Twentieth Century Views; T.S. Eliot: A Collection of Critical Essays by Hugh Kenner

Author:Hugh Kenner [Kenner, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Poetry, General, Literary Criticism, Talking books, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, European
ISBN: 9780132743242
Amazon: 0132743248
Publisher: Prentice Hall Trade
Published: 1962-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

T. S. Eliot, 1925-1935

by D. W. Harding

This new volume [Collected Poems, 1909-1935] is an opportunity, not for a review -- for "The Poetry of T. S. Eliot" begins to have the intimidating sound of a Tripos question -- but for asking whether anything in the development of the poetry accounts for the change in attitude that has made Mr. Eliot's work less chic now than it was ten years ago. Perhaps the ten years are a sufficient explanation -- obvious changes in fashionable feeling have helped to make the sort-of-communist poets popular. But on the other hand it may be that these poets gratify some taste that Mr. Eliot also gratified in his earlier work but not in his later. If so it is surely a taste for evocations of the sense of protest that our circumstances set up in us; for it seems likely that at the present time it is expressions of protest in some form or other that most readily gain a poet popular sympathy. And up to The Waste Land and The Hollow Men this protest -- whether distressed, disgusted, or ironical -- was still the dominant note of Mr. Eliot's work, through all the subtlety and sensitiveness of the forms it took. Yet already in these two poems the suggestion was creeping in that the sufferers were also failures. We are the hollow men, but there are, besides,

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom

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