Denis Donoghue takes his title from a line of Yeats’s: “Words
alone are certain good.” Yeats may have believed this, but
Eliot didn’t and nor does Donoghue. His book begins as an
intellectual autobiography, an awkward framework, which he soon
discards, though preserving an agreeably personal tone which
never becomes slack or self-indulgent. His preoccupation with the
philosophy of language is not of the fashionable
kind—Wittgenstein is mentioned only once in passing, with more
frequent references to Bradley, Hegel, and Kant. Yet we also
encounter Adorno, Habermas, and Heidegger; here, for once, is
someone who has taken the measure of postmodernism and can make
intelligent use of it, without supposing that it supersedes all
previous thought.

Donoghue uses Eliot to throw into relief the inadequacies of that
laureate of the Enlightenment, Wallace Stevens, who is bitingly
censured: “The main difference between the pope and Wallace
Stevens is that the pope does not claim to have invented, or to
have deduced from his private desires, the articles of his
belief.” Stevens is presented as a transcendentalist in the
Emerson-
Thoreau tradition, which Eliot pronounced “the most
untrustworthy and deceitful guide that ever offered itself to
wandering humanity.” Stevens took for
granted the bankruptcy of Christianity, elaborating in its stead
an Arnoldian cultural theology, in which God is replaced by
imagination, adherence to a church by membership of an
intellectual elite, prayer by poetic rumination, and ultimate
truth by the supreme fiction. In all this he is an antitype of