby winner is essentially a problem of relativity, there is

65 Michael Oakeshott, Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1933), 107. See as well Neal Wood, “A Guide to the Classics: The Skepticism of Professor Oakeshott,” Journal of Politics 21 (1959): 658 – 60.

66 Guy Griffith and Michael Oakeshott, A Guide to the Classics; or, How to Pick the Derby Winner (London: Faber and Faber, 1936), 11 – 12.

67 It should be noted that the 1937 guide was not very valuable during wartime, because its analysis is based partly on the qualities of the track at which the Derby is run, the Downs at Epsom, and during the war the Derby was run at Newmarket.


no absolute Derby winner” (11, 89). This approach to the problem of value is quite different from Eliot’s. It is open, insists on the possibility of error, and concludes with a call for the final judgment to be made by a product of reasoned reflection that may differ among educated people. One must, in the end, gamble on a reasoned hunch, for there is no single winner straight from the gate, whereas Eliot’s talk quite thoroughly insists otherwise.

For Eliot’s touchstone is the “classical standard” set up by Virgil (68). Yet Eliot’s touchstone — a single author, and even more strongly an idea behind that author — works quite differently from those famous touchstones of Arnold’s essay. What makes Arnold honest is the move away from the generic and toward the method of Longinus, expound-ing on the “great passages [which] have a high distinction of thought and expression to which great writers owe their supremacy and their lasting renown.”68 While the touchstone method for Arnold is probably derived from Sainte- Beuve, who called Madame Bovary a work “which acts as a touchstone,” the term is found in John Locke’s Essay concern-ing Human Understanding, where common prejudices are “the Rule and Touchstone of all other Opinions” and as such doom critical inquiry.69 To avoid the personal fallacy, Arnold does not make “touch” primary. Rather, stone dominates: “Excellence dwells among rocks hardly acces-sible,” he writes in an essay on Milton.70 Yet it is unclear what is so special about Arnold’s touchstones, which seem limited in emotional range to lines of loss and grief.71 In the same year as “The Study of Poetry,”

68 Longinus, On Great Writing (On the Sublime), trans. G. M. A. Grube (India-napolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 4.

69 Charles- Augustin Sainte- Beuve, “Poésies complètes de Théodore de Banville,” in Causeries du lundi, 14:77; John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 83 (1.3.25). On Arnold’s indebtedness to Locke, see the evidence presented in Daniel Kline, “ ‘Unhackneyed Thoughts and Winged Words’: Arnold, Locke, and the Similes of Sohrab and Rustum,” Victorian Poetry 41 (2003): 173 – 95.

70 Matthew Arnold, “Milton,” in CPW, 11:329.71 See John S. Eells, The Touchstones of Matthew Arnold (New York: Bookman,

1955); and R. H. Super, “Arnold and Literary Criticism: (ii) Critical Practice,” in Mat-thew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 168n1. For a similar diagnosis of Eliot’s touchstones see John Guillory, “It Must Be Abstract,” in Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon, ed. Robert Alter (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2004), 74.


72 Quoted in G. W. E. Russell, Matthew Arnold (New York: Scribner, 1904), 99 – 100.

73 Peter Melville Logan reads Culture and Anarchy’s use of “fetish” in “Fetishism and Freedom in Matthew Arnold’s Cultural Theory,” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 555 – 74.

74 “Arnoldism there [Oxford] had grown into a cult”; “each brilliant paradox of his had become a shibboleth” (anonymous review of Essays in Criticism, Second Series, Athenaeum, March 2, 1889, 129, quoted in Bill Bell, “Beyond the Death of the Author: Matthew Arnold’s Two Audiences, 1888 – 1930,” Book History 3 [2000]: 156 – 57).

75 “The Production of a National Classic” (1795), in Goethe’s Literary Essays, ed. J. E. Spingarn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 83 – 84.

76 Matthew Arnold, “A French Critic on Goethe,” in CPW, 8:255, 253.

Arnold as a school inspector argued against the use of “selections” or “extracts,” because “within these hundred lines the real interest of the situation is not reached; neither do they contain any poetry of signal beauty and effectiveness.”72 As a literary critic, however, he believes in his “infallible touchstone[s]” (168): “These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate” (170). So the touchstone distinguishes the false from the true, and having a portable touchstone means that one will never be duped. The fetish for the new, the fashionable, is replaced by what contains permanent value, as the touchstone defines the “mark and accent” of the serious poem (171).73 This is, quite obvi-ously, the Judaic shibboleth: pronounce it incorrectly, with an accent, and one is cast out.74

Questions of accent and entry, of self- evident belonging, lead to the question of a “people.” Goethe, whose essay on the classic influ-enced both Arnold and Eliot, provided an important analysis in his 1795 “Literary Sansculottism,” popularly known as “The Production of a National Classic”: “What are the conditions that produce a classical national author? He must, in the first place, be born in a great com-monwealth. . . . He must be thoroughly pervaded with the national spirit, and through his innate genius feel capable of sympathizing with the past as well as the present. . . . He must find much material already collected and ready for his use.”75 In an essay on Goethe, Arnold speaks of the need for judgment founded on “mature reason” to determine “right poetical rank.”76 This maturity requires understanding of a


people’s historical development. For Arnold, England has over time become a “great nationality.”77 But it was not in Chaucer’s time, and so “we praise him, but we feel that this accent is out of the question for him. It may be said that it was necessarily out of reach of any poet in the England of that stage of growth” (176), a judgment that Eliot echoes to the Virgil Society.

Accent is not simply a class distinction within a society but also what shuts off one society from another. While he spent a lifetime insist-ing on closer links between England and the Continent, Arnold was hardly a cosmopolitan thinker. He admits that his religious works are addressed “to one people and race, and to one sort of persons in it, and to one moment in its religious history” (God and the Bible, 398). “English civilisation, — the humanising, the bringing into one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society, — that is what interests me.”78 On foreign cultures he was shopkeeper- ish, searching out the best wares; to argue that Arnold began the “de- Saxonization” of English literature takes revisionism too far.79 His was a time when France and Germany had better goods than England, when even Rus-sia had Tolstoy. His travel letters reveal little genuine understanding of foreign cultures. When lauding the French working class, he simply lists qualities (respect for intellect chief among them) that he wishes the English “mobs” had.

For Eliot, these mobs, the walking dead crossing the great Thames, are a far cry from the Roman soldiers who settled Britain. Virgil was the representative figure of this early conquest, and Eliot fastened on him as the emblematic classic because he was part of the most inclusive and expansive empire in history. Even at a time when empires were falling, Eliot remained “all for empires. . . . I deplore the outburst of artificial nationalities, constituted like artificial genealogies of millionaires, all over the world.”80 He could not avoid the question of belonging if he wished to invest himself in the British literary tradition. The British Empire, after the Boer War, the Easter Riots, and the Amritsar Massa-

77 Matthew Arnold, “England and the Italian Question,” in CPW, 1:71.78 Matthew Arnold, “Ecce, Convertimur ad Gentes,” in CPW, 9:6.79 Joep Leerssen, “Englishness, Ethnicity, and Matthew Arnold,” European Jour-

nal of English Studies 10 (2006): 74.80 T. S. Eliot to Ford Madox Ford, October 11, 1923, in TSE Letters 2, 251.


cre, could hardly approximate the inclusiveness of Rome. Two strategies mark Eliot’s move inward. The first, appearing in his earliest critical works, is Eliot recasting what it means to belong. Tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor,” as “his-torical sense” is not a civilizational quality but a personal one.81 The second involves broadening the scope of English letters by connecting it to the Continent; Eliot took pride in the Criterion for being “much more welcoming to foreign thought” than all other English journals.82 But these two strategies did not bring about the results Eliot needed: the first was necessarily tenuous, as it made a civilization an object external to an individual and not innate, while the second necessarily blurred the boundaries of the uniqueness of the English language.

What markedly separates Eliot and Arnold is their different touchstone methods and, more concretely, their contrasting evaluations of Virgil and Homer. Arnold sees none higher than Homer, who brings us to “another world” (168). Arnold’s first three touchstones are from Homer. Not much more is said, but there is no need for more, he implies. There was, though: Homer was often in the hands of “cranks and pedants,” writes Warren Anderson, until Arnold “made his place secure among the masters of literature.”83 Homer was always Arnold’s fulcrum. After the 1848 revolutions he immersed himself in “all [of] Homer’s works.”84 Homer is “the most important poetical monument existing,” he lec-tures.85 In an essay about the need for criticism to introduce “a single rule which clearly marks what is right as right, and what is wrong as wrong,” it is Homer who is “in the grand style.”86

Whereas Arnold scorns “the artificial epic of literary periods” and largely keeps silent on Virgil (167), Eliot sees an essential reality in Aeneas. Wrathful Achilles and wandering Odysseus the West has had enough of. It needs an anchor, not more shipwrecks; a purpose-ful founding is the order of the day. In light of the desolation of the

81 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in SP, 38.82 T. S. Eliot to Hermann Hesse, March 13, 1922, in TSE Letters 1, 645.83 Warren Anderson, “Arnold and the Classics,” in Allott, 274.84 Matthew Arnold to his mother, July 29, 1849, in MA Letters, 1:14.85 Matthew Arnold, On Translating Homer, in CPW, 1:97.86 Matthew Arnold, “Last Words,” in CPW, 1:187.


West, Eliot feels that another renaissance is necessary; the preceding one tore Western society from its root, the Christian religion. Although never enunciated as such, surely part of Eliot’s dream is Dante’s of De Monarchia, with its call for states to unite under papal power. But this new hierarchy is unworkable without a prior revolution in values, which is why Eliot needs Aeneas steering the ship of civilization. Homer, in contrast, is provincial, uncouth, living in rude times. He lacks maturity, and, more damning, he lacks self- knowledge, because he knows only himself: “In Homer, the conflict between the Greeks and the Trojans is hardly larger in scope than a feud between one Greek city- state and a coalition of other city- states” (OPP, 61). In a 1951 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) program, “Virgil and the Christian World,” part of that year’s Virgil Season, whose origin lies in the Virgil Society, Eliot says that Homer “accepted” his civilization, but Virgil “made of Roman civi-lization in his poetry something better than it really was.”87 Eliot implies that Homer accepted his culture because he knew no other. (But to say that the Greeks did not “relate” to another culture is to miss the point: the alphabet came from the Phoenicians, Homer praises Hector, Herodotus combines the exploits of Greeks and barbarians — points buttressed in the modern scholarship of Gregory Nagy and other clas-sicists who show how much interaction there was between the Greeks and the Near East.)88

What does this difference imply? The coupling of Homer and Virgil is one of the oldest in Western literature. Just as George Orwell could write that all of us are part Don Quixote, wishing to be saintly and good, and part Sancho Panza, a little fat man wanting his bellyful, so it is with Homer and Virgil: there is part of ourselves in Homer’s violence, directness, and clear vision, and there is another in Virgil’s refinement and care. But the oppositions are more extreme: Homer the oral poet, meant to be sung; Virgil defiantly literary, composing with great care

87 T. S. Eliot, “Virgil and the Christian World,” in OPP, 125. Blandford again proves instructive here, noting that the idea for a Virgil Season arose in 1948 when Harman Grisewood, director of the BBC Third Programme, chaired Lord Wavell’s presidential address (in Eliot’s place). Lord Wavell was viceroy of India from 1943 to 1947, and his talk, “Virgil and War,” was well publicized (Blandford, 35 – 36, 40).

88 Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).


