Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot.(Review)

Denis Donoghue Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot. Yale University Press, 326 pages, $26.95

Denis Donoghue takes his ride from a line of Yeats's: "Words alone are certain good." Yeats may have believed this, but Eliot didn't and nor does Donoghue. His book begins as an intellectual autobiography, an awkward framework, which he soon discards, though preserving an agreeably personal tone which never becomes slack or self-indulgent. His preoccupation with the philosophy of language is hot of the fashionable kind--Wittgenstein is mentioned only once in passing, with more frequent references to Bradley, Hegel, and Kant. Yet we also encounter Adorno, Habermas, and Heidegger; here, for once, is someone who has taken the measure of postmodernism and can make intelligent use of it, without supposing that it supersedes all previous thought.

Donoghue uses Eliot to throw into relief the inadequacies of that laureate of the Enlightenment, Wallace Stevens, who is bitingly censured: "The main difference between the pope and Wallace Stevens is that the pope docs hot claim to have invented, or to have deduced from his private desires, the articles of his belief." Stevens is presented as a transcendentalist in the Emerson-Thoreau tradition, which Eliot pronounced "the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity." Stevens took for granted the bankruptcy of Christianity, elaborating in its stead an Arnoldian cultural theology, in which God is replaced by imagination, adherence to a church by membership of an intellectual elite, prayer by poetic rumination, and ultimate truth by the supreme fiction. In all this he is an antitype of Eliot. "All men are priests," Stevens proclaims in "Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas"; to which Donoghue brutally responds: "Is that all Stevens's creed comes to, a self-deluding Humanism? ... His poems assume that having a feeling is enough; there is no warrant for interrogating it."

The difference between Eliot and Stevens--who dismissed The Waste Land as "negligible" and "a bore," while quietly appropriating some of Eliot's techniques--raises questions, Donoghue argues, about modernism, specifically the nature and function of poetic symbolism and its relation to syntax. In his early poetry, Eliot borrowed Laforgue's trick of juxtaposing situations and moods while abstaining from syntactic connexion. Donoghue contends that it is a distinctive mark of modernist poetry that its words possess "relations ... not prescribed or predictive but experimental." In contrast to classical poetry, which is "organized on the assumption that nature is continuous; hence the primacy of syntax" and whose words are therefore subject to a causal grammar, modernist poetry treats words as "independent and therefore vulnerable." This is pressed rather too hard, for, after all, the words in any poem establish formal relations among themselves merely by coming one after another: but one sees what Donoghue means; the broken syntax mimics the broken world. Yet Eliot's quotations, allusions, and echoes invest his poems with a literary authority independent of that world. This introduces a major theme of Words Alone: Eliot's compulsion to transcend the personal--a trait which, paradoxically, underlies his weakest as well as his greatest poetry.

Eliot's verbal universe, before his conversion, is claustrophobic. Through Prufrock, Gerontion, and his other personae, he grapples with the same subject as he perceived in Hamlet: the agony of having a capacity for consciousness that surpasses any use to which one can put it. This extreme self-awareness is also, as he accepted from his study of F. H. ...