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subsequent ideas and the polemical emphases of the later intellectual
commitments can be more easily assessed.
Eliot s immersion in the American language took a new twist when he
found himself at Harvard. In St. Louis the Eliots were an elite family; in
Boston Tom was surrounded by the scions of the New England Brahminate.
He was no longer on top of the social heap by virtue of his family s pedigree.
In New England all the boys into whose company he was thrust had equally
distinguished bloodlines and connections. In Missouri his family s social
position and his delicate health made him something of an outsider, but it
was a comfortable remoteness fashioned by privilege. In Boston he faced a
diVerent dilemma. His speech, infused with a Missouri twang, marked him as
an outsider in a new way. There was nothing comfortable about the taint of
provincialism that accompanied the flat vowels of his accent. Some adoles-
cents, with a more rebellious streak in them, might have pressed home their
diVerence from their fellows. Eliot, in the social maneuver that would later
acclimatize him to Britain, simply changed the way he spoke. Later in life, the
words   provincial  or   provincialism,  tainted by the experience of disquiet
in adolescence, would invariably take on a pejorative association for Eliot.
A curiosity and wariness about language and culture emerges very early in
Eliot s intellectual life. It comes in comments and observations in papers that
he wrote during his university years and in his doctoral thesis, Knowledge and
Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley (1916). But this focus on language
took its most important form, not in his philosophical studies per se, but
Works 41
in his poetry and in his criticism. The causes of this turn to language in the
twentieth century are many and complex but perhaps the single most
important reason for a poet, the one that captures the mood of Eliot s
early and even some of his late poetry, has been described best by the
German philosopher Heidegger in his comments about the spoliation of
language as a vital medium for connection in modern times. He argues
that in modernity,   language in general is worn out and used up  an
indispensable but masterless means of communication that may be used as
one pleases, as indiVerent as a means of public transport, as a street car
which everyone rides in. Everyone speaks and writes away in the language,
without hindrance and above all without danger.  2
Heidegger goes on to say that only   a very few  are able to bring language
back to life from the death-in-life into which it has fallen in modern times.
This is the special task of poets and Eliot seems to have understood this as his
own particular poetic task. The possibilities of making poetry from a fallen
language, a language exhausted by use, worn down by the nonstop traYc in
pedestrian chatter and triteness, was suggested by his reading of the poetry of
Charles Baudelaire and Jules Laforgue.
Early poems
This conception of his task can be seen in an early poem like   Conversation
Galante  (CP 35) published in his first collection in 1917, The Love Song of
J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations. Framed as a stilted dialogue about
the moon, music, and miscommunication between two lovers, the poem
heightens our sense of the inveterate languageness of experience. Contact
between the two lovers is mediated by the labored metaphors about the
moon. They foreground the impossibility of getting past a language used
up by the standard clichés we associate with such a scene. The poem makes us
conscious of the world as a cardboard stage with pretty characters posed in
self-conscious imitation of the sentimental lovers one might find in an
Elizabethan play. These are not the witty lovers of Shakespeare, the Beatrice
and Benedict of Much Ado About Nothing, for example. These represent a
dreary Hero and a vacuous Claudio. The care that is taken in how the
language is put into circulation and the relation between experience and
the words that both construct and interpret it are clear loci of attention in the
poem. The emphasis on what is said by the two lovers in the first few lines
attunes us quickly to the languageness of experience, while implying at a
deeper level a philosophical problem of wide compass. The poem satirizes a
42 The Cambridge Introduction to T. S. Eliot
situation of reticence, misunderstanding, and coyness, which would become
a stock scene in Eliot s early poetry. It unveils a society where life seems little
more than a masquerade, an empty ritual of idle talk and narcissism.
In order to understand in greater detail the satiric uses to which Eliot put
much of his earlier poetry, we need to understand the upper-middle-class
social milieu, especially the manners and mores of New England, which
provided Eliot with his experiences as an adolescent and as a young man.
He learned early, as did   Miss Helen Slingsby  (CP 31) the   secret codes  of
this world. But his attitude toward this environment was ambivalent. He
both enjoyed the benefits that such a world had to oVer him  a Harvard
education, study abroad, and so on  and loathed them. Enough at least to
grasp any excuse not to return when he escaped to continental Europe and
England in 1914. Although he found himself in avant-garde circles in London
in his first English years, his changing religious sensibilities moved him toward
more socially central aYliations. There was a rough equivalence between
Eliot s social destination in England and his social origins in America. His
experience of emigration from America to England was keyed by his sense of
America as   a family extension  of England, so that his migration was from the
peripheries of a culture back to its center.3
From this view of its origins, Eliot s America had come into being as the
consequence of a number of sociopolitical transformations in England in
the seventeenth century. In virtual isolation, as early as the 1620s the pilgrims
and earliest settlers had begun to erect a sort of paternalistic culture from the
least promising fragments of English social and religious life in the seven-
teenth century. Later, the Puritan émigrés were people who could not stom-
ach or survive the political and social settlements in Restoration England at
the end of the century. These fragments, whose aVective experience was
determined by their genesis in opposition to the established continuities of
English royalism and the Church of England, also turned out to be the most
open to Enlightenment ideas in the eighteenth century, through which
the hinterland finally glimpsed an acceptable, republican future for itself.
As an Enlightenment extension of Europe, having never lost its sense of [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]