2.

movement that one comes to see the connection between the stanza of 1907 which I have just quoted and the passages on the nature of time and reality in "Four Quartets". Thus what this book aims at most of all is the unfolding of a method of regarding Eliot.

But not just one method, after all. For, as in all matters of seeing anything, one sometimes uses opera glasses, sometimes one uses a telescope, sometimes one climbs to the roof, sometimes one goes down to the cellar, sometimes one moves objects from one side of the room to the other, sometimes one uses a magnifying glass, and sometimes one just looks with a simple and direct gaze.

And sometimes instead of looking, one just listens to what other people have to say.

Consequently, I must say how much I am in debt to everyone to me who has spoken/about Eliot. I am indebted most of all to R.P.

Blackmur and Meyer Schapiro. Students of Meyer Schapiro will recognize immediately how great my debt to him is. And I owe a good deal

William Barrett,
specific observations to Conrad Aiken, / John Berryman, Andrew Chiappi,

Elizabeth File, Milton Klonsky
the late H.W. Eliot, / James Laughlin, / George Palmer, William Phillips

W.G. Van Keuren, Mark Van Doren, and all the authors quoted in the text.

This is merely to mention the debts which I remember. There must be many more which I have forgotten, and there must be some observations which I think my own, but which I heard from someone else long ago.

The Use Of Dramatic Technique

The use of the technique of the stage, its transposition
to lyric poetry, ought to be distinguished from what is poetic
technique, strictly speaking. Of course they are not really separate;
in some poets, there is a greater reliance upon diction, the tone
of words, meter, and poetic discourse; in others, narrative, character,
and scene are used with equal strength; or used at times to the
neck of versification, as in the late Elizabethan dramatists.

The distinction between poetic technique as such and dramatic technique is important because in his prose Eliot seems to deny it, declaring that all poetry is dramatic in the sense great that all poetry presents us with a human being's attitude and actions in a given situation. But this is too stretched the word, dramatic, too far in meaning for the sake of affirming a view of what constitutes great poetry. It is a normative judgement, masked as a description. With consistency, Eliot judges certain poets in terms of this norm of great poetry; and his dislike of Milton in a judgement of his lack of dramatic quality. But this example shows very well how the use of dramatic technique must be distinguished from the use of purely poetic technique; we know that "Paradise Lost" is a triumph of versification and a rhetorical triumph; and we know that it is not "Macbeth".

In Eliot's poetry there is a use of dramatic technique
which, far from brushing aside poetic technique, works very well
with it; versification aids drama, and drama aids versification.
The sense of the dramatic leads to a use of characters, --Sweeney,
Prufrock, Tiresias, thetyrpist, and the cobkney women in "The
Waste Land"; and, such is the unity of effort which we separate
merely in critical distance; this sense of the dramatic is
essentially involved in Eliot's sense of the actual. One need not

2.

decide whether the sense of the actual is the basis of the use of dramatic technique, or the use of dramatic technique is a key to Eliot's unerring sense of the actual. The cokkney women in "The Waste Land," shows us both as inseparable: if one has an overwhelming sensitivity to the actual as such, then only dramatic smethod, actual characters who speak in an actual time and place, can be adequate to what is perceived by the poet. On the other hand, this is not in the least to forget that there are other poets who are interested and burdened with other things than the actual, --again, Milton is our example, --and their methods are not to be scorned.

The use of character of necessity involves the use of dramatic speech; and Eliot has depended upon a fine ear for the way that how human beings speak; it is to be seen most of all in the unfinished play in verse, "Sweeney Agonistes". Elsewhere we have the speech of only one character; he is speaking to himself, as in "Gerontion"; and here too Eliot avoids the danger of the dramatic monologue, for although the character is speaking to himself, his speech is dramatic in the sense it gives of an actual situation, and in the extent to which it is speech which might be spoken to another, if another were present.

"Gerontion" and passages in "The Waste Land" and some of the Ariel poems, especially "The Fortune Of The Magi" are in a literal sense the kind of speeches which might be part of a tragic play. The influence of the study of Elizabethan dram shows itself throughout, most obviously in "Gerontion", which is late Elizabethan to such an extent that it is almost pastiche, --redeemed however by the fact that Eliot's versification is superior to that of the late Elizabethan--but just as strongly elsewhere.

INTRODUCTION

T.S.Eliot is a great poet and a great critic. Greatness
is not an exact word because it has been used by too many human
beings for too many different purposes. But if the term refers
to something ambiguous and not clearly marked out, nonetheless
it refers to something actual. It refers to the actuality of
Donne, Dryden, Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Arnold, also
great authors; to all for whom poetry is a necessary part of life.
Perhaps one should say goodness and not greatness to avoid the
resistance imposed by connotations in an age not of the laurel
or the true academy, but of the advertisements.

Let us then say goodness, a goodness hemmed-in, one-sided,
and peculiar, the goodness almost of a master at bowling, chess,
or statistics; and not the goodness of Shakespeare or Tolstoy.
Especially for this reason such goodness deserves a scrutiny and
a celebration of its own kind, even as each one deserves his own
birthday and his unique name.

The first poems of Eliot are the essential beginning of a
new period in poetry. A new period begins when, by means of the
forms of poetry, new insights into experience occur. And often
radical changes either in the surface and texture of experience,
or in its inner order, create the pressure which is, at least in
part, the cause of the new kind of poetry.

Thus, to illustrate the altering surface and texture of
experience, Eliot has observed that the internal combustion

2.

machine (a fancy or a generic way of speaking of automobiles)
has altered our sense of rhythm. And the inner order of experience
has changed very much in our idea of sexual morality, a shift
which touches at the very quick of Eliot's poetry.