(seven years for the two thousand lines of the Georgics). As Pope noted, “Homer makes us hearers, and Virgil leaves us readers.”89 Homer as Caedmon keeps poetry with the divine (“Sing, goddess”); Virgil as Mil-ton surveys previous literature with diligence, knowing that he has been called to write a masterpiece and starting with brio (“I sing of arms and of a man”). Homer is the origin (“the first and best,” George Chapman writes), Virgil summation (“excell’d his Master,” John Dryden retorts).90 Homer is the father, Virgil the son.

Arnold’s preference for Homer came at a time when even a prime minister was engaged in Homeric studies.91 In the eighteenth and through the nineteenth century, Virgil’s prestige suffered as he came to be seen as an imperial propagandist and servile adulator of Augus-tus (like his translator, Dryden of the Annus Mirabilis), which tied him to absolutism; being part of the Catholic South did not help his case.92 Homer was revered, the most popular subject of prize paintings for the Prix de Rome.93 To Arnold, a soft critic of imperialism, though nothing short of an imperialist when it came to domestic reform, the “problem of England” lay within. Against democracy’s “inevitable revolution,” as Tocqueville dubbed it, England held on to old forms. Its aristocracy

89 Alexander Pope, “Preface,” in The Iliad of Homer, ed. Steven Shankman, trans. Alexander Pope (London: Penguin, 1996), 8.

90 George Chapman, “The Preface to the Reader,” in Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, trans. George Chapman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 14; Dedication of the Aeneis, in Works of John Dryden, 291.

91 Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 176.

92 David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 350. On the shifting reputations of Homer and Virgil in the eighteenth century see Kirsti Simonsuuri, Homer’s Origi-nal Genius: Eighteenth- Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic, 1688 – 1798 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); among the Romantics, Paul H. Fry, “Classical Standards in the Period,” in Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown, vol. 5 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2000), 19 – 22; during the World War II period, C. M. Bowra, From Virgil to Milton (London: Macmillan, 1945), 4 – 5, 81. On Virgil’s shifting poetic reputation in England see G. B. Townend, “Changing Views of Vergil’s Greatness,” Classical Journal 56, no. 2 (1960): 67 – 77.

93 See the exhibition book for the exposition at the Dahesh Museum, New York, in the fall of 2005: Emmanuel Schwartz, The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts, Paris, trans. Christopher Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).


was bankrupt, no longer inspiring respect; its growing middle class had imperial wealth but lacked ideas; the working class lived in misery. Homer’s admonitions are insular: stay in one’s own home, have it fully. The Greeks were anti- imperialists, builders of the perfect polis, but it was Virgil’s empire that England had, and England was suffering.

For Eliot, it is the reverse:

What we call the beginning is often the endAnd to make an end is to make a beginning.The end is where we start from.94

It was not imperialism that Eliot preached but a stable and definitive founding, with all the implied consequences. For civilization to have value, it must give up something of value, and the priceless freedom of the Homeric heroes must be abandoned for duty’s call. “Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy,” C. S. Lewis writes in 1942, but “with Virgil European poetry grows up.”95 Homer cannot be a founder, because he lived among the gods, whereas Aeneas has pietas toward them, which is what Eliot wants: as Haecker notes, Virgil respected “the strict limits imposed upon creation and man” (13). Homer is godly (which implies arrogance); Virgil, god- aspiring (with its requisite humility). Homer’s civilization ends in ruin and destroys itself in civil war; Aeneas begins the world’s greatest epoch of peace and order, and his time ushers in Christ, as Constantine would invoke Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue when fighting for the Christian faith in the Roman Empire.

Aeneas is also “related” to the “blood- stream” of English literature, for a long tradition of outsiders uses Virgil to stake claims of belonging in England. The Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth is the first to credit the founding of “the best of islands” to Aeneas’s great- grandson, Brutus, who founded Troynovant, the future London.96 From Brutus stems the ancient line of British kings: the iconography of James I’s 1603 trium-phal arches evoked this alleged Trojan ancestry. One of the first Brit-

94 T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (1942), in CP, 207.95 C. S. Lewis, “Virgil and the Subject of Secondary Epic,” in A Preface to “Paradise

Lost” (London: Oxford University Press, 1942), 37. That same year Eliot’s presidential address to the Classical Association, The Classics and the Man of Letters, was published by Oxford University Press.

96 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 51, 54.


ish translators of the Aeneid was Gavin Douglas, whose rhymed heroic couplets in “Scottis” appeared in 1513. A graduate of Saint Andrews who held the bishopric of Dunkeld, Douglas had English sympathies, both political and religious (with Henry VIII) and poetic (Chaucer was his acknowledged master). During Eliot’s lifetime, Ezra Pound champi-oned Douglas, whose translation was reissued in four volumes by Black-wood and Sons in 1957 – 60.97 One of the first poems out of the New World was a Virgil translation by George Sandys, colonial treasurer of the Virginia Company, which was published on his return to Britain.98 Finally, the Virgil Society, over which Eliot presided, was established six years after the founding of the Vergilian Society of America.99

Eliot follows in this long line of literary maneuvers by the provin-cial into the center. Does he succeed? From our perspective, the answer cannot be positive, as it is not so much Virgil that is his classic as the founding of Christendom, which Eliot believes Virgil prefigured. Like Arnold, Eliot often felt that he was “preaching in the wilderness.” The religious imagery is appropriate. The classic for Eliot, Dennis Dono-ghue writes, is necessarily “the imperial classic, imperfect text of the City of God.”100 The term imperfect is suspect when every nonclassical work has, in Eliot’s view, something “defective” in it, whereas the clas-sic embodies perfection, since it summons forth unity and wholeness out of the disparate strands of language and history preceding it. Yet Donoghue is right to call the secular classic “imperfect,” as all that is secular and earthly is necessarily imperfect. By that vein, the true clas-sic in Eliot’s text is not so much Virgil, although certainly Eliot sees something of the religious in Virgil, especially in the adventist Virgil as prophet of Christ. Rather, the only classic is the Bible, the holy work that in its perfection defined a way of life and moved history onto a dif-ferent plane by imposing duties on its readers.

After his conversion Eliot visited an undergraduate club at Univer-sity College, Oxford; the scene is recounted by Stephen Spender:

97 Bruce Dearing, “Gavin Douglas’ Eneados: A Reinterpretation,” PMLA 67 (1952): 845 – 62.

98 Peter Levi, Virgil: His Life and Times (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 11.99 See Robert M. Wilhelm, The Vergilian Society of America: The First Fifty Years

(Oxford, OH: Vergilian Society, 1988).100 Dennis Donoghue, “Nuances of Eliot,” Guardian, January 15, 1976.


The question was raised whether there was any ultimate criterion for judging a work of art. How can we be certain that Antony and Cleopa-tra and the Acropolis continue always to be beautiful? T., an under-graduate, . . . said that surely it was impossible to believe in aesthetic values being permanent, unless one believed in God in whose mind beauty existed. Eliot bowed his head in that almost praying attitude . . . and murmured words to the effect of: “That is what I have come to believe.”101

That struggle to lift words out of prayer, that murmur, shows how the classic brings forth universal assent, a condition of silence: “The stillness, as a Chinese jar still,” a line from “Burnt Norton,” shows how words, when ideally ordered, “reach / into the silence.” A poet able to do this does away with language: “When a great poet has lived, certain things have been done once for all” (NDC, 114). This idea — developed more fully in “What Is a Classic?” — makes Eliot cautious and, indeed, almost frightens him. Eliot speaks of the classic poet who “exhausts” language, for “when he is a wholly classic poet, the language of his time will be the language in its perfection” (65). Yet perfection is a divine attribute and can only be profaned by human labor. This element of the classic forcing silence is always pregnant in Eliot’s talk, erupting in its conclusion, the only passage of poetry that Eliot quotes, when Dante’s guide, Virgil, could “discern no further” (70).

