"Where Are the Eagles and the Trumpets?": The Strange Case of Eliot's Missing Quatrains

Abstract

T. S. Eliot rated quatrain poems he wrote between 1917 and 1919 among his best and most important work. Shortly after publication of Waste Land, for example, he wrote to his brother, Henry: consider my poems as serious as anything I have ever written, in fact much more serious and more mature than early poems but I do not know anyone who agrees with me on this point except William Butler Yeats and Vivienne who have both said much same thing about (Letters 608). Further evidence of his high regard for them can be found in two selected editions published in his lifetime--the contents of both of which he chose. In small selection in 1940 he included Sweeney among Nightingales rather than Portrait of a Lady, and in second and fuller selection he made eight years later (which remains standard selected edition), he included all seven of English quatrains.(1) However, his opinion has not been endorsed by academic criticism. One of most striking aspects of this criticism until recently is unquestioned and unquestioning organic narrative that is used to chart Eliot's poetic career. In this narrative quatrains are located between on one hand greatness of two central early poems, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Portrait of a Lady, and on other work that is depicted as fulfillment of his first period: Waste Land. Ronald Bush, for example, uses just such an organizing structure, asserting that the causes of [Eliot's] evolution were there from beginning (ix), and spends five pages out of three hundred on quatrains. Grover Smith uses a similar rhetorical strategy but is prepared to be more blunt about his antipathy toward poems: From 1917 to 1919 he based his technique more on than anyone else. Pound having disastrously encouraged him to study Gautier's Emaux et camees, he set to work being amusing (38). Periodical criticism shows a similar lack of balance, as essays on quatrains are few and far between, and those that do exist are normally either short, allusion-hunting pieces or are primarily biographical. Even while this imbalance appears to be changing in two recent books (Robert Crawford and Kinley E. Roby), quatrain poems, when they have been considered at all, have generally been portrayed as only useful stepping stones in Eliot's development as a poet.(2) F. B. Pinion is exemplary in this regard: Though [Eliot's allegiance to Gautier] produced a number of poems which with their daring and wit, period must be regarded as temporizing and preparatory (85-86). By using term Gautier period, Pinion rhetorically intimates that they were too derivative, influenced only by Gautier. Yet there is also paradoxical admission that they were perceived in very different terms at time--they excited with their daring and wit. use of word wit is particularly problematic here, since critics, including Pinion himself, generally valorize term by using Eliot's definition of it (which he formulated in some of theoretical essays he was writing at time) to explain power of later poems, especially Waste Land. Indeed, Eliot's assertion in letter to his brother that no one liked quatrains apart from himself, his wife, and Yeats is certainly not true, as Pinion points out. Angus Calder, however, is more explicit about whom of younger generation quatrains excited, although he too exemplifies typical critical approach to Eliot's quatrains: Most of [new] poems in English were written in quatrains, he writes, [and] Pound's Mauberley sequence at same time was largely composed of not dissimilar verses. Their retreat from vers libre towards an erudite formality is an interesting (45). Calder sets work of two poets during this period in opposition to reality of trenches and postwar working-class agitation and so charges reaction with a double-edged signification: a conservative recoil from vers libre and a reactionary response to politics of time. …