Modern experience is alike and yet different, alike in being
different just as the experience of each age is alike and different
(thus the son is like the father, he too becomes a father, and
yet different from his father) -- it is the nature of modern
experience which we must keep in mind in order to see how it has
been penetrated by new insights and by means of a new technique
in poetry. The first extraordinary metaphor on the first page of
Eliot's first book,

Like a patient etherized upon a table

to which an overcast evening sky is compared -- how forced, ingenious,
and strained this metaphor must seem at first. And it may seem,
in the end and after intimate acquaintance, too forced as a visual
image, since it strains our impression of the recumbent patient
stretched out upon the operating theatre, white sheets drawn
over his face; our impression is turned upside-down when compared
to the grey evening sky, which is concave and not recumbent.

But the quality of the image is what matters. It is an
image at a great distance from any of the poetry of nature; or
the poetry of the late Victorians, the Pre-Raphaelites, the
imitators of Wordsworth, Tennyson, or Swinburne, and the initiators
of the Irish Renaissance. Such an image (and its quality is

3.

essential to Eliot's first poems) requires a sensibility able to
move with great speed through different, distant, and estranged
regions of modern life; requires a sensibility which responds to
what is actual as actual (a term I will try to make more precise
as I continue); and requires the power to relate such perceptions
of the external world to states of mind and feeling.

Thus it is with this first image, drawn from the modern
hospital; granted its forced character, it connects us profoundly
with the agony of Prufrock, the protagonist who utters it.

THE IMITATION OF LIFE

IN 1937, I lived in a roominghouse, near Washington Square. Because I read late at night and because it was difficult for me to fall asleep, I slept every morning until noon. I wrote all afternoon and then in the evening I went to the pictures, often walking the two miles to Times Square in order to do so, and going through the dark garment district of that part of the city until I came to the crowds moving about under the garish brilliance of Broadway. After the picture was over and I had left the theatre with my at the waste of an evening, customary sense of guilt, I returned to the room where I lived with my brother and for the first time during the whole day enjoyed a genuine human relationship. All that I had done in that respect during the earlier part of the day was to tell the waitress behind the counter what I wanted for lunch and communicate in like terms with the waiter in a restaurant when I had my dinner. But when I came back from the movie, my brother was usually there and in bed, reading a tabloid. He had read my mail, which usually concerned literary matters, and we discussed these letters briefly. Then he began each night to tell me what had happened during the day at the office where he worked, a concern which marketed artificial flowers and made a good deal of money, but not enough, it seemed, to keep the four brothers and their brother-in-law who owned the business on good terms with each other. I would try with all the will in me to listen to my brother's stories, but they scarcely ever interested me very much, and so I would soon find myself turning the pages of my brother's tabloid while he continued to talk, wholly unaware of my lack of interest. Then he went to sleep usually, unless he had found some novel among my new books which interested him, and I sighed to think how far apart we were, although we had been in the same house and the same bedroom almost always from the day we had been born. These thoughts preoccupied me for a few moments, and then I would begin to read, placing four or five books beside my bed because I never could bring myself to believe that any one book would interest me sufficiently.

2.

I came home one Saturday night in mid-winter and was surprised to find my brother there with his best friend. I was surprised because Saturday night was their big night, the one when they were determined to have a good time, or at any rate to stay out late. If they stayed out late they would feel they were not making the best use of the one night of the week when they did not go to sleep with the need of getting up the next morning and going to work.

Neither of the boys had been paying any attention to the other. My brother S&anley was reading the evening edition of the next day's Sunday paper and his friend Howard was studying the colored comics with profound attention, grunting now and then with amusement.

Howard said to me: "We have just been talking about you and trying to decide why you spend the time you do, writing poems, stories, and reviews. What is it going to get you? No one or hardly anyone is interested in these things and you don't make much money, do you?"

"No, I don't, and you're right, only about two thousand people in the whole United States are interested; perhaps not even that many".

"Then why do you do it? How do you know that anything you write is any good? Here you are writing articles of criticism in which you say whether a book is good or not. Now what I want to know is, How do you know what is good?"

"Would you really like to know how I try to decide? Because I'll tell you, if you're willing to listen to me".

"Well as a matter of fact" he answered, "we were just getting ready to go out".

Both boys arose, knowing they had left me in a lurch, in the middle of a sentence, so to speak. My brother, a person of much more delicacy, said that he would like to hear about it tomorrow. But Howard could not suppress one parting shot--

3.

"Just remember", he said aggressively, "that millions of human beings feel differently than you do and like the books you dislike and dislike the books you like, that is, if they waste any time paying attention to them. I don't like the books you read, and I can't even understand your poems or stories."

One of the low on whom assurance sits
Like a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.

The same kind of question arose in different forms upon
other occasions and among other people. Once a relative of mine
returned from a performance of "Mourning Becomes Electra" to ask
why human beings, unhappy themselves, should be expected to enjoy
and to pay for a view of unhappiness for hours on end. On another
occasion, another person looked at a story of mine and then at a
poem; and then I inquired why I never attempted beautify anything.

The Theme Of Separation

If Love is often a failure, the solitude is the natural-
consequence; or perhaps the reverse is true and love is a fail-
ure because of an inevitable separation of human beings. Prufrock
sees lonely men smoking at their windows and he himself suffers.
from loneliness. But this is not the simple loneliness of the lack
of a social life; it is the inability to participate in the social
life which is available, perhaps because of personal defect or per-
haps because of the quality of the social life, which may be too
genteel and false, or too crude and thus barbarous.

And more than that is involved. When Eliot was a student
of philosophy at Harvard, one of his teachers, Ralph Barton Perry,
invented the phrase, "the egocentric predicament", to state the
impossibility of knowing anything except through the medium of one's
own perceptions (which is not the same thing as saying it is im-
possible to know anything but one's own perceptions). And this view
is familiar in the history of philosophy from the time of Descartes,
who was able to doubt everything but his own thought of doubt. It
is perhaps through the study of Bradley, however, that Eliot may
have been most impressed with this doctrine as a philosophical
conclusion. Yet it should be clear that what makes the doctrine
important to the poet is not its philosophical weight, but its
relevance to his perceptions and his emotions. Many another
doctrine may well have seemed equally plausible, or more plausible;
as a statement of the essential nature of experience
this doctrine enters into the writing of the poet because it
seems to be an explanation or it seems to be generalization of
important experiences.

The separation of the human being from all other human
beings is implicit again and again. It is stated directly in
"The Waste Land", when, in answer to the command, Sympathize,
the protagonist replies that each is locked in the prison of

2.

his own being. The insight of the poet, the subtlety with which he examines this separation, is manifest in the statement that it is by thinking of the key which locks the prison, by this act of thinking, the prison is confirmed; perhaps we may even say that this thinking is the cause of the prison.

The separation is metaphysical, that is to say, it is inseparable from
rooted in the nature of things. But it is brought about by the sin
of pride. Hence Eliot's reference to Coriolanus, the type of the
hero, who is separated from family and community by pride; and here
too we may see the freshness of the poet's use of literary allusion,
the sense of actuality which he brings to bear upon his sense of the
literary past. For the stock figure for the isolation of the intell-
ectual man is obviously Hamlet; and most poets would have alluded to
Hamlet; the allusion to Coriolanus extends the statement of isolation
by its implication of pride, the family, and the city.

Since pride brings about the separation of the self from
the beings and the things to which it is naturally united by love,
the emotion of humility is an important one. In "Ash Wednesday",
the protagonist prays that he may be of the desires which lead to
pride, --of the three leopards, the world, the flesh, and the devil.
And the protagonist accepts and even desires the scattering of his
bones in death and the eating of his body by the leopards who
"Have fed to satiety". But, if the scattering is a relief, it is
a separation too, and at the end of the poem the protagonist prays
to be united once more --"Suffer me not to be separated"--from
sister, mother, from the spirit of the river and the sea, from
love, and from God. We should note too that pride as a cause
of separation is to be seen at the beginning of the poem in
the line, "desiring this man's gift and that man's scope".

The Sense Of The Past

The sense of the past is bound up with the sense of the actual.

Without a sense of the past, one's sense of the actual is likely often to be mixed with a blanket grasping at the sordid, the factual, and the transitory. This is the dead-end of the naturalist, who supposes that the slum is more real than the library.

The sense of the past can degenerate into the merely literary, if the past is not grasped as something which once was actual in the same way that the present is actual.

On the other hand, the Shavian pitfall is always possible and it is possible merely to debunk the past by attributing to it the same sordidness as the present.

On the other hand, it is possible to suppose that the past is an Arcady, a lost and Golden age, an age which shows by its very perfection how sordid the present is. This is the trite misunderstanding of Eliot's poetry which has circulated for a long time and which has been a substitute for serious reading, an easy expression of irritation, and facile way of attacking Eliot's joining of the Anglo-Catholic church, the Church of England, and his political royalism. first

The former ought/to be examined in terms of Eliot's essay on Pascal and the latter in terms of the French royalism with which Eliot had long been familiar through the writings of Charles Maurras.

For a poet, the sense of the past must show itself in the availability of the past as a source of literary allusion. This can be a dead-end too, when it is the use of allusion for its own sake; or it can be a source of great light, a source by means of which Ovid's and to illuminate the present. Thus Eliot uses/Sopocles' Tiresias in order to illuminate the seduction of a stenographer in modern London. And thus too, in "The Love Song Of J.Alfred Prufrock", the reference to Michelangelo.

2/ If we look into each of these references, we can find further distinctions in the way that the past is used. Most poets read a good deal, and it is natural for a poet to make use of his reading when he writes. The reference to Tiresias might well have been made by a poet for its own sake; it might have been made because the poet had been very much impressed in reading Sophocles or Ovid; or because the poet felt strong poetic connotations in references to the classic era and to myths. In "The Waste Land", however, it is clear that Tiresias is not used for any of these reasons. He is brought forward to regard the seduction of a stenographer because he is neither man nor woman, and because he makes a judgement which takes account of his experience as well as modern London. His presence makes possible perceptions which otherwise would have been absent.

So too with the reference to Michelangelo, which again in some other poet might well have been used for its own sake or for its erudite and cultivated suggestion. In "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock", however, it has, first of all, a realistic character; the society in which Prufrock lives half his life is one in which ladies discuss art works a good deal. But the richness, relevance and reality of the symbol are inseparable. For if Prufrock is a weak, shy and timid man, Michelangelo is of course *par excellence* the sculptor of the strong and the heroic man. Precisely this question of relevance --of what is sometimes termed, organic necessity--should be a precise measure of whether the past and literary allusions to the past are being used for their own sake and for some reason which does not really flow from a strong sense of the past.

One thing always stands out in good stead, the link or perhaps one should say the *co*-existence --of his sense of the actual and his sense of the past. The actual prevents a view of the past which is idyllic, nostalgic, or glamorous; which is what

3/

Eliot's sense of the past has often been mistaken for; the sense of the past, on the other hand, prevents the past from having too limited and too narrow a view of the actual. For the past was once actual; too, and to know its actuality is to see how at any moment it seemed to be less than it was, it was more than it seemed; it was a ground of its own past and future; which is true of the actual, now, although we cannot do more than envisage these possible characteristics of the actual, in terms of what we have before this discovered about any present moment of time and any immediate perception.

Perhaps one can go so far as to say that one cannot have much of a sense of the past without a sense of the actual; and much of the sense of the actual without a sense of the past. This is stated abstractly; but one must remember that Eliot's career as poet and critic developed in Europe, where the co-existence of the past and the present confronts one on the street. And for the sake of understanding expatriation in general, Eliot's choice of Europe and not America, and the America from which Eliot departed, it is worth quoting at this point the sentences of two other citizens of America. It was about this time that Henry Ford, world-famous as a great American, wrote that "History is the bunk", even as Carl Sandburg, who wrote of Chicago, wrote that "The past is a bucket of ashes". For the mere geographical identity, which is significant of very little, unless, if it be by way of negation, we can observe that all three of these Americans are citizens of the Middle West. And Eliot's essay on the actuality of the past, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" was written not long before the remarks about bunk and the bucket of ashes.

