There was no coming back for him then; he had thrown in his lot with the English and would remain in Britain the rest of his life. There was not much more poetry, although the collections of small pieces of prose and verse kept appearing and winning plaudits. Those critical essays in immaculate prose are well worth reading, worth studying, if that is your bent. Two volumes, in particular, are noteworthy: The Sacred Wood (1920) and Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932). No essay of Eliot’s has been more influential than “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” It is the prime statement of a classical view of literature and should not be ignored in the flood of novelties that so many prefer.
Looking back, there are a dozen or so other poems that are of lasting importance. The Wasteland, “Ash Wednesday,” and Four Quartets lead the list, but “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Hollow Men,” “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” “Morning at the Window,” “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” “Journey of the Magi,” “Marina,” and “Eyes That Last I Saw in Tears” belong on it, too, as well as Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.
EZRA POUND
1885–1972
Selections
Ezra Pound was born in Idaho, of Quaker parents, in 1885. His education was decidedly desultory but not the less thorough and far-reaching for that. He was probably the most widely read of poets, in English, French, Italian, and other Western languages, and Eastern (at least in transliterations) as well. In fact one of his most famous poems, and (I think) perhaps his best, is “The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” which, he states in an afterword, “By Rihaku.” The poem is a letter from a young wife who married when she was still a child and is now old enough to know what love really is. Her beloved husband has gone away for a while, and she writes to ask him to tell her when he is returning: “Please let me know beforehand,” she says, “And I will come out to meet you/As far as Cho-fu-Sa.” We do not know why he has gone or whether in fact he will return, nor do we know how far Cho-fu-Sa is although it is apparently a long way from her home. These details are unimportant; what is important is the sense, almost tactile, of her longing and her devotion to this young man whom we know only through her loving eyes. I have read this poem perhaps fifty times and it never fails to bring tears to my eyes.
Pound’s life was in many ways a mess. At the end of it, during World War II, he broadcast pro-Fascist messages on Italian radio, was arrested after the war, tried, convicted, and imprisoned in a mental hospital. Thanks to a worldwide movement in his favor he was released and returned to Italy, where he died in 1958. But his poetic output had been large, and his influence inspired T.S. Eliot to describe him as “more responsible for the Twentieth Century revolution in poetry than any other individual.” There is no doubt, at least, of his great influence on Eliot and other contemporary poets. He was especially helpful to Eliot in his writing of The Wasteland, and Eliot dedicated the poem to him in these words: Al miglior fabbro—“To the better workman.” Pound’s establishment of the Imagist school of poetry is exemplified in one of the best known imagist poems (the title, “In a Station of the Metro,” is longer than the poem, to wit):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.
There was a time, in my youth, when everyone I knew could recite those two lines. Strange? Maybe.
Pound’s major works are The Cantos and The Pisan Cantos, the latter written when he was confined in a mental hospital near Pisa, in Italy. The Cantos is a very long and immensely complex retelling (in a sense) of The Odyssey of Homer in something like Dantesque dress. Parts of it are wonderful, but to wade through the entire work is beyond most readers, including me.
EUGENE O’NEILL
1988–1953
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Eugene O’Neill was born in a Broadway hotel in New York City in 1888. He was the son of an actor and he grew up on the road. He spent a year at Princeton and then, to complete his education, sailed as a seaman, worked on the waterfront, and suffered from tuberculosis and alcoholism. He began to experiment with drama in 1913 and saw his first play, Bound East for Cardiff, produced by the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, in 1916. In 1920 his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, opened on Broadway and won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes. In 1936 he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1953, the victim of a crippling disease that had ended his writing ten years before.
O’Neill’s most serious early dramatic works were self-conscious imitations of Greek tragedies They did not really work.
Long Day’s Journey into Night (written in 1941 but not produced until 1956) and its companion piece, The Iceman Cometh (written 1939, produced 1946), are also tragedies but of a different kind. They are not imitations of anything literary. They are tragedies of ordinary men and women in ordinary life—quotidian tragedies about life as we live it today. Gone is the necessity, seemingly imposed by the old Greek models, for “great” characters, dynastic events, monstrous cruelty, and bloodshed. There is tragedy enough, O’Neill knew, in ordinary families. Families like his own. Especially families like his own.
The Greek playwrights had also known, of course, that families were the place to look for tragedy. Family life is essential, indispensable, for human beings; but it is very hard to live in families. In fact, we almost do not know how to do it, at the same time that we know no other way to live that is anywhere near as satisfactory. What living soul has not at some time or other echoed Sophocles’ lament, in Oedipus at Colonus:
Best is not to be born at all.
Next best, to die young.
It is the conflicts of, and within, families that are most likely to bring us to such straits. Yet families are also where love and comfort and most joys that human beings know are to be found, as well as hatred and fear and loathing. Life can be desperately lonely even within families, but it is worse without them. Poor mankind!—as O’Neill would have been first to admit.
The Greeks had known, too, that small faults, often enough repeated, add up to great pain. Faults of character, we call these—the arrogance of Oedipus, repeated over and over, finally leads to his downfall. A single instance of such a fault is never, by itself, decisive. In O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey, the stinginess of James Tyrone Sr. is eminently forgivable—if he had only been stingy once. The drunkenness of his son James would be forgivable—if he had not been drunk so often. And Mary Tyrone, the mother—one drug episode, one morphine binge, would be forgivable and would have been forgiven. But there will be no end to those binges, short of the night to which our long day’s journey tends.