{"id":163,"date":"2016-07-03T23:23:23","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T23:23:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=163"},"modified":"2022-06-27T12:35:58","modified_gmt":"2022-06-27T16:35:58","slug":"steven-matthews-t-s-eliot-and-early-modern-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2016\/07\/03\/steven-matthews-t-s-eliot-and-early-modern-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Steven Matthews, T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"

Steven Matthews. T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature. <\/em>Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. vii, 222p. ISBN 9780199574773. \u00a350.00 (hardcover).<\/p>\n

Steven Matthews\u2019s book offers a comprehensive account of one of the most important critical issues in the work\u2014poetic, critical and theatrical\u2014of T. S. Eliot: his relationship to and absorption of an inheritance from the literature of what he called the \u201cElizabethan\u201d or \u201cRenaissance\u201d period, of what Matthews, in the correct scholarly style of today (or perhaps of almost-yesterday) calls the \u201cEarly Modern\u201d\u2014the period from 1580 to 1630. Because this is so significant a relationship in Eliot, it is also highly significant in the subsequent history of literature in English, because Eliot has been so important to that literature as both poet and critic. Whether Eliot actually \u201cinvented\u201d the Early Modern for modernity, as has often been thought by critics, is therefore an issue at the heart of the book.<\/p>\n

Matthews considers such relevant elements of the relationship as the following: Eliot\u2019s development of \u201cdramatic lyricism\u201d from early modern literature, and especially from his engagement with the work of John Donne; his translation of \u201cMetaphysical\u201d sensibility and conceit into a revolutionary modern, or modernist, idiom; and the cultural critique consistently, if not always effectively, implied by it. Grounded in a great deal of contextual material that uncovers Eliot\u2019s impressively extensive reading not only in early modern literature itself but in contemporary critiques of it, and taking stock of Eliot\u2019s immersion in the literary politics of his time, Matthews\u2019s book will advance knowledge of his topic and prove a valuable resource for academics and postgraduate students of modern literature.<\/p>\n

Matthews strikingly proposes that \u201cThe Assignation,\u201d a short story by Poe, had great impact on Eliot as a child and that he discovered in it quotations from the early modern poet Henry King and playwright George Chapman that remained important to him all his life. Not only this, though, but also that what these quotations suggested to him was \u201cthe interplay between present freshness and immediacy in poetry, and the dependency of such moments upon earlier versions of the words presented\u201d (4). This, Matthews says, \u201cgoes to the heart of his poetry\u201d (4). Eliot\u2019s early discovery of the significant value of what his famous essay \u201cTradition and the Individual Talent\u201d calls the \u201chistorical sense\u201d may certainly account for the allure, invitation and testamentary witness which the concept evokes from him in that piece and\u2014variously and under other forms too\u2014in the rest of his work. Frequently in some sense concerned with being haunted, Eliot\u2019s poetry is haunted by literature; and his criticism tells us why this must be so. Matthews\u2019s treatment of allusion in Eliot is responsive to this and, he claims, is to be distinguished from the approach taken by other critics.<\/p>\n

Whether this is exactly so or not, Matthews\u2019s readings of Eliot\u2019s criticism and poetry are spiritedly parti-pris<\/em> and take stock of a wide variety of response to it. The book is scholarly in resourceful, disciplined ways, as well as both strenuous and exacting. If one misses anything of Eliot\u2019s own feline stealth of argument and wit, this is not necessarily to disparage the work of a scholar (which Eliot was not), but I do wish Matthews would refrain from using the word \u201cacross\u201d so frequently and with what seems to me a wholly personal connotation.<\/p>\n

Neil Corcoran<\/p>\n

University of Liverpool<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Steven Matthews. T.S. Eliot and Early Modern Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. vii, 222p. ISBN 9780199574773. \u00a350.00 (hardcover). Steven Matthews\u2019s book offers a comprehensive account of one of the most important critical issues in the work\u2014poetic, critical and theatrical\u2014of T. S. Eliot: his relationship to and absorption of an inheritance from the literature of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1894],"class_list":["post-163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","tag-15th-17th-centuries"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":599,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163\/revisions\/599"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}