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The European English Messenger 16.2 (2007)

T. S. Eliot Studies in Italy 1950-2007: An Overview

Franco Marucci (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy)

The last fifty years have been for English Studies inItaly a period of high receptivity and originalassimilation of literary theories, critical methods andeven metaphysical constructions of the text, aftermuch pre-war “feeding / A little life with dried tubers”.If one excepts the isolated phenomenon of a MarioPraz, our academic studies attained maturity whenwe ceased to import culture passively from abroad,and, with Giorgio Melchiori and Marcello Pagnini,some of our most outstanding criticism began to betranslated and made available to English andAmerican audiences.

Before and after the war Benedetto Croce was anundisputed authority on aesthetics, and also amilitant comparatist – not by chance, as we shall seein a moment – in his several collections of essaysthat ranged over all the ancient and modernEuropean literatures. But, as happens with literarydictatorships, he froze the critical debate well afterhis death in 1952. Today, with hindsight, we shouldperhaps rehabilitate him as the one who gave thecoup de grâce to an old-fashioned and immobilehistoricism. Curiously enough, Croce came to becombated and anathematised by two schools ofthought then emerging, which faced each other withdaggers drawn: that of the politically engaged,Marxist critics, who had their gospel in Lukács andcriticised Croce for his deafness to literature as arevolutionary political weapon; and that of the firstformalists whom he, Croce, was to a certain extentinstrumental in shaping, along with the Americannew critics and Russian formalism. They rejectedCroce’s axiom that poetic form, and all thetechnicalities of poetry, are secondary andincidental, and objected to his famous formula of a“chemical” separation of “poetry” from “nonpoetry”. What he had been insensitive to, accordingto his accusers, was the importance of an organicconcept of literary art.

After the wane of “crocianesimo” at the end ofthe fifties, critical schools slowly stabilised in Italyaccording to a tacit geographic partitioning.Academic seats won a reputation as centres of well-defined literary approaches and cultural interests,and worked for years with some mutualimpermeability, later overcome thanks to the speedingup of communications and the foundation of theItalian Society of English Studies (A.I.A.). In the

sixties and early seventies, for example, an academicmap would have featured Milan and Rome asstrongholds of a sociological method of a Marxistmatrix; Venice as the bridgehead of an approachmainly oriented towards philological and textualquestions; Florence as the vanguard, where thesubtlest theoretical assumptions from beyond theAlps were absorbed, at the very moment when Pariswas becoming the European laboratory ofinnovation.

In the last three decades or so the vicissitudes ofEnglish Studies in Italy have become hardlyintelligible, and difficult to synthesize, owing to ananarchic reshuffling that stems from many factors,among which the dissolution of local and regionalschools, and of the immediate identification ofacademic seat and range of interests, is not the leastnotable. A further factor is the acquired scientificindependence of professors of English, along withthe transformation of the Italian academic systemfrom an élite to a mass university, entailing a steepincrease in the members of staff to match acorrespondingly steep rise in the numbers of studentenrolments. The recruiting system of members ofstaff, which until some years ago worked on anational basis, could, to construct an example, movea lecturer, whose career had begun in Milan, to theUniversity of Catania. It is thus impossible to updatethe Italian academic map, so easily sketched out afterthe war, as far as English Studies are concerned.What remains feasible is simply to keep referring touniversities identifying, with some exceptions, withthe study of certain authors rather than withapproaches and methods – Shakespeare at Romeand Florence, Joyce at Trieste, Conrad at Pisa, theVictorians at Venice and Pescara, to name only afew. Also, one should not forget the bifurcationwhich occurred after the institutionalization of Post-colonial Studies, an interest taken up today by manyof us as an alternative to “purely” English Studies.This split completes the one which, years ago,separated American from English Studies. One finalremark concerns the ruinous earthquake caused bythe recent academic reform which, by institutingthree- and two-year degrees (supposedly) modelledon the English B.A and M.A. respectively, hasreverberated – mainly negatively – not only in thestrictly educational field but in the scholarly activity

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itself of staff researchers. These are discouragedfrom writing – and therefore find it hard to publish –specialized books which cannot be targeted at theacademic consumer, let alone the ordinary reader.Hence, there is an undoubted lowering of thescientific standards of the publications destined forthe university, only remedied in the form of bookstotally or partially financed by the CNR (NationalResearch Centre) or by Departmental funds.

T. S. Eliot studies in Italy between the post-waryears and today may exemplify the gamut of thesephenomena. On the one hand Eliot, retaining analways provocative centrality in the Modernistcanon, and a durable pride of place in the syllabus,has never failed to stimulate the production ofreading guides in Italian, and periodically challengespoets and critics to compile annotated anthologiesof his poetry with facing texts. Alessandro Serpieri,as we shall see, one of the most sophisticated Italiancritics of Eliot, has recently reprinted1 his edition ofThe Waste Land (first published in 1982) enriching itwith an appendix dealing with the first draft of thepoem, excerpts of which appear in translation. Onthe other hand, Eliot seems to be the ideal writer toallow us to follow the vicissitudes of theory andmethod in Italy in the last half-century, a roleobviously shared by Shakespeare and, on a differentscale, by other authors. It goes without saying that,in what follows, a purely phenomenological, neutraland objective overview will hardly be possible, sinceI am myself an actor in this story2.

Eliot studies began to establish a major traditionin Italy in the late fifties, at the very moment whenthe English scholar and university researcher wasslowly trying to divest himself of an old-fashionedidentity. He had been and still was a literary historian,an anthologist and therefore a translator, in order toface primary or quasi primary needs of the Italianreadership. Until then, significantly, to write a literaryhistory had been the crowning achievement of anyoutstanding literary scholar and of any ambitiousprofessor of Modern Languages aspiring to leave apersonal mark in the annals of his discipline. At thesame time, or I could say pour cause, he was acomparatist in the broadest sense of the word: astudent not only of English literature, but also ofmodern and ancient European literatures, and anoverall expert capable of capturing and elegantlyexpatiating on parallels between the sister arts –literature, painting, sculpture, music and, later,cinema. Herein lies the explanation of the surprisingfact that many pioneering Modern Languages Italianscholars, active on either side of World War II, suchas Federico Olivero or Arturo Farinelli, boasted an

eclectic, if not chaotic, bibliography that includedpublications on topics ranging from English toFrench, Spanish and German literature. Specializationwas still to come. The literary interpreter wasnaturally inclined to a judicial kind of criticism basedon mere impressions, which dangerously relied onrather vague and largely implied canons of taste. Noless than four major histories of English literatureappeared in a short time-span between the latethirties and the early sixties. That of Mario Praz (1937,revised and enlarged in the many subsequenteditions), properly speaking not a manual, as I shallargue, was followed by A. Zanco’s unpretentiousone (1945 and 1958), and by C. Izzo’s (1961-1963).Gabriele Baldini, a fine, well-known Shakespeareanscholar, left his unfinished after the first volume(1958), which reached the middle of the sixteenthcentury. This identity of the Professor of English,who had to act, perhaps somewhat unwillingly, as aliterary historian, collapsed at the end of the sixties.No single-handed histories of English literature, nohistories at all were produced after Izzo’s for manyyears. Decades later, the revival of historiographywould result in a brand-new shape: that of a team ofexperts on definite areas and authors, working undera general editor, the internal organization plannedaccording to the different aspects or problems ofthe literary activity to which authors accommodatedthemselves (the audience, the literary market, theaesthetic debate etc.), rather than to the sequenceof authors. To explain this revival we need only recallcertain developments in European criticism in thelate sixties. The literary work – obviously in rivalrywith different configurations of the text – hadincreasingly come to be considered as a self-contained structure, with no links whatsoever withthe author and with his/her social, historical,biographical and even psychological background:it was irrelevant who wrote a poem, or when it hadbeen written, because a poem was a network ofpurely linguistic and signic relations. A fierce warwas waged in Italy, in some quarters, on historicismin any form. The “death of the author” was per sethe death of the literary history. Yet semiotics, withthe reinstatement of history and context, andLotman?s cultural typology concomitantly providedan inflow of oxygen to new-concept, resurrectedliterary histories. Manuals of English literature didget to be written in Italy in the eighties and nineties,such as those edited by Franco Marenco (Storiadella civiltà letteraria inglese, 4 vols, 1996); byMarcello Pagnini (I contesti culturali dellaletteratura inglese, from 1986, in severalmonographs), and by Agostino Lombardo (Storia

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delle letterature di lingua inglese, from 1991), notto mention other, self-defined “short histories” inresponse to the reform of the Italian academic systemwhich I mentioned above.

After all, the most popular and best-knownHistory of English Literature in Italian, the manualpar excellence, has always been for us that by MarioPraz, who is reputed by almost unanimousconsensus the greatest all-time Italian scholar ofEnglish literature, and ipso facto of the century justgone by. I do not personally fully concur with thisevaluation. One might object that the vocation ofthe historian did not fit him well, and that he wrotethe book (the first edition is dated 1937) merely tomeet the demands of the publishing market and toprovide a long-expected instrument for a growinguniversity population. True, Praz wrote at least twoeverlasting, and even today indispensable classicsof criticism which everyone knows and has read,but his spectacular bibliography overflows aboveall with collections of essays, especially of that kindcalled in Italian “elzeviro” – a term, I find, whichcomes from Elzevier, a Dutch family of printers. Heexcelled in this genre, which is not merely the literaryreview but may be a rhapsodic divertissement on avariety of topics. Simply as a reviewer, his style waswitty and vivacious, his pen pointed, even caustic,whenever, for example, he pitilessly exposed errorsin others’ translations. Praz as literary historian –Praz the asystematic, Sternian and Borgesian writerof fantasies, Praz the weaver of far-fetched analogicalwebs that transgress the historical perspective –nearly sounds a contradiction in terms. EdmundWilson coined the term “prazzesco” for his method,which may be defined as “a quasi Sternian play ofassociations and digressions” (A. Lombardo). Prazhimself left us a disconcerting, delicious persiflageof the métier of the uninspired, routine literaryhistorian, worth quoting to give an idea of his proseto those who have never come across it: “very littleis needed. It is not necessary to be intelligent. Onthe contrary a certain, sweet passivity is preferable– a certain, tranquil obtuseness, which lets itself besoaked more easily by the colours and sounds ofbooks. As to the writing itself, it’s a trifle. You butneed to know the main verbs, some adjectives (butnot too many), the correct use of consecutiotemporum; and at the end, even if one has no talentfor literature, the art of the past, from Homer to Musil,is so rich and so beautiful that it will end up byletting fall a few tiny drops of its riches, forminglovely or bizarre stalactites, into the critic’s prose”.

Defining Praz’s aesthetics of historiography helpsone not a little to understand the objectives of his

criticism. The best and most valid critical sectionsof his Storia strike one as indeed idiosyncratic,imaginative, altogether personal résumés, enlivenedby a systematic attempt to define a literary work, ora passage or a line of poetry or prose, in terms ofanother work. Such a method may be judgedbenevolently and felt as quite modern; it creates infact a few inconsistencies. One is that it conceals arelativistic deferment of judgment: to define a writeror a work by means of an analogy with another writeror another literary work, or a painter or a painting, isobviously not equivalent to explaining them. As T.S. Eliot himself once remarked, “any book, any essay,any note in Notes and Queries, which produces afact even of the lowest order about a work of art is abetter piece of work than nine-tenths of the mostpretentious critical journalism, in journals or inbooks”. At any rate Praz’s fundamental critical workswere targeted at the élites of the well-read. TheRomantic Agony is strewn with overlong quotes,often drawn from secondary and marginal works,and given in all the major European languages, andquotes which should speak for themselves, offeredas they are to the expert without comment. One mayadd a couple more objections to this kind ofprocedure. What one favourably notices on readinghis collections of “elzeviri” is that Praz is much moreconvincing, and critically informed, when he visitsan author for the second time. A comparison of partsof his Storia with subsequent essays dealing withthe same subject, while it astonishingly reveals thatPraz tended to repeat his initial formulationsverbatim, also proves that he was able to enrich anddocument them. Far less agreeable, and much moreirritating, is the detection, which follows even acasual reading of his books, of entire parts liftedfrom his previous works – Praz seems to have knownand applied the now so well-known practice of “cut-and-paste”. Est modus in rebus. What is alsodisturbing is that Praz did not know, let alone admit,of the possibility – if not the necessity – of revisingone’s own idea of an author or a work. He set instone his definitions for posterity, so to speak. Arecent commemorative book3 has put the finishingtouches to the mythologizing of this scholar. Thishagiographic work hardly concedes limitations toits subject – except perhaps some timid doubt onthe part of Agostino Lombardo on Praz as atranslator. For Piero Boitani, Praz is “in this genre[essay-writing], the greatest writer in the world” –an obviously overgenerous judgment. D. Colussion Praz’s critical style and use of the Italian languageprovides in fact the only non-eulogisticcontribution; its companion might have been one –

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missing – on Praz’s method and analytical procedure.The book also features a witty interview with Prazby the well-known journalist and polemicist CorradoAugias, which, however, mostly teases Praz as aman rather than as critic. In one of his answers Prazmaintains, however, that he had kept aloof, as ayoung scholar, from the “positivist orbit of the searchfor sources”. If one elides “positivist”, this definitiondescribes to a tee Praz’s critical practice.

Were one to point to some constants or variablesin T. S. Eliot studies in Italy, the first is the evidenceof a predictable growth in critical density – fromwhich subterranean depths Eliot’s texts get dredged,the sort of magnifying lens which is employed. Inthe primitive stage a critic could well afford to quotea long poetic excerpt and close it with the tag that“the reader may easily enjoy it by himself”, and judgethereby the complexity of the poem. From the eightiesonwards the single poetic line, even the singlelexeme, may raise a paragraph, if not a page or anumber of pages, of commentary. Another constantconcerns the subdivision of Eliot’s œuvre and thekind of focus brought to bear on the different textualaggregations. Four Quartets has never enjoyedmuch favour with us, and in books and essays criticalanalysis tends to thin out when that text is reached,the exploration usually ending with The Waste Land.Prufrock has received the same if not greaterattention than The Waste Land, and chapters dealingwith it occupy the largest part in the most recentmonographs. Virtually every prominent criticalmethod or jargon has found nearly immediateapplication in Eliot studies. In this effort to test theoryon text, two famed theoreticians who seem to havehad a lesser or no impact are Lotman and Bakchtin.Lotman is cited by D. Calimani in his 1998 book,when he analyses what he calls the “rhetoric ofspace”, which in fact means the metaphors of spaceand the moral symbols or even allegories attachedto them. We may finally subdivide the Eliot criticsinto two rough categories, those who haveapparently studied him malgré tout, and others whohave thought him infallible as poet and critic. In thepolitically incorrect Italy of the sixties and seventiesone might be likely to tackle Eliot from the wrong

and to tolerate his ideology, limiting praise tothe mere technique. Marxist critics could but paradehim as an example of the crisis and degeneration ofadvanced bourgeois capitalism, and approach himemptied of any drop of suspension of disbelief. Eliot’sinternational stature could not be disowned and notfind status and function even in the rigidlydemarcated agenda of Marxist ideology. Perhaps athird group is that of the neutrals, who would have

dissented both politically and ideologically withEliot, but were aware – with Mallarmé – that poemsare made with words and not ideas.

