Aesthetic Politics—Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary || “You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets”: The Literary and Political Hinterland of T.S. Eliot'sCoriolan

“You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets”: The Literary and Political Hinterland ofT.S. Eliot's CoriolanAuthor(s): Steven MatthewsSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, Aesthetic Politics—Revolutionary andCounter-Revolutionary (Winter 2013), pp. 44-60Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.36.2.44 .

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“You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets”: The Literary and Political Hinterland of T.S. Eliot’s Coriolan

Steven MatthewsUniversity of Reading, UK

There has been an increased amount of scholarly interest lately in T.S. Eliot’s unfin-ished sequence, Coriolan (1932) — interest drawn from its Shakespearian allusiveness, and from analysis of this writing’s particularly rebarbative, jarring poetic. Although, however, the two parts of the sequence published by Eliot are acknowledged as being his nearest approach to poetic commentary upon contemporary political ideas, little criticism exists establishing the hinterland of the political thought, with which Eliot was most familiar, as editor of the Criterion. Coriolan emerges at a time when the lure of fascism pulled hardest at Eliot’s sensibility. This article reviews the full political context provided by Eliot’s journal, as well as considering the connections between that political engage-ment and the readings of Shakespeare he was also promulgating through this forum, in order to provide a more complex sense than hitherto of the diverse pressures underlying the unsettled nature of the existing Coriolan poems.

Keywords: T.S. Eliot / Politics / The Criterion / Shakespeare / Coriolan

From the outset of his career as a literary critic, T.S. Eliot made his prefer-ence amongst Shakespeare’s plays evident. Querying the right of Hamlet to its assured status as Shakespeare’s masterpiece, Eliot’s “Hamlet and his

Problems” (1919) asserted the counter-claims of Coriolanus and Anthony and Cleopatra, as proofs of the reach of Shakespeare’s “artistic” (or “tragic”) success (The Sacred Wood 84). His “ ‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama” of the same year drew examples from these two plays, together with one each from Othello and Timon of Athens, to make the contention that moments of “really fine” Shakespearian rhetoric ensures that a lead character in a play to “sees himself in a dramatic light” (The Sacred Wood 81). Anthony’s speech at Caesar’s funeral, from Julius Caesar, is then added to that of Sylla’s ghost opening Ben Jonson’s Catiline, as evidences of the right deployment of rhetoric in poetic drama. Such deployment, Eliot asserts, works both to further the play’s action, and to show an audience new aspects of its main character through conscious presentation of the character’s innermost self before the spectator (The Sacred Wood 68–69).



The Political Hinterland of Eliot’s Coriolan 45

It is striking that these early aesthetic and technical judgments about Shake-speare’s tragedies became for Eliot consistently important into his mature career, and frequently lie behind his more famous mature declarations of similar ideas. The achievement of making characters see themselves “in a dramatic light,” for instance, is reviewed in relation to Othello’s last speech in the pivotal essay, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (1927). That essay, although it does not draw directly upon any of Shakespeare’s plays about the ancient Roman Republic, asserts the significance of Rome’s distinctive philosophy behind the English lit-erary Renaissance. Indeed, it asserts continuities between Senecan stoicism and Christianity. According to Eliot, once such continuities have suffered “dissolu-tion” after the Renaissance, break down into Nietzschean individualism (Selected Essays 140) — a notion which, as we shall see, characterizes Eliot’s troubled think-ing and politics in the years leading up to his own creation of a work reflecting upon that Roman Republic, Coriolan (1932). The unfinished Coriolan sequence, whilst acknowledging in its title the precedent of Beethoven’s orchestral overture of the same name, depends upon the assured artistic success of Coriolanus for its enquiry into the contemporarily compelling issue of political leadership after the rise of Hitler.

What is marked, however, is not just the consistent development of the technical or literary features of his favored Shakespearian dramas into broader philosophical themes in Eliot’s thinking, from the late 1910s into the late 1920s. Within that development, there is in Eliot persistence of an interest in Shake-speare’s (and, much less so, in Jonson’s) Roman plays as touchstones within and behind this thinking. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Roman plays were significant insti-gators for Eliot’s poetic self-redirection after The Waste Land. The tragic sense of inadequacy and failure from Julius Caesar shadows “The Hollow Men” (1925), which derives its title from Shakespeare’s play. Those brief lyrics deploy allusion to Julius Caesar in order to bring awful plangency to its realization of the “Shadow” of death or disappointment which “falls” “Between the motion / And the act” (Collected Poems 92).

This article will trace the issues pressing upon Eliot’s multiple involvements with Rome, as mediated into his thought — often and vitally — by Shakespeare’s plays about Rome’s history, and, crucially through his editorship of the Criterion. For his politics was often mediated via the broader contemporary critical context in which he came to read and think about them. Through this means, the article will establish the complex and unresolved Coriolan poems as primary focal point of Eliot’s political sensibility at this point, on firmer ground than hitherto.1 These poems will be seen to be unsettled and unsettling, as they alternately resist, absorb, and transform some of the political and critical co-ordinates of Eliot’s fascination with Roman history and its aftermaths.

Eliot’s literary criticism of the late 1910s, and his political thought in the later 1920s into the 1930s, involved him in some readjustment of perspective upon the critical context he was familiar with regard to Shakespeare’s Roman plays. The interpretations of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, for instance, with which Eliot



46 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 2

was most familiar as a younger man did not lend themselves to underwrite the tonal complexity with which Coriolan would cast its hero. Eliot’s Harvard tutor, George Pierce Baker, for example, wrote of the play as a flawed experiment on Shakespeare’s part that appealed only to “a small portion” of its original audience (Baker 291). For Baker, Coriolanus himself is a simple creature, “a man who reveals at our first sight of him an intense pride of rank and an almost uncontrol-lable temper.” He is a “courageous and splendid fighter,” whose “personal affection for his wife and mother” are his only redeeming features. As such, he is “curious material” for a tragedy. The play is unbalanced, Baker feels, since the first three acts are solely devoted to showing the hero’s prowess on the battlefield (290–1).2 Such an interpretation perhaps underlies the characterization by Eliot of Corio-lanus as “broken” in The Waste Land (V l. 416). But it does not suggest the creative potential in the figure Eliot was to find once his political thinking became more urgent in the early 1930s.3

Elsewhere amongst contemporary criticism of Shakespeare’s play with which Eliot was familiar as a young man, Coriolanus as a whole was seen as a test-case for the qualities of imagination that Shakespeare could bring to his source mate-rial. The Temple Classics edition of the play, for instance, claimed Coriolanus was “directly derived” from Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Shakespeare xi). Shakespeare’s versification of North’s prose was praised by Israel Gollancz, editor of the Temple Shakespeare, as well as by Eliot. In a 1929 radio talk on “The Tudor Translators,” Eliot praised its comparative “force, concision, and ease of syntax” (833).4

Whatever the suggestiveness of such aesthetic and technical implication for the allusive practice of Eliot’s own poetry, it is clear that as Europe fell increasingly under the shadow of Fascism by the later 1920s, Eliot was taking on, through his editorship of the Criterion, an increasingly involved engagement with issues of leadership and of the relation between the exceptional individual and a nation’s people. These are issues that, as this article will explore later, are also integral to Eliot’s readjustment in thinking about Shakespeare’s Roman plays across this period. From these multiple sources, it will become clear that the unsettledness of Coriolan poems derives from a period of dangerous, if momen-tary, equivocation in Eliot’s political thought. In this period, the strength offered by belief in totalitarian politics threatens but ultimately does not overturn the reli-gious foundations of his apolitical understanding of the nature of the individual in society. That period stretched sporadically from 1928 — which saw increased perturbation across Europe at the rise of Hitler — to 1934, when Eliot began work on Murder in the Cathedral and “Burnt Norton” and seemed to have recovered a centeredness (however assailed) in tradition and Christian value. David Bradshaw has noted that some of Eliot’s statements of the later 1920s, “making plain his disbelief in liberal democracy,” have understandably led Eliot to being “tarred with the ‘fascist’ brush” (269). Coriolan is the dramatization of the complexities underlying Eliot’s feeling for the allure of such politics, as well as the grounds for his resistance to them.




If Coriolan is the poetic summation of the diverse pulls upon Eliot’s thinking in the later 1920s, however, his editorship of the Criterion further informs the complex allegiances of that poetics from the outset — particularly in its consid-eration of the inheritances from ancient Rome, via the Renaissance and into the early twentieth century. In the most sustained consideration of Eliot’s editorial policy at the journal to date, Jason Harding has justly confronted standard critical acceptance that the Criterion demonstrates the poet himself to have held “pre-dictably conservative, even proto-fascist” (The Criterion 177) political opinions that remained unaltered virtually from the journal’s inception in 1922 to its close in 1939. Harding points instead to the “difficult and complex areas of politico-cultural exchange,” and “the political complexities” Eliot “struggled to accommo-date in the Criterion” (The Criterion 177). Harding maintains that sympathetically considering the work that appeared in the journal without oversimplifying these issues shows instead Eliot’s careful and open approach to the often extreme politi-cal concerns of the day. These were difficult and troubling political concerns from which Eliot — particularly in his editorial “Commentaries” to each number of the Criterion — did not make his journal shy away (Harding, The Criterion 183).

At the heart of the politico-cultural enterprise Harding sees Eliot as having been engaged in with the Criterion, lies what he calls “a degree of nostalgia bor-dering upon despair” towards “the papal myth of Rome in her universalism, the urbs aeterna” as a symbol for the “order and continuity” that “the Criterion sought in the face of historical dissolution” (The Criterion 224). To this end, Harding quotes Eliot’s April 1926 “Commentary”:

The Old Roman Empire is an European idea. . . . The general idea is found in the continuity of the impulse of Rome to the present day. It suggests Authority and Tradition. . . . It is an idea which comprehends Hooker and Laud. (The Criterion 225)

Such contentions form an immediate adjustment on Eliot’s part from his earlier view of Rome, at least as it had been mediated by Shakespeare’s Roman tragedies. This “Commentary” appeared one year after the completion of the mini-sequence “The Hollow Men.” Harding calls Eliot’s history lesson here a “mythologizing conflation” that he claims is “often practiced by Eliot” (The Criterion 225), though he provides no supporting evidence for this contention. Certainly, however, the passage Harding cites does show Eliot’s odd running-together of an idealized version of ancient Rome with Catholicism and the continuation of unidentified “Catholic” elements through the Reformation and into the early twentieth cen-tury. “Authority and Tradition,” as so conceived, here stand as precursors for the classicism, royalism, and Anglo-Catholicism Eliot would notoriously proclaim to be his literary, political and religious belief, in the Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. The book would appear two years after this 1926 “Commentary” in the Criterion. The European origins of that impulse, as laid out in the April 1926 “Commentary,” connect Eliot’s Maurassian politics with his broader religious and social aspirations, aspirations once again derived from a (however mythologized) version of Rome.5




By the time For Lancelot Andrewes was published, of course, the seeming con-tinuity of present day Rome and its ancient republican past was complicated and soured by more immediate association. Eliot’s essay on “political ideas” (he rejects any notion that he is interested in the practicalities of politics), “The Literature of Fascism,” in the December 1928 issue of the Criterion, touches upon this con-nection: “. . . there are some similarities between the fascist revolution and certain events in early Rome, but before the time of Christianity” (286). Eliot’s drive here is to confront a commonly-held belief at the time, one not remote from his earlier point: that Fascism, at least in its Italian incarnation, was simply a development out of the Catholicism that had previously dominated Italy’s culture. However, he also allowed expression of this commonly-held belief in the journal, as will become clear from citations below.

