T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide

by David E. Chinitz

For decades T. S. Eliot has been applauded and denounced as a staunch champion of high art and an implacable opponent of popular culture. But Eliot's elitism was never what it seemed. T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide represents this great writer as the complex figure he was, an artist attentive not only to literature but also to detective fiction, vaudeville theater, jazz, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley.

David Chinitz argues that Eliot was productively engaged with popular culture in some form at every stage of his career, and that his response to it, as expressed in his poetry, plays, and essays, was dynamic rather than hostile. He shows that American jazz, for example, was a major influence on Eliot's poetry during its maturation. He discusses Eliot's surprisingly persistent interest in popular culture, both in such famous works as The Waste Land and in such lesser-known pieces as Sweeney Agonistes . And he traces Eliot's long, quixotic struggle to close the widening gap between high art and popular culture through a new type of public contemporary popular verse drama.

What results is a work that will persuade adherents and detractors alike to return to Eliot and find in him a writer who liked a good show, a good thriller, and a good tune, as well as a "great" poem.

274 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2003

Reviews

[Jacky Chan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating so far (and will, I'm sure, continue to be so). Chinitz's prose is brisk, readable, and every bit as interesting as what he has to say. T. S. Eliot has fascinated the world ever since he emerged from the Atlantic shores, and Chinitz shows here that this is because Eliot engages with the very roots of culture. We see an Eliot searching for his own place within the British tradition, an Eliot deeply ambivalent about his American roots, an Eliot consciously fashioning and refashioning himeslf for the world, an Eliot whose modernism bridges where other modernisms divide. To read Eliot might seem like a fashionable thing to do at the moment, given the recent unsealing of Eliot's letters to Emily Hale, but we must not forget that Eliot is so much more than a literary celebrity. Our world and culture is very much his legacy, what he shored up with the fragments of cultures past and present. And Chinitz reminds us very well of that.

[Birch · Rating 4 out of 5]

:D