Mario Praz was the author of the first substantialand authoritative Italian essay on T. S. Eliot, “T. S.Eliot and Dante”. It first appeared in English in aSouthern Review issue as early as 19374. But Ipropose to discuss it later on, along with his 1967book on Eliot and Joyce. With this exception, thepioneering essays on the poet were those by GiorgioMelchiori in his Tightrope Walkers5. By a strange orperhaps predictable optical effect Melchiori soundstoday more “modern” than Praz, who followed himnine years later; and a whole critical epoch seems tohave elapsed between Praz 1967 and the equallypioneering article by Marcello Pagnini on FourQuartets, which in its turn precedes Praz’s book bynine years.

Both Praz and Melchiori took for granted, in rapidand synthetic reductions en passant, the or a meaningin Eliot?s poetry, and dwelt instead on the literaryechoes as a key to or a support of the poetic meaning.Such a procedure, certainly legitimate with all poets,is most necessary with Eliot, in whom each singlequotation is relevant in the parodic interplay, andpoetry exists as a series of conflicts of echoes anddecontextualized quotations; but it must not beradicalised. Both critics therefore worked, on the basisof inference, as diviners of echoes and influencesmostly undeclared by the author, and detected in thesingle line and even in the single lexeme.

The title of the main chapter on Eliot in Melchiori’sTightrope Walkers – “Echoes in ‘The Waste Land’”– is emblematic both of the aesthetics of that bookand of the overall activity of most Italian critics inthose days. The book first came out in English in1956, and a few years later it was translated intoItalian. It thus addressed an adult, internationalpublic. Melchiori did not aim to give his own globaland organic interpretation of the poem – in his words“the whole impression of the structure before me”.He sought in fact to prove, in Eliot’s poem, a theoryof his own regarding the creation of poetry: a “streamof more or less unconscious echoes and recollectionsreassemble and rearrange themselves to form theunit of a new poem”. This is the “creative process”of poetry. Hence, the critic was for him the eruditescholar able to capture the most recondite sourcesthat may have acted in the poet’s mind – every grainof literary material that migrates, raw or reshaped, toanother linguistic organism: “all real poetry is bornin the same way, absorbing and transforming thework of the past”. Melchiori himself unveiled hisanalytical model, that formidable catalogue by

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Lowes, The Road to Xanadu, which “leaves nothingto be discovered” in Coleridge’s creative process.Lowes’s book was repeatedly praised because itexemplarily performed the same task as Melchiori’s:to open up, as with a lancet, the brain of the author,to “meander through the mind of a poet”, toreconstruct “the process of mental associations”.

In this essay Melchiori avoided any attempt toseriously clarify the ways in which the externalmaterials get pasted into the new organism. Hejudged as “dangerous” any foray into psychology,and was satisfied to define the “interplay” of sourcesas either “fully conscious” or “not conscious” – adistinction reformulated as “conscious” vs “lurkingin the back of the mind”. Focussing on the secondsection of the poem, A Game of Chess, to the poeticreminiscences stated by the poet Melchiori addedothers, not “conscious” ones, that is to say“automatic”: congeries of residues or surfacings fromhabitual memory (Keats, Ovid, Swinburne,Shakespeare), all of them proving the “shifting andconstant rearranging of known images and words inthe artist’s mind”. One of these images was drawnfrom Joyce’s Ulysses. Eliot, argued Melchiori, hadread that masterpiece, admitted to having beenimpressed by it, and, therefore, “it would not besurprising” that a scene from that novel “shouldhave wandered into the poet’s imagination”. Thefinal part of the essay addresses Joyce’s “influence”on the poem “as a whole”. Such an interplay of bothconscious and unconscious reminiscences createsa distinction which corresponds, substantially, tothat between echoes that a well-read audience couldimmediately spot, and others so subtle as to requirethe expert. Melchiori’s critical style evoked theUniversity classroom, if not a circle of academiccolleagues who need only to look each other in theeye to understand each other. He often used thefiller “of course” to fend off the possible objectionthat he was disclosing an obvious source; but thenmoved on to deal with more concealed and moresophisticated borrowings. These function on thebasis of inference, of probability, of the “nose” ofthe critic as detective (see for instance: “the presenceof Joyce’s novel can also be detected...”). Closinghis discussion of the Philomel range of echoes,Melchiori observed that a “hook” acted in Eliot’smind to bring to the surface words and images fromthe magma of memories lying on its bottom. Thecritic quoted James’s “unconscious cerebration”.

As I have mentioned, Praz received, while stillliving, a canonization d’emblée backed by Americancritics such as Edmund Wilson. Some years ago(2002) he was awarded the immortalising accolade

of a “Meridiano”, a prestigious Mondadorianthology of his multifarious production. Wilson, itmust be noticed, had extolled the artist rather thanthe critic. Even to define Praz as the greatest-everItalian scholar of English literature means little afterso many vicissitudes in our discipline, and requiresthe specification of a few parameters. In an age ofapproximations such as the one when he startedout, Praz no doubt knew English perfectly and couldrap on the knuckles the sometimes pathetic andimprovised translators of his time, whose versionswere full of blunders. A formidable scholar, he wasrarely or never at fault on the objective data. Praz’sown method, he himself admitted, was “blamedbecause metaphorical”; he didn’t write “like astructuralist”, and whenever he could he hadrecourse “to an image”.

Praz, too, in the Introduction to his book on Joyceand Eliot6, repeated the rudimentary distinction,apropos of the creative process of 20th centurywriters, between the “semiconscious” and the“subconscious”. The book seemed written andconceived in the wake of Melchiori’s exploration,because it put the two writers on the same axis asMelchiori had done. Praz the historian of ideas andof historical cycles aligned the 17th and the 20th

centuries along the ideological turmoil, thedesperation and frustration of the writer at grips withthe new scientific discoveries, and facing thecollapse of a previously solid world-image. The twoensuing chapters, one on Joyce and one on Eliot,form an odd and uneven book, certainly not one ofPraz’s best. Probably a transcription of a radiobroadcast, it simplifies and reduces the criticalappreciation, while it is occasionally unable to resistthe temptation to add some pearls of erudition.

The “influences” detected in Eliot do not conflictwith those of Melchiori – they coalesce with them.Eliot, for Praz, felt above all the influence of Dante.The single Eliot poems were presented andintroduced following the biographical thread, andas usual one is struck – and by turns fascinated andsurfeited – by Praz’s mania for associations7. Hisliterary comparativism has remained unique, and itis always first-hand. A reading of this Eliot chapterleaves no room for doubt that Praz was at the sametime a superlative Italian and French literature scholar.He was perfectly at his ease in those literatures.While detailing the influence of Laforgue, Praz onlycould pick out the French poet’s subtlereminiscences in the less well-known Italiancrepuscolari such as Gozzano, Palazzeschi andGovoni. In the course of the chapter Praz, likeMelchiori, let himself be guided by the echoes, he

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too bypassing the question of the conscious orunconscious nature of Eliot’s borrowings. He oftenobserved of such and such a line that it “made onethink” of another poet; or that this or that passageshared “a family likeness” (a typical idiolect) withanother; but he said precisely nothing about thepoet’s associative processes. Due perhaps to itsorigin, as I have said, this chapter soon turns into achain of poetic quotations, in some cases of poemsthemselves given in their entirety and without anycomment. At the end, the pages containing onlyquotations exceed those of commentary! A realexplication de texte always remained foreign to thiscritic. Praz seemed much more anxious to embellishhis discourse by not only pointing out echoescaptured from the most disparate writers, but alsoby venturing towards hazardous and surprisinganalogies (like the equivalence between Eliot’sdramatic works, exploiting the conventions ofcommercial theatre for metaphysical aims, and theburlas y juegos of the 17th century Jesuit Alonso deLedesma). The “echoes” he found, though to him“self-evident”, had not of course appeared as suchto anyone before. Intermittently his comparativismbecame interartistic – Prufrock’s “overwhelmingquestion” reminded him of a scene in IngmarBergman’s Wild Strawberry. Yet the realm of paintingis obviously Praz’s privileged field of reference andsource-finding. In The Waste Land he discoveredanalogies with the fauves, with Surrealist painting,even with the photomontages and the pastiches ofan Erni, the caprices of a Max Ernst or thecauchemars of a Dalí; in another passage hecompared the element and sensation of “fake” inMurder in the Cathedral with Ingres’s paintings ofhistorical subjects. Extending the range he sightedan analogy between a divertissement by Ibert andthe obscene song about Mrs. Porter in The WasteLand, and compared Eliot’s mixture of tragic andcomic to Strauss’s operas.

An appendix to this essay is a shorter one, “T. S.Eliot and Dante”, which English readers find includedin The Flaming Heart, though that version is notexactly coincident with the Italian in a number ofslight but not wholly insignificant details. Once againit confirms Praz’s extraordinary command of Italianliterature, with a witty and paradoxical discussion ofDante’s influence on Eliot “from an Italian point ofview”. In this case, the nature of the essay exemptedPraz from any attempt at a proper interpretation, andsoon the essay becomes an affair of “echoes”, ofwords and themes Eliot “may have remembered” –of his “indebtness”, of the poetic “germs” (this wordappears in the Italian text only) he caught from Dante.

On La Figlia Che Piange, Praz shared Melchiori’sview that Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel “may havehaunted the dim corners of [Eliot’s] memory”, oreven “was actually at the back of [his] mind”.

In 1958 Marcello Pagnini wrote an essay on the“music” of Four Quartets8. It had nothing in commonwith the search for echoes and influences of Prazand Melchiori, and beat courageously an altogethernew critical path. Pagnini had already proved theItalian scholar most receptive to suggestions andinsights coming from the most advanced sectors ofEnglish and American theoreticians of the literarytext. His essay on Four Quartets is interspersed withreferences and quotations from, for example, I. A.Richards and Northrop Frye, of whom very few wereaware in those days. Simply put, with that essayPagnini inaugurated in English Studies in Italy a typeof approach more attentive to the morphology ofpoetry. For such a task a deeper knowledge of theraw materials of literature, and a new and moreappropriate critical vocabulary were needed. Heachieved that by seeking to tackle, on the basis ofthat poem, the question of the analogies – generaland specific – between two languages havingdifferent grammars and signic systems. In FourQuartets Pagnini found the application of therhythmic phrase of music; and in the domain ofmeaning he brought to light the iteration of imagesor “subjects”, the presence of thematic groups, andthe recourse to the Leitmotiv. He was indeed silentlyacting according to a different generative premise.Poetry did not take shape, in Eliot and qua poetry,as echo or verbal substance, but rather as rhythmicalfigure, an intention borne out by his theoreticalwritings. Four Quartets thus revolved, for Pagnini,around rhythmical variation and around linguisticdiscontinuity modelled on colloquial speech. Thiskind of argument was obviously imperfect for thetime being, and the analogies were found anddiscussed in terms of “similarities” and of recurringeffects in rhythm and construction (as in the fuguemotifs) and of examples of fusion between soundand sense. (Conversely, one might add, musico-logists often employ linguistic and prosodicmetaphors, such as spondees, iambs, or anapaests,in describing a musical passage.) The term “echo”indeed recurred in Pagnini, but it had an exclusivelymusical meaning, and referred to structural andmorphological aspects alone. Thus, on theconceptual plane, it meant, exclusively, a repetitionof a thematic enunciation.

In the early seventies the fruitful encounterbetween formal-structuralism and Eliot’s poetry wasalready under way if not yet in full swing. However,

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it had been preceded, chronologically, by anothercritical school that “appropriated” Eliot for half adecade. Intrinsically, Eliot might have very little tosay to materialist and Marxist criticism; or he mighthave figured merely as the reactionary poet andideologist to decry. This friction was unavoidablewhen that encounter did happen. In 1971 SilvanoSabbadini was a young graduate from the Universityof Milan, where he had attended the English andAmerican literature courses of Agostino Lombardo,a competence surfacing in Sabbadini’s book of 1971– Una salvezza ambigua. Studio sulla prima poesiadi T. S. Eliot (Bari 1971) – in the wealth of backgroundreferences to a realist, decadent and at the sametime symbolist Puritan culture into which, Sabbadiniinsisted, Eliot was born. Infatuated by Marxism as amedicine for the regeneration of society, Sabbadiniexplained the genesis of his book, its justificationand raison d?être, in his preface: “the insufferability,for us, of some parts of Eliot is the surest proof ofhis utter refusal of second-hand amiability”. Eliot’sœuvre was thus, in 1971, already dated and“impracticable” in many of its parts, and the onlyjustifiable approach was neither the “speciousdiscussion of a frankly reactionary ideology”, nor afocussing on the “pure poetry”, but the adherenceto its existential trajectory. A Marxist like Sabbadiniwas apt to feel reassured by Eliot’s “disillusion”, byhis failure to “attain salvation”, and his “adventure”was seen as one of the many “frustratedperegrinations” of a long prehistory of writers. Hisbook may be taken to demonstrate, from its point ofview, the ontological impracticability of a merelyspiritual, “vertical” salvation, and the necessity ofone “laically taking place on the horizontal plane”.This ideological frame was, on the whole,superfluous, as it led to the stock diagnosis, that“the central problem of Eliot’s poetry” is a “crisisnot simply involving the individual, but embracingthe whole Western world”. Because of its obedienceto this frame the book does not make easy reading.Based “on a continuous parallel of poetry andideology”, it imitates a “philosophical” style madeup of overlong periods, syntactical contortions andunusual participial formations. Its critical languagebetrayed the rigidity, the peremptoriness and thepenchant for apophthegms of the Marxist jargonthen in vogue (of the type: “The innermost meaningof art has always been in its alienation”).

Eliot’s poetry was studied by Sabbadini withinits segnic demarcations, yet consideredmaterialistically as the poetry of a New EnglandAmerican that arose subsequent to realism anddecadentism – the poetry of the bourgeois

intellectual, conscious of the commercialization ofhis product, and looking for his salvation to an artalienated from the world. Yet Sabbadini was far frominsensitive to the new French theories of the text,and sought to combine Marxist and post-Marxistaxioms with the analytical techniques of formalismand structuralism, and even with suggestionsderived from studies of phonology. The result was aseries of probings carried out in almost totalforgetfulness of the ideological schemes: eventraditional readings of the poems are seen asparodies of forms transmitted by tradition, or asclusters of recurrent images submitted to gradualsemantic metamorphosis. In the last analysis,Sabbadini’s critical and theoretical equipment couldbe said to be of mixed in its nature, as his points derepère ranged from Lukács to Spitzer, from Sartre toContini, from Marcuse and Benjamin to Barthes. Herelay perhaps the reason for his paradoxical defenceof Eliot’s ideology as an integral part of his poetry, adefence due to the fact that the “transcendence” ofhistory is an ideal more often called into questionand denied by the exploration of its “negativecounter-ideal”. This made it, for him, all the morenecessary to relate the poetry to its socio-culturalcontext, that of the “last phase of the collapse of acivilization that was by then outside history, and towhich nothing remained but the refuge in Utopia ormetaphysical sublimation”. As one easily notices,Eliot’s plight was seen as a 20th century version ofthe “disappearance of God”, even though HillisMiller’s classic was not cited: a “theologicalimpotence”, in fact, accompanied “the infernalwanderings of Eliot’s early personae”, vainly,tragically driving man to replace a dead God.

In 1975 Franco Moretti made his academic début– if I am not mistaken – with an anthology oftranslations of Eliot criticism to date9. His brilliantand problematic introduction – which is, betweenthe lines, no less than a reasoned interpretation ofEliot’s poetry – represents in my view the final “twistof the knife” for an updated and self-critical Marxism,yet one always strenuous, perfervid in combatingthe supporters of the autonomy of the literary andthe extrapolation of the writer, of any writer, from thehistorical context. And indeed Moretti was honestenough to present this anthology as “partial”, thatis to say “constructed on a partisan point of viewand founded on two hypotheses whose validity isobviously for the reader to judge”. He was “guilty”of some glaring omissions that stem from thatperspective. For example, there is no coverage ofthe tradition of textual studies and source-finding inEliot’s poetry. He was evasive on Melchiori, and,

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mysteriously, altogether silent on Praz, who is noteven anthologized. It is a target, however, whichMoretti hit obliquely, when he accused Empson ofhaving fathered “academic post-war pedantry” andmade of Eliot’s poetry an “inventory” of “bookishquotations”. On the other hand it would bemisleading to say that Moretti simply wanted toquarrel with the formalist or structuralist critics who,just a few months before, supremely indifferent toall ideological schemes, had opened up newperspectives on the poet. He criticized the alleged“indifference of the structural-semiological approachto the meanings of poetry” and the “non-historicityof its interpretative categories”, but he was evenmore positive than the structuralists that it is in formand style that the “concordance between [...] poetryand its historical and ideal humus” resides: that“semantic organicity”, as he repeated, was what acritic should seek – that, in other words, even themost advanced contemporary Marxist critics weretoo imperfect formalists. His reprimanding ofrudimentary critical Marxism turned on the point thatform is not a surplus of content or, worse still, adeceiving “trick”. In his survey he was dissatisfiedwith or even dismissive of everyone, and animatedby a destruens attitude which betrayed that matureMarxism, unhappy with the simplistic and thereforerepudiated canons of the likes of Lukács, was still insearch of a critical father and a theoretical guarantor,and was unable to find one in a Raymond Williamsor a Terry Eagleton. Re-reading this essay it stillescapes me which is, in the end, Moretti’s exactformulation of the proper sociological criticism hehad in mind, and how it is possible to prove, from aMarxist perspective, that the “mystic” and“decadent” Eliot may be preferred to the writers ofthe “progressive” bourgeois tradition. His workinghypothesis, that it is precisely in the “aestheticforms” that the social values of literature lie, was leftunproved.

With Moretti the battle between the content-oriented critics and the formalists came to an end.The latter were the victors. In another essay Pagninifocused on the “modular scheme” at work in Eliot’sRhapsody on a Windy Night10. In its wake AlessandroSerpieri11 set himself the objective to study theoperations of the Jakobsonian linguistic functionsand of the “submerged” structures, also employingcategories drawn from Chomsky’s generativegrammar and thus amalgamating neo-Freudianism,Russian formalism and linguistics. A. L. Johnson12

was the author of the most organic mapping of Eliot’simages and of their major oppositions, reappearingtransformed throughout the whole extension of the

poetry. In every lexeme, nominal or verbal form,colour or vectorial field, Johnson found associationswith a table of abstract and symbolic values (dirt,sensuality, fertility, the phallus, female and male,money and gold, etc.). This type of approach wastaken in this book to an analytical level beyond whichit seems difficult or impossible to proceed. Eliot’spoetry was disassembled down to the last units ofthe signifier – down to the morphemes and thephonemes of the single poetic line – in the attemptto find the mutual cohesion of the sound-chains (inthe form of anagrams, puns, etc.) with the sense-chains. Yet, when from this pulverization he tried toreassemble it and set forth a model, even he couldbut find results not all that different from the usualones, that is to say of a poet puritanically obsessed/fascinated by sex as “negative death”, i.e. sex asprocreative, rejected and dirtied in hallucinated andrepellent symbols. Johnson’s premise was itselfpartisan, both aesthetically and practically, sincepoetry is in its nature, he thought, conflictual, andwhere there is no more conflict there is no morepoetry, and after 1922 or 1925, and a fortiori after1930, Eliot did not have any more conflicts to workupon, let alone oppositions of images, and the criticfinds himself deprived of his materials, with theimplicit consequence that poetry is defunct after TheWaste Land.

The eighties saw the end of a critical task jointlyperformed by Pagnini, Serpieri and Johnson. AngeloRighetti, in a remarkable book13, did not substantiallychange the received interpretation of Prufrock, butsupported it with unprecedented attention to themotivation of its signs. He was able to catch unheardresonances and to weigh sources we had neversuspected or had been told. He proved how deepand permanent was Eliot’s knowledge of Swinburne,and how often he reworked lines from Browning, orparodied Wilde, or echoed the Old Testament andthe Gospels. A small reservation remains: sometimesthe source is so remote and far-fetched that it ishardly possible to believe that Eliot may have readit, let alone kept it in mind; and the proof that asource is a source would seem to come from merelyconsulting a concordance. Not even Righetti, in thelast analysis, refrained from using the risky inferentialmethod of Eliot’s first critics. Paradoxically, he provedthat the search for echoes is still far from over andwill go on, and that other fils rouges may still befollowed, as for instance the intertextual dialoguesbetween Eliot and Hopkins, never thoroughlystudied. Prufrock was examined with an alertnessto the text as a semiotic and many-levelled organism.Righetti’s object was to prove the cooperation of

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signifier and signified, the former covering, by andlarge, the rhetorical usages and strategies, anothernew tool in the critical equipment of those years,after Barthes’s L’ancienne rhétorique and theGroupe ì. Apart from that, the new critical agenda inRighetti’s book may be summarised as the sequentialreading of the poem, a fresh attention to theinterfusion of the poetic levels, the use of a specificand specialised critical language, and the secondaryimportance, or even irrelevance, of the judicial act;finally a self-imposed abstention from oversteppingthe linguistic boundaries of the text towardshistorical contextualization. This procedure struckroot and found favour, whether applied to aShakespeare play or to a poem by Donne or DylanThomas.

From the late eighties to our own day Eliot hasbeen predictably reread in Italy against thebackground of the critical currents and of the

international issues that are “in”, such as genderand new historicism. We may provisionally concludewith Dario Calimani, who republished in 1998 aprevious book – mainly dealing with the subtle usesof irony in Prufrock14 – with very few substantialadditions except a new introduction aiming a belatedattack at Eliot qua ideologue. Calimani looked backto Anthony Julius and to his allegedly fundamentalstudy on Eliot and anti-Semitism (1995 and 2003) –on Eliot?s “vandalic” anti-Semitism. In 1998 Calimanisupported an openly ideological reading of the poet,joining more openly the ranks of Eliot’s detractors,and sounding rather like someone who repentshaving loved too much an undeserving woman. Thisbook proves a development or perhaps an involutionin English Studies in Italy at the end of the millennium,the growing decline of a rigid and thereforeideologically anodyne structuralism; it also provesthe wane of Eliot’s formerly untouchable primacy.

NOTES

1. T. S. Eliot, La terra desolata, ed. A. Serpieri, Milan 2006, “with a new essay on the genesis of the poem”.2. Likewise, as this article cannot be exhaustive for obvious reasons of space, I apologize to all colleagues

whose valuable books and essays on Eliot are not examined or mentioned.3. Mario Praz vent’anni dopo, ed. F. Buffoni, Rome 2003.4. M. Praz, “T.S. Eliot and Dante”, The Southern Review, II:3, 1937, rpt. The Flaming Heart, New York 1958,

1973, pp. 348-374.5. G. Melchiori, “Echoes in ‘The Waste Land’”, in The Tightrope Walkers: Studies of Mannerism in

Modern English Literature, London 1956, pp. 53-88 (Italian edition as I funamboli, Turin 1963).6. M. Praz, “Thomas Stearns Eliot”, in James Joyce Thomas Stearns Eliot. Due maestri moderni, Turin 1967.7. Praz’s translation of The Waste Land, reprinted several times, and judged by some “a beautiful translation”

constituting “a reference point for all new translators of the poem” (Serpieri), was preceded in theEinaudi edition (Turin 1966) by a short preface which largely re-uses and concocts previous material onthe poet, but with some additions. The opening statement may be taken as an example of an excess ofconflicting analogies found by the critic, which creates confusion in the reader, to say the least: “Eliot isthe American who returns to his European origins following the same course as James, one also typicalof so many characters of this novelist; he is the vers libre poet in the footsteps of the poétes maudits,the greatest exponents of Romantic individualism, which came to react against a century of confessionsand unruliness in the attempt to go back to a classic, objective ideal of art. He looks back to Dante’sParadiso, yet reaches it not from the Inferno, but from much farther, from the Saison en enfer byRimbaud. Even stronger than Rimbaud’s, however, is the influence he initially felt from Laforgue, inwhom decadentism, on a philosophical plane – Laforgue had profoundly nourished himself withSchopenhauer and Hartmann – reaches a lucid self-consciousness and resolves the vanity of the worldinto bitter amusement”.

8. M. Pagnini, “La musicalità dei Four Quartets di T. S. Eliot”, in Critica della funzionalità, Turin 1970 (Ied. 1958).

9. Interpretazioni di Eliot, ed. F. Moretti, Rome 1975.10. M. Pagnini, A. Serpieri and A. Johnson, “Rhapsody”. Tre studi su una lirica di T. S. Eliot, Milan 1974.11. A. Serpieri, T. S. Eliot. Le strutture profonde, Bologna 1973.12. A. L. Johnson, Sign and Structure in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot, Pisa 1976.13. Dittico eliotiano, Verona 1984.14. The two books, largely coextensive as I am saying, are respectively T. S. Eliot. Lo spazio retorico, Rome

1988, and T. S. Eliot. Le geometrie del disordine, Naples 1998.