The New Criterion

Christopher Ricks takes his title from Blake’s aphorism “Opposition is true friendship.” To the subject of the imaginative engagements (and disengagements) of Hill, Hecht, and Lowell with Eliot and Pound—and Dante as a further key influence—he brings his superhuman ability, no less amazing for being familiar, to detect verbal echoes, parallels, and reworkings. While the thrill of the chase is undeniable, the danger is that the book sometimes reads like a collection of annotations to editions of these poets which do not yet exist, resulting in a rudderless feel to the writing. To prove a debt is one thing, to estimate the success of the indebted poem another; Ricks sometimes neglects the second task, taking for granted that the poem is beautiful or moving.

This is most acute, and most problematic, in the chapter on Hill, which does nothing to help those who have no idea what his later poems are about, and who suspect that unintelligibility is masquerading as difficulty. Hill’s status as a major poet is simply assumed. His criticism is not treated so respectfully. Ricks contrasts his grudging, often carping, references to Eliot in his essays (on which, see my review of Hill’s Collected Critical Writings in The New Criterion of December 2008) with the greater generosity of the poetry, and, like me, puzzles over the meanings Hill gives to “pitch” and “tone” in his criticism. He objects to Hill’s exaltation of F. H. Bradley and Charles Williams at Eliot’s expense, and to his contemptuous rejection of Larkin (which goes with a swipe at Ricks for having bought “the Larkin package”). Hill and Eliot share an interest in the relationship of artist to work, of religion to literature, of humiliation to exaltation, of tragedy to farce—this last more explored by Hill than Eliot, who, after experimenting with it in the “Coriolan” poems, abandoned it for the (for Hill) inferior Four Quartets.Ricks duly traces debts to Eliot, and even Larkin, in Hill’s recent work, and shows that, although Hill the critic praises Pound more, Hill the poet learns from him less.

Taking the chapters out of sequence, I will move to that on Lowell commemorating his friendships with Eliot and Pound, and their often tense friendship with each other, in Notebook and History. Initially, Ricks’s focus is more on the difference between Eliot’s absorption of what Pound had to teach him and Pound’s resistance to being deeply influenced by Eliot. They and Lowell all use the Brunetto Latini episode from Canto XV of Inferno: Eliot quarried it in Section II of “Little Gidding” and Lowell translated in Near the Ocean and referred to in “For George Santayana” (Life Studies) and “Dante I” (History). As for Pound (who advised Laurence Binyon on his translation of Dante and made a recording of Lowell’s translation), Ricks believes he is one of the elements of Eliot’s “familiar compound ghost.” In correspondence with John Hayward about the drafts of “Little Gidding,” Eliot said that although he wanted the reader to notice the explicit allusion to the Brunetto episode, “I wished the effect of the whole to be Purgatorial.” The figure of Arnaut Daniel, the Provençal poet admired by Pound, is also in Eliot’s poem, as he is in Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto XXVI) where he is described by the phrase miglior fabbro, which Eliot applied to Pound in the dedication to The Waste Land. Ricks mounts a complicated, but ultimately persuasive, argument that Eliot was leaving open the possibility that not only Brunetto Latini but also Ezra Pound might ultimately be found in Purgatory rather than Hell.

I have to confess that the poetry of Anthony Hecht was unknown to me until I read this book, an omission I quickly remedied, and I am deeply grateful to Ricks for introducing me to his work. In my view, it is the best chapter in the book, more temperate and strenuously engaged than the other two, and able to profit from pre-publication sight of an edition of Hecht’s correspondence. Hecht’s fluency and elegance go with a troubled awareness of tensions, contradictions, and frustrations; he is not in a pejorative sense “musical.” He frequently and explicitly alludes to Eliot, whether by direct quotation or echo, and Ricks sensitively explores how the borrowings fuse into new wholes that are, as he wincingly says, “echt Hecht.” In several engrossing pages, he discusses ghosts in Hecht, as both subjects for poems and traces of previous poems, Eliot’s and others’.

As a Jew who was present at the liberation of Flossenbürg concentration camp, Hecht found Eliot’s anti-Semitism more deeply lodged and thus more disturbing than that of Pound, whom he nevertheless found antipathetic and from whom he never learned as, say, Basil Bunting did. Yet not being personally a survivor of the camps, he felt that “undue indignation on my part would be a vulgar appropriation of the suffering of others for cheap rhetorical purposes and a contemptible kind of self-promotion.” (Would that others had been so scrupulous!) “More Light! More Light!,” with its summoning of “Ghosts from the ovens,” is his most piercing commentary on the Holocaust, with nods to “Little Gidding” and to Section I of The Waste Land, “The Burial of the Dead.” As Ricks mordantly concludes, “The world of ‘More Light! More Light!’ is that of the burial of the living.”

It is exciting to know that Ricks is co-editing, with Jim McCue, the poems of Eliot for the authorized edition now at long last underway. This volume, together with his previous edition of Eliot’s early poems, The Inventions of the March Hare (1996), gives a hint of the riches we may expect when that one appears. He is, in every sense, an annotator of genius.