Eliot’s elliptical thoughts on the “last poet” are a fruitful point of depar-ture to reflect on the classic. They imply that the classic is an absolute text carrying in itself a silencing of all other poetry and literature: yet this silence of the last poet is perhaps not complete, since the Chinese jar is still yet “still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” As Eliot notes in “Poetry and Drama,” “It is ultimately the function of art, in imposing a credible order upon reality, and thereby eliciting some perception of order in reality, to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and rec-onciliation; and then leave us, as Virgil left Dante, to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no further.”102 The guide that can

101 Quoted in Louis Menand, “T. S. Eliot,” in Modernism and the New Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz, Louis Menand, and Lawrence Rainey, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 26.

102 T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” in OPP, 87.


serve us no further is the image that ends “What Is a Classic?” showing how the classic is, for Eliot, a terminal work. Yet the terminus creates its own sense of a new beginning, as all the old roads are now closed off. The classic, in this view, is the completion of a historical movement and as its summation becomes a work that rises above that history. In this absolutist sense, the classic is not simply a descriptor assigned to certain works but an essential quality of the work itself: it is classic not from the outside but from within. Eliot learned from Arnold, whose classic was “utopian and untouchable,” that the only way to avoid the historical and personal fallacies in the evaluation of the classic was to raise the classic above history and the individual.103 Eliot’s “classical standard” becomes akin to a touchstone, as he becomes Arnoldian when speak-ing of the “greater error” of “giving the second- rate equal rank with the first- rate.” This, Eliot adds, avoids our confounding “the contingent with the essential, the ephemeral with the permanent” (68 – 69).

The text that can do this avoids the plague of modern writing:

Endless invention, endless experiment,Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. (“Choruses” [I], in CP, 161)

In “Ash- Wednesday” Eliot writes,

About the centre of the silent Word.. . . Where shall the word be found, where will the wordResound? Not here, there is not enough silence.104

This silence is what the poet, “Son of Man,” should strive to create

Out of the slimy mud of words, out of the sleet and hail of verbal imprecisions,Approximate thoughts and feelings, words that have taken the place of thoughts and feelings,There spring the perfect order of speech, and the beauty of incantation. (“Choruses” [IX], in CP, 181 – 82)

103 Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 365.

104 T. S. Eliot, “Ash- Wednesday” (V), in CP, 102.


The classic, by this view, is a religious work, a perfection of language in a community, and that is why Eliot toward the end of his essay argues that no modern work can be a classic. For the modern artist is divorced from common standards and a common culture; rather than reflect and refine a common ground, as Hans- Georg Gadamer notes, the mod-ern artist has to create a separate community, bringing about further division in humanity.105

Dante, “the classic in a modern European language,” took Virgil as a guide but then reached past Virgil into a new world (60). Virgil’s achievement effectively silenced all Latin poetry, and so Dante’s poetry must be in a nascent Florentine. Both Virgil and Dante are cast as tran-sitional figures: Virgil embodies the height of the Roman Empire while prefiguring Christ, and Dante is the summation of the medieval tradi-tion while pointing toward the creation of modern European nation- states. It would not be difficult to read Eliot positioning himself in such a Janus- faced moment as Europe confronted the ruins of one civiliza-tion and the possibility of creating anew after two world wars. Excusing his poetry for its inability to become a classic — and blaming not its intrinsic worth for that condition but history itself — Eliot also opens up a space whereby it could rise above that history and become a classic, as it would be, like both Virgil and Dante, standing on the cusp of one world and looking into another.

Eliot’s position is far from the normal definition of the classic. Hor-ace defined the classic through a simple test, defying time: one century was the mark he gave. William Temple, who brought the querelle into England and who was Jonathan Swift’s employer, concurs: “For the scrib-blers are infinite, that like mushrooms or flies are born and die in small circles of time, whereas books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.”106

105 Hans- Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful, and Other Essays, ed. Rob-ert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 7. Gadamer later calls this created community a “truly universal community (oikumene)” that “extends to the whole world” (39), but Eliot would certainly take exception with that analysis, as the community created would necessarily be driven by subjective motivation.

