Critical Writing:

Mervyn de Silva on T S Eliot

When Thomas Stearns Eliot, an American who became a British citizen later, died, former doyen (considered by many of his peers) of Lankan English journalism and literary critic labelled the poet an 'intellectual hero' or' triumphant rebel'. He also noted that it was a 'passing of a pontiff of slightly faded glory'

Whether one readily agrees with Mervyn de Silva or not, it is interesting to observe his observation on the famous T. S. Eliot of 'The Wasteland' fame. This is what he wrote in one his pieces in the then Sunday Times which he edited.

"The revolution he led had long since fulfilled its destructive tasks and accomplished its radical purposes. Its passion nearly spent, the literary movement of which he had been prophet, publicist, and presiding genius, had already by the fifties (1950s) lost its original impetus. And Time, in a capricious and cruel gesture which would have pleased the young ironist of the Prufrock years, had rested on his head the once-scorned silk hat of respectability."

As we all know re-evaluation of past giants has now become a commoner aspect in literary criticism. Let's see what more Mervyn says as his considered opinion:

"It had contrived to change him, both the historical and the private person, from defiant innovator and rebel to a grey remote and self-assured patriarch of the Literary Establishment and prepared him for a Death that would come dressed properly in his own sardonic image of Eternal Footman."

M de S was quick to underline the fact that "Eliot made an immeasurable contribution to not merely to English Literature and to our own concepts of the English poetic tradition and the poetic function, but to the very shaping of what we may call the modern temper."

Some of the epithets the critic has used to describe the international celebrity were; he was the apotheosis of modernism, both high priest and cult, a generation's alter ego and secret sharer.

I am not sure of the present day students of English Literature, but M de S was hopeful that the generation that followed after the emergence of T.S Eliot when he said: "the discovery of Eliot's poetry will surely remain a treasured and critical moment in their imaginative life- moments excitingly ravelled with and forever sharing the confusions, the pain and sweet memory of adolescent awakening."

I agree with the critic in regard to this statement:

"Poetry in one way or another, it is true, is a reflection of the poet's society.

But Eliot's control over his cultivated contemporary was so tyrannical that the latter was tempted to see modern life as it was framed in Eliot's language and to fashion his own response to living in Eliot's terms."

In defence of TSE as it were M de S wrote:

"Admittedly, Eliot's influence was restricted to a sophisticated minority but the extent of this intellectual sway was so extraordinary that here was no social philosopher or religious thinker but a poet and a man of letters."

He added: In this sense, it could be said that Eliot's writing was undoubtedly one of the formative forces in the making of 'of the modern sensibility'

Talking of Eliot's historical mission the critic observed that "He had to undertake then to revitalize the language of poetry, to purify, in his own words, the dialect of the tribe and construct techniques and rhythms afresh. This was Eliot's historical mission".

Mervyn de Silva concluded his article befittingly thus: "How he drew sustenance from the Jacobean dramatists, the Metaphysicals, and other poets both English and European (the French symbolists notably) is now a commonplace of modern literary history. All that needs be said is that in serving his own needs he also gave English poetry a new start. He was indisputably the maker of modern verse"

ks.sivakumaran@ yahoo.com

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