The Case of the Missing Subject

Abstract

Eliot’s poems, as Hugh Kenner remarked in 1959, ‘differ from reader to reader to an unusual degree, posed between meaning nothing and meaning everything, associating themselves with what the reader thinks of, and inclined to wonder whether Eliot was thinking of’.¹ Unusual, that is, in terms of the kind of reading they invite; compared to John Ashbery, Eliot seems, at first sight, a model of discursive clarity. Each component is so precisely turned as to suggest, to the reader who takes up the challenge, that there can be only one right way of fitting them together. The trouble, as witness the collective record of interpretation, is that they combine all too readily into whatever pattern the interpreter is bent on discovering.

‘I thought about what progress I’d made on the Larisch case…’

Martin Rowson, The Waste Land

It is necessary to understand That a poet may not exist…

Ern Malley, ‘Sybilline’