By Elysia Balavage
When the turning world ground to a halt in 2020, the International T. S. Eliot Society was forced to postpone our yearly conference, specially scheduled at Harvard University, where Eliot spent his student years absorbing the literary, philosophical, and theological texts that inspired his work for the entirety of his career. Three years later, nearly 70 scholars and friends shipped up to Boston for the Society’s 44th Annual Meeting from September 22-24, 2023. One could say, “This is the hour for which we waited.”
Though Tropical Storm Ophelia draped New England in rain for much of the weekend, the first day of activities began in the Houghton Library with abundant sunshine, warm air, and an appearance by Remy, English Department cat and Macavity doppelganger. This year’s Peer Seminars, tackling topics pertaining to communication, critical reading, and contemporary media, were led by Sumita Chakraborty (Eliot and the Creative Arts), Kamran Javadizadeh and Megan Quigley (Close Reading Eliot), Ria Banerjee and Julia Daniel (Eliot in Dialogue), and Stephanie Burt and Michelle Taylor (Four Quartets). President John Whittier-Ferguson greeted attendees in the inspiring Edison and Newman Room, where the copious selection of rare books—some of the oldest in the West, dating back to the 14th century—that adorned the muted sea-green walls of the space’s perimeter foreshadowed the intellectual rigor of what was to unfold throughout the weekend. The first panel commenced with Anita Patterson, who reminded us of the Eliot family’s abolitionist roots while adeptly highlighting the Middle Passage as a suppressed figure of The Waste Land. Speaking of suppression, Anthony Shoplik followed with a discussion of the damaging impacts of capitalism on Eliot’s landscapes in “The Self and the Land in Eliot’s Early Poems.” Greed and war scrape life from The Waste Land and complicate the ways that human subjects relate to crumbling environments. Ending the panel with some Nietzsche and umbra, my own paper snuck possibilities for actualization into The Waste Land and The Hollow Men through my discussion of shadowy imagery.
After a break for lunch—the Cambridge streets afforded many deliciously fulfilling options—John Whittier-Ferguson gave the official President’s Welcome to “our second meeting after the world fell to pieces” in the Lamont Library’s Forum Room. Some important announcements by board members followed, with Jayme Stayer humbly requesting contributions to the Capital Campaign, which will help defray the costs of running the Society and associated events. Frances Dickey then announced a vacancy for the position of Reviews Editor for The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual. Dickey and Query also reminded members to send article-length submissions to the Annual and short pieces to Time Present.
The afternoon continued with concurrent panels, in the Forum Room and the Houghton Library’s Hofer Classroom. Chris McVey gallantly led the way to the Hofer classroom, where Seth Lewis challenged us to “read against whiteness” in The Waste Land through the lens of Dido and Marlowe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage. John McIntyre delivered a fascinating literary weather report—happy coincidence, given Ophelia’s arrival the following day—in “Eliot and the 1918/19 El Niño.” He cast The Waste Land as a meteorologically conscious poem and argued in favor of reading El Niño itself as a modernist text. A lesson in economics concluded the panel, with Ian Webster emphasizing a less-conservative Eliot, a “seriously unprofessional economist” who saw no difference between those who lived off ancestral wealth, and those who lived on the dole. A few steps away, back in the Forum Room, an intriguing discussion of language, poetics, and voice bound the panel together. Will Brewbaker merged verse and theology with a detailed exploration of Eliot and the Marian devotional mode, a style that propels the Four Quartets. Continuing the theological ethos, Cécile Varry, displaying some eye-catching slides, presented her work on the language of ritual in Eliot’s oeuvre, shining a light on intersections of genre. Gabrielle McIntire turned us to the ecological and rounded off the panel by examining the nonhuman voices in The Waste Land.
Following a brief recess, we all reunited in the Forum Room for the afternoon’s final panel, led off by Isabelle Stuart. Stuart shared her ongoing research into Eliot’s use of the choral voice and argued compellingly for its function as a connective tissue between his poetic and dramatic compositions. Jayme Stayer’s talk focused on his discoveries in the Oxford archives. This included both a meditation on “the joys of diving head-on into suffering” rather than “hiding” in the refining fire of Purgatorio 26.148, and what was surely the most thorough reading of a “dog-eared” page in the history of literary studies. The lack of marginalia on the tagged page of Eliot’s unmarked 1924 Confessions copy, in which Augustine meditates on the death of his mother, shows the text moving from “literary to devotional” for Eliot, as he perhaps sought comfort from the passages after his own mother’s passing in 1929. Sometimes, it seems we can learn as much from absence as abundance.