For Eliot himself, though, such belief confused religion with politics. If religious faith is ignored, he claimed in the essay, then politics destructively takes on its aura. Clearly Eliot’s own ambition is to argue for the predominance of the theological over the temporal in these matters. As a result of Eliot’s desire to remove hieratic religious thought from the political arena, Eliot mounts, in the final pages of “The Literature of Fascism,” a strong defense of democracy, and of the need to rediscover the democratic impulse by building “a new structure in which democracy can live” (287). “Order and authority are good” Eliot claims, and “I believe in them as wholeheartedly as I think one should believe in any single idea” (“Literature” 287–8) (an assertion that raises the question as to how far that is).6 But such predilections do not invalidate democracy, in Eliot’s view. The fact that in England at that time both intellectuals and the general populace were feeling the allure of Fascism as a panacea was, he contended, due to the “spiritual anaemia” that had the country in its grip (288). Eliot asserted the notion that it was local conditions in Russia and Italy that had propagated the totalitarian move-ments of Communism and Fascism in those countries. Both movements were “unsuited” to English traditions (this was something he had contended, earlier, when considering an issue of the British Fascist journal, The British Lion, in his Criterion “Commentary” of February 1928 (98)).

Typically, within what seems to have been Eliot’s concern, as editor of the Criterion, to allow both sides of any argument to have full airing, the next issue of the journal contained a long, rambling, response, to Eliot’s own “The Literature of Fascism” by J.S. Barnes. Barnes’s “Fascism,” in the April 1929 number, reasserts the idea that the movement, as realized in contemporary Italy, is the equivalent of Catholicism, and that Fascism sees in “the perfect man” simply

the normal man, raised to a higher level of faith — the normal man with a keen sense of realities and a mistrust of ideologies, the man with the old Roman family virtues, profoundly robust, full of healthy animal, combative spirits. (459)

Although Fascists did not believe in war, Barnes concludes, war might become a necessity to bring the world back to these “virtues” (459).




Aware, perhaps, of the imprecision and inequity of such arguments, Eliot promptly terminated the debate about Fascism in the journal in medias res. But he had already had his last word on the matter, as it were, under cover of the “Com-mentary” he contributed to the same number as Barnes’s riposte to him. Under the subtitle “The Politics of Men of Letters,” Eliot reiterated his previous claim that intellectuals in particular were vulnerable to Fascist ideas, such as they were understood at that point in England: H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, and his friend Wyndham Lewis, were, Eliot said, inclining “in the direction of some kind of fascism” (“Commentary” [Apr. 1929] 379). Contrarily, he himself believed that governments should have limited scope for intervention in their countries, and must leave to their peoples “as large a measure of individual and local liberty as possible” (Eliot, “Commentary” [Apr. 1929] 379).

Across the last four years of the 1920s, therefore, we find Eliot wrestling with the distinction of his own understanding of the words Tradition, Order, and Authority — from the resonance they had taken on in contemporary inter-national politics as well as their lax rendition among contemporary intellectuals in England. In his tricentennial essay, “Lancelot Andrewes” (1926), Eliot had similarly turned the sudden enlightenments he found contained in Andrewes’s literary style against the “vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing” (For Lancelot Andrewes 19). But the staging of the debate with Barnes in the Criterion did not mean that, for Eliot, “exact ideas” — particularly in regard to the “continuity of the impulse of Rome to the present day” (“Commentary” [April 1926] 225) — were in any sense settled upon once and for all. His editorial selections for the Criterion, especially around the time that he was struggling with the proposed four parts of Coriolan, meant that the complex literary and political inheritance from ancient Rome to the present remained very much a matter of contemplation in his thought and poetry.7

The October 1931 number of the Criterion, more or less contemporary to Eliot’s abandonment of any ambition to complete Coriolan, is replete with these issues, overtly or by implication (Lyndall Gordon cites a letter from this month in which Eliot is losing the struggle to complete the poem (41)). In “Notes on Lucretius,” for instance, Hugh Sykes Davies pointed to the way in which his sub-ject’s scientific ambition was, throughout, mediated using a vocabulary familiar to contemporary Roman citizens. De Rerum Natura is punctuated by “symbols drawn from the legal and political machinery of the Republic” (Davies 37). This equation, Davies contended, was “typically Roman”:

They felt profoundly, throughout their history, that the Roman system of government had the same validity, the same unquestionable sanction that they found in the realm of Nature; sometimes it seemed to them that their system was the direct outcome of the working of the natural world, that the Roman “Imperium” was no more to be questioned than the mutations of the seasons. (37)

Davies felt that this concatenation between nature and government in Lucre-tius’s language was something the Stoics of the Republic persistently espoused.




According to Davies, Lucretius’s deployment of equivalence between nature and imperium was, for an aristocrat in the Roman system, “in no way strange” (37).

