Although TS Eliot was arguably the most influential literary critic of the 20th century, for decades, scholars worked without a collected edition of his critical prose, which was scattered through the high-minded journals of his day. Such a gathering would not only have spared the split bindings of the periodicals scoured hundreds of times across library photocopiers: it would also have enabled ready cross-referencing to Eliot’s opinions on Charles Baudelaire, the relationship between prose and verse, English and American stupidity, the music hall, the churches of London, and Stravinsky—to list just some of the topics covered while he was writing The Waste Land (1922), his poetic collage of a civilisation.
So when, half a century after his death in 1965, we got both The Complete Prose of TS Eliot (2014–2019) and The Poems of TS Eliot (2015)—fully annotated by academics who had paid their photocopier dues—it was a relief to think that the magazines of yesteryear could finally gather a handful of dust. The Complete Prose contained everything available, while The Poems supplemented 300 pages of verse with 900 pages of commentary that quoted generously from Eliot’s prose for context.
So who has been waiting for The Collected Prose of TS Eliot, which now arrives a decade later? The obvious answer is: anyone who can’t afford $700 for the eight volumes of The Complete Prose. This is the kind of price that university presses (in this case, Johns Hopkins) charge academic libraries for big-ticket items. But there are poorer libraries—and richer individuals—who will be tempted by the four solid volumes of The Collected Prose at £50 each.
Eliot’s achievement as a critic was unique. Frequently hitting heroic annual word counts—each volume is more than 800 pages—he published reviews, essays and lectures that, studied alongside his poems, shaped English literature as a university subject and influenced the writing of poetry around the world. Moreover, he did so while also doing an office job: first at Lloyds Bank, and then as an editor at Faber & Faber, the London publishing house that has now produced The Collected Prose.
Having a genius on staff was the making of Faber as a literary imprint—when Eliot joined, its core business was health and nursing publications. In return, the firm has been loyal to its employee of the century, publishing The Poems as well as ongoing volumes of his vast correspondence (which can total more than 500 pages a year during his busiest letter-writing periods). With The Collected Prose, Faber has expanded its Eliot box set. Archie Burnett, the editor of the new books, has restricted himself to collating, without commentary, “all the prose that T.S. Eliot allowed to reach print, or that circumstances indicate he would have allowed to reach print”. This caveat strikes a truly Eliotic note of scrupulousness tinged with mystery. In practice, it means that various debatable items are excluded, including student essays and unpublished lectures, not to mention the many unsigned blurbs dashed off for Faber dust jackets.
All of which no doubt satisfies the various commercial and tribal imperatives that have led to this deluxe shelf-breaker, which arrives like a time traveller from an era when universities invested in unflashy scholarship. But where does it leave the general reader whom Eliot was always trying to reach in affordable paperbacks such as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948)?
What we need is a new Selected Prose. There have been three so far: Eliot’s own Selected Essays (1932), the Penguin Selected Prose (1953) and Frank Kermode’s Selected Prose of TS Eliot (1975). The Complete Prose contains the raw clay to fashion a fresh Eliot for readers wanting to know more about the mind that produced poems—from “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock” (1915) to the Four Quartets (1943)—whose lines have become part of the English language itself.
The one piece no Selected Prose can exclude is “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)—Eliot’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” as an essayist. To argue, as it does, that the art of the present must reinvent the art of the past is not obviously rock opera; but to say that a culture is “a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen”—well, that’s a guitar solo of a sentence guaranteed to drive the crowd wild.
‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919) is Eliot’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as an essayist
The philosophically trained Eliot was never a florid stylist, but there is often a veiled poetry to his precise formulations. The learned cadence of “the Magdalenian draughtsmen”, for example, reflects the fact that he was writing shortly after seeing late Palaeolithic cave paintings while on holiday in France. The Collected Prose doesn’t explain this allusion, though, or any other, due to its lack of contextual notes. The only annotations are textual, tracking Eliot’s revisions of reprinted pieces down to the tiniest peck of the typewriter—“partly, perhaps”, for example, becomes “partly perhaps”. Accuracy matters, of course, but this makes for a strange contrast with the exhaustively annotated edition of the poems.
Calculated obscurity was a rhetorical trick of Eliot the critic as well as Eliot the poet, and served to heighten his sage authority. The poet and critic Vidyan Ravinthiran has shrewdly likened the early Eliot to an internet “edgelord”: someone who expresses provocative opinions for attention. And Eliot pretty much confessed to being a keyboard warrior when, in 1961, he accused his early essays of “the braggadocio of the mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter”.