106 William Temple, “An Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning,” in Five Miscellaneous Essays, ed. Samuel Holt Monk (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 38.


More recently, for Kermode “classics are, roughly, works of art that sur-vive.”107 All this, though, falls under Arnold’s “historic estimate,” a faulty way to define the classic. The reasons for literary survival are multiple, and we cannot be sure that a certain work survives for the right reason rather than because of “accidents, irrelevances, misunderstandings and superstitions” (“Virgil and the Christian World,” 121). Popularity with different readers and in different times implies only that different peo-ple in different times happened to read and enjoy a certain book. The greatest follower of Arnold in 1920s criticism, I. A. Richards, noted that accepting this test abrogates the office of criticism, because it implies that “if we cannot decide for ourselves, let us at least count hands and go with the majority.”108 Yet kritai, critics, are judges, not tabulators.109

That the “historic estimate” is more suitable for the canon is indis-putable. The questions of a classic and a canon are distinct, yet the con-temporary debate on the classic is mainly concerned with the canon. Steven Shankman, surveying the scholarship on the subject, notes that the classic is seen as a “work that for political reasons those in power have decided to call a classic.”110 This, though, describes the canoni-cal, not the classic. Canons reflect and come from centers of power, even if the process has more contestation than some critics assume.111 A canon may be important, but it does not imply the classic: the classic requires permanence if it means anything, or else Fortuna’s wind “first blows one way and then blows another,” whereas there is no reason for the canon not to change as societies do.112 If every culture has a right

107 Frank Kermode, “Survival of the Classic,” in Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renais-sance Essays (New York: Viking, 1971), 164.

108 I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 220.

109 See George Kennedy, “The Origin of the Concept of a Canon and Its Appli-cation to the Greek and Latin Classics,” in Canon vs. Culture: Reflections on the Current Debate, ed. Jan Gorak (New York: Garland, 2001), 108.

110 Steven Shankman, In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the Greco- Roman Tradi-tion, Homer to Valéry and Beyond (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), i.

111 See Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1991); the fullest expression of the view that canons reflect hegemonic values is Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Per-spectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).

112 See Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990); and Paul


to exist, this implies a right to propagate its existence through certain literary works, through a canon, but there is no analogous right of an individual work of art to exist, which is the claim that the classic makes. Created in freedom, art is received in freedom. Art can be ignored, discarded, cast aside. Yet the work that demands a right to exist and a duty to be heeded is metaphysically distinct from the free artwork: this, in some measure, is what the classic means when it comes to impose duties, and why standard evaluations of it have failed to mark out its unique qualities.

A canon may have a definite aim in mind, but for all the uses of the classic as serving or fulfilling a particular aim — whether it be aesthetic perfection; transcendent applicability to “all men in all times”; or an ability, akin to a “cultural grammar” (Altieri, 33), by which individuals may come to terms with their age — there is an inevitable failure. So serving burdens the classic with duties we expect it to fulfill, whereas Eliot sees the reverse: the classic imposes duties on us. The language that he uses toward the classic is dutiful: “We must maintain the classical ideal before our eyes” (“What Is a Classic?” 59); “it is of a particular debt that I speak” (67); “the constant application of the classical measure, which we owe to Virgil” (69); “this obligation . . . our annual observance of piety towards the great ghost who guided Dante’s pilgrimage” (70). This duty toward Virgil stems partly from Virgil’s own obedience to the gods, as Eliot stresses the piety of Aeneas, whom in “Virgil and the Christian World” he calls “the prototype of a Christian hero” (128).

As Walter Cahn notes, one result of calling a work a “masterpiece” is that we “seek to set our judgment, insofar as this is possible, beyond challenge or equivocation.”113 But toward what work can we be said to have duties? Despite their desire to escape the “historic estimate,” most recent estimates of the classic depend on the historical diversity of inter-pretation rather than on some property of the work itself (Kermode, Classic, 139). This position seems endemic in contemporary critics,

Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). The quoted line on the rising and falling reputations of artists is from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. C. H. Sisson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 246 (Purgatorio, 11.101).