As though echoing Davies’s conclusions about Roman government and poetic rhetoric, Eliot’s “Commentary” for the same number of the Criterion (October 1931) first pondered political theory, before declaring his own preference of politi-cal affiliation in the British system. The “Toryism” he favors, he says, might not, “for parliamentary purposes,” be distinct from the opinions held by the majority of the Conservative Party (71). Yet, it is philosophically separate, in that it rejects the trends of the modern conservatism of “business men”: “For such a Toryism not only a doctrine of the relation of the temporal and spiritual in matters of Church and State is essential, but even a religious foundation for the whole of its political philosophy” (Eliot, “Commentary” [Oct. 1931] 71).

A footnote refers us to a contemporary essay Eliot favored that paralleled his views, one in which the essentially mixed nature of Kingship — being ideally both secular and ecclesiastical — is sustained. But, at this point, Eliot’s definition of Toryism takes an unpredictable turn. He notes the traditional value of the “Good Life” to be lived on the soil, and in connection with the rhythms of nature (the politics of Lucretius’s implication, as suggested by Hugh Sykes Davies):

. . . it is hardly too much to say that only in a primarily agricultural society, in which local people have local attachments to their small domains and small communities, and remains, generation after generation, in the same place, is genuine patriotism possible. . . . (Eliot, “Commentary” [Oct. 1931] 72)8

For Eliot, as for Lucretius in Davies’s version of the imperium, poetry provides one nexus in which all of these affiliations might be drawn together. However, as will become evident, Coriolan also shows how poetry precisely resists such easy presumptions of affiliation, once it dramatizes conflicting perspectives upon ancient or contemporary events.

That such affiliations do not eradicate the issue of leadership, and of Fascism, is, however, everywhere evident in Eliot’s writing at this period, and in the kinds of ideas he promoted through the Criterion. Max Rychner, another contributor to the October 1931 issue, in effect complicated the drift of such nostalgic con-tentions from its editor. In unqualified fashion, Rychner delighted in “the higher humanity,” “the Complete Man” on Renaissance lines:

. . . when heroes such as these fall, there is nothing tragic in their death, for they have fulfilled themselves in their lives, and have shown forth the permanent laws that give meaning to human existence. . . . Genius is not, or rather should not be, alone and separated from the stream of events. (101)

Such conquerors are of the Renaissance, or so Rychner maintains, in that they turn “men’s minds to classical antiquity” (101). Writing from Germany, however, there is an uneasy justification in Rychner’s urge to equate the Roman (Caesar is one such “Complete Man” for him) and the modern.




It would be literal-minded to believe that Eliot wholly endorsed the views put forward in his journal. His staging of debates about Fascism, for example, shows his openness to unmediated expression of views that oppose his own. Yet the sheer pragmatics of editorial commissioning and selecting materials, as well as their arrangement in each number, says something about the arena — however uncertainly realized — that Eliot’s interests tended towards. As always, these views combined the political with the cultural, as well as with his own literary inclinations at this stage of his life. Rychner’s celebration of a Renaissance genius, which if not separate from its age, at least sustains a notion of heroism that dic-tates insight into “permanent laws” to the people and includes Shakespeare as a teacher of those values across the globe. In this same October 1931 edition of the Criterion, Eliot’s difficult long-term friend and associate, John Middleton Murry, was also given scope to return to the “problem” of Hamlet as a test case for the kinds of contradiction that Shakespeare’s art encountered in relation to its contemporary audience. “Heroism” is therefore once more, in Murry’s rendi-tion, embroiled in the contingent and the quotidian, in ways that Rychner’s easy correlation does not allow for.

Murry sees a tension in Hamlet (and by implication, across Shakespeare’s oeuvre), resonating within the playwright’s need to “appease” the groundlings, the common people watching the original performances of the play. There is tension, in Murry’s view, because that appeasement operates within and against Shakespeare’s more personal need to create in Hamlet a philosopher-hero who can surmount his context with a genius correlative to Shakespeare’s own. In the process, Murry challenges, Hamlet fails as a work of art. The grave-digger scenes, and the scenes involving the travelling players, do not advance the action or the intellectual side of the play’s concerns: “Hamlet rises up from its awareness of the impossibility of its own creation” (Murry 124–5).

Murry’s impatience with the groundlings, for their unknowing forcing of compromise upon even so great an artist as Shakespeare, would seem unwar-ranted in relation to the book he was reviewing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Shakespeare’s Workmanship. Murry contends that the book is bland in its labored rehearsing of the plays’ plots. But the politics of Murry’s departure — seeing in the need to appease the common people an inevitable compromise for the great work of art — receives something of a fillip from his editor, Eliot, two issues later. Eliot’s critique of what he called “the mystical belief in herd-feeling” or “social psychology,” was aimed, as he asserted, at warning against the dangers of a craving for a (Yeatsian) “passionate conviction, and for a living organic society” (“Commentary” [Apr. 1932] 470). This latter idea, as seen above, elsewhere held considerable appeal in his political imagination:

To the honest freethinker, the heir of eighteenth-century enlightenment, it must seem a deliberate repudiation of civilization and its responsibilities; to the Christian, it must appear a travesty of all that in which he believes. It is apparent in extreme Nationalism, as well as in Communism . . . being a symptom of weakness, it is also




a strength; both the fugitive strength of a violent stimulant and the permanent strength of true communion. (470)

This ends by conflating Nationalism (including, presumably, Fascism) with Communism and Christianity as trends all presenting at least some strength to set against the contemporary mysticism or anomie of what he calls “herd-feeling.” At this difficult moment in his life and career, Eliot is casting about for a “violent stimulant” that might overthrow all such complacent presumption, as well as, alternately, the communion that would quell such dangerous conviction. In these circumstances, if such stimulants can take odd forms, they can also, Eliot avers, take extremely dangerous ones. The political extremism from which he had else-where carefully distanced himself momentarily garners some acknowledgement of its circumstantial inevitability, through his unease with those automatically sympathetic to “the herd.”

