Issue: 27 November 2004	PAGE 2 of 2 << previous

I recalled this conversation (from 1947) last week, when I was writing an essay on T.S. Eliot for my book-in-progress on creative people. Eliot, whom I once or twice had the thrill of meeting, though he told me nothing — he was costive of his treasures or, as the late John Raymond put it, ‘anally retentive’ — was a great man for leaving things out. Indeed the wonder is that he ever put anything in. His ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), which introduced modern poetry into the English-speaking world just as surely as Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ (1798) introduced Romantic poetry, though it seems so massive and formidable and is divided into five parts, is actually only 434 lines. The ‘Four Quartets’ is longer, though not by much. In the Faber edition of The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, the poetry occupies only 236 pages.

‘The Waste Land’, when it appeared not long after the end of the first world war, the same year as Ulysses, D.H. Lawrence’s Aaron’s Rod and Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, to put it in context, was a thunderbolt which left the literary landscape changed for ever, not because it was a literary success, for the notices were mixed, but because the intelligent young took it to their hearts straight away. The reasons they did so were manifold. The poem was pessimistic but smartly and fashionably so. It was post-Einstein and post-Freud. It was subtly and tantalisingly sexual, hinting but giving nothing away (not surprisingly, since Eliot was still a virgin, albeit in his mid-thirties). It had jazz rhythms, hints and more than hints of demotic speech, though it also appealed strongly to the intellectual and academic mind, with its oblique references and quotations and its pretentious footnotes, a con trick of which Eliot was later ashamed. But the real and fundamental reason why it appealed to clever young men and women was that it made them co-creators. He left out things and bade readers fill them in. It ‘stimulated them to supply what is not there’.

For this, I think, Eliot had to thank not only himself and his natural costiveness, but Ezra Pound. Pound was not (in my view) a great poet and he seems to have been a most unpleasant individual. But to Eliot he was a godsend. When they met in London and Eliot showed him his work, Pound immediately recognised a master-poet, and thereafter poured over the difficult and unsure young man the supercharged encomiums he desperately needed, and gave him the self-confidence he conspicuously lacked. Moreover, when presented with the text of ‘The Waste Land’ he edited it, cutting a lot of meretricious and pretentious verbiage and stripping it down to its drumbeat rhythms and pure music, making it tantalisingly spare and increasing the temptation of the reader, whom Eliot himself had already invited to join in the creative act by fleshing out the inferences and innuendos. This collaboration of Eliot and Pound, albeit one-sided, was just as creative as the astonishing alliance between Wordsworth and Coleridge in west Somerset. Eliot became at a stroke the head of the poetic profession, a position he held till his death in 1965. It was omissions, reticence and silence which did the trick.