College Literature

Abstract:

This essay examines T. S. Eliot's lifelong practice of coterie verse, focusing on his two major coterie projects, the Bolo verses and Noctes Binanianae (1939). Instead of seeing Eliot's coterie verse as an extension of his biography, I argue that the practice of coterie poetry was important to Eliot himself, who relied on its sanctioned indiscretion as a means of destabilizing not only his, but others' aesthetic sensibilities. After tracing Eliot's thinking about coterie through his prose, I turn to the Bolo poems to understand Eliot's poetics of coterie (in)discretion; I then consider Noctes Binanianae, whose writing, I argue, enabled an Eliot who had become (and belonged to) an institution (Faber & Faber) to recover the freedom for aesthetic experimentation that defined, for him, the coterie space. Having done so, I argue, he could return after a six year hiatus to the practice of lyric and to the writing of Four Quartets. My argument has important implications not only for the study of Eliot's poetry, but for studies of modernist cultures more generally. It proposes the coterie as a critical anti-type to the institution, a means of destabilizing the taste that the institution threatens to fossilize.