The Poet T S Eliot by Denis Donoghue, review Pat Boran

Words Alone. The Poet T S Eliot by Denis Donoghue. Yale. UK £17.95 HB.

(from Sunday Tribune, February 2001)

Since his death in 1965, TS Eliot's reputation has undergone, in the words of Michael Schmidt, 'a serious and excessive devaluation'. The difficulty of many of the poems, where depth of reference and allusion seems compounded by a chorus of ever-shifting voices, inevitably contributes to this fact. So too do accusations of anti-Semitism in both the poetry and the critical work.

In an attempt to explain and share his own long-standing passion for Eliot, and conscious that a journey of exploration will lead the reader into a landscape at times almost devoid of certain landmarks, a landscape of words alone, Denis Donoghue has written a highly personal book in which, despite just a single encounter with the poet himself, Eliot and the work are real, felt presences. Hugh Kenner's 'invisible poet' proves not to have been in hiding, after all; rather his invisibility seems like a sacrifice that had to be paid for words.

In the first chapter of this fascinating, multi-layered book -- part autobiography, part homage, part re-evaluation -- Donoghue returns to 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', these days perhaps the best known of the poems but one that took almost twenty years to create an audience for itself. The observation that 'We are not allowed to escape from the words into another place' points up one of the great difficulties and attractions of the poem, at the same time as nodding back in the direction of the book's title, itself a borrowing from Yeats. The places, houses and streets, even the famous 'you and I' of Prufrock's opening, are, as perhaps in the work of no English language poet before, wholly shadows and phantoms. The reader seems to see things only, seconds later, to suspect they are not there at all. Even the famous 'overwhelming question' is never actually enunciated. All that is certain is the sense of absence, of something fallen between the cracks. In Eliot, meaning is but a small and unreliable part, something that must 'do the best it can'. And there are more than occasional moments in which 'language stands baffled'.

Then there is the thorny question of emotional coldness. In a later discussion of 'The Waste Land', Donoghue points out that Eliot's poems often try 'to escape from the emotional condition that incited them by working through a range of alternative conditions'. And earlier, Eliot's admiration of what he calls the 'intense frigidity' of one French poet's work indicates that 'emotions are ambiguous gifts or blows to be deflected'. In between, discussing what he believes to be Eliot's most beautiful poem, 'La Figlia che Piange', Donoghue makes one of many brilliant observations -- about Eliot's but perhaps also about all good poetry -- when he says 'His early poems analyze feelings he didn't otherwise have'. Here he raises Eliot's declared 'escape from emotion' to a new level. 'Other emotions would not gain a hearing, even if they were his,' he concludes. 'They become his as the poem comes to recognize its formal destiny.'

The reader who comes to this book for an easy-to-digest account of the work of the American poet for whom becoming a European, rather than an Englishman, was 'the final perfection' will face challenges. Eliot's use of the symbolist 'juxtaposition without cupola' -- unlinked images placed side by side -- as well as his use of voices that may be, as in 'Ash Wednesday' 'purely textual', make knowledge of the poet's life of little help in approaching the poems, and for this reason the focus is the words themselves.

The shifting narrative identities accord with similar revisions and breakdowns in other 20 th century art forms, and the copious quotations and foreign language epigrams seem often intended as little more than shadows of other times and cultures. But perhaps confusion is a built-in fact, and Eliot was right: 'The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.' If so, a committed, sensitive reader like Donoghue is irreplacable.