Title: Turning in the Widening Gyres of Eliot Criticism
Abstract: Any new volume written or edited by Jewel Spears Brooker should make the world take notice. I have long been an admirer of Brooker, who is at her best when she is passionately engaged in explicating the historical and philosophical contexts that bear on the poetry. Brooker may be explaining what is about or what he means, but her subtext is always why matters. In her newest volume, Brooker has assembled a group of scholars to whom matters deeply, and their thoughtful engagements reward study. Even though the articles are not of a consistently high quality, most of them are good to excellent, and anyone seriously interested in criticism will want this volume on the shelf. I must confess a little dismay at the title: the a reference to Eliot's vision, in Four Quartets, to the fractious, always-already disintegrating place (what some call the world) in contrast to which sought the even more real still point of spiritual life. Defining how Eliot's work fits into our turning world is a formidible task, and the title seems to promise a result at once melodramatic and vague. This broad reach even tempts Brooker into an uncharacteristic cliche in her introduction: Eliot's poetry, she claims, is rooted in popular culture as in scholarship, and as the world turns, it has been reabsorbed into the popular imagination ... (xiii). That the volume does not seem to cohere as a collection is less a comment on the failure of its titular premise than a recognition that it is nearly impossible to convince scholars of varied interests to address in any coherent way the place of Eliot's work in something as wide as the world, turning or otherwise. As a more accurate title, however, A Group of New Articles about would set the wrong tone, so one must grant some concessions to marketing strategies. But this problem of overreaching goes deeper than the title page. As with the volume's title, Brooker's subcategories attempt to make the articles resonate in larger ways than they actually do. For example, the first section, Eliot and Innocence/Experience?considered either with or without its Blakean subtext?seems an odd category in which to place an article on Eliot's religious sensibility. The third subtitle, Eliot and the Other Arts, presages a comparison of to arts outside his milieu, but two of its three articles focus on (playwright and poet) and his relationship to Shakespeare (playwright) and Dante (poet). And the fifth section?Eliot and Anti-Semitism?addresses neither nor his alleged anti-Semitism, but focuses more narrowly on Anthony Julius' charges of the same in his book Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form. But if one is willing to look past what the volume seems to promise to what the volume actually offers, there are many delights. My personal favorite is William Blissett's T.S. and Heraclitus. Blissett handles with aplomb the aphoristic terrain ofthe Greek philosopher in an essay that manages to be serious and scholarly, as well as quirky and amusing. In another essay, Marianne Thormahlen, discussing an often overlooked theme, argues that although references to childhood in Eliot's work are few, they are evocative and emotionally
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot