Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot
by Professor Denis Donoghue, Denis Donoghue
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Book Summary Information
Author: Denis Donoghue, Professor Denis DonoghueEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-01
ISBN: 0300097190
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Yale University Press
Book Reviews of Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot
Book Review: One of the best books on Eliot's poetry
Summary: 5 Stars
After going through volumes of literary criticism of Eliot by luminaries like F. R. Leavis, Edmund Wilson, Northrop Frye, and I.A. Richards, Denis Donohue's "Words Alone," (along with an outstanding but out-of-print biography of T.S. Eliot by the great poet Stephen Spender) is, I think, among the best books on Eliot's poetry. Read especially his definition of the symbolist use of words, contrasting its use by Eliot and Yeats.
Disregard the above review by Publisher's Weekly. Eliot's anti-Semitism is tired and old and not especially interesting to those who understand that anti-Semitism in Europe those days was as flagrant as, say, anti-Americanism is today.
Not only Eliot but many poets of his times like Pound were anti-Semites, perceiving Jews as detriments of classical, if high Greco-Roman culture they so admired. Eliot, said Wilson, was the most chiseled person he met and if you trace his lineage from his ancestral Unitarianism (one of his forefathers was a Salem judge), his youthful New England Puritanism, his later English Anglicanism, and his lifelong disdain of "barbarism," you needn't strain too hard to understand his anti-Semitism, agree or no.
And unlike Pound and Woolf, not to mention the French Symbolists before him and Plath and Millay after him, Eliot was too intelligent to end up so tragic a figure, embracing Christianity--the "prodigious responsibility"--late in life. He devoutly prayed the Rosary everyday and met his second and much beloved wife after writing his Christian poem "Journey of the Magi." (Valerie Eliot heard the poem recited by Sir John Gielgud on radio and resolved at once to meet him. In Eliot, Dante met and MARRIED his Beatrice.)
If you want to see the effects of Christianity on a great person, simply read Eliot's oevure's of poems in chronological succession and track the progress of his life, going from a poet deeply ingrained with "religious sensibilities," like all true poets, and feeling very ennui to full-blown devout Christian and feeling very happy, unlike most poets.
Professor Donohue's brilliant insight in Eliot's progression from Pre-Raphaelite symbolism to Christian iconography is worth a special mention. A major literary--not to mention personal--accomplishment since great writers like Yeats, Mann, and Hesse, not to mention a thousand contemporary authors, never made the joyful transition themselves. That Eliot made the transition himself is a staggering achievement, that Professor Donohue recognized it and articulated it is, I think, a momumental achievement in Eliot criticism.
For those who are still stuck on new age, eastern, or heathen mysticism, I can't recommend this book and the study of Eliot enough.
"In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger..."
But if you TRUELY want to split hairs, read Eliot's critical essays to better understand how he became "a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglican in religion." (And lucky are you who are about to read them for the first time.)
Mr. Donohue presents illuminating stuff--far removed from "intellectual conceit" and academic jumbo-mumbo, it has the flavor of the New Critics, ushered in by the figure of towering Eliot.
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