A similar edginess, at a literary level, continued through Eliot’s sponsoring a new generation of Shakespeare critics at precisely this moment in his career. Against the wilder reaches of a Romantic approach to Shakespeare, for instance, which had been consistently expressed in the journal by John Middleton Murry (and, incidentally, by such as Max Rychner), or against the “disintegrationist” approach he had earlier sponsored in the work of J.M. Robertson, Eliot increas-ingly favored the more technical and historically-contextual accounts of L.C. Knights, and the exhaustive accounts of Shakespeare’s imagery of G. Wilson Knight.9 However, in terms of the new aesthetics in which this focus upon a particular brand of Shakespeare criticism was involving him, as well as in terms of the political complexities Eliot had seen aired and contributed to in the Cri-terion 1928–1934, his continuing advocacy of Wyndham Lewis’s book The Lion and the Fox: The role of the hero in the plays of Shakespeare (1927) across this period is absolutely crucial.10 A year after the first publication of The Lion and the Fox, Eliot alerted Criterion readers, as we have seen, to the fascist tendency in Lewis’s thinking. Yet in 1937, Eliot wrote a review in Twentieth-Century Verse on the tenth anniversary of the publication of Lewis’s book, proclaiming its continuing importance. In particular, Eliot noted that Lewis’s insights into the Shakespeare play he favored, Coriolanus, displayed a thought that remained “peculiarly per-tinent,” even “revelatory”: “Coriolanus is not a defense of aristocracy, or a mere attack on the mob. Shakespeare is, in fact, completely critical and detached from any partisanship” (“Lion” n.p.).

Lewis’s book as a whole, though, is wedded to some of the tendencies and complexities that we have reviewed in connection with Eliot’s encounters with recent political theory, as they were relayed in the Criterion Commentaries. Lewis attributes Shakespeare’s greatness in the plays to his impersonality, which is, for Lewis, a substantially Keatsian quality. For Lewis, that impersonality, supported by Shakespeare’s practical experience of entering different roles as an actor him-self, is historically delimited. Shakespeare is forced, in the plays, to “balance” two worlds: the “world of chivalrous romance, and . . . the world of positivist nature




which has triumphed since his time” (Lewis 284). In this view, Shakespeare is held in suspension, as it were, between the medieval world — noble and feudal, predicated upon the heroic actions of the main character — and the Renaissance world, in which more complicated, commercial, scientific, and democratic prin-ciples are predominant. These are the opposing principles Lewis derives from his reading of Shakespeare via Machiavelli in The Lion and the Fox, and which he lays out in the first two parts of his book.

For Lewis — this is where Eliot’s charge of Fascism presumably most inheres — it is in the plays’ hero that this opposition between old world and new is played out, since it is the hero who is cast in contradistinction to the world (mod-ern by implication, if not actually) around him. As such, therefore, Shakespeare’s plotting amounts to what Lewis called “a herd-war against the head ”:

It must be remembered that human beings are congeries of parasites subsisting on The Individual, subsisting on a very insufficient supply of Individuals. . . . On the back of every great human intelligence there are millions of contingent forms, which it compels and feeds. (Lewis 136–7)

It is when “the Person, the One” is wrenched out of his organic context “by the impulses of some divine ferment,” Lewis asserts, that the real Shakespearian drama (and Lewis’s preoccupation is largely with the tragedies) begins (84–5). Therefore, Lewis seeks to isolate those amongst Shakespeare’s heroes or kings who most display what he takes to be the “pathos” of Shakespeare’s having written in a time of transition between one age and the next (88). The implication repeatedly is that the early twentieth century is another such age. Such correlations in Lewis’s thinking presumably spark Eliot’s assertion of the pertinence of Lewis’s book in his tenth anniversary review of it.11

In Lewis’s view, Shakespeare displays his greatest affection for, or advo-cacy of, those heroes who understand the full import and pain of this pathos of separateness. It is Shakespeare’s Roman hero most devoid of human and sexual distractions, Coriolanus, who Lewis perceives as most intensely involved in his key polarity between hero and context. Hence Eliot’s praise of the chapter “Coriolanus and Aristocratism,” which calls to mind aspects of his own contentions in the 1927 “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca.” Coriolanus, as supreme “Individual,” is, for Lewis, a Nietzschean but also an “artificial” aristocrat (238). He is in thrall to his mother, Volumnia, and behaves childishly throughout Shakespeare’s play, in his abandonment of, and promised revenge against, Rome and a Roman people that refuses to yield to his autocratic demands (238).

But, contrarily, according to Lewis, Coriolanus speaks often “like a god,” and his voice, we are assured, is “Shakespeare’s own voice and manner”:

Shakespeare no doubt agreed with all the abuse his puppet Coriolanus was called upon to hurl at the roman [sic] crowd. It would very nearly describe what Shake-speare probably felt about the London crowd of his time, and especially as he came in contact with it in his theatre. (245)




This association of ancient Roman and Shakespeare himself, through a godlike “music” in Shakespeare’s “own voice,” is yet over-ridden in Lewis’s interpretation of Coriolanus by that sense of “divine impersonality” that he claims Shakespeare always maintains (245). Coriolanus is full of “snobbish unreason,” the play is not written “on a tone of morals,” and Shakespeare is, ultimately, “neither for nor against” his hero (245). As a play in which Shakespeare creates his most Nietzschean superhero, in other words, Coriolanus is “cold.” The hero’s rants against the “herd” are compelling, and underwrite the best rhetorical and poetic moments in the play; but Coriolanus, their utterer, is flawed and unappealing in his dependence upon his mother (243).