The past is old-fashioned; or it is naive; or it is ignorant; or it is naive; or it is the model of a harmonious society.

Eliot often speaks of feelings as new in a poet; or of technical mastery; or of observation; or of a unified sensibility in which thought and sense-perception are not separated; or of economy; or of a wit; or of a mind at work, an intellect; or of an effort to digest new objects and new experiences; or of being universal and yet of a definite time and place.

A sense of confidence is one of the chief pleasures
given us by poetry.

but

Byron had the heasteear and Tennyson the best;
Swinburne was a master of verbálism, Blake was a master of
home sty--"naked observation" and "naked feeling".

Middleton presented an ideal of womanhood and exhibited one permanent situation of damnation. Marlowe tended to caricature, Jonsor's world was non-Euclidean, and his mastery was the mastery of a self-contained world of manners.

(To formulate something is to put it into a form ula; and this is one of the chief virtues of prose.)

17.

of literary development once more, for it was Pound and not Eliot who grew up as a poet through an admiration of Browning and an effort to take over the dramatic monologue. (Move forward to op. previously of P. and E.)

## Evaluation

The Waste Land is a great poem, in spite of the tour de force--the successive tours de force--which occur throughout. If we try to make clear to ourselves what we mean by speaking of the greatness of a poem, except that we have been powerfully impressed, must we not proveed through a careful dialectic of question and answer./Is a product at least in part the greatness of a poem/a matter of its historical significance,aa reason one would naturally come to in thinking of this Shelley, poem? Some of the worst poetry of Tennyson is equally significant, of its period, and of Victorianism. Is it the result of influence of its style, (by contrast with its historical and period signif.) upon the body of English verse that comes after it? Certainly Eliot has played a major part in revolutionizing modern poetic style. But so did Shelley, one of the worst of all important poets, and the one who is the most important literary influence in the styles of both Tennyson and Swinburne. Is it a matter of being used as a model/ is it matter of being imitated not simply by many other poets and by the young ( the first genuine success in verse as elsewhere is being imitated), for Kipling was much imitated in his time; but a matter of being imitated by good poets? Well, t Shakespeare has been much imitated by good poets as well as bad poets with the curious results (for reasons connected with the have begun theatre) that good poets usually begin to write badly when they imitate him. We know furthermore that bad poets are sometimes very useful elements in the development of good poets. I have run through all these possibilities not merely to dismiss them, for they are clearly involved somehow in the greatness of any poetry.

18.

The中心 of the greatness of a poem, a center
mostly
arrived at only by means of the poem's relationships to other poetry,
historical and social
its/significance, and its triumphs of style, must be its relationship
to some permanent human <u>immortal</u> interest or need. Still speaking
abstractly, we may say it satisfies and gratifies some interest or need
of human beings which, mutatis mutandis, is continuous. War and Peace
a great work (which more and more readers appear to think was written
by Clifton P. Fadiman) is an example which by its very obviousness
will be helpful at this point, for if that very great novel satisfies
the permanent curiosity--among very much else--about how men feel
on a battlefield, then by contrast The Waste Land would seem to be
special and at a tangent to human experience most of the time; it is
from such a point of view what has been called with such rare stupidity
and emotional bigotry, Secondary literature. But this is not so and
Mr. Van Wyck Brook, the hysterical and abnormal advocate of normality
(which he takesto be connected somehow with being <u>unconscious</u>, whatever
may
that word/mean to him as he uses it in praise of authors in The Flower-
ing of New England) is wrong both in a literal and in the most essential
senses when he directs his attack upon him in, Oliver Allston, where
he says for example, p.249, that there is no religious feeling in Eliot's
writing, an incredible remark in that it suggests that Brooks has
-out
attacked Eliot with reading Ash Wednesday, The Journey of the Magi,
Thoughts After Lambeth or Religion and Literature.

a man of

the feeling of
religious

The Waste Land is also full of religious feeling/### religious
need; and it is full of many other things which, strange as the assertion
may seem, and unhappy, --are likely to be permanent aspects of the
human situation.

19.
The question of the permanence of The Waste Land is
(many fine poems have been left behind by History)
bound up with what the future will be like, and if our ignorance
of the nature of the future is as great as ever, nevertheless,
certain guesses may be ventured (without fear of successful contra-
diction immediately). I suggested at the start that the poem will
certainly be of immediate interest in the post-war period which seems
likely.// I would now like to venture the pious and pathetic guess
that some time in the future, sooner or later, the benefits of
socialism will arrive (O grandeur and misery of socálism! why do
the peoples not seize this wondrous hope?), and then there/will be
sufficient education and leisure for the whole of the populace to
be interested in such a thing as modern poetry (that is to say,
poetry from Baudelaire and Mallarme to Pound and Eliot). I do not
venture this guess with any degree of conviction (Capitalism often
seems to be immortal, surviving the most desperate inner-struggles,
like the Laocon). But it does seem that if socialism makes available
education and leisure, then the usual and banal picture of the
life of the socálist populace--dancing to swing music and sunning
themselves at Miami--is false. The notion/that socialist man will
then be a harmonious creature, psychoanalyzed out of all his
inner woes/and/made secure by a just economy, and by being his popper
plade in society; and this nation is, I think, ridiculous.
a fantasy

Is it not likely, on the contrary, that it will be
then that the difficulties of being a human being will be heightened,
because they will be freed from the degradation imposed by economic
necessity? As Sidney Hook pointed out in another period of history:
then man will stop suffering as an animal and will begin to suffer
as a human being. We know, of course, that much human suffering
flows in part from economic and social conditions which will vanish
will the onset of socialism. We know too that the rich (who are alee

20.

