Eliot, Pound, and Early Modernist Poetics

In considering the previous class’ discussion of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, I am still stuck by the sense of mediation, both from the tone of the work as well as from the guided discussion that followed it. Indeed, there were no easy answers, no demarcations of black or white, merely infinite shades of grey. In particular, the discussion of the tension between rural and urban and how those two worlds had no singular champions. The city of London was integral to the Bloomsbury existence, but the rural was equally vital. Neat categorization does not work with such subtle intertwining threads. I am somewhat at a loss in my internal analysis of the Bloomsbury Group – they seem to defy easy theses.

In considering the current readings, I am struck by several things about Pound and Eliot. The feel of Pound’s and Eliot’s work, in light of the readings, exhibits a far different sensibility. Where Forster’s prose is overall gentle and balanced, Pound and Eliot appear fiercer, more stalwart, and territorial. Indeed, Pound’s statement’s from “A Retrospect” are direct, and he wants poetry to be “harder, saner,” and “nearer the bone.” There is no mediation here; there is attack. Likewise, as Eliot says in his “Function of Criticism” that comparison and analysis are tools that can be misused without lucidity, and that “The real corruptors supply opinion and fancy.” There is a predatory directness to it all. The poetry they value is essential, spare, and in and of itself.

“To define is to kill. To suggest is to create.” – Stephen Mallarmé

One gets the sense that Pound and Eliot would prefer to define and kill than leave a suggestion alive to create an erroneous impression. Take Eliot’s critique of Hamlet. He calls it a failure because the audience does not feel the horror intended – even as Materer notes that one cannot divine what reaction Shakespeare intended. As such, Eliot defines a singular point of view of a creative work and deems it the authoritative point of view.

This leads me to another impression from the readings. If Eliot and Pound profited greatly from their status as poets and opinion makers, then their art and intellectual pursuits become not just practices, but resources – ducats to purchase the ultimate prize, power.

Materer notes that Eliot and Pound sought not just to be great poets but great critics as well. Likewise, they and their contemporaries (such as Hulme) revered the “Classical” forms. If Eliot began as a revolutionary poet who then later became a critic who revered the Classics and made them his standard, one might view his rebellion, his desire for influence, and his quest to control the definitions of that which is “good” as a grand poetic and critical version of the Oedipus Complex, wherein the great poetic fathers of the Classical era become both objects of reverence and revolt. Eliot, in become the great poet and the great critic, casts down his fathers and elevates himself to their throne, all the while nodding toward their influence upon him.

Thought digression: if, as one has proposed, that we are still in the “Modern” era, especially the “Heroic Modern” era of Eliot and Pound, then who shall seek to cast them from their Olympus and crown themselves as the new high arbiter of poetics?