ABSTRACT
The familiarity of Tradition and the Individual Talent breeds not so much contempt as staleness. Eliot’s ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’, in which so much was invested by the New Criticism, now seems a known quantity, thoroughly absorbed and largely superseded, and his verse, so readily assumed to vindicate and be vindicated by this aesthetic, has tended, over recent years, to be greeted with a similar weary recognition. Anything so firmly lodged within the canon, it is supposed, can only represent an orthodoxy against which to rebel. I wish to dispel this complacency by stressing what is ‘perverse’ in Eliot’s early poetry, in particular Poems 1920. For over fifty years, the collection was subject to a virtual conspiracy of silence concerning its violently repudiatory sexuality. Eliot’s ‘persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation’ (Richards 1926:292) was readily granted a representative and even heroically diagnostic status; Randall Jarrell’s tribute, for instance, is entitled ‘T. S. Eliot as International Hero’ (Schwartz: [1945] 1970). Yet explicit sexual
reference has been customarily recuperated as demonstrating a broader social degeneration, or simply ignored. As early as 1931, the formative influence of American Puritanism, with its ‘dark rankling of passions inhibited’, was noted by Edmund Wilson (1931:102). Yet in A Half-Century of Eliot Criticism, compiled, it must be said, by a woman, Mildred Martin, in 1972, there are no entries under disgust, eroticism, female, femininity, impotence, misogyny, obscenity, sexuality or woman (compared to, for example, seven articles on the influence of Conan Doyle). And in 1980, Beatrice Ricks, in T.S. Eliot: A Bibliography of Secondary Works does little better, recording one article on impotence (Fitz 1971) one on disgust (Johnson 1969); and a solitary survey of his representation of women (Sampley 1968). Perhaps the decorum of such lacunae may be approved, but more is at stake than the occasional suppression of a lurid detail: I shall argue that the strength of this phase of Eliot’s poetry lies in the virulence of its misogyny, and its capacity not only to shock and repel, but also to implicate.
