Readers of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot will surely discover unpublished or previously uncollected essays that will enlarge their understanding of Eliot’s poetry and criticism. Volumes 1 and 2 of the forthcoming edition of eight digital volumes are now available through the academic database Project Muse, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Volume 1 (1905–1918) alone contains twenty-six previously unpublished essays and nearly one hundred pieces published in periodicals but never before collected. Volume 2 contains most of the essays—including “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Hamlet,” and “The Metaphysical Poets”—that secured Eliot’s fame as a critic. Now we can read these works in the context of the 130 essays, reviews, and letters to periodicals that he wrote in 1919–26. These two volumes print Eliot’s unpublished works, such as his Harvard University essays and the essay that the author said had left a “gap” in his studies of Elizabethan dramatists: “A Neglected Aspect of Chapman.” They appear for the first time in corrected, fully annotated texts. These volumes may well transform our understanding of Eliot’s intellectual and religious development. Review Essay

Journal Article T. S. Eliot and his Biographical Critics Get access Timothy Materer Timothy Materer University of Missouri MatererT@missouri.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Essays in Criticism, Volume 62, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 41–57, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgr028 Published: 01 January 2012

Reviewed by: James Merrill: Knowing Innocence, and: James Merrill and W. H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence Timothy Materer James Merrill: Knowing Innocence. Reena Sastri. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xiii + 244. $110.00 (cloth). James Merrill and W. H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence. Piotr K. Gwiazda. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xi + 203. $69.95 (cloth). James Merrill died in 1995, and it's too soon to know if he will be ranked among the major poets of mid-century America. Merrill's Collected Poems was published in 2001, and the record of his long and brilliant career inspired praise such as Helen Vendler's on the "Mozartian" quality [End Page 459] of his oeuvre. Since then a Collected Novels and Plays (2002), a Collected Prose (2004), and an edition of his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (2006) have appeared; but these volumes have received relatively little notice, and Merrill's reputation seems in a post-mortem slump. (The 2005 Blackwell Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry does not even mention him.) Critics often underestimate the emotional intensity of Merrill's poetry and consider him, for example, a poet of "medium range elegance and formal bent."1 Editions of Merrill's letters and journals as well as the forthcoming biography by Langdon Hammer should correct this misapprehension and renew interest in his poetry. Meanwhile, Merrill's reputation is sustained by academic studies. Reena Sastri's Knowing Innocence provides a comprehensive guide to Merrill's lyric poems and also illuminates his epic poetry and fiction. Piotr Gwiazda's Merrill and Auden is a scholarly account of the relationship between two major poets that continued to develop long after Auden's death. Sastri approaches Merrill as a formalist, and claims for him only a "place among postwar America's most significant poets" (4), but she is a sensitive close reader who demonstrates Merrill's gifts for indelible rhythms, brilliant images, and themes that are both serious and witty. She has an ear not only for word plays and rhymes but also for allusions to and echoes of modern poets such as W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, and for romantic poets such as William Blake, John Keats, and William Wordsworth. Her readings of major poems such as "Self-Portrait in Tyvek¯ Windbreaker," "Press Release," and "Oranges," even though she is unconcerned with them as anguished love poems, are detailed and illuminating. Although the subject of the book is innocence, as if it were an old-fashioned theme study, the book's real achievement is to demonstrate the intertextuality through which Merrill absorbs and renews the themes of precursors such as Wordsworth and Stevens. Among these themes are the nature of innocence, our perception of the natural world, individual freedom, and the identity of the self. The meaning of innocence, however, whether it's the supposed innocence of childhood, nature, science, or even language, shifts throughout the book in a sometimes strained attempt to make it seem the major obsession of Merrill's life. The theme is clearest in the discussion in the book's first chapter of Merrill's myth of lost childhood innocence in a poem such as "Scenes of Childhood." Sastri argues that she will demonstrate Merrill's early "struggle to sever childhood and innocence" and then show in Chapter Five that the later poems of A Scattering of Salts (1995) "bring childhood and innocence back together again" (13). She believes that Merrill "relinquishes the idea of childhood innocence" (25) after "Scenes of Childhood" (Water Street, 1962), but he never in fact embraced it, even in his student poems at Amherst College or in those of his earliest poetry volume The Black Swan (1946), which Sastri surprisingly does not discuss. One of the Black Swan poems, "Perspectives of a Lonesome Eye," begins: "In a green twilight the avenues of our love / Are shadowed by an unseen running child," leading to the statement that "emotions are least artless / When most experienced."2 This precocious poem then proceeds to ring all the changes on Merrill's dialectic of innocence and experience that pervade his work. Sastri is a perceptive guide...

