Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot [Paperback]

Professor Denis Donoghue (Author), Denis Donoghue (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2002

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot-from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists," Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied." Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue's case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot's poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Best known for a critical biography of Pater (Lover of Strange Souls) and for the lucid canon defense The Practice of Reading, New York University English professor Donoghue offers what he describes as an intellectual memoir of his ever-growing interest in the work of T.S. Eliot. Light on memoirAhe states that he was born in Ireland, but omits any mention of the yearADonoghue mainly focuses on a lot of literary analysis. Seekers of insights into the ever-hot topic of Eliot's anti-Semitism may be disappointed by Donoghue's approach, which is to list at length varying views from different critics, as if to paralyze the reader and defuse this potentially inflammatory subject. Concluding that there is "a range of respectable judgments available on the anti-Semitic aspects" of the blatantly nasty poem "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," Donoghue ignores the question of whether his own book respects too many judgments by others, rather than advancing anything original in a crowded field. The intellectual memoir conceit degrades into a recitation of which book by which critic had appeared by a given year of Donoghue's early academic employment, and there are few things duller to read than that. Whether readers consider Eliot to be a dry and overrated anti-Semitic horror or a great modern poet, or even both, few will find this attempt at a generalist's overview satisfying. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot-from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists," Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (September 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300097190
• ISBN-13: 978-0300097191
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,164,045 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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22 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best books on Eliot's poetry, September 24, 2005

By 

Jae H. Lee "Conservative Catholic" (Palisades Park, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Words Alone: The Poet T.S. Eliot (Paperback)

After going through volumes of literary criticism of Eliot by luminaries like F. R. Leavis, Edmund Wilson, Northrop Frye, and I.A. Richards, Denis Donohue's "Words Alone," (along with an outstanding but out-of-print biography of T.S. Eliot by the great poet Stephen Spender) is, I think, among the best books on Eliot's poetry. Read especially his definition of the symbolist use of words, contrasting its use by Eliot and Yeats.

Disregard the above review by Publisher's Weekly. Eliot's anti-Semitism is tired and old and not especially interesting to those who understand that anti-Semitism in Europe those days was as flagrant as, say, anti-Americanism is today.

Not only Eliot but many poets of his times like Pound were anti-Semites, perceiving Jews as detriments of classical, if high Greco-Roman culture they so admired. Eliot, said Wilson, was the most chiseled person he met and if you trace his lineage from his ancestral Unitarianism (one of his forefathers was a Salem judge), his youthful New England Puritanism, his later English Anglicanism, and his lifelong disdain of "barbarism," you needn't strain too hard to understand his anti-Semitism, agree or no.

And unlike Pound and Woolf, not to mention the French Symbolists before him and Plath and Millay after him, Eliot was too intelligent to end up so tragic a figure, embracing Christianity--the "prodigious responsibility"--late in life. He devoutly prayed the Rosary everyday and met his second and much beloved wife after writing his Christian poem "Journey of the Magi." (Valerie Eliot heard the poem recited by Sir John Gielgud on radio and resolved at once to meet him. In Eliot, Dante met and MARRIED his Beatrice.)

If you want to see the effects of Christianity on a great person, simply read Eliot's oevure's of poems in chronological succession and track the progress of his life, going from a poet deeply ingrained with "religious sensibilities," like all true poets, and feeling very ennui to full-blown devout Christian and feeling very happy, unlike most poets.

"In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger..."

But if you TRUELY want to split hairs, read Eliot's critical essays to better understand how he became "a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglican in religion." (And lucky are you who are about to read them for the first time.)

Mr. Donohue presents illuminating stuff--far removed from "intellectual conceit" and academic jumbo-mumbo, it has the flavor of the New Critics, ushered in by the figure of the towering Eliot.