Review of a Review

This review of Eliot's first two volumes of poems, "Visions and Revisions: On T.S. Eliot" has been circling for a little while. I am unimpressed. First: What is new in this? Second: I think there's something false. The author focuses on the contrast between what he calls "The Eliot Way," tying Eliot's own hesitation of action to his ancestors and even to Boston, and "a moment of awful daring," which is what his marriage to Vivienne was. I think that what the author gets wrong is the connection between hesitation and action for Eliot. These weren't disconnected. It all goes back to "Tradition and the Individual Talent," I think: these aren't two things that oppose each other; rather, action emerges from the tradition and involves something new. Tradition is nothing if not reinterpreted in the present through new actions. Perhaps Eliot's hesitation came from his respect for the past. Yet he clearly, however hard it was for him, also asserted himself with the creation of the new--from his poetry, to his moving to a new country, to his two marriages (although, granted, he didn't marry Emily Hale). These actions weren't a rejection of "The Eliot Way," but were, rather, inextricably connected to it.