Escape from personality?

On T. S. Eliot: a provisional response to Gribbin and Pistelli

First, in case you missed it, a plug for my recent essay on James Salter for RealClearBooks, which begins by taking up a subject of recent controversy, on Substack and elsewhere. As my opening paragraph puts it:

A retrospective on Martin Amis in the Times of London has voiced a complaint made several times in recent years—that young male writers are at a disadvantage, today, not just because of declining numbers of men reading fiction (a complaint taken up in an engaging recent exchange by

Ross Barkan

and

John Pistelli

, not to mention several other widely shared essays), but because of the impossibility of writing honestly about sex. (That is, about men’s desire for and pursuit of it, especially when these involve women.) Deterred by a not unreasonable fear of cancellation, many young male writers, an earlier essay observed, have adopted a studied sexlessness, typically mixed with moralism and barely concealed resentment. 

As the above perhaps already intimates, I find such fears at once reasonably justified, somewhat exaggerated, and, ultimately, misplaced. Read the whole thing here.

The remainder of my post for today has some bearing on another recent discussion. Though not written in response to it—the text below is soon to appear in an essay collection meant to exhibit the contemporary state of scholarship on T. S. Eliot—my essay may nonetheless profitably be read, I think, alongside two other recent pieces:

Alice Gribbin

’s rewriting of Ezra Pound’s “The Serious Artist” and

John Pistelli

’s response to it, “In for a Penny, in for a Pound: The Modern Writer and/as The Total Subject,” a subsection in one of his “Weekly Readings” from last month.

On some other occasion, I hope to take up the subject of Gribbin’s essay in more detail; for now, I wish to call the reader’s attention to the following paragraph, in which Gribbin intimates perhaps her core objection to the art of our time, an objection that, though not cited in it, doubtless underlies (in the way of an irritant) Pistelli’s subsequent defense of poetic subjectivity:

The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of the human, the immaterial human, the human considered as a thinking and social and sentient creature. It is from the arts that we discover what sort of animal humans are. That the premier question for the arts, “What are we?,” has been superseded by “Who am I?,” an infinitely less compelling question of the self, is the nub of our waywardness.

This is provocatively put, and I no doubt share Alice’s judgment about many particular items of the contemporary sludge that fall under it; and yet, as a Yeatsian-Lawrentian, I cannot help reading it with a certain reservation. (It is probably superfluous to add that, in the confrontation between Stevens and Pound that Pistelli restages, prompted by the late Marjorie Perloff, I place myself in Stevens’s camp, in much the same terms that Pistelli does.) For the Yeatsian, “personality” is indispensable. What, after all, is A Vision but a fantastically detailed taxonomy of personality types, above all the personalities of artists? And yet, as that taxonomy (and its in this way not altogether spurious lunar symbolism) itself suggests, my “personality” is not simply mine; it is itself as apt to be viewed as a supernal visitation, rather than something wholly my possession. And it is in this sense that what might seem Yeats’s vestigially nineteenth-century celebration of the personality not only finds its kinship with its apparent opposite, Lawrentian “impersonality,” but also thereby reveals the difference between such vitalism (“Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me”) and the more reserved, elegiac, and (in its best sense) haunted “impersonality” (the product, as one critic has shrewdly noted, of the “historical sense”) that we find in others of the high modernists, such as, for instance, T. S. Eliot.¹

As I say, though, these are matters to take up another time. Far from mounting a critical response to Gribbin’s thesis, the paragraphs that follow will, I think, be taken rather as confirmation of it—certainly insofar as that thesis can account for the priorities of the contemporary scholarship against which they take aim, though whether my essay itself falls under that censure, I leave for the reader to decide.

My subject (assigned to me, I might say, by the editors of the collection, who added the helpful stipulation that my essay base its argument on hitherto unpublished or little known poems) is the relationship between Eliot and something called “lyric.” What “lyric” is is itself the subject of much recent scholarly dispute, and much of my essay is accordingly taken up with delineating two of the currently most influential schools of thought on the subject. For the purposes of the present discussion, however, what remains most important is the layman’s understanding of “lyric” as a literary mode concerned with the expression of the self. Recent scholarship, thrilled by the discoveries made possible by the publication of Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale, and doubtless influenced by that aesthetic slackening that Gribbin observes, has been keen to find in Eliot the “self” in its most intimate, which is to say least threatening, sense. As I argue below, such scholarship is descriptively accurate: Eliot indeed had a self, and this self indeed appears in his poems. But the price of this discovery has been a weakening of aesthetic apprehension, a failure to apprehend the true nature of Eliot’s impersonality, which this essay attempts, in however provisional a way, to restore. An attempt at accurate portraiture of Eliot the poet, the essay below offers something to dissatisfy everyone. If you favor the more strenuous impersonality, Pound, rather than Eliot, will be your man. But if you favor the more strenuous personality, you will certainly look elsewhere than Eliot. Be it so. It is hoped that, nevertheless, the essay reveals something of that poet’s compressed power.

---

T. S. Eliot did not describe his poetry as “lyric,” nor did he employ the term as a catch-all for non-narrative, non-dramatic poetry centered on the individual voice. On the infrequent occasions when he speaks of “lyrics,” he tends to mean short, typically stanzaic poems, with a pronounced musical element.² However, from earlier studies that questioned modernism’s claim to have broken with nineteenth-century poetics, to more recent forays into biography inaugurated by Ronald Schuchard’s proposal to “resurrect the depersonalized” voice in Eliot’s “acutely personal poems,” many critics have claimed Eliot as a lyric poet despite himself.³ But a lyric poet in what sense?

In recent years, two schools of thought have been particularly influential within English-language scholarship on the lyric.⁴ One, the comparative framework put forward by Jonathan Culler, regards lyric as an ancient poetic form that persists to the present day. The distinctiveness of lyric, for Culler, is exemplified above all in the prominence it gives to the trope of apostrophe, a figure of “extravagant” discourse that both foregrounds the act and power of enunciation and, in its “turning away” (apo-strophe) from the “empirical listener,” performs a radical detachment from context—including time, place, language, and medium.⁵