The New Critics, as much as I respect their attention to close reading, did somehow downplay the idea that classical rhetoric (and how closely are rhetoric and poetry related?) was based on a speaker's use of the three appeals: ethos, the appeal to character and reputation; pathos, the appeal to the emotions; and logos, the appeal to reason. The New Critics came up with "fallacies" to more or less dismiss the first two of these: the "biographical" and "intentional" fallacies for the former and the "affective" fallacy for the latter. So they relied almost solely on a poem's logos in their analyses.
It's interesting that Eliot, whose high water mark came during the height of the New Criticism, was rarely discussed in terms of the biographical content of his work or in terms of the emotions contained in it. Not until fairly recently, that is. The flap over John Peters's notorious explication of "The Waste Land" (there's a book about it, T. S. Eliot's Personal Waste Land) seems to have scared critics off for a long time. But the biographies are now out and will probably multiply in the future.
Frankly, I don't think Eliot was so bad. He didn't marry wisely, and he may have treated Vivienne badly at the end but stayed with her for many years; she was not easy to live with, as many noted. He said a few silly anti-semitic things, most of them in a book he recanted; he certainly recoiled at Pound's embrace of fascism. He was not a member of Mosely's legion, but Vivienne probably did tend that way. He probably did treat Emily Hale rather shabbily, but who really knows what went on there? He was a Tory, high-church, and believed in the monarchy. So were a lot of the English of his day. So what? From the personal memoirs of those who knew him (Hall, Levy, others) he seems to have been a gentleman, perhaps a bit self-manufactured (as are lots of poets), maybe a bit of a snob, but also one who enjoyed a good joke, liked to smoke and drink, and was generally kind to those he met. As a poet and critic of the last century, he had, for a time, unprecedented power, and he seems to have used it wisely and with an appropriate amount of irony.
As for Larkin, he was a guy, as I tell my students, with all of the attendant faults of most guys. When I compare his behavior to that of most of the poets I have known he comes out looking pretty good.
I often wonder why novelists don't come under the same kind of biographical scrutiny as poets. It's as if we expect poets to be saintly somehow but fully expect novelists to be rounders. I'm just reading a memoir of Raymond Carver written by his first wife. A great writer, I think, but one who put his loved ones and himself through all kinds of hell.
|