T.S. Eliot

About This Book

As a general introduction to Eliot's life and work, Professor Bergonzi's book could not be bettered. He is a sane and independent critic, and although he cannot entirely avoid the well-worn quotation, he has drawn freely on the less familiar source of Eliot's early journalism to illustrate his points. Perhaps it is in these quotations and the use he makes of them in composing his argument that the permanent value of his book lies. And although there are not enough source-references, he does set right some common misconceptions- as, for instance, the origin of the 'drunken helots' comparison. When it comes to the criticism of separate poems, one regrets the lack of space for development. Surely there was no need for yet another summary of the well-known facts of the poet's life, and although Mr. Bergonzi says in his Preface that this biographical element is 'no more than a framework, or skeleton', it makes a cramped framework, with only 192 pages in which to cover the whole life and work, poetry and prose. In our present state of surfeit, admirable as Mr. Bergonzi's comments are (especially on Pound, on 'Portrait of a Lady', and 'Ash Wednesday'), one looks for something more detailed, and the ten pages allotted to the 'Quartets' hardly make out a case for Mr. Bergonzi's minority view-expressed in the curious phrase 'the whole work seems to me to be some- what less than the sum of its parts'. -- from https://www.jstor.org (Sep. 20, 2017).