Denis Donoghue takes his title from a line of Yeats’s: “Words alone are certain good.” Yeats may have believed this, but Eliot didn’t and nor does Donoghue. His book begins as an intellectual autobiography, an awkward framework, which he soon discards, though preserving an agreeably personal tone which never becomes slack or self-indulgent. His preoccupation with the philosophy of language is not of the fashionable kind—Wittgenstein is mentioned only once in passing, with more frequent references to Bradley, Hegel, and Kant. Yet we also encounter Adorno, Habermas, and Heidegger; here, for once, is someone who has taken the measure of postmodernism and can make intelligent use of it, without supposing that it supersedes all previous thought.

Donoghue uses Eliot to throw into relief the inadequacies of that laureate of the Enlightenment, Wallace Stevens, who is bitingly censured: “The main difference between the pope and Wallace Stevens is that the pope does not claim to have invented, or to have deduced from his private desires, the articles of his belief.” Stevens is presented as a transcendentalist in the Emerson- Thoreau tradition, which Eliot pronounced “the most untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to wandering humanity.” Stevens took for granted the bankruptcy of Christianity, elaborating in its stead an Arnoldian cultural theology, in which God is replaced by imagination, adherence to a church by membership of an intellectual elite, prayer by poetic rumination, and ultimate truth by the supreme fiction. In all this he is an antitype of Eliot. “All men are priests,” Stevens proclaims in “Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas”; to which Donoghue brutally responds: “Is that all Stevens’s creed comes to, a self-deluding Humanism? … His poems assume that having a feeling is enough; there is no warrant for interrogating it.”

The difference between Eliot and Stevens—who dismissed The Waste Land as “negligible” and “a bore,” while quietly appropriating some of Eliot’s techniques— raises questions, Donoghue argues, about modernism, specifically the nature and function of poetic symbolism and its relation to syntax. In his early poetry, Eliot borrowed Laforgue’s trick of juxtaposing situations and moods while abstaining from syntactic connexion. Donoghue contends that it is a distinctive mark of modernist poetry that its words possess “relations … not prescribed or predictive but experimental.” In contrast to classical poetry, which is “organized on the assumption that nature is continuous; hence the primacy of syntax” and whose words are therefore subject to a causal grammar, modernist poetry treats words as “independent and therefore vulnerable.” This is pressed rather too hard, for, after all, the words in any poem establish formal relations among themselves merely by coming one after another: but one sees what Donoghue means; the broken syntax mimics the broken world. Yet Eliot’s quotations, allusions, and echoes invest his poems with a literary authority independent of that world. This introduces a major theme of Words Alone: Eliot’s compulsion to transcend the personal—a trait which, paradoxically, underlies his weakest as well as his greatest poetry.

Eliot’s verbal universe, before his conversion, is claustrophobic. Through Prufrock, Gerontion, and his other personae, he grapples with the same subject as he perceived in Hamlet: the agony of having a capacity for consciousness that surpasses any use to which one can put it. This extreme self-awareness is also, as he accepted from his study of F. H. Bradley, an extreme isolation, which, if unchecked, can turn to solipsism. Donoghue quotes from Eliot’s book on Bradley: “It is only in immediate experience that knowledge and its object are one… . Experience is non-relational.” Yet this does not lead to the kind of poem Yeats wrote; it is Yeats, rather than Eliot, who reminds us of Mallarmé. Eliot’s range of tones, his diversity of styles, his mélange of languages are devices for escaping from solitary confinement. This is supremely true in The Waste Land, which Donoghue approaches, fascinatingly, as “an American romance,” somewhat like The Great Gatsby (a book Eliot admired). Distrusting the principle of the eternal new start—which Henry James, for one, saw as basic to the American character—Eliot accepted the authority of tradition, while employing the modernist syntax referred to above: the result is “not a seamless narrative, but a set of lyric moments, each isolated for consciousness.” A symbolist poem would stop there, but The Waste Land goes further. Using the “mythical method” he acclaimed in Ulysses, Eliot pointed beyond words, beyond the self, to a higher consciousness which includes but transcends them. This is not Tiresias, for his is only yet another perspective: the transcendence is enacted by the trajectory of the whole poem, in which language is seen as “a great treasury of images and figures and, increasingly in Eliot, identified with the Word of God.” Eliot turned romanticism’s idolatry (as he saw it) of the imagination against itself: the “heap of broken images” has the significance of pieces of mosaic rather than of shards of glass.

On all the early poetry, Donoghue is fresh, stimulating, and attentive to details, whether elucidating the Virgilian element in “La Figlia che Piange,” detecting the pres- ence of Yeats as well as Henry Adams behind “Gerontion,” or glossing “Marina” by referring to Eliot’s own wondering awakening to Christian faith. Turning to the post-conversion poetry, he distinguishes the “doctrine professed” from the “doctrine felt”; Eliot doesn’t insist that we share his belief, he only asks us to imagine what belief is like. That is well said, but this part of Donoghue’s book causes more unease, especially when he refers to Eliot’s “spiritual genius.” I’m unhappy with that phrase, and believe Eliot would have been too; he wouldn’t want to offer himself as a director of souls or a model of holy life. “It would be absurd,” Donoghue says, “to repeat the canard that Eliot hated life and longed only to be rid of it.” Hatred is too strong a word, but, at least until his second marriage, Eliot displayed fear of life, even revulsion against it—witness his obsessive insistence on original sin and his decision, in Donoghue’s words, “to regard human relations as provisional and ancillary to some relation beyond them.” In the early poetry, where he is asking agonized questions, he avoided the disabling abstraction this would imply; later, however, when his concern was to proffer answers, he often gave in to it.

Donoghue sympathizes with Eliot’s detractors to a daring degree. He admits that the Four Quartets are “meditative poems, dealing with their objects at the remove of contemplation and generalization”; that Eliot was obliged to maintain that this world is worthless yet that God became incarnate in order to redeem it; that his rhetoric depends heavily on negative tropes, whether of purging or of renunciation. We may find defects where Donoghue finds virtues, but when we disagree with him, it is with respect, as with a friend. He admirably exhibits the same scrupulousness which he praises in his author; everyone who really cares about Eliot’s work should salute this book.