Taken along with the diverse and complex engagements in the Criterion, Lewis’s reading of Coriolanus seems to impact many of the political concerns, as well as the focus upon the Individual in relation to the people, which would continue to play in Eliot’s thought into the early 1930s, and his writing of his own poems upon Lewis’s supreme Individual, Coriolan. The redemptive tendency in Eliot’s recourse to Shakespeare, which had led him to reflect upon Pericles in Marina (1930), was rapidly overtaken as the political allure of “violent stimulant” briefly preoccupied him in 1931–2. He reverted to one key text in which he had earlier recognized a dramatic hero “seeing himself,” Coriolanus, as instilling, in the light of Lewis’s contentions, all those complex pressures and alignments that had exercised him for the previous five years. In the process, threads, ideas, images from much of this political context within Eliot’s critical understanding of Shakespeare’s Roman plays, and of the complex import of ancient Rome for modern political theory and contemporary totalitarian movements displayed in the Criterion, resonates behind Coriolan. But the poems transmute them to a dif-ferent tenor, and provide their own resistances and dramatizations of the drift of this hinterland of political and critical prose.

There remain, in other words, various strands of irresolution and complexity, which reflect the political context and historical perspective out of which Eliot shaped the surviving two parts of Coriolan. F.O. Matthiessen recognized early on that there is a deep unease caused by the multiple interlayering of the poems’ historical resonance: “the central figure . . . is seen to be neither Coriolanus nor a modern statesman alone, no more an Elizabethan than a Roman general” (140). For Matthiessen, however, that lack of identification did not cloud the obvious message of Eliot’s published poems — the message is the “humanitarian” one, that “the individual cannot find fulfillment except through also giving of himself to society” (141). And yet, as we have seen across this article, the “Authority and Tradition” emanating from Rome through to the present day of the early 1930s had more unsettling implication at the point at which Eliot was writing the unfin-ished poems. Eliot’s use of anachronism, for instance, includes mention of the German armaments referred to in the Versailles Treaty in “Triumphal March.” The listing of various public committees in the second poem, “Difficulties of a Statesman,” as well as the mentions of the boy, then man, “Cyril” in both poems,




further unsettle matters. In “Triumphal March,” the hero is a modern dictator as much as he is a Shakespearian tragic character flawed by pride:

And the eyes watchful, waiting, perceiving, indifferent.O hidden under the dove’s wing, hidden in the turtle’s breast,Under the palmtree at noon. . . . (Eliot, CP 140)

This is a hero wary of the crowd he moves amongst, his indifference capturing something of the coldness Lewis found to have characterized Shakespeare’s hero. But it is an indifference caught up in the oscillating excitements of the crowd, as expressed by the onlooker to these events: “what did it matter, on such a day?” (CP 139). Yet the hero remains apart. There is no “interrogation” in his eyes; instead, the main speaker constantly interrogates the reader in her or his impatience before this event, of the successful hero’s arrival home from the wars: “Is he coming . . . Can you see?” (CP 139). Part of this anxiety is about the classic controlling quality of numeration, “How many? Count them . . . how many?”, which finds its answer in the absurd parade when it does arrive, led by the “5,800,000 rifles and carbines” (Eliot, CP 139). There is a ghost of The Waste Land ’s weary Dantean “so many” here: “So many waiting” (Eliot, CP 139). Eliot’s effect is to convey the welter of the crowd, but also anxiety about the need to quantify it, contain it. In line with Lewis’s metaphor about the Individual compelling and feeding the people, Eliot’s is a crowd absurdly feeding: “Don’t throw that sausage, / It’ll come in handy” (CP 140).

The perspective of “Triumphal March,” in particular, remains very much that of the crowd in a state of bewilderment that contrasts with the hero’s poise and pose: “We hardly knew ourselves” (CP 139). At this moment, members of the crowd are transported beyond themselves by the Triumph, but the hero remains self-contained. Although we are made to feel the excitement of the crowd, it would be difficult to see this as a portrait of the democratic (or Matthiessen’s “humanitarian”) potential. If Eliot’s Coriolan does not abuse that crowd, as Lewis notes Shakespeare’s did, then he also takes no very positive view of it, in its ready wonder at this spectacle. Although the tone throughout remains close to demotic (“Give us a light?” (CP 140)), the poem’s main speaker is not at liberty to establish her or his separateness within or against the mass feeling. What is instigated, instead, is an odd mutual regard, a shared perception between the crowd (“Can you see?”) and the hero. The line “The natural wakeful life of our Ego is a perceiv-ing” (CP 139) is, indeed, oddly interjected in this opening poem. It feels tonally out of place as part of the voice of the crowd mediated by the poem’s speaker, but does not come from the hero, either. What it establishes, in contradiction to that tragic quality that Eliot had from early on associated with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “seeing himself,” is simply a process whereby crowd looks at hero, and hero’s eyes, if watchful, also just “perceiving” the crowd. Eliot’s Coriolanus has lost that self-redemptive power of Shakespeare’s. To that extent, he is the “normal man” raised up, as J.S. Barnes had claimed the “perfect man” under Fascism to be.




