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Jewel Spears Brooker. Mastery and Escape: T S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 274 pages. $35.00. Frank Lentricchia. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. 305 pages. $59.95 and $16.95.
As modernism is increasingly taken as a whole at the end of the present century and reexamined as such, two new studies contribute to that reappraisal. Frank Lentricchia's Modernist Quartet takes up Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot; Jewel Spears Brooker focuses on Eliot alone.
They write in the context of a reaction against modernism generally and Eliot in particular that has lost little of its fin de siecle momentum, in spite of Lentricchia's disclaimer that the "anti-Eliot movement . . . seems to have recently tapered ofP' (270). One of the most vehement recent attacks was mounted by Cynthia Ozick in the New Yorker in the wake of the various articles, books, and conferences that marked the centennial of Eliot's birth in 1988. Ozick found it embarrassing to recall "that nearly universal obeisance to an autocratic, inhibited, depressed, rather narrow-minded, and considerably bigoted fake Englishman" (121). She decried Eliot's condemnation of "democratic American meliorism," his rejection of Unitarianism ("centered less on personal salvation than on the social good"), and his "contempt for Jews" (122). She concluded that "in the wake of the last forty years, it is now our unsparing obligation to disclaim the reactionary Eliot" (154). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar have concluded that modernism generally represents a conspiracy "against the rise of literary women [that] became not just a theme in modernist writing but a motive for modernism" (156), while Eliot himself, having protested against the "dissociation of sensibility" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, betrayed a psychological need to denigrate "history associated with the entrance of women into the literary marketplace" (154). Jewel Spears Brooker challenges these assumptions of Gilbert and Gubar's in one of the essays reproduced in her new collection.)
Lentricchia and Brooker are far less dismissive of Eliot and modernism, and they are committed to naming and understanding the importance of both. Brooker is generally a determined defender of the poet, while Lentricchia values the "novelistic character" of the early Eliot, "which anchors itself in...