Volume 6, Number 3 · March 3, 1966
Eliot's Achievement
By Philip Rahv
To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings
by T.S. Eliot
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 198 pp., $4.95
There is much to interest and even fascinate students of T. S. Eliot in this posthumously published collection, consisting for the most part of public lectures and addresses delivered between 1942 and 1961. Of the earlier articles not heretofore reprinted only two, both dating back to 1917—one on vers libre and the other on the metrics of Ezra Pound—are included in this volume. The analysis of vers libre is as lively as it is discriminating, keyed up to the highest pitch of poetic intelligence; but the essay on Pound's metrics is less satisfactory. It is full of technical argumentation that somehow steers clear of any truly evaluative judgment. It has generally been my impression that, in his various statements on Pound, Eliot seems to be laboring under an intolerable burden of personal indebtedness that inhibits candor. As a result, what we get is a kind of embarrassed formalism that makes more for the appearance than the substance of criticism. He is always ready to praise Pound; yet the grounds of his praise, apart from the purely technical points involved, remain obscure.
Review, 2427 words
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