As signaled in the lines quoted above by the ejaculatory “O hidden,” a fur-ther tension in the poem is communicated through jarring contrasts between the inert materiality with which the poem opens (“Stone, bronze, stone, steel”) and the natural imagery in which the potential for any resolution “At the still point of the turning world” is expressed. True to Hugh Sykes Davies’s contemporary remarks about Lucretius in the Criterion discussed above, the ideal of governance is expressed through a potential in nature to yield its resources (and its metaphoric potency) to humanity or the Imperium. Yet, in the actual dynamic of Eliot’s poetry here, the two seem decisively unreconciled or at odds. Shakespeare had had his Coriolanus raiding the “dovecote” “like an eagle” (V.6.115) in the lines Eliot admired as early as “ ‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama.” Hiding some more meliorative potential under the wing of the symbol of peace, “the dove’s wing,” in “Triumphal March,” however, feels vulnerable and unconvincing. The reference to a “turtle’s breast” feels odd, appealing to the type of dove, but also momentarily suggesting the reptile buried in the specific name. Both Coriolan poems, taking up a strain which had been given Eliot through his translation of St-John Perse as Anabasis, and re-rendered in “Journey of the Magi” (both 1927), conceive of freshness and nature as oases in a desert rather than as immediately available. There is a secret “hidden” “Under the palmtree at noon, under the running water” (CP 140). The clematis that “droops” “over the lintel” in “Difficulties of a Statesman” (130) directly, but wiltingly now, mimics the vine-leaves “over the lintel” noticed by the Magi (103). Nature and the State feel curiously at variance through such means in Coriolan.

This state of disjunction continues in the tonality of the poems. That “O hidden” will be taken up in the “O Mother” that punctuates the second poem, “Difficulties of a Statesman,” a cry that carries something of the childishness Wyndham Lewis attributed to Shakespeare’s hero. If “natural wakeful life” (CP 139) is a perceiving, then life itself seems curiously remote from the Ego through-out. The gesture in that second poem towards Virgil via Dante (“O Mantuan”), as poet of history and tradition in the original Roman Imperium, suffers simi-lar desperation — particularly when mentioned in connection with the marshes outside Rome that Mussolini had drained.12

Eliot’s political self-debate in the later 1920s would seem to have suggested that religion is the only recourse in such confining yet violent or dangerous cir-cumstance. Yet the functional account of the speaker “on the way to the temple” in “Triumphal March” does not raise ritual to a life-giving potential: “Now they go up. . . . Then the sacrifice” (CP 140). Here instead is The Waste Land ’s dust, again, even a reducing “Dust of dust,” borne in urns by “virgins” (CP 140). “That is all we could see,” the speaker concludes, before ejaculating “But how many eagles!” (CP 140), returning to wonder not at the religious celebration of Rome’s triumph, but at the glamour of the parade itself. The first poem ends by break-ing off with the sloganizing, seemingly again from beyond the voice of the main speaker, of a Maurrasian “amazement” at the absurdity of the event (Bush 155). The excitement of the poem’s speaker from the crowd is thereby contained and




dismissed in shocking fashion, as the emptiness of the event, and of poem-as-event, is confirmed.

“Difficulties of a Statesman” renders in turn bathos a part of its fabric, “what shall I cry?” (CP 141) and gives the Biblical “All flesh is grass” a derisory gloss, through the list of what such a statement comprehends, “The Companions of the Bath,” etc., etc. (a list that predicts the prolonged enumeration of the City work-ers in East Coker, III (1940)). What emerges in this second poem is a leveling uniformity, a sense of family and national history as a series of statue busts, “all looking remarkably Roman, / Remarkably like each other” (CP 130). J.S. Barnes’s sense that fascist man displays the “old Roman family virtues” (459) takes on a hollowness here through such tokens. This Coriolanus, now seemingly speaker of the poem, rather than the poem’s perceived subject, can simply yearn, for recondite meaning in “O hidden,” and for a togetherness with the mother to be heralded by a diminutive natural stirring. The reiterated reference to “small creatures” does not alleviate the speaker’s difficulties. In place of the reader’s seeming inclusion amongst the crowd at the “Triumphal March,” the interrogation of the reader in this second poem seems to involve that reader standing in as the mother, listening to the statesman’s lack of assurance or power, in any conventional sense: “What shall I cry?” (CP 143) This is a Coriolanus not simply unmanned, as Shakespeare’s is, by the enormity of what his prowess on the battlefield leads him to, but also now without any understanding other than of the purposelessness of a modern administration, the perceiving of the endless “mactations, immolations, oblations, impetrations” (CP 142).

The surviving Coriolan poems draw into themselves and cast their own inter-rogative light upon many of the political themes and critical contexts around Shakespearian drama and the Roman plays, which Eliot had been attentive to across the latter 1920s and into the first years of the 1930s. The two poems form a complex dialectic that reflects the nature of Eliot’s convictions at this unsettled point: “Triumphal March” captures the abjection of the crowd or mass before an equally incognizant hero-figure, or Individual, in Lewis’s terminology. “Difficul-ties of a Statesman” renders the equivalent, “hardly” self-knowing perspective of the hero himself, a weakness that brings on the demands to “RESIGN” at the poem’s end. The hinterland of literary and political complexities and complications that surround the moment of Coriolan, therefore, seem to enliven its potential, its harsh excitements poetically, but also its irresolution, which remains thereby “completely critical,” in Lewis’s revelatory (for Eliot) version of Shakespeare’s play.

