Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Read online

  in 'The Perfect Critic', an essay here included as the fullest statement of Eliot's early position on the place of the intellect in criticism ; one understands his admiration for the scientific critics

  Aristotle and Remy de Gourmont, here quoted. 6

  Again and again one sees this third moment in the making, for

  example in the Marston essay of 1934. The first moment is the

  possession of a few beautifully observed lines ; the last a general

  doctrine of 'double reality' in poetic drama, of 'a pattern behind

  the pattern . . . the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own

  lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment.' We

  may then go on to observe the meaning of this doctrine in relation

  to the poet's own drama, that still lay in the future, and even in

  the most recent of his poetry, Ash-Wednesday. 7

  The construction of such contexts must, of course, follow the

  surrender. In the letter to Spender Eliot warns against doing it

  the other way round - constructing a system and bringing it to the

  'object' under discussion - reading to prove one's point. That is

  not surrender but conquest - an objection which contributes to

  Eliot's evident discontent with the use other critics have made of

  his own tentative and tertiary theoretical constructions. Without

  the first moment there is nothing worth having. When we observe

  Eliot in the Dante essay patiently point to passages which, since

  they once possessed him, he now possesses ; and when we find in

  his own poetry signs that its foundations consist in part of matter

  similarly achieved by surrender and meditation on surrender, we

  have some idea of what he meant when he spoke of the creative

  element in criticism. We should reflect further that what began

  as a private motion of his sensibility has become part of the

  common stock of educated feeling ; the lines from The Revenger's

  Tragedy, fragments of Dante, 8 the objects of a unique creative

  impulse, are now of the material of our minds, and from that we

  may judge the depth and quality of the initial surrender.

  The first moment, then, is one of emotional rather than

  intellectual engagement, and here the critic resembles the poet.

  He is not thinking ; like the poet he 'starts from his own emotions',

  as Eliot argued in a striking passage in 'Shakespeare and the

  Stoicism of Seneca' (1927).9 Later there comes the necessity of

  'great intellectual power', necessary to the expression of 'precise

  emotion'. Just so the critic, most of all in the third phase of the

  operation, stands in need of intellect. That is what Eliot meant by

  saying that 'the only method is to be very intelligent'. The critic

  starts from his own emotions, but 'having something to say' calls

  for intellect.

  So, in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', we hear of the

  need to articulate the emotion we have felt in reading : to have

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  I NTRODUCT I O N

  something to say about the surrender, to understand and speak

  of an intemporal experience in temporal discourse. For such is

  the hypothesis : that the moments of our possession occur in the

  ordinary course of time but give access to something beyond

  time, to a tradition which conflates past and present and gives to

  'the whole of the literature of Europe' simultaneous existence and

  simultaneous order.

  Eliot's idea of tradition implicitly rejects the schismatic, antipasseiste positions of such avant-garde movements as Futurism and Dada ; yet he was, on his own admission, campaigning for an

  avant-garde, and he proposed a view of the past which, though far

  from abolitionist, was not at all conventional. The work of the

  poet will, under certain conditions, join that which exists outside

  time, and speak with that voice rather than with the voice of

  his immediate predecessors. History is flawed by disaster ; the

  'dissociation of sensibility' which occurred, according to Eliot, in

  the seventeenth century - the hypothesis had as its immediate

  stimulus the need to 'say something' to explain the superiority of

  the metaphysical poets over Milton - did not prevent access, by

  dint of much labour, to poetry which did not divide thought and

  feeling; for that poetry is not borne away by time. The effort of

  the true poet must be, simply and enormously, to know 'the mind

  of Europe' - to hold it, changing as it is in time, in a single

  thought of the permanence that underlies all change and without

  which we should be unable to apprehend change.10 This is a way

  of thinking that issues from some deep place in Eliot's mind, and

  is registered in his later political and ecclesiastical writings, as

  well as in his poetry.

  Equally profound, and also given later expression in thinking

  on a more extensive scale, is Eliot's account of the means by which

  the poet achieves access to the tradition ; he does so by 'a continual

  surrender of himself', by 'a continual self-sacrifice, a continual

  extinction of personality'. In this way a doctrine of 'impersonality'

  is associated with the doctrine of tradition ; and together they

  imply a third, imperfectly expressed by the formula 'objective

  correlative'.

