Rhyme and Reason.(Review)

Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot, by Denis Donoghue (Yale, 326 pp., $26.95)

Is T. S. Eliot a great poet, and if so, what is the nature of his greatness? Intelligent people have been debating this question since 1915, when "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" first appeared in Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine. Literary critic Denis Donoghue now offers to demonstrate Eliot's greatness by closely examining his use of language. This is supremely important because Eliot expanded the possibilities of our language, and consequently our possibilities of cognition.

Donoghue has been absorbed by Eliot's poetry for decades, both as a professor at New York University and as a man of acute sensibility. In Words Alone he has given us the best book written so far about Eliot. He settles one major question after another, and reinforces his authority with careful and decisive readings of the poems. He also weaves in his own critical arguments with colleagues going back to his days at University College in Dublin, where he studied under the well- known scholar and critic Donald Davie. Donoghue's interlocutors in this project-too many to name here-contribute valuably, even in disagreement. In this sense the book is not only a work of criticism and elucidation but a work of art that, drenched in time and the ongoing conversation about Eliot, manages to bring it all to a point of clarification that has the character of inevitability.

Central to this project are the words of Eliot's poetry, how they work and to what effect. Donoghue takes his title from Yeats's lyric "The Song of the Happy Shepherd." That short poem begins, "The woods of Arcady are dead, / And over is their antique joy." The poetic homeland of Arcady is now, in effect, a wasteland. The last line reads, "Words alone are certain good."

The shepherd may believe this, at least for the joyful moment of his song. But neither Eliot nor Donoghue believes that "words alone are certain good." As Donoghue shows through his explication of Eliot's poetry, words are indeed one way towards certain good, but it is a difficult way. The order of words, slippery as they are, may reflect or point toward an order beyond words.

Donoghue is an extraordinarily good reader of Eliot's words, and here his reader wishes to cry out, "Yes, attentiveness is all!" Consider what he does with ten very familiar lines from the 1925 poem "The Hollow Men":

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams