T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Dantean 'familiar compound ghost' in Little Gidding

Abstract

In a personal essay Remembering Eliot Stephen Spender relates an anecdote concerning a talk he was asked to give about W.B. Yeats, at T.S. Eliot's request, to the Tomorrow Club during the war - two years after Yeats's death in 1939. Eliot according to Spender, took the chair giving Spender the impression that he did this in order to avoid giving the lecture himself. Spender's embarrassment was considerable: he was about to deliver the lecture with Eliot at his side (rather like an undergraduate in front of a formidable tutor) and feeling the effects of sherry and brandy offered by Eliot before the lecture, he admits he was overcome by liquor and in the course of the lecture kept saying 'T.S. Eliot' when he actually meant 'W.B.Yeats.' This confusing of the two literary giants was not, I think, entirely due to influence of liquor but to the plain fact that, to the poet Spender's mind, these predominant modern poets tended to merge.