Everyone then gathered at the Harvard Faculty Club to re-caffeinate and settle in for the 44th Annual T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecture, delivered by the distinguished poet Linda Gregerson, Caroline Walker Bynum Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan. Gregerson’s talk, provocatively titled “Eliot and Ignorance,” redefined our notions of not knowing, defining it instead as a “measure of good faith” and a necessary part of the poetic composition process. We learned about an ignorance of a certain kind that facilitates seeking and exploration. This ignorance, in contrast with adverse understandings of the idea, prevents the poet from “knowing too much” in advance while still preserving a space for discovery. Gregerson pointed to form and the “choral” as facilitators for this variety of ignorance, architectures that enable the poet, and Eliot specifically, to “filter a vast range of voices, both living and learned by book, through a single unifying consciousness.” Bringing together the disparate voices of the social and cultural spheres is indeed a crowning achievement of The Waste Land. Hearing about the intricacies of form and craft from such a gifted poet as Gregerson was surely a high point of the weekend. A reception in the Faculty Club followed Gregerson’s lecture, complete with laughs, camaraderie, drinks, and hors d’oeuvres. Plenty of hors d’oeuvres.
Saturday morning began in Room 305 of Emerson Hall, home of the Harvard Department of Philosophy, with a blanket of rain, the buzz of fresh coffee and of course, a spirited panel. Michael Coyle set the session’s stimulating tone with his thought-provoking examination of Eliot and the “public intellectual.” He pointed out that the public sphere is “always already around us”—an appropriate turn of phrase for the philosophy building—and influential texts change in tandem with a shifting public. Navigating into new waters, Philip Coleman then shared his work on periodization as a critical problem and asserted that periods can be “redrawn,” which inspired a stirring conversation during the Q&A that called a period’s function into question. Tong Liu continued the line of ecological inquiry that Friday introduced and discussed land, water, and the “shore” in Eliot’s poetry.
Everyone dispersed for lunch to refuel for the afternoon’s concurrent panels, both housed in the historic Barker Center. In Room 305, the “drama” panel, complete with presenters from Fabio Vericat’s collection on “Eliot and Drama,” was certainly filled with dramatic presentations, starting with Christina Lambert’s analysis of food and ritual in The Cocktail Party. An actual egg prop brought Lambert’s presentation to life as she dexterously showed the egg’s connection to sacrament and continued the important work of discerning Emily Hale’s visages in the play. Vericat followed with further detailed discussion of Eliot’s drama, mixing Sweeney Agonistes with the idea of the “modernist playwright.” In the panel’s final act, Tony Cuda engagingly presented his ongoing research into belatedness in Eliot’s oeuvre, citing Harry of The Family Reunion as disrupting Eliot’s pattern of writing perpetually “late” protagonists. Down the winding hall in Room 024, John Matthew Steinhafel also discussed Eliot’s drama though his investigation of The Cocktail Party and its influence on Ralph Ellison’s fiction. Bringing the visual arts into the mix, Valentina Monateri looked at the way a younger Eliot absorbed Victorian, Rococo, and Modernist artistic influences. Justin Stec followed by combining the dramatic with the poetic in a rhetorical analysis of speech in “A Game of Chess.”
Though hard to believe, it was time for the final panel of the conference. Just as Gregerson offered a nuanced discussion of “ignorance” in her Memorial Lecture the evening before, Megan Quigley delved into ideas of “the normal” in Eliot and Emily Hale’s relationship. She traced the pair’s use of “abnormal” in their correspondence, which they often coupled with words like “uncanny” and “paranormal.” Frances Dickey then immersed our olfactory senses in a delicious bouquet of sewage and florals, an off-putting combination that Eliot and other turn-of-the-century St. Louisans would have known all too well. Through images of the Mississippi River contaminated with raw waste, she articulated the ways that individuals are intimately connected via rubbish and grime. The panel ended with Eve Sorum’s discussion of “attentiveness” in Eliot’s work, with special consideration paid to “The Dry Salvages.” To echo Ron Schuchard’s sentiment, this was surely a particularly memorable, intellectually inspiring conference, and an event well worth waiting for.
Of course, no Eliot Society meeting would be complete without the announcement of awards. There were two Fathman Award winners this year: Isabelle Stuart for her presentation “All Together Now: Eliot’s Choral Voice in Context” and Christina Lambert for “Urban Feast and Ancient Sacrifice in The Cocktail Party.” Frances Wear received the Annual Award for her piece “To Worship Burning Art: T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ V as the Organon of Philosophy.” Next Year, the International T. S. Eliot Society will be returning home to St. Louis.
