Page 6, 10th November 1950

10th November 1950

Page 6

Page 6, 10th November 1950 — Mr. Eliot disciplines his dreams
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Mr. Eliot disciplines his dreams

T. S. Eliot, by Elizabeth Drew. (Eyre and Spottiswoodc. 12s. 6d.) Reviewed by FR. V. TURNER, S.J.
MOST of us are nowadays pre
pared, as fifteen years ago we were not, to take trouble to understand a work of art. We are no longer angry or outraged if a play or a poem, or even if a painting or a piece of sculpture, is not comprehensible at a first glance. We arc ready to admit that, provided its obscurity will yield a meaning after study and a meaning that is worth the effort, it is not unreasonable that works of art, contemporary as well as old, should demand for their understanding and enjoyment as much preparation and information and reflection as we are ready to expend on any business of serious moment.
There is no doubt that Mr. T. S. Eliot is a poet who, among the many worth-while things that he does to us, also makes us "a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings that form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly an evasion of ourselves." There is no doubt, either, that to the majority he is an obscurepoet, who yields his meaning only after study and with the assistance of books that elucidate him.
Of these books there is already a not inconsiderable number, and in these columns attention has been drawn in the past to the two most distinguished, the studies of Professor F. O. Matthiessen and of Miss Helen Gardner. T. S. Eliot, the Design of his Poetry (written, 1 should imagine, before Miss Gardner's book was published) is an elucidation and an analysis that deserves to be read along with them, and to say only this is to pronounce high praise.
" We have nothing but dreams. and we have forgotten that seeing visions was once a more significant. interesting and disciplined kind of dreaming." It is an opinion of Mr. Eliot's from which, in many a passage, Miss Elizabeth Drew would appear to take her cue.
She discusses the "mythical " vision and the " mythical" method— the word does not, of course, in this context, mean make-believe or just false—and her programme is to trace, in a fashion, the design of Mr. Eliot's poetry (the plays, however, are not included), and of his poetry as communication of his experience, from Prufrock up to the Four Quartets, She helps herself by some ideas and categories borrowed from Jung, but those who see little utility in this sort of criticism need not he deterred, for her book is by no means a collection of high fallutin generalities about myth and symbolism nor a Procrustean use of such generalities, but an examination in careful detail, as chapter follows chapter, of particular poems and particular passages. Labour is not shirked, There is no space to say more than that a lover of Mr, Eliot's poetry, one, too, with a grasp of his author, will find much both to disagree with and to welcome, and much to deepen his understanding and his appreciation. And so will the beginner, for this is not a difficult book,




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