T.S. Eliot. A Symposium

by Tambimuttu, Tambimuttu (Editor)

First Published in 1965. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genres: Family

259 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 3 out of 5]

Amazing what you can turn up in a quick rummage through an outdoor dollar bin, elbow to elbow with the mumbling and the malodorous. This is a festschrift compiled in celebration of Eliot’s sixtieth birthday and recent winning of the 1948 Nobel Prize. Except for a few academic articles that I merely skimmed (because really, who cares?), the tone of so many of the tributes is intimate, collegial. (There’s even some donnish humor: one of the glossy insets reproduces “the original Holograph Manuscript and the only extant copy of the Author’s first and only Essay in Historical Biography”—-school report on George Washington, crayon-scrawled by Eliot when he was six years old.) The Eliot they talk about is a guy they know, only just on the verge of becoming a canonic statue. He sets off Fourth of July firecrackers in Faber & Faber board meetings, and really likes cheese. Clive Bell ably preserves and conveys the mixture of awe, condescension and incomprehension Bloomsbury had for Eliot: his primness of speech and pedantic haberdashery raised titters in a circle whose tone was set by Lytton Strachey’s cultivated raunchiness and outlandish dress. Bell even airily mentions all the rare first editions of Eliot’s early work that he has, somewhere, but really, he wonders, can it be worth the trouble to try and unearth old Tom’s books? Wyndham Lewis’s account of meeting Eliot at Pound’s flat and Marianne Moore’s whimsical whatever are the best things in the book. Conrad Aiken fills in the Harvard years. Eugenio Montale, George Seferis and Mario Praz asses Eliot’s continental influence in oblique, knotty self-examinations. Louis MacNeice and others testify to the mania for Eliot among the literary sets of Oxford and Cambridge in the 1920s. The tributary poems are a mixed bag. There are the embarrassingly imitative efforts of quite a few whose names seem rightly lost to oblivion. Auden’s is good. Edith Sitwell’s is fulsomely bad. And Stephen Spender once again reminds us of what Auden would sound like if he weren’t funny:

his great night-limbed lovers
In operative moments of enlacing
Were experiments for sensuous manoeuvres
From which he formed those tears and blushes gracing
To-day's libraries.

[ciel]

partly sentimental, partly theoretical anecdotes/ poems/ essays about Eliot & his works. highlight was Magny's A Double Note on T. S. Eliot and James Joyce; the more personal pieces (loved Clive Bell's) were mostly insightful & entertaining as well though!

picturing Ezra Pound and Eliot squished into Pound's triangular sitting room.