Chapter 5 - From Agamemnon to Herakles

Summary

This chapter explores the relationship between the Four Quartets (1936–42) and Eliot’s roughly contemporaneous Greek-inspired verse plays, The Family Reunion (1939) and The Cocktail Party (1949). The author traces the development of Eliot’s programmatic use of increasingly distant reading, and of his implicit argument for not translating Greek. Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale reveal that Eliot deliberately thought about the use of Greek prototypes in the late 1930s, assessing both his own earlier effort with Aeschylus’s Agamemnon and other Greek-inspired plays. The author examines the theoretical questions that prompt and frame Eliot’s approach and that tie the plays together with his last great poetic work. She thus outlines major aspects of his late poetics which surprisingly depend on his treatment of Greek materials, showing how they bring to a close his first foray into such materials in the late 1910s/early 1920s. Finally, she suggests that Eliot’s own Herakles character in The Cocktail Party is indebted to H.D.’s portrayal of Freud in Tribute to Freud.