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse Timothy Materer University of Missouri-Columbia Early in his career, James Merrill considered the influence of the modernist poets "something to react against" (Collected Prose 51). Merrill thought that T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams revealed a "drift toward the more or less monumental" that obscured the human scale of their work. In Merrill's view, they began their careers writing "small, controllable" poems, but then each produced—in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and Paterson—a "huge, unruly text that grapples ravenously with everything under the sun" (351). When he read Elizabeth Bishop, the intimate tone of her poetry seemed the "antidote to those ambitious and daunting 'giants' of modernism" (155, 163). When finishing his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), however, Merrill realized that his poetic development had come to resemble that of the modernists. He admitted in 1980 that, following the modernist tendency toward the monumental, he "felt a similar pressure at work in my own case" (351). The pressure that led Merrill to write the "huge, unruly text" of The Changing Light at Sandover included the desire to grapple with a variety of subjects. But more significant, as we will see in Merrill's own description of his development, was his desire to get beyond the limited sense of self and the constrained voice of his early [End Page 207] poetry. Like Eliot's Prufrock or Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, whom Pound described as "consciousness disjunct" (201), Merrill's poetic personae were limited by their alienated self-consciousness. Merrill's A Different Person (1993), a memoir that centers on the years 1950–52, describes his early career in the familiar terms of a young poet finding his own voice. 1 Dissatisfied with the voice of his early poems, he experimented by dramatizing aspects of the self as separate voices before he conceived of the poem as a medium for voices independent of the conscious self. In his one-act poetic play The Bait (1953) and long lyric poems such as "The Thousand and Second Night" and "From the Cupola" (Nights and Days, 1966), he experimented with a variety of speakers. In The Changing Light, he created a long poem that can be characterized in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms as a "polyphonic" work of layered voices. Merrill's ambition to speak in his own voice developed into the need to express the multiple selves or voices within him. Merrill's conception of himself as an "author" became more complex as he explored his poetic and sexual nature. A Different Person allows us to see why Merrill remarked on "how little choice I had in the matter" of his poetic development because of the complex psychological factors that went into it (Collected Prose 351). A Different Person links his growth as a poet to his growing understanding of his sexual nature. Finding his voice, his poetic muse, and a sense of his inner femininity were all linked. Merrill recalls making progress on The Bait only after he had made its narrator a woman, because "words came more easily to me in a woman's voice than in a man's" (Different Person 251). This statement seems surprising because, especially in the fifties, Merrill's poetry did not appear to speak in a feminine voice or create a feminine persona. Even though Merrill's love poems were written to other men, a reader of that time would be likely to assume that they were written by a man to a woman. As Merrill wrote in A Different Person, the [End Page 208] obscurity of his early poems had the effect of "masking . . . the gender of my loves" (183). Such masking and obscurity in his early poetry were limitations Merrill wanted to escape by finding a more authentic self and poetic voice. By leaving New York for Europe and eventually settling in Rome, he hoped to remake his poetry by remaking himself and becoming...