Yet this moment of danger soon passes in Eliot’s political thinking. From this stage, which included the abandonment of Coriolan, Eliot’s political stance in his contributions to the Criterion take on a more settled aspect. Having reviewed the opposing political theories and movements of the age, from the late 1920s until that moment, and perhaps because of his abandonment of the poem, Eliot eschews “violent stimulants,” and presents a temperate, if still anti-communist, version of individualism. In a rare, autobiographical Commentary two years after Coriolan had been abandoned (in the April 1934 Criterion), Eliot recalled his own sojourn




in Paris as a young man. He had sympathies then for the camelots du roi movement that reflected the politics of Charles Maurras. Eliot’s conclusions are defensive, and to an extent self-exculpatory, but seem slightly melancholy in their adherence to the self who was formerly excited by direct political activity:

Let us therefore say a word for diversity of opinion. What ultimately matters is the salvation of the individual soul. You may not like this principle; but if you abjure it, you will probably in the end get something that you like less. (“Commentary” [Apr. 1934] 454)

Emphasis upon “the individual soul” presumably counters the contempo-rary dangers (in Eliot’s view) of Communism or Fascism, or some totalitarian movement that “you” would “like less.” In this “Commentary,” Eliot’s Chris-tian sensibility seems somewhat oddly derived from his memories of the violent political interventions of the camelots. But, on the other hand, from this point on, Eliot presents a consistent stance in the journal, as the political impact of Fascist ideology across Europe intensified.

Notes

1. Commenting on the first Coriolan poem, “Triumphal March,” Ronald Bush claims that Eliot’s intention was to make a “piece of political satire,” but ended up with a piece displaying “private nightmare” (153).

2. Eliot recommended Baker’s book as “very useful” for his Extension Lecture course on Elizabethan literature in 1918–19 (Schuchard 49).

3. In a 30 December 1930 letter to G. Wilson Knight, Eliot questions certain incomprehensible qualities in the plotting of Coriolanus, such as his extravagant praise for Valeria. He contrasts that play with the more sophisticated plotting of Anthony and Cleopatra, suggesting that Coriolanus “merely” undergoes a “sudden conversion” in his understanding of his love for his mother, whereas the love between Anthony and Cleopatra benefits from its “gradual development” (Eliot, “Letter” MS 20c Knight 2 (k)).

4. Vivien Eliot’s partial inventory of T.S. Eliot’s library, made c. 1933, records that he owned twenty-two volumes of the Temple Classics Shakespeare. For discussion of the relevance of such editions within Eliot’s poetics of allusion, see Matthews, Early Modern.

5. Kenneth Asher makes some pertinent remarks about how Eliot reconciles Maurras’s politics, and the Frenchman’s atheism, with his own Anglo-Catholic belief, in his chapter on French influences in Eliot. See especially Asher 56–58.

6. Gareth Reeves quotes “The Literature of Fascism” in his recent discussion of Coriolan, but accepts it to be the definitive statement of Eliot’s political position, and hence as the informing stance of the poems. See Reeves 205, 208. My argument here suggests that Eliot’s position was in fact more responsive, complex, and subject to subtle shifts than Reeves suggests it to be.

7. Lyndall Gordon describes Eliot’s original plan for “Coriolan” in Eliot’s New Life 41–42.

8. Similar themes run through Eliot’s post-Coriolan commentaries on allegiance to place, as definer of an individual’s or a nation’s culture. This is disturbingly so in the first Lecture gathered in After Strange Gods, with its references to the blood kinship of “the same people living in the same place” (18). But such notions persist, more neutrally, in Eliot’s later contentions about the bases of tradition and understanding. Chapter III of Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, “Unity and Diversity: The




Region,” is the most obvious case in point (Culture & Christianity, especially 125–6). Leon Surette argues that such new agrarianism in Eliot’s thinking is a direct result of his baptism, so linking his religion and politics at this stage. (189)

9. See Matthews, “Calculated Indifference,” for discussion of Eliot’s long and surprising support for Robertson’s so-called “disintegration” of Shakespeare’s texts. Eliot called the Renaissance his “favourite literary period” in a letter to his mother (Letters I, 263). Hugh Haughton has recently noted that Coriolan is “aligned” with Knight’s account of the pattern of imagery in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (166). Knight himself, who felt that his analysis of the imagery of the play had a decisive impact upon the Coriolan poems Eliot was planning in late 1930, saw in Coriolanus a Renaissance clash between worldliness and Christianity, or between love and war — a clash he believes to have been taken up in Eliot’s poem, with its Nietzschean “super-hero” (Knight 248–9).

10. When reviewing G. Wilson Knight’s The Wheel of Fire for the Criterion, Bonamy Dobrée had con-trasted the book — which he claimed had made him see Shakespeare “anew,” to some extent — with Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox, which he said suffered the fault of Lewis seeing in Shakespeare only what he (Lewis) “wants to see” (Dobrée 342). This is a view Eliot shared in his first response to Lewis on Shakespeare, “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” (Selected Essays 128).

11. Neil Corcoran has argued for the relevance of Lewis’s book for Coriolan, but does not explore the nuances of Lewis’s argument in their relevance to Eliot’s complex political understanding across these years. For Corcoran, the protagonist is a “leading actor” on the Hitler or Mussolini models (108).

12. Eliot’s key post-war essay involving the Roman poet, “Virgil and the Christian World” (1951), would interestingly install him once more as the poet of such traditional cultural, political, and religious continuities.

Works Cited

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———. “A Commentary.” Criterion vol. VII no. ii (Feb. 1928): 97–99. Print.

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Surette, Leon. Dreams of a Totalitarian Utopia: Literary Modernism and Politics. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2011. Print.



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Aesthetic Politics—Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary || “You can see some eagles. And hear the trumpets”: The Literary and Political Hinterland of T.S. Eliot'sCoriolan