victims of capitalism, although they do not know it) suffer from profound emotional difficulties which, if they do not flow immediately from economic and social need, nevertheless are reflections of the degraded and indeed infamous character of the whole of society. Yet surely this is not the only reason why the difficulties of the spirit whirled and undergone by those who are not immediately subjected to economic necessity. The boredom, the constant exhaustion of appetite, the emptiness and stamp-collecting of the rich, the inability to maintain a satisfactory inner order which alone makes possible happiness--all of these and other difficulties arise from recurrent or permanent necessities of human existence; they arise, in different forms, under many kinds of conditions; they come from individual need which cannot be satisfied merely by a just economy; and they arise, as we know now, from the failure of a society to produce an integrated culture to sustain the spirit. Too

It is at this point that we man see one of the important
will be relevant.
ways in which modernist poetry,/and in particular, a poem like the
Waste Land, about the difficulties of a protagonist who is a culture
hero-- The connections between The Waste Land and the period in which
it is written are obvious enough. The extent to which the poem may
be personal is, if not obvious in detail, obvious in general. But
great poems often transcend their historical, social and personal
roots. Homer is still read, although a tribal society, and the Greek
religion is long since gone. It might be maintained that Homer is
central and wholesome; many modern authors are not (the echoes of Brooks
once more, here again is Brooks, echoing). A number of years ago Mr.
I.A.Richards wrote of the same future here in question, "there will be
be cases where even literature to which immense value has been assigned--
the speculative portions of Dostoyevsky may be instanced, will lose much
of its interest, except for the history of the mind. It was because he

21.
belonged/so terribly/ to our age that Dostoyevsky had to wrestle so
terrible in these toils (of the conflict of intellect and emotion)".
But I do not think that this can be true either of Dostoyevsky or
of Eliot, who belongs to our age in the same degree.

Will not such as Dostoyevsky, and to a lesser degree Eliot
not only provide paradigms of the difficulties of the spirit in the
future? The notion that socialist man will direct his attention <u>outward</u>
to Nature and to Society seems less likely to me than the contrary
process in which the whole populace undergoes a process of inward
growth which will not be the same thing as the subjectivity of the
modernist poet, but which will correspond to it, under the differing
conditions. The interior richness of the future would then be immense;
and then modernist poetry and modernist prose will be objects of
the utmost interest to socialist man. But more than that, since culture
will be cosmopolitan and since the experience of socialist man will be
culture
world-wide in space as well as in time, the experience of the/hero
of <u>The Waste Land</u>, will be of the most direct interest. And finally,
it is possible that the religious need and the failure of love which
are the two principal themes of The Waste Land will be moments of
the experience of all the peoples (moments of the experience of all
to whom it is true that one cannot live by bread, nor even by toast)
in the days when, in Sidney Hook's noble phrase, man will suffer not
as an animal, but as a human being.

The Sensibility Asa Culture Hero

It should be clear that the consciousness at work in "The Waste Land" is both cosmopolitan and expatriate. Indeed, it is questionable whether the *kind* of perceptions attributed to the protagonist of the poem would be possible to anyone who was not an expatriate American. Thus there is a close resemblance between the cosmopolitan awareness in the *Can Tos* of Pound and in "The Waste Land", which is not merely a matter of influence and which has no equivalent in the poetry written at that time by Englishman.

The differences between Pound and Eliot when they are closest in method are also extremely significant. There is a religious sense in Eliot at this point, before his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, which is utterly lacking in Bäum. The consciousness present in both poets is cosmopolitan and expatriate; it is international and it is historical; but Eliot is aware of religious belief in a way that Pound is not. At this stage, Hardy's famous line expresses the character of his awareness: "If it were only true!", Hardy says of a Xmas story and of Christianity in general. Pound, although he writes of the gods of the classical world and uses their myths, does not manifest a sense of the *need* for religious belief. Heremarks in his prose that Eliot's concern with "certain fertility-gods", seems idiosyncrasy to him, as does Joyce's Catholicism. The tone of (this quotation) is itself a witness of the superficiality of his mind when religion is in question. It is not a lack of belief which is at fault, but a lack of awareness; Yeats, as subpiercings Pound, nevertheless wrote of "The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor!"

This religious awareness is important in estimating

14.

The doctrine can be illuminating also in some of
the most difficult problems of the critic, the one already
touched upon which concerns poetry in which the declared be-
liefs are important. "Ash Wednesday" affirms a belief in
Christianity, while "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Services"
and "The Hippotamus" not only deny that religious belief, but
consider it with irony and contempt. The three poems are not
truly comparable, since they make use of different means and
are of different length. But it may be agreed that the three
poems are good and that they contradict each other and that
the reader may respond to each of them as successful poems.

But how can a good poem be based upon false
beliefs? Or how can we regard two poems which contradict
each other in regard to the same area or realm of human be-
havior be both said to be good? One ought to bear in mind
that the problem is real enough in that the reader may en-
counter all three poems in the same volume, and that there
is a sufficient common ground in the fact that the Church of
England is involved each time, first as the target of satire,
and then as the church whose sacraments and prayers inspire
the poet.

The answer in terms of an objective correlative
is that each time the belief, whether false or true, is given
the right objective correlative, the correct "set of objects,
situation, and chain of events which shall be the formula of
that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which
must terminate in immediate sensory experience, are given, the
emotion is immediately evoked". The repetition is useful for the

15. Sake of the application. Immediate sensory experience! This is the crucial phrase. It is the possibility of making use of different kinds of sensory experience which makes possible the entertainment of contradictory beliefs with regard to the same object. The goodness of the poem thus is caused by the adequacy of the objective correlative in evoking the emotion. Thus the question to be raised about the assertion of a belief in any poem becomes the same as the question which arises when an emotion is asserted. With the abstract rightness of the emotion or the general truth of the belief outside of the poem, we are no more concerned than we are with the propriety of the emotion of self-pity, let us say, or the good sense of the point of view to be gained by standing on one's head. Stepping outside of the sphere of any poem as such, we may say that a belief which condemns all experience as illusion, or emotion such as self-pity is not likely to make possible a poem or poems which have a wide degree of reference to experience. But this is a question of the scope of a poem, the amount of material it deals with, and it is not a question of its genuineness.

