Abstract
This essay examines the understudied relationship between T. S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. In the first part of this essay, previous critical treatments of this relationship are considered and factual corrections are made where error has been introduced regarding remarks by Beckett on Eliot. This essay then explores Beckett’s treatment of what he identifies as two distinct versions of Eliot: the early twentieth-century experimental writer of such poems as The Waste Land; and the critic-publisher of The Criterion, Faber & Faber, and the producer of what Beckett labelled a ‘professorial’ approach to poetry. In doing so, this essay considers how the conflicts between Beckett’s rejection of Eliot as a critic and his more ambivalent treatment of Eliot as a poet allow for an exploration of the tensions that are central to modernism, and how this impacts the configuration of both Eliot and Beckett within what has come to be thought of as ‘Late Modernism’.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of late modernism’s distinct features and its relation to Beckett, see Weller (2015a).
- 2.
- 3.
The full interview (1972) and accompanying correspondence are part of the collection of Deirdre Bair’s research materials held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (MS-5124, Container 1.6).
- 4.
Of his various biographers, Bair attributes ‘jewel thieves’ to Beckett, as does Cronin (1996: 112). Knowlson (1996a) does not speculate much on Beckett’s relation to Eliot, reporting only of the substantiated encounters Beckett had with Eliot. For Gibson (2010), Eliot appears of little or no concern for a biography of Beckett.
- 5.
For further discussion of Beckett’s reaction, see Pilling (2011: 14–15).
- 6.
See Nixon (2011: 156–164).
- 7.
- 8.
As Dirk Van Hulle and Mark Nixon (2013) have shown, Beckett’s collection of Dante criticism remained present in his library throughout his life and, by the time of these comments in the 1930s, he had already obtained the texts that would supply any necessary ‘marginalia’ to his readings of Dante. What compelled him to read Eliot’s essay is unclear.
- 9.
This was also discussed in an article by David Wheatley in The Guardian on 13 November 2015 (www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/13/the-poems-of-ts-eliot-annotated-text-christopher-ricks-jim-mccue-review).
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Davies, W. (2018). ‘A new occasion, a new term of relation’: Samuel Beckett and T. S. Eliot. In: Beloborodova, O., Van Hulle, D., Verhulst, P. (eds) Beckett and Modernism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70374-9_8
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