Full reviews to appear in the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual Vol. 6 (2024)
Jasmine Jagger, Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. xx + 272 pages.
Reviewed by Justin Stec
The book’s central argument is that in “exploring the duality of rhythm as a poetic technique and a recurrence of physiological processes,” scholars can “capture the agency of affect rather than the fact of affect” in poetry and thus better understand how personal feeling drives poetic composition. Jagger’s methodology combines prosodic analysis of Lear’s, Eliot’s, and Smith’s published and unpublished poems with a forensic approach to each poet’s handwritten material in manuscripts, letters, illustrations, and sketches. She then demonstrates how the affective experience of each poet suggested by her analyses was likely informed by mental illness and its attendant discourses—its symptomatology, diagnosis, treatment, and discussions of its creative affordances—as recorded in advertisements, music, medical images, and other cultural ephemera. Using this methodology, Rhythms advances a four-sided argument. First, Jagger argues that Lear, Eliot, and Smith comprise a genealogy of poets who were conscious of how their feelings drove their creativity. Second, Jagger’s genealogy tacitly disrupts more traditional literary-historical accounts of genre, form, or poetic movements. Third, Jagger argues that these poets embodied their affective experience as poetic rhythm: the mechanism she posits is transference through the poet’s hand. One can, Jagger claims, diagnose changes in a poet’s affective state in the moment of composition by examining their handwriting for evidence of if, when, and how the poet’s hand tightens, loosens, shakes, scratches, or quickens in response to a new feeling, and then these feelings further drive the poet’s composition. Jagger finds this phenomenon dramatized in poetry when, as she writes, a poet’s rhythm breaks through the artificial patterning of a metrical form. Fourth, Jasper explains how, influenced by a range of contextual discourses, Lear, Eliot, and Smith each conceived of poetic composition as a form of emotional catharsis.
T. S. Eliot. The Letters of T. S. Eliot to Emily Hale. Ed. John Haffenden. The T. S. Eliot Estate, 2023. tseliot.com/the-eliot-hale-letters
Reviewed by Timothy Materer
After more than fifty years of embargo, T. S. Eliot’s 1, 131 letters to Emily Hale are freely available in John Haffenden’s monumental digital edition at TSE.com. In his Introduction Haffenden explains that the original plan was to publish two volumes of selected letters. Realizing the scale and sensitivity of the project, the Eliot estate decided to publish online the letters to Hale as well as Hale’s surviving letters to Eliot. The website includes the formal statements (filed under “Endmatter”) Eliot and Hale made about her bequest of the letters to Princeton University Library, a “chronology” of Hale’s life (in effect a concise biography), and a collection of Hale’s essays and reviews. Taking advantage of its digital form, the expansive index contains links for each entry to the letter cited; for example, under the entry “Burnt Norton,” one finds the sub-head “the moment in the rose garden,” with a link to a September 10, 1935, letter expressing Eliot’s “gratitude” for such moments. For entries on people, a “bio” link often gives one a pop-up sketch, and for important figures, there is a further link to the edition’s Biographical Registry. A Gallery of photographs identifies significant people and places.
An Overview: T. S. Eliot’s Letters and the Course of Eliot Studies
by Timothy Materer
In 2010, Ronald Bush questioned whether the publication of Eliot’s Letters and Complete Prose would “change the course of Eliot studies” as their editors claimed. Bush felt “the power of scholarly categories to condition even floods of rediscovered prose” was too great. Observed at the flood in 2022, the categories of a repressive family background, traumatic marriage, and social prejudice remain powerful. Often ignoring the editions as scholarly texts, many reviewers treated them as the autobiographical accounts that (as we will see) Valerie Eliot seemed to have planned. The sheer amount of specific detail in the Letters, however, should lead to a fuller understanding of Eliot’s career. This review essay considers the effects of this still-cresting flood on the study of Eliot’s life and work.
