Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot

by Denis Donoghue

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature.Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot -- from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists", Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied".Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue's case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot's poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.

Genres: Poetry, Literary Criticism

352 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Diann Blakely]

The seeds of National Poetry Month began to germinate when the former executive director of the Academy of American Poets, William Wadsworth, studied at Columbia University with the late Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, whose COLLECTED POEMS IN ENGLISH has been on many shelves since its 2000 publication; now a biography has appeared. While Brodsky defected from his native Russia and became a fan of many things American, our native suspicion—and even dislike—of poetry stunned him. Russia regularly fills soccer stadiums with fans eager to hear Yevgeny Yevtushenko, just as Irish citizens do the same to hear Seamus Heaney; in most American cities, poets are lucky to read to a dozen folks, not including relatives and bookstore staff. Yet Brodsky became convinced that the American avoidance of poetry resulted from the art’s elitist and academic associations, not the general reader’s inability to understand and enjoy verse. For in Brodsky’s totalitarian Russia, where the average citizen’s level of education fell considerably short of the American standard, poetry was customarily available in village and town shops and read by a large number of the customers, who browsed through newly published volumes at checkout counters the same way Americans do with PEOPLE and TV GUIDE.

Is this because even well-educated Americans lack a particular verbal skill possessed by Russians? Not according to Eliot, who, unlike Brodsky, wasn’t exactly known for his democratic politics, but read to football stadiums filled with willing listeners himself on visits back to his native country during his latter years. Genuine poetry, as the St. Louis native said many times, “can communicate before it is understood,” meaning that the art’s more obviously complex elements are rarely as important as its simplest—imagery, rhythm, and emotional urgency. Thus mass interest in poetry, both for the author of OLD POSSUM'S BOOK OF PRACTICAL CATS and for the Russian émigré, finally depends on availability and the reader’s willingness to participate actively in the poetic experience.

Eliot’s and Brodsky’s ideal readers are willing NOT to understand immediately. They are willing to engage deeply with otherness without judgment, and to submit their own egos, sometimes over the course of many years and many rereadings, to a poet’s work. Such submission has its best contemporary proponent in the renowned Irish critic Denis Donoghue, who—coincidentally enough—exemplifies the process in a study of Eliot that combines a lifetime’s immersion and reimmersion in Eliot’s poetry with intellectual memoir, proving a the willingness to subsume self in someone else’s words is finally nothing more—and nothing less—complicated than literate empathy.

Nonetheless, it’s significant that Eliot chose to live in England, not in America: On these shores we worship independence and view any kind of submission with something close to horror. After all, our country’s favorite mascots are drawn from the frontier experiences that demanded a perhaps ultimately crippling myth of self-reliance: The strong, silent cowboy; the Huck Finn who defies attempts at “sivilizing” him; the stoic mother jostling along on a covered wagon; the one-horse town’s only woman, usually a golden-hearted prostitute—many, many variations of these characters remain ubiquitous, from MTV to Montana to fashion magazines, and none of them is even remotely hospitable to the fostering of a national appreciation for language. In fact, a cynic would say that America’s only real lingua franca is the one created by advertising, which sells back to us images of the very same characters named above.

Not that Eliot ever condemned popular culture--think of his love for his native St. Louis's jazz and blues, his essay on Marie Lloyd, the obvious influence of cinema on his work. The dramatic shifts between the demotic, the pure lyricism of "Phlebas the Phoenician," the satirical, and the oracular combine in a polyphony to create the greatest single work of the twentieth century, THE WASTE LAND. Eliot wasn't an aesthete who believed poetry could replace religion, but many handed copies of that poem, distributed gratis during the first celebration of National Poetry Month, reserve a place on their bedside table for the small books--sometimes stacked atop their worn King James Bibles and/or Shakespeare's collected plays,

(earlier version originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE in 2000)

[David]

I mistakenly bought this book thinking it was a biography. The title alone should have alerted me to its being a work of literary criticism. As much as I love poetry and T.S. Eliot's, there are too many other books of genres I find more engaging that I want to read than to see myself working my way through this very academic tome in the foreseeable future.