4,000 pages of T.S. Eliot’s literary criticism is not enough

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Craig Raine has narrated this article for you to listen to.

This is Alice B. Toklas, ventriloquised by her partner, Gertrude Stein:

I must say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead [the mathematician].

Defiantly, flagrantly clairvoyant. Daring us to dispute the claim, the Big Lie flourishes. Size matters. Think George Steiner, Joseph Brodsky, Big Whoppers both, tirelessly fibbing.

Towards the end of his life, in 1963, T.S. Eliot expressed his reservations about three early essays on which his reputation was founded – ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’; ‘Hamlet and His Problems’, which introduced the objective correlative; and ‘Four Elizabethan Dramatists’. He ruefully noted ‘their callowness’, their ‘facility of unqualified assertion which verges, here and there, on impudence’. His criticism, as these four volumes of almost 4,000 pages demonstrate, is strewn with unprovable, magisterial solipsism.

For example: ‘When Henry VII came to the throne, the English mind, and the civilisation that expressed it, was cruder by a century than the French mind, and still further behind the Italian [my italics].’ How can he know? ‘But for Dryden’s verse, we might not have had the perfection of Congreve’s prose, though this is not demonstrable.’ Again: ‘At certain moments… a word can be made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilisation.’ Is that all? We are frequently told by Eliot how much depends on poetry: