The New Lifetime Reading Plan

0'Neill once remarked, "I am interested only in the rela- tion between man and God." One must not take this literally, for 0'Neill did not, as did his master Aeschylus, have a truly metaphysical mind. But the statement points to the underlying and intense preoccupation of 0'Neiirs intelligence with the deepest and most permanent concerns of humankind. It is this anguished seriousness that sets him apart from every other American dramatist.

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T.S. ELIOT

1888-1965

Collected Poems, Collected Plays

In our short list of leading twentieth-century writers the inclu- sion of T.S. Eliot is inescapable. Not because in 1948 he won the Nobel Prize—on balance the prize has just as often gone to mediocrities as it has to those of high talent. Nor because he was the (involuntary) leader of a highly vocal and influential school of poets and critics. Nor because he occupied a position in England held in previous eras by such literary popes as Dryden, Addison, and Samuel Johnson [59]. Nor because he was in his time one of the most controversial figures in con- temporary English letters. Nor because the klieg lights of pub- licity were switched on him when he declared himself "Anglo- Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, and classicist in literature"—a description fitting hundreds of thousands of vir­tuous and intelligent Britishers. (The fuss made over it sprang from the liberal temperamento besetting weakness, parochial- ism.)

Except in his lucid essays (some of which I recommend you try), Eliot is a difficult writer, though as the years pass he seems less so, for he educated us to understand him. His achievement may be stated simply. He altered, deepened, and refined the character of English and American poetry in our time. He supplied modern criticism with a set of elevated and rigorous standards useful as a counterweight to the prevailing sleazy impressionism. In so doing he retrieved for us or set in a new light a whole series of writers: the minor Elizabethans, the seventeenth-century divines, Dante [30], Dryden, Donne [40].

Read his poetry in chronological order. Eliot—and this is not true of ali the Plan's writers—was by nature a developer. His growth was both technical and spiritual. Technically he passed from verse filled with allusions and quotations, verse often rather tricky and fantastically clever, to verse of great purity, sonority of rhythm, and symphonic form. Spiritually he moved from the dandyish irony of the Prufrock poems of 1917 through the detached, terrible despair of The Waste Land (1922) to the brooding metaphysical religiousness of Four Quartets (1943).

During the whole of this evolution he held fast to his origi­nal aim: "to digest and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects." Many of these objects and feelings are unpleasant, corresponding to our modern waste- land as the traditionalist eyes of Eliot saw it. But his purpose was neither to enjoy the luxury of misery nor to shock us with the disagreeable. "The essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal; it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory." Ali three—the boredom, the horror, the glory—are woven into his verse.

Though it has forebears, Eliofs poetry is nonetheless truly revolutionary, like the fiction of Proust [105] or Joyce [110] or the plays of Beckett [125]. It is exact and condensed on the one hand and rich in magical suggestion on the other. Every word or allusive echo carries its proper weight, and ali is borne upon a rhythmic current whose effect becomes evident when you read the lines aloud or listen to Eliot's own recording of them. At first the language seems private, impossible to pene- trate. But as one gains familiarity, it begins to emerge as a mar- velously precise and evocative rendering of states of mind peculiar to sensitive Western men and women at this particular stage of our evolution or devolution. And it shares at least one quality with the greatest verse, Shakespeare^ [39] or Dante's: It is rich in lines so finally expressive that they remain in our heads forever and become part of our emotional world.

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117

ALDOUS HUXLEY

1894-1963 Brave New World