On Company Time by Harris Donal;

Author:Harris, Donal;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004020, Literary Criticism/American/General, LAN008000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Journalism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-10-04T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Our Eliot

Mass Modernism and the American Century

My business is with words; yet the words were beyond my command.

—T. S. ELIOT, 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature Banquet Speech

The Uses of T. S. Eliot

“Has the Reader Any Rights Before the Bar of Literature?” asked the inaugural issue of Time News-Magazine in March 1923. It raised the question in response to the recent news that the American literary magazine The Dial had awarded T. S. Eliot its second annual prize for outstanding service to letters—and the hefty sum of $2,000 that accompanied it—partially because of The Waste Land, which The Dial published for the first time in the United States. Instead of directly answering his own rhetorical question about readerly rights, the Time reviewer laid out what he sees as the contemporary field of letters: “There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand it.” The broken signal between poet and reader is not an accident, according to Time: “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax” and that its poet thinks that “lucidity is not part of the auctorial task.”1 What’s worse, though, is that the hoaxers are not limited to poets and novelists; they also publish, review, and publicize this new literature. Burton Rascoe at the New York Tribune, Edmund Wilson at Vanity Fair, and John Middleton Murry at The Athenaeum (referred to only as “a British critic”) all positively review Eliot’s experiment. They legitimize it, they rain down American literary awards on it—they make it circulate.2

At the onset of the modern news magazine, then, we find modernism as news. More than this, we find the positive evaluations of modernism from other periodicals reframed as news about the unhealthy state of literary culture. The reviewer, John C. Farrar, was a Yale friend of Henry Luce and Britton Hadden, and he had a personal stake in the success or failure of Eliot’s formal innovations. Though he is now remembered more for his outsized influence on American literary production as a publisher, in 1923 Farrar was an up-and-coming poet in his own right. Yale published his first two books of verse, Forgotten Shrines (1919) and Songs for My Parents (1921), and Forgotten Shrines won the second annual Yale Younger Poets Prize. Placing Farrar’s Yale prize alongside Eliot’s Dial prize can help explain the animus behind Farrar’s Time review, as both poets and their prizes fight for space in “the economy of prestige”3 as representatives in the struggle between the academic poetry of university presses and the more aggressively experimental work taking place in little magazines. Forgotten Shrines displays a formal regularity and pastoral vision of poetry that provides a perfect antipode to Eliot’s poem. The book is broken into three sections—“Portraits,” “Miscellaneous,” and “Stanzas”—and is full of tightly crafted, rhyming stanzaic portraits of rural simplicity such as “A Hill-Side Farmer,” “A Hill-Woman,” “A Coal-Miner,” and “A Barge-Wife,” among others. Farrar’s poetry, then, devotes itself in subject

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