Some important distinctions must be made repeatedly in discussing the expression of emotion because it is so likely to be confused with the notion of the mere communication of a feeling which is in the poet and which has been transferred to the reader. The reader of Eliot's criticism may also be perplexed because Eliot speaks of the invention of new feelings by certain poets. It is not at all a communication of the private emotion of the poet to the reader that is necessary, though the emotion may well be the poet's much of the time. What is necessary is that the reader in reading the poem should come to feel about the subject of the poem as the poet intends the reader to feel.

26.

Manners And Morals As A Subject

Here as before in dealing with a subject we make an artificial separation of what is a concrete unity in the poem. The manners of the society in which Prufrock exists are an effect of a whole way of life, and we risk forgetting the general character of a way of life in separating out its manners as such. Yet especially in Eliot's first two books of verse does the theme of manners come to the forefront of the poem. Prufrock speaks of tea, toast, and the bald spot where he parts his hair, polite conversation, and the way in which the footman regards him. His concern with these things, with taking care of his trousers and saying the right thing, is a concern with the area of human experience where his difficulty as a human being makes itself felt. And in this poem what we must see is the way in which manners, by being detached from motives and by becoming a disguise for the feelings instead of the norms by means of which they are expressed, create a shallowness and emptiness in human relationships.

In "The Portrait Of A Lady", an even deeper wrong is performed or accomplished. The lady of the poem takes advantage of the manners of her society in order to place the young man of the poem at her mercy. She uses the good manners which are due her as a human being in order to make claims upon the feelings of the young man to which she has no right whatever, since in coming to tea the young man has had in mind nothing more than a polite visit. The lady of this kind of society is

27.

thus one who is able by being a lady to put another human being
in the wrong. She makes use of the most sacred human values,
such as friendship, pity, and sympathy, in order to accomplish
what is essentially a barbarous violation of human relationship.
In this way, the manners of this society are in direct contrad-
iction to what is supposedly its morality.

Given such manners, such a society is apt to exper-
ience its own nature in terms of shock. Certain areas of human
experience must never be mentioned. It is understood that these
regions exist, but they must not be discussed. A visitor such
as Mr. Apollinax who does not adhere to these manners and who
speaks of unmentionable matters must thus seem like an irres-
ponsible foetus, a centaur, or the old man of the sea. And some
metaphor of the sea is often an expression of the violation of
the manners of this society or a release from it. For example,
the shocking Mr. Apollinax's laughter seems to be "submarine"
and he is expected to have seaweed in his hair, just as Prufrock,
sickened by his life in this society, goes to the seashore and
wishes to be a pair of ragged claws at the bottom of the sea
and daydreams about sea-girls and mermaids.

When the maiden aunt who is the pillar of this kind
of society dies, her servants behave in precisely the way that
she has regarded as disreputable or even obscene. And to speak
to the true citizens of this kind of society is compared to
saying goodbye to La Rochefoucauld, the moralist who found self-
love and self-interest the key to all behavior, noble or ignoble.

28.

In this polite society, politeness is an end in itself, and decorum is very important, so that when a young lady laughs very loudly in a restaurant, it seems like hysteria to the protagonist, who is perhaps a version of Prufrock, and who feels devoured by the young lady's laughter.

The concentration upon manners shifts in Eliot's second volume, and less as his career continues. In his second volume, we encounter manners as a lack of manners, that is to say, as lowness and coarseness, as the bedshaking sounds in a rooming house, the amorous successes of newly rich Jews with a European princess, the uncorseted bust of a Russian girl, and the bad manners of a prostitute when she yawns and draws her stoking up in public. The essential point here is the triumph of the low and the coarse, of those who violate good manners, over those who are well-bred and hence tormented by hesitation, doubt, and scruple.

In "The Waste Land", the cosmopolitan background already present in the second volume transforms the awareness of manners into a concern with civilization. Not New England, but Europe is the mise-en-scène of the characters. The emptiness of behavior which exhibited itself in the triviality of polite conversation now becomes cockney speech or polyglot conversation about summers in the south of Germany or ski-ing in the Alps. More than that, the mask of manners is repeatedly lifted to disclose a meanness of feeling and a stupidity of mind, as in the seduction of the type by a young man whose assurance is as such an affront.

29.

The description of the young man's manners brings us to the
typist's emotion of indifference, the degradation of the
act of love, her expression of the meaninglessness of this act
by her automatic smoothing of her hair. Here manners and
morals are united. The cearseness or insensitivity of the
one is an expression of the poverty of the other. And the
broken fingernails of dirty hands represent not vulgarity,
but an utter defeat of mind and heart. This is even more
true of "Sweeney Agonsites", where vulgarity of manners
and banality of speech is the direct expression of an
emptiness in living: "I've been born, and once is enough",
says one of the characters.

Turning to Eliot's prose, where more and more an
interest in literary criticism as such is succeeded by an
interest in morality, we meet with a general formulation
of what, so far as morals and manners are concerned, is
at the heart, the source of movement and inner warmth, of
the poetry.

There is a Puritan sense of life in the poetry which
shows itself at first in a heightened delicacy or what is
sometimes called squeamishness. But it is soon much more than
this, and Eliot passes far beyond any aspect of manners. In
"Thoughts After Lambeth", "thought, sacrifice" and "a dis-
cipline of the emotions" are recommended to youth. Perhaps
this brings to the Puritan sense of life, or, at any rate, to
the report that as a student Eliot always did precisely those
things which he most disliked doing. Elsewhere in Eliot's prose

T.S. Eliot is a great poet and the best literary critic in the English language.

I begin with this extreme statement so that the purpose of this book will be clear. Sainte-Beuve, a great critic, said that the purpose of the literary critic was to show the reader how to read more and more. This plain statement assumes that there are many ways in which to read the same book. By examining his own experience, the reader will remember how interesting and how illuminating the reading of other readers has often been. It is the best means of checking and extending and correcting our own experience of the book. Do we not look at the introduction, converse about the book, and look for book reviews, always or chiefly with the purpose of seeing how our reading is 'the same or different from the experience of other readers? how we missed what other readers saw? how we projected into the book what was in our own existence, noy in the book itself?

Implicit in this experience is the social nature of experience and of literature. Each one must read for himself, but he must be taught how to read by the society in which he exists and has to being. And each one's understanding of the words which he reads is determined by the way in which words are used by society.

We must remember our own society as well as the poet and the reader when we come to the first metaphor in T.S.Eliot's first book. This metaphor may very well be the beginning of modern American and English poetry, for it is likely that the

2.

reader will begin with this poem and this metaphor, when he begins
to read the poetry of this age.

....When the evening is stretched out against the sky,
Like a patient etherized upon a table

With this metaphor, J.Alfred Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem,
begins to express, --which means to press out what is within--his
inner anguish of being.

To compare an evening sky to a patient upon an oper-
ating table is perhaps a forced comparison, considered in itself.
For the visual image of the patient must be inverted; we must
look down at a patient, but we must look up at the evening sky.
What is important about the metaphor, considered as poetry, is
the way in which two very different things have been joined. Con-
sidered in the most general way, within the context of the way in
which poetry is written in English, the important thing about this
metaphor is the width of sensibility or sensitivity which it shows.
Although Keats studied to be a doctor, he could not have written
such a metaphor; and neither Tennyson, Arnold, Swinburne, Rossetti,
nor the poets of Yeats' generation were capable of a consistent
apprehension of experience in such a way. A conception of poetry and
of the nature of the poetic prevailed which prevented these poets
from thinking in terms of such a metaphor. This very conception of
the nature of poetry was itself installed by Wordsworth and Col-
eridge, who in turn introduced a sensibility or sensitivity differ-
ent from the 18th century conception of poetic style and diction.

Wordsworth by means of a new poetic style, a new use
of words, rhythms, and images, made possible a new consciousness of
nature. Eliot and other modern poets have made possible a new
consciousness of modern life.

3.

Yet to speak in this way of a new consciousness of
modern life is to risk a misunderstanding which has deceived
many poets, critics, and readers. A poet does not achieve a new
apprehension of experience merely because he writes about new
experience, and many poets have made the error of supposing that
they were holding a mirror up to nature because they wrote
poems about the automobile or the railroad train. In the same
way, some poets have been misunderstood and condemned because
they did not write about automobiles, trains, and the industrial
character of modern life. But to expect this of the poet is to
expect him to be a camera, an automatic register of experience.

The new experience of modern life made possible by
Eliot's poetry is a new sense of the actual, new in that it
joins for us things which in ordinary experience exist far apart
from each other. Our sensitivity to experience has been widened
not because two objects have been newly joined, but because the
relevance of any two such objects to each other and to human
thought and emotion has been accomplished.

It is thus essential to consider the actual, and the
sense of actual in Eliot's poetry. The sense of the actual and the
supreme power to grasp the actual has been one of the great
virtues of Eliot's poetry from the very start.

The actual is that which exists. It is not that which
we would like to exist, nor what we hope will exist, nor what we
are taught should exist. The failure to distinguish between what
is actual and what is not actual is the cause of much weakness
and blindness. The power to grasp the actual is also very important
in any effort at understanding what is possible and what is ideal.

4.

The actual is like a moist handshake, damp with nervousness or the body's heat. This should suggest degrees of actuality and the difference between such a handshake and the gloved hand of an ambassador. The latter is also actual, but one has encountered less of the reality of the person.

"Rocks, moss, stone-crop, iron, merds", as Eliot writes in one poem, are instances of actual things. But it would wrong to suppose that things are more actual than feelings and motives. "I don't like eggs; I never liked eggs" is an instance of how colloquial speech brings us an actual person, or a definite time and place. "Disordered papers in a dusty room" are an instance of the decay and disorder of the actual.

Yet the sense of the actual is narrow and deceptive when the actual is identified or limited to the sordid, the squalid, and the dirty. On the other hand, it is the refusal to admit or pay attention to this aspect of the actual which makes many human beings shut their eyes, draw the window shades, or seek out the many other devices for escaping from reality. Thus it is significant that in some of Eliot's early poems there is an effort to satirize the genteel in speech and in manners. But if "carious teeth" are actual, the "inexplicable splendor of Ionian white and gold" is just as actual. And order is as actual as disorder. We are wrong only when we take the aspiration or the wish for order for actual order.

Hence Eliot as a critic speaks of the peculiar honesty of the great poet. This honesty is the moral quality of mind which insists upon knowing what is actual, no matter how unpleasant the judgement may be.

5.

The actual eludes formulation because it is the
foundation for all formulation and for all statements
about what is true and what is not true. One must attempt
definition merely by pointing. In the end, one must point
to the color, blue, in order to identify it; and this point-
ing is useless too to the blind.

The sense of the actual must be refreshed repeatedly,
and in the course of this book, the reader ought to try
what is said and what is cited by invoking his own sense of
what is actual. As the reader continues to examine Eliot's
work and this effort to describe his work, the actual and the
sense of the actual will turn out repeatedly to be the very
heart, the inner warmth and source of movement, of the subject.

The progress of poetry, the process by means of which
one method and style of writing is succeeded by a new one, is
inspired by the way in which a given convention of style which
once made possible an experience of the actual has been made
habitual and stock to the point at which instead of helping
the poet to arrive at the actual, it is a block or barrier be-
tween him and his subject. It is also a barrier between a new
kind of poetry and a reader who is devoted to the style of a
previous period. The style and idiom of Victorian and Pre-Raph-
aelite poetry was the barrier which Eliot had to break through
when he began to write poetry, and it was precisely the famil-
arity with this kind of poetry which made his new work seem
wrong and unpoetic to habitual readers of poetry. Such a scnr
is natural because it is natural for the reigning taste to
take for granted and to proclaim its own universality.