  It is unlucky, I think, that this important element in Eliot's

  theorizing about poetry was stated so briefly, and in one of his

  least impressive essays, 'Hamlet'.11 It suffers from imperfect

  articulation, and of all the 'notorious phrases' that, as Eliot

  remarked with amusement, 'have had a truly embarrassing success

  in the world', this is the one he was least concerned to defend.12

  Yet the objective correlative has its importance, especially in

  relation to Eliot's own poetry. It is a clumsy expression, first used,

  as has several times been pointed out, by the American artist

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  I NTRODUCTI O N

  Washington Allston i n the mid-nineteenth century ; but Allston

  meant something different.13 Perhaps the expression stemmed

  from a remote memory of Santayana's 'object correlative'. The

  difficulty arises from the fact that what the object is correlative

  with is the emotion of the poet ; and this correlation was, in

  Eliot's own opinion, the least interesting thing about it to anybody

  except the poet himself. For although every poet starts from his

  own emotions, his struggle must be 'to transmute his personal

  and private agonies into something rich and strange, something

  universal and impersonal'. 14 Purged of naive expressiveness, as of

  all relation to 'the logic of concepts', the poem achieves an impersonality which established its relation to the tradition at the expense of its correlation with the suffering of its author. In short,

  its objectivity, accomplished at the expense of its correlativity, is

  the measure of the poet's success, his surrender to the tradition.

  An adequate objective correlative would be the most effective

  mask of its relation to the originating emotion ; and of course it is

  an inadequacy in this regard that Eliot complains of in Hamlet.

  In later years he sometimes referred to the personal nature of The

  Waste Land, but by then he could do so
without harming the

  good reader's reaction to that work precisely because of the

  effectiveness of the mask ; nor does information posthumously

  made available concerning the composition of that poem, and

  Eliot's emotional disturbances at the time, affect the situation.

  The great poet, as Eliot went on to say in the Seneca essay, 'writes

  his time', not himself. He was to remark of his poem that 'to me

  it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse

  against life . . . just a piece of rhythmical grumbling' ;15 but the

  important words in that sentence are to me.

  In 'The Three Voices of Poetry', a lecture delivered in 1953,

  Eliot commended Gottfried Benn's Probleme der Lyrik for its

  understanding of his 'first voice', which is 'the voice of the poet

  talking to himself - or to nobody'. Benn explains that poetry of

  this sort begins with 'an inert embryo or "creative germ" (ein

  dumpfer schopferischer Keim) and, on the other hand, the Language, the resources of the words at the poet's command. He has something germinating in him for which he must find words ; but

  he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the

  words ; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order.

  When you have the words for it, the "thing" for which the words

  had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem.' The

  process is painful. 'When the words are finally arranged in the

  right way - or in what he comes to accept as the best arrangement

  he can find - [the poet] may experience a moment of exhaustion, of

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  appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable. And then he can say to the poem : "Go away ! Find a place for yourself in a book - and don't

  expect me to take any further interest in you." '16

  This passage seems to account more satisfactorily for the process by which the surrender of the personality produces the impersonal objective correlative, and to emphasize the importance

  of the idea for a certain kind of poetry. The argument seems to

  owe something to Mallarme's sonnet 'Don du poeme'. There

  needs only a reminder that the birth of such an impersonal poem

  requires a submission to something outside oneself; and to make

  such a submission implies the existence of external authority. The

  reward for such submission is great, and not only in the making

  of poems ; and we shall see that Eliot began to develop more than

  the merely aesthetic implications of this fact.

  'The Function of Criticism' restates the need for sacrifice to

  something outside oneself, and expresses in consequence a

  preference for the classic over the romantic, for external 'Catholic'

  authority over the 'inner voice', for tradition over self-sufficient

  novelty. And the role of the critic is to contribute to 'the common

  pursuit of true judgment', a task undertaken with the 'possibility

  of arriving at something outside of ourselves, which may provisionally be called the truth'.

  Clearly that 'surrender' to a line or a poem, which is the first

  moment of both poetry and criticism, and the construction of a

  'generalization' - the having something to say about one's

  'contact with the individual object' - are both essential constituents of the act ·of criticism. That is why the dividing line between 'generalizations' and 'appreciations' is so vague ; and

  though Eliot himself thought the latter would survive longer, the

  former are just as surely based, in so far as they are valuable,

  upon an initial encounter with a line, a stanza, a poem, or an

  ceuvre.

