T. S. Eliot's Ambiviolences: Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor

Abstract

T. S. Eliot's Ambiviolences:Oscar Wilde as Masked Precursor John Paul Riquelme (bio) "Literature prevents the question Who speaks? from ever being answered." —R. Barthes, S/Z LIX A Masked and Queer Modernist Aesthetic Oscar Wilde's place in the history of literary modernism has yet to be satisfactorily described. The obscuring of his position in modernism's emergence and development involves thorny issues. Thorns aside for the moment, as with Thomas Hardy (especially his poetry and his late fiction) and some other writers of the 1890s, there is no consensus about whether Wilde is a late Victorian writer or one who produced works that anticipate aspects of later modernist writing so thoroughly that they stand at the beginning of the modernist canon and fully within it. Among authors of the 'nineties, Wilde's situation is especially tortuous, as I explain in the next section. His significance to modernism would be clearer if prominent first-stage modernists had been able to acknowledge more directly and candidly his effect on their thinking and writing. T. S. Eliot provides a particularly revealing case, one that involves his ambivalence concerning Wilde, some of whose works we know that Eliot owned and lectured on before he became an established poet-critic. In the fourth of his "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry" in The Egoist of July 1919, drawing a parallel between experiences in life and experiences in art, but not conflating them, Eliot describes in remarkably [End Page 353] amatory terms the powerful relation a contemporary poet can have to a precursor who instills a "passion." The passion involves a "profound kinship" and a "peculiar personal intimacy" that is "imperative" during "a genuine affair" in which the younger poet is "quickened" and can produce work that would not have been possible without the experience. Eliot emphasizes that the "imperative intimacy" is not to be confused with admiration, and that the result is neither imitation nor borrowing. When mature poets steal, they presumably do so having reached a maturity beyond imitation and borrowing through the quickening effect of intimacy with a precursor. Poetry that Eliot did not publish during his lifetime and poetry that he did indicate that he experienced such an affair with Oscar Wilde, with consequences of lasting significance. Salomé had a particularly intense effect on Eliot. "We are changed," Eliot says about the younger poet's experience. He was, for the long term. Eliot also mentions the likelihood that the ardor will cool, as happens in life: "Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable." Eliot's cooling toward Wilde is an important element in understanding Wilde's continuing but varying role in Eliot's writing and thinking. Equally important is the ineffaceable quality of the initial effect. About the "dead master" in Eliot's "Little Gidding" II (1942), at the beginning of the dialogue between the quickened and the dead, we hear that he is "a face still forming." That could mean a face about to resolve itself into a definitive shape, one that is coming into crisp focus in the particular scene. But the temporal implications of still, a word that occurs in Four Quartets with various meanings, suggest a continuing state of emergence, or generation, like the Chinese jar of "Burnt Norton" V, which "Moves perpetually in its stillness." Eliot's statement in "Reflections" resembles Wilde's response, during the first of his two criminal trials (1895), to the request that he explain the phrase, "the love that dare not speak its name," from a poem by Lord Alfred Douglas. Mentioning "the sonnets of [End Page 354] Michelangelo and Shakespeare," the "great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan," and the basis of Plato's philosophy, Wilde says that "It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him." Eliot's version translates Wilde's perspective into terms relevant to poetic creation enabled by contact between different generations. Made a quarter of a century apart, the two statements...