If I were editing a new Selected Prose, I would ditch coat-trailing pieces such as “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919), which perversely argues that the play is an “artistic failure”. I would also swerve around the moral car crash that is the book After Strange Gods (1934), written as Eliot pivoted from iconoclastic critic to conservative Christian commentator; it includes a notoriously antisemitic remark, and was rightly not reprinted in his lifetime.
The Eliot I would spotlight is the waspishly honest critic of contemporary letters. This is where The Collected Prose delights: as a clean, uncluttered expanse to dip into for page after page of pithy judgement. The poet kept a professional eye, for example, on the literary pretensions of politicians, remarking in 1916 that the philosophy of the former prime minister Arthur Balfour was a kind of “Tennysonian naturalism”—which was not intended as a compliment. (A couple of years later, Eliot would observe that Tennyson had “a large, dull brain like a farmhouse clock”.) In the oratorical prose of Winston Churchill, meanwhile, he heard “the author pause for the invariable burst of hand-clapping”.
Eliot disliked crowd-pleasingly “poetic” effects, and his early, pseudonymous round-up reviews pop with the fun of a sharpshooter hitting every tin at the fair. Sacheverell Sitwell’s verse, for example, has a tendency to “fly off like a beautiful but ineffectual aeroplane, beating its propellor vainly in a tree”. (A note would explain this Looney Tunes simile as a parody of Matthew Arnold’s description of Shelley: “a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain”.)
One of Eliot’s party tricks was to recite the opening paragraph of a Sherlock Holmes story
Conversely, he had a keen feeling for the formal beauty of kinds of writing neglected “by seekers of the poetic”. One of his party tricks was to recite the opening paragraph of a Sherlock Holmes story, and his essay on Conan Doyle’s detective is a fan’s analysis. He demonstrates a detailed command of logical flaws in the tales (why did Holmes “go mountain climbing in Switzerland when he could better have eluded Moriarty in London”?) while putting his finger on the secret of their appeal: “The content of the story may be poor; but the form is nearly always perfect.” He was also one of the first critics to describe the technical distinction of Marianne Moore’s drily precise verse, finding in it “a sort of Latin stateliness” and praising her as a “living master” of “light rhyme” (pairing little words such as “the” and “sea”).
My personal selection of Eliot’s prose would admittedly draw heavily on Burnett’s first volume, which covers the decade up to 1928, a period when, as a critic and a poet, Eliot had almost perfect pitch. There is much to enjoy in the later volumes, but they are increasingly padded with social commentaries that—like his unhappy post-Second World War attempts to write drawing room comedies—now smell dustily of their era. Burnett, though, has also seen fit to include transcripts of remarks made by Eliot during interviews and poetry readings, which offer suggestive asides, such as the observation that “many readers find it easier to read [The Waste Land] to themselves after they have heard it read aloud”.
The final volume, which covers 1951 to 1966, begins with a rarity: Eliot discussing the drafting of his own verse. In Four Quartets, he admits, he was misled by the sounds of words—a sin for which he often damned other poets—to put “hermit crab” when he meant “horseshoe crab”. The self-illumination, however, is generally more indirect. Speaking to mark the centenary of the death of Louis Braille in 1952, for instance, Eliot comments that “the thought of possible blindness… has always haunted me”, which might take us back to the neurotic preoccupation with dead eyes in his early poetry: “I could see nothing behind that child’s eye”; “My eyes failed”; “Sightless, unless/The eyes reappear”.
John Updike parodied Eliot’s later lecture-hall manner as humourless (“here I perform a pratfall while grimly clutching a goat-bladder depleted of wind”). But his acute instinct for the right word—which guides the bull’s-eyes of all his best criticism—still shines satisfyingly through. One of his last articles was a tribute to Aldous Huxley that recalls the author of Brave New World rising to give an after-dinner speech in an airless room while “unwisely” smoking a large cigar. A long speech would have bought Eliot time to prepare his own remarks, so he had hoped Huxley “was good for five more learned and witty minutes, when he jack-knifed on to the table”. Eliot’s prose may be more famous for its erudition, but the timing of “jack-knifed” here has the comic aplomb of PG Wodehouse.