  It is in the earliest works that the relation between the emotional stimulus and the act of intelligence is closest. Later the manner grows more discursive, and this is partly a consequence of

  the demand for longer pieces - the eight or so thousand words of

  a lecture, or the substantial contribution to some collection of

  essays. Many of these works are retrospective in character, as if

  to recall a time when the critic's relation to poetry was more

  spontaneous and more engaged. For the commitment to external

  authority, when, in 1927, it took a more intelligibly doctrinal

  form ('The general point of view may be described as classicist in

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  I NTRODUCT I O N

  literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic i n religion')17

  could hardly be made without some reduction in spontaneity -

  which is not at all to say that the general pattern of Eliot's critical

  activity was altered.

  What is surprising - especially to readers who erroneously

  suppose that a conversion is not founded in a habit of mind, a

  temperament already established - is that this change is not

  accompanied by any marked discontinuity of literary interest or

  method (the Dante essay, arguably the centre of Eliot's critical

  work, recapitulates in many respects his earlier criticism, and

  carefully refrains from insisting on a political and theological

  context, as it might easily, and without palpable loss, have done).18

  Perhaps the opening words of 'Religion and Literature' (1 935)

  could not have been written very much earlier : 'Literary criticism

  should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and

  theological standpoint.' A critic so early committed to external

  authority against the inner voice ; to the surrender of self to something greater ; to permanence as the opposite and measure of change ; to the intemporal as opposed to merely sequential time

  and history - such a critic, as 'The Function of Criticism' suggests, would almost necessarily be drawn to a religion, an ethic, a politics that accorded with such convictions. The classicist in

  literature might, for a time, rest content with the traditionalist,

  even elitist humanism of Babbitt ; but there was an element of

  mysticism also, and a scholastic sense of the complexities of time

  and eternity, that impelled him to a Catholic Christianity and a

  conservative-imperialist politics.

  Having seen the individual poet as subordinate to a timetranscending tradition, Eliot extended the idea of submission and became a citizen of that Empire which constituted the political

  aspect of the mind of Europe and of the Church which represented its spiritual being. It need not surprise us that he chose the variants proper to his province ; he had always seen the historical

  necessity of accepting the Empire in the divided form time liad

  imposed upon it, and a vernacular church as similarly entailed ;

  though he once said that England was a Latin country, it had not

  a Latin language or a Latin church. Appropriately he announced

  his conversion in a book called For Lancelot Andrewes (rgz8).

  Andrewes he took to be the greatest of the early Anglican bishops,

  and he gave reasons why we should admire both the Elizabethan

  episcopate and the accuracy and force of Andrewes's vernacular

  style.

  Henceforth, perhaps, there could be no denying that poetry,

  though still in some senses what he called 'a superior amusement',

  nevertheless 'certainly has something to do with morals, and with

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  I NTRODUCTION

  religion, and even with politics pe
rhaps, though we cannot say

  what.' 19 Some hardening of this formula is visible in After Strange

  Gods ( 1934) in which Eliot was willing to call certain of his contemporaries, Pound and Lawrence included, heretical - not in the sense that they expressed unacceptable doctrine - Marlowe, he

  said in 1927, was 'the most blasphemous (and therefore, probably,

  the most Christian) of his contemporaries'20 - but because of a

  heterodoxy of sensibility.

  The Dante essay is not concerned with censures of this kind,

  but gives most satisfactory expression to the relation between

  poetry and those other matters from which it cannot ultimately

  be separated. Obviously it has many affinities with the earlier

  work, for Dante was always important to Eliot, and had provided

  many bewildering minutes ; but he was also the poet of the

  catholic, the imperial, and the illustrious vernacular. He could

  communicate, as good poetry can, before he was well understood ;

  but the language in which he did so was the volgare illustre, which

  inherited the universality of Latin. His Tuscan had a quality

  Eliot valued above all others ; though founded in the common

  speech, it possessed an extreme poetic lucidity, and was versatile

  enough to encompass the whole range of human experience. This

  range and lucidity make him the most important model of all

  European poets ; and Eliot himself was engaged throughout his

  poetic career in emulating them.

  He spoke, in an unpublished lecture at New Haven in 1933, of

  his long ambition to 'write poetry which should be essentially

  poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its

  bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the

  poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry . . . .

  To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to

  get beyond music . . . .

  ' And he goes on to speak of the 'forty or

  fifty original lines' he has written which approach this condition. 21

  He was probably, as Matthiessen remarks, thinking of part of the

  last section of The Waste Land, which he elsewhere singles out in

  the same way. 22

  This was a Dantesque enterprise, and it continued throughout

  his subsequent poetry. 'The kind of debt that I owe to Dante is

  the kind that goes on accumulating, the kind which is not the debt