113 Walter Cahn, Masterpieces: Chapters on the History of an Idea (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), xv.


114 See David Fishelov, “Dialogues with/and Great Books: With Some Serious Reflections on Robinson Crusoe,” New Literary History 39 (2008): 335 – 53, esp. 340 (“The factor of diversity appears to be crucial in the process by which a work acquires greatness”).

115 See Krister Stendahl, “The Bible as a Classic and the Bible as Holy Scrip-ture,” Journal of Biblical Literature 103 (1984): 9.

116 Jorge Luis Borges, “The Mirror of Enigmas,” in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby (New York: Modern Library, 1983), 211.

who desire to have variety and diversity in the classic, always renewable because its meaning can never be final.114 This justification — everything can be put in, all questions and interpretations are valid — seems dubi-ous for the classic. Rather than accept the view of interpretation that “the more the merrier,” the classic, in the sense that the Bible is the classic, requires that interpretation be stricter; our position vis- à- vis the classic is not one of freedom but one of submission.115 For if the classic does impose duties, what does it mean to consider Eliot’s idea of the silence brought about by the “last poet”?

For this is perfection, this is what it means to be a classic, Eliot seems to say: in the Qu’ran, to change a single word or syllable, a single breath, means that the work is no longer holy and perfect. This is what Jorge Luis Borges meant when he called the Scriptures an “absolute text: in other words, a text in which the collaboration of chance was calculable as zero.”116 Eliot, whose poetic project was premised on col-laboration and chance, whose greatest poems and legacy would be defined by his working with others and using the work of other authors, would be understandably intimated by the classic. There would be some consolation in saying that no modern work could be a classic, as his own work would be removed from that impossible burden. Not en route, the classic closes off all the roads — as Eliot puts it, it “exhausts” language — because it is where all roads lead. There can be only one classic, for if there is more than one, how does one compare these infinities? So either the Bible (or any holy text — but only one, for there cannot be competing holy texts) is the classic, or the classic does not exist. It alone is the classic, because it alone has the unique power and right to judge, to demand of the reader a duty toward it, which no other artwork, produced in freedom and gifting freedom, can summon.

This is what Eliot means by the last poet: a poet who leaves no more


poetry afterward, who exhausts it (“What Is a Classic?” 65). Is it possible to read a last poet or to feel when poetry cannot exist afterward? This frightens Eliot, and it would be better to read him as a critic of the clas-sic rather than as its strongest supporter. For his essay does not so much establish the classic as pull it away from the realm of possibility. What the classic means is a kind of universal silence: no more bombs from the air, no more disputation from mouths. To accept this silence comes at a heavy cost and is the reason that the classic should be resisted. Justifying the classic by the diversity of voices it inspires, in this view, takes the wrong track, because the classic does not inspire polyphony; a canon may, but not a classic. Eliot’s particular religious views, and that “murmured” answer to the Oxford undergraduate, show exactly how he understood the transcendent claims of the literary classic. One can only read and accept; one cannot argue, debate, give reasons. All this is the embodiment of silence, which is how Eliot described his reading of Dante: “I feel so completely inferior in his presence — there seems really nothing to do but to point to him and be silent.”117 Our own voices can be raised only because the classic does not — and cannot — exist.

Marius Hentea is completing a Phd in English at the University of Warwick, with a dissertation on Henry Green. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Narrative, the Review of English Studies, and Studies in the Novel and in the collection Rousseau and Freedom, edited by Christie Mcdon-ald and Stanley Hoffmann (2010). His biography of Tristan Tzara is forthcoming.

117 T. S. Eliot to Ottoline Morrell, March 21, 1920, in TSE Letters 1, 453.

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The Silence of the Last Poet