Eliot Regained

T. S. Eliot's remarkable win in the BBC poll provides an excuse for further rehabilitation of the old master.

There's no way I would ever have voted for Eliot as my 'favourite' poet but I'm not overly distressed that those who took part in the process preferred him to Donne, or any of the others that I would put ahead of him, who are (at least) Larkin, Gunn, Auden, Shakespeare, Donne and probably Edward Thomas. There is always that difficult difference between 'favourite' and 'best' and Eliot is definitely more likely to win 'best' than 'favourite' for me.
On the few occasions, long ago now, when I had anything to do with editing magazines, I certainly wouldn't have wanted to publish any poem that featured lines like,
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
Such heavy-handed philosophical exegesis looks like bad poetry to me and, if asked by its sixth-form author, what was wrong with it I'd have to suggest that long, portentous words are bad and the idea might be better expressed in shorter, less abstract phrases. Except, of course, Eliot was by the time of Burnt Norton an elder statesman of versification who surely knew all that, especially having had Ezra helping him. But I certainly have held up several passages in The Four Quartets as evidence against him in the past. Not anti-semitism. Even if he's guilty of that, moral concerns don't make the poetry bad. It's only the use of language that can do that.
Eliot had the great advantage of writing the critical essays that set the standard by which his own poems were to be judged so it's no great surprise that he was lionised up to and including the time in the 70's that I was discovering what it was all supposed to be about. The received view of him was as the cold fish intellectual, recycling old literature into big, important poems and his own readings of them confirmed the view of him as a dry old stick, never mind how glorious, exciting and danceable the opening lines of Prufrock were and still are. One wonders if the vogue for Eliot among students goes much beyond the Baudelairean ennui of half-deserted streets, coffee spoons and general fin de siecle malaise.
There is still every reason to count Prufrock as one of the very finest poems of the century, a tremendous, pivotal moment, etc. but the suspicion remains that he meandered a bit later on.
Lots of people, many of them much better read and wiser than I, are ready to admit that they didn't fully understand Eliot and that's part of his power. Something too quickly understood is soon regarded as lightweight but we all seem to agree that we somehow knew he was good. The addition of the notes to The Waste Land, padding it out for the American edition, don't seem to help much. But at the time, nobody told us that some of these notes were playfully spurious, mischief-making and fun.
As well as the esoteric references, and the de-bunking of them, it's easy to forget that Eliot can be quite funny and if The Waste Land had kept its work-in-progress title of They Do the Police in Different Voices then that might have been made more obvious. Most of the intrepid readers of Ulysses are so intent on looking at the notes on it that they miss the point that it is supposed to be a comic novel.
Hurry up, please, it's time. I do remember thinking that when my friend was quoting these words in a bar in Gloucester when we were schoolboys that he wanted to go and it was about time I finished the rest of my beer.
But there is great musicality in Eliot which, along with all the application of his avowed methodology, the bleak world view and mental breakdown ('On Margate Sands I can connect nothing with nothing.') leading to the need to transcend into 'shantih shantih shantih', he is an enormous poet, perhaps bigger than we are now able to conceive of. You can't imagine such a revolution in poetry happening again anytime soon but such revolutions do need somebody's example to lead them and it wouldn't have happened if Ezra Pound's poems, along with Yeats', had been the only paragon examples that the next generations had been required to admire.
So, yes. I have the gravest misgivings about allowing people to vote on things but this time, they seem to have got it right. I still wouldn't vote for him as 'favourite' but 'most important to us now' is an entirely different question and that might have been the question that people thought they were answering.
That, and the fact that he wrote Cats, obviously.

P.S. My other thought on Betjeman's slightly disappointing showing in the poll was that maybe now his time is coming to an end. Those of us who have any idea of the England he was writing about and wanted to preserve are getting older and some of them will have voted for the slightly harder-edged Larkin anyway. We might be arriving at the time when Betjeman is regarded as the anachronism that we all sort of knew he was but forgave him for it. It's a shame but it was bound to happen. Give it another 20 years and he might not feature at all unless Prime Minister Boris Johnson has made him central to the curriculum on some heritage Eng Lit reading list.