STEVEN MATTHEWS. T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature.

Abstract

Eliot recorded his ‘passion for the poetry, dramatic and lyric, of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, even tracing his poetic formation to the Elizabethans and Jacobeans. Remarkably, Steven Matthews’ T. S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature is the first full-length study of Eliot’s creatively critical engagement with the literature of this age. The book approaches its subject through an examination of contemporary source materials, most notably the popular Mermaid, Everyman and Temple Classics editions Eliot owned, as well as the more specialist scholarship he reviewed for the TLS. This fertile area of research nourishes thought-provoking new readings of Eliot’s poetry and drama. Matthews begins by reminding us of those Early Modern ‘touchstones’ (p. 6)—lines from Bishop King’s ‘Exequy’; Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois; Donne’s ‘The Relique’—which resonated in Eliot’s auditory imagination throughout his career. Emphasis is placed on Eliot’s 1918–1919 Extension lectures on ‘Elizabethan Literature’, which represent the foundations for his understanding of Early Modern literature. Matthews argues that Lamb’s Specimens of English Dramatic Poets stimulated Eliot’s use of exemplary quotations illuminating bold reassessments of seventeenth-century authors. The turbulent energies of Jacobean literature—‘tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires’ as Eliot put it in The Sacred Wood (1920)—are palpable in ‘Gerontion’ (1920), a dramatic monologue saturated with Early Modern allusions (Shakespeare, Jonson, Tourneur, Lancelot Andrewes, John Davies, Middleton and Chapman). These authors are re-inflected by Eliot’s modernist poetic enabling them to speak as living voices to the post-WW1 world: ‘reconfirmation that “dead voices” must directly and unaltered “speak through” the living voice of the true contemporary poet’ (p. 84).

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