Peter Howarth

Eliot in the underworld: the politics of fragmentary form

Many critics of T. S. Eliot have expressed their bafflement at the disparity between his conservative, authoritarian politics and his radical aesthetic form. This is part of a question which resonates for modernist studies more widely, of course, and since Frank Kermode’s Romantic Image, there has been a fairly well-trodden route tracing an answer in the connections between the unificatory poetics of the non-discursive autonomous artwork, instant, immediate and brooking no dissent, and the authoritarian politics based on violent and unreflective unity of the nation or tribe, unified by faith in the political artist’s genius. But Eliot is a more difficult case, since much of his philosophical and aesthetic enterprise was written against the poetics of the unreflective, and The Waste Land is exemplary in its openness, plurality and resistance to any single dominant authority of either narrative voice or interpretation, its lack of closure literally realised in the way it has no final full stop. Yet its author’s social vision was less interested in openness: as Kenneth Asher has explored, much of Eliot’s recommended reading in The Criterion through the 1920s is politically ultramontane, and while Eliot was no fascist, also sometimes violently authoritarian. Hence his study is forced to conclude with the question which worried Terry Eagleton some years earlier, ‘how did one fit together the lyric poet of chaos and the plus orthodoxe que les orthodoxes champion of cultural institutions?’ Tracing the relation between Eliot’s fragmented form and its paradoxical political resonances is a complex business, but despite his hostility to Arnoldian substitutions of poetry for religion, it is not really plausible to claim that Eliot himself divorced poetic form from politics. The ostensible formalism of his claim in the 1928 edition of The Sacred Wood that this early criticism tried to deal with poetry ‘primarily as poetry and not another thing’, and that only later did he realise that this was an impossible separation, is double-edged; if politics really are always involved in purely poetic judgements, then these early essays will be political despite themselves. And for the first 15 years of his critical career Eliot cast much of Textual Practice 20(3), 2006, 441–462

Desire, discontent, parody

If English Renaissance sonnet sequences are about anything they are about desire, but in order to appreciate the import of that word it might be worth, for a moment, transmuting it into a baser metal: to convert ‘desire’, that is, into the older and more native word, ‘want’. ‘Want’ derives from the Old Norse vant , which entered the language via the Viking invasions of the Dark Ages and, from the beginning, signified a lack or deficiency, the state of missing or not having something, as in – to cite the Oxford English Dictionary ’s example – var vant kýr , ‘a cow was missing’ (‘to wane’ – to reduce or diminish in size – derives, incidentally, from the same source). It was not until the eighteenth century, some thousand years later, that the verb ‘to want’ first came to develop the positive sense of yearning or longing for the missed object, while the noun never did, retaining its original negative sense to this day (as in ‘a want of delicacy’, ‘the war on want’, and so forth). When English Renaissance sonneteers use ‘want’, then, it is invariably to indicate a state of lack, as when Sidney’s Astrophil complains, for example, that, since his beloved Stella is absent, ‘I, alas, do want her sight’. If they wished to indicate a positive craving or wish, the sonneteers did, of course, have the word ‘desire’ available to them.

The sonnet and the lyric mode

‘Let us inspect the lyre’ (Keats): introduction At first glance the relationship between the sonnet and lyric seems transparent: if one adopts the common definition of a mode as an overarching and transhistorical category encompassing many genres, surely the sonnet is not merely an instance but also a textbook example, even a prototype, of the lyric mode. Lyric is, for example, often defined in terms of its length, and, according to common though not unchallenged definitions, the sonnet weighs in at fourteen lines; lyric is frequently represented as the genre of internal and individualized emotions, and the principal subject traditionally associated with the sonnet is love; lyric is typically associated with song and music, as is the sonnet. To be sure, many critics have claimed that prototypical status for elegy, maintaining that its emphasis on death and loss renders it a prime example of the preoccupation with absence often attributed to lyric. But the candidacy of that genre for the status of prototype does not preclude and may even support another contender, since the sonnet too often dwells in and on loss, whether it be the death of the lady in the originary sonnets by the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), her loss in poems by many of his followers, or the permutations on disappearance and absence in numerous later sonnets (‘So help / me God to another dollop of death, / come on strong with the gravy and black-eyed peas’, Rosanna Warren implores in her witty sonnet ‘Necrophiliac’, 2–4).

European beginnings and transmissions

Within the relatively short span of 100 years, southern Italian poets developed the enduring structural properties of sonnet form, northern Italian poets appropriated their invention and expanded its range, and two particular poets with vastly different outlooks and agendas – Dante and Petrarch – exploited its potentials with a lasting impact upon western literature. During these years, the conventional topics addressed by the sonnet form expanded from guileful entreaties of sexual seduction to more complex expressions of tangled erotic yearning, tumultuous sexual impulse and exalted amatory devotion, in associated ways laden with statements of religious conversion, philosophical conviction, political sentiment and even scientific insight. With so many possibilities at hand, the sonnet form carried within it seeds of experiment among poets old and young, male and female, amateur and professional. My chapter will explore the sonnet’s early development from its invention in the thirteenth century to its dissemination throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. It will emphasize the sonnet’s propensity for expressing self-awareness; for affirming local, communal and emergently national sentiment; and for enabling poets to chart a career path that intersects with public as well as private ambitions.

The sonnet, subjectivity and gender

The sonnet is a little poem with a big heart – and at its core lie subjectivity and gender. Both words are grammatically basic yet surprisingly slippery. Although people usually think they know what gender means, subjectivity is a more specialized term, a word that puns on the tensions it captures: whether or not one is familiar with the subject–object split (a basic philosophical problem associated with epistemology since Descartes), the essence of the matter is that the subject of a sentence is also ‘subjected’ to forces beyond itself. Moreover, the human grammatical subject, the self that is supposed to be ‘one’, also knows itself to be multiple and unruly – if ‘one’ is inclined to a modicum of introspection, as poets are wont to be. What does it mean poetically, then, to express one’s own subjectivity, to speak (metaphorically) in one’s own voice? The sonnet form originated in an age when poets were also political ‘subjects’ to princes, when emotions were perceived as external forces pressuring internal spirits and when earthly experience was deemed subject to heavenly will; the sonnet allowed poets a fourteen-line space in which they could at least articulate, if not exert, their own wills. As Europeans in a hierarchical world that presumed male superiority even if exceptional virgins were subjects of veneration, writers of the first love sonnets expressed the cultural and social paradoxes their desires engendered, as well as their personal experiences of emotional contradiction. Out of this maelstrom arose the split personalities that would become models of great art, and the richly expressive vocabularies that would allow centuries of poetic followers – including women and non-Europeans – to make the sonnet their own, adapting it to capture vastly different perspectives, needs, values and definitions of selves.