Research Article| June 01 2005 Mirrored Lives: Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill Timothy Materer Timothy Materer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2005) 51 (2): 179–209. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2005-3008 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Timothy Materer; Mirrored Lives: Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2005; 51 (2): 179–209. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2005-3008 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2005 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Marjorie Perloff is one of the few critics who is essential to our understanding of contemporary American poetry. Without her we could not trace its roots in twentieth-century modernism so clearly or distinguish the innovative from the imitative poets. She describes Twenty-First-Century Modernism as a “manifesto,” and many of her early books, such as The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981) and The Futurist Moment (1986), have the same tone. In these works she argues that the poetry of iconic representation has been exhausted and is being replaced by a poetry that features a free play of signifiers (with its resulting indeterminacy). In Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991), the closest in spirit to Twenty-First-Century Modernism, Perloff critiques contemporary poets and readers who believe, even in an age when the media have co-opted poetic imagism, that the image is the essence of poetry. The threat to genuine poetry is that it is confused with the poetry of the “direct” image and with the implication of an authentic self that mass discourse conditions us to accept uncritically. Perloff argues that the modern period is not over and that modernism is an unfinished project. Twenty-First-Century Modernism addresses a scene in which the universities and mass discourse have fostered an “official verse culture” (Charles Bernstein’s phrase; 155). “Establishment poets” (4) such as Anthony Hecht and Ed Hirsch write generic poems in which a “‘sensitive’ lyric speaker contemplates a facet of his or her world and makes observations about it, compares present to past, divulges some hidden emotion, or comes to a new understanding of the situation. The language is usually concrete and colloquial, the ironies and metaphors multiple, the syntax straightforward, the rhythms mute and low-key” (161–62). Although the irony, urban imagery, and technique of the “objective correlative” in such poetry derive from T. S. Eliot, Perloff observes that Eliot’s “Prufrock” is “more immediate and ‘contemporary’” than even the “fabled postmodern ‘breakthrough’ of Lowell’s Life Studies” (164). We can now see, as the quotation marks in her subtitle, The “New” Poetics, suggest, that the development of modernism was sidetracked by the world wars and then the Cold War. The challenge of experimental modernism has been taken up by avant-garde poets such as Bernstein, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Steve McCaffery rather than by the Establishment poets, who imitate modernist style without its innovative spirit. As she rethinks modernism, Perloff reevaluates Eliot’s key role in its development and the recent critical trends that have discounted it. In 1982 she asked if the modern era in poetry was best characterized as the age of 628 MLQ December 2004

(Simic 6), a Mozartian love poet (Vendler, Ardor 101), a magician (Fraser 3), and so richly gifted that he seemed extraterrestrial (Allison Lurie qtd. in Mendelsohn 16). But the reviewers were also struck by how his poetry is when seen as a whole. Even Adam Kirsch, who complains of Merrill's ironic detachment and aestheticism, concludes that in his poems he was one ofthe finest American poets of the last half-century (44). Charles Simic believes that Merrill's escape from the aesthete's aloofness by the time he published Water Street (1962) was in part inspired by confessional especially Lowell's Life Studies, with its autobiographical bent and shameless self-concentration. Simic writes that Lowell deeply influenced Merrill's preoccupations and stylistic directness, but he adds that Merrill did not share Lowell's need to blurt out dark secrets (6).' The inevitable reservation of critics, when they relate Merrill to the confessionals, is that he is never genuinely confessional. For example, when David Kalstone compares Merrill's poetry to so-called 'confessional' poetry, he argues that Merrill, unlike Lowell,

Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill, are the concluding lines of Sylvia Plath's Ravaged Face (116).1 In this poem, Plath uses major trope of modern writers, the wholesale rejection of the past, represented here by two symbolic figures from the Greek and Judeo-Christian traditions. The historical discontinuity of the modern age with the past is familiar in many modernist writers, as in Yeats's prediction of violent conclusion to the 2000-year cycle of Christianity and Eliot's less violent but still destructive dissociation of sensibility. But the closest we can come to Plath's sense of this discontinuity is probably Ted Hughes's statement about contemporary writers who gone beyond the modernist state of belonging spiritually to the last phase of Christian civilization. The world of these contemporary writers is a continuation or re-emergence of the pre-Christian world ... it is the world of the little pagan religions and cults, the primitive religions from which of course Christianity itself grew.2 Plath shares with Hughes an attempt to find new ground for writers beyond the traditions represented by Oedipus and Christ. Hughes sees such an attempt, for example, in East European writers like Vasko Popa who have in way cut their losses and cut the hopelessness of that civilization off.... At its most profound, such an attitude is a shifting

Critics of modern poetry have too often treated W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound as poetic opposites of modern literature. In this view, Yeats is last romantic, who took poetry of mysticism and archetypal to a brilliant extreme in English literature; Pound is poet of precise image, who believed that the natural object is always adequate symbol and who scorned Romantic age as a blurry, messy sort of a period.'' Pound himself initiated this kind of contrast when he wrote of Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer) in 1913: Mr. Hueffer's beliefs about art [of poetry] may be best explained by saying that they are in diametric opposition to those of Mr. Yeats. Mr. Yeats has been subjective; believes in glamour and associations which hang near words.... Mr. Hueffer believes in an exact rendering of things. Pound indicates which side of opposition he is on when he writes in same passage that Yeats's poetic method is very dangerous and that he would rather talk about poetry with Ford Madox Hueffer than with any man in London.2 This 1913 statement is strengthened by famous description of Yeats in 1948 Pisan Cantos: