Mr Bush himself voices doubts about the consistency of Eliot’s achievement after The Waste Land, but modestly refrains from adducing, as supplementary evidence, the fact that he feld compelled to write a book-length commentary which might have been a mere article if Eliot had gone on succeeding – or, at any rate, had not failed in a way that requires so much help from explicators in order to be made intellible. Mr Bush does not blame Eliot for needing him. Professor Denis Donoghue, we remember, betrayed no such hesitation in the case of Yeats, saying that what was wrong with Yeats was that he needed so much learned attention from the likes of Professor Donoghue. It is possible, however, that Professor Donoghue picked up this notion from the late Dr F.R. Leavis, who thought that the total number of ‘fully achieved’ poems written by Yeats was two, and that everything else was vitiated by its crying need for illumination from an outside source. Leaving aside its infernal arrogance, the palpable falseness of this idea did not stop it from becoming a talking point in its turn, a contribution to the exponentially expanding literature on Yeats, as opposed to the relatively contracting literature of Yeats.
Necessary inhibitions [fragment]
uit: Snakecharmers in Texas : essays 1980-87 - Clive James