38

36

THE ARGUMENT

This book is written on the basis of certain assumptions which, beginning as assumptions, ought to be conclusions on the reader's part, if the book has fulfilled its purpose.

The first assumption is Sainte-Beuve's that the task of the critic is to show the reader how he has read the books of the author, and to show the reader, who presumably has less time and training, how to read more and more, and with more attention, and in a better way. Thus, half of this study is devoted to direct exposition, analysis and summary.

The second assumption is that T.S. Eliot is a great poet. Without attempting for the moment to Berine greatness, I meant to assert that he is a greater poet than Donne, for example, and Coleridge, two authors he may be said to resemble; and he is inferior as a poet only to the very greatest writers in English.

To begin in this way by the pronouncement of obiter dicta may well seem to résemble the famous device in vaudeville, the one in which the comedian enters with a shotgun and announces that if any one departs during his act, he will risk assassination. No shotgun is available, but it is worth saying that the reader who is unwilling to make these assumptions is wasting his time in turning this page and going forward. For one thing, the very process of detailed analysis is not worth following unless these assumptions are taken to be true for the time being.

This leads directly to an assumption and a declaration which may cause more doubt than the reader's part, namely, that Eliot is the greatest literary critic in English. One element in this superiority is the fact that he includes or comprehends the literary criticism of the past. And one reason for making this assumption explicit is the intention to scrutinize, question,

38

The Argument/2/
and question the body of his literary criticism; another reason is
the intention of making a system or compendium of his critical views.

Finally, I wish to assume that Eliot's prose and poetry,
taken as a whole, constitutes a new moment in the sensibility, literary
moral, and religious, of Western man. To make a general statement, which
will not be precise until a good deal else is expounded, the sensibility
which manifests itself in Eliot's prose and poetry may be declared
to be that of a culture-hero. For the first time, the experience of
man is international and is involved in all history; and in Eliot's
work this new experience is expressed, examined, and evaluated, though
at times in a fragmentary and incomplete way. Thus, borrowing and extending
James's term, we may say that this author is an international hero; and
his work has a prophetic value; to speak of the future is a necessary
foolishness; what I wish to show is that international man will have to
go through the stages of experience literary, cultural, moral and
religious, which are the subject of Eliot's prose and poetry. No doubt,
the international man will endure this experience in a variety of
inconceivable ways. But as he does, he will find Eliot's work a text,
even a scripture, which illuminates his situation profoundly.

38.

36.

The Use Of Dramatic Form

Everyone has known the enchantment of coming to the
theatre when the play is already in progress, and looking toward
the actors in the stage's lighted window, and suffering the ill-
usion momentarily that we have entered into the intimate life of
other human beings. The illusion is such that the poor body,
ignorant as ever, may even make abortive gestures of intervention
or warning when an innocent person is menaced by evil danger. In
the theatre we get the immediacy of time, place, and character; we
get a sense of being really there and of an experience lived through.

Naturally some poets will try to carry over this
quality of experience into lyric poetry. The chief means is a
use of scenic form, that is, of characters in a time and place.
But in lyrical poetry the time and the place must be somehow
described. The scenic means available to the playwright are of
course absent. This leads to a greater reliance upon the speech
of the characters, and thus it naturally leads to the dramatic
monologue as the form of lyric poetry. The course of development
is illustrated by Browning who came to the dramatic monologue
after trying to write plays in verse for the stage. Eliot has re-
versed this course by going from the dramatic monologue to an
attempt to write dramatic poetry for the stage.

In separating forms of versification from dramatic
forms, we ought to remember that this separation can break
down in any given example. The reliance upon diction, meter,
and stanzaic pattern is not the same thing as relying upon
the actual speech of a character in a definite time and place
or upon the development of an action. But a mere phrase--

38.

The knowledge of how human beings speak is always a
strong support, but Eliot avoids the dangers of the dramatic
monologue, the danger that it may become a mere exercise in
dialect
Cultivation of a
language or the danger that the poet's style may annihilate
the particular subject, by moving always toward some actual
situation of the protagonist.

The Use Of Psychological Form

From the dramatic monologue, it is but one step
to the interior monologue or the use of the ways of the
stream of consciousness. Here the poem moves in the way that
the mind moves, and not in the way that an action takes place.
We can see the beginning of the movement from dramatic form
to psychological form in some of Prufrock's subliminal images,
his sudden expression of a wish to be "a pair of ragged claws".
This should be compared with the dramatic character of his
rehearsal of what would happen if he attempted to make love to
one of the ladies of his acquaintance.

The consequence of this natural development from
dramatic to psychological form is the suppression or abandon-
ment of the traditional ways of unifying a poem. The tradition-
al basis in all English poetry for each transition from begin-
ning to end is either the sequence of the story or the action
or the exposition,

Eliot, and Pound before him, began to go from percep-
tion to perception and from statement to statement without putting
in transitions or connectives. We ought to remember that this is
the time of *montage* in the motion-pictures, images superimposed
upon images, and of a like techniques in the other arts, for if
we keep this in mind we have one way of seeing that the method

39.

of "The Waste Land", for example, is not arbitrary.

Perhaps a disposition to this method began or had as one of its causes ~~also~~ the experience of the American in Europe. As an exile and as a traveller, he sees things in detached snapshots, and not with the continuity of the native who has seen those things in that place for many years. Another cause may well be the notetaking of impressions, or the marking of quotations, great lines and great passages, a practice natural to the literary mind.

Whatever the causes, the method of psychological form revealed increasingly new possibilities of rhetoric, structure, tone and mood. It made possible dramatic surprise, flashback and flash forward, the summoning up of a moment in memory which was a source of great poetic excitement, although perhaps at times a suspect one, since it may depend too much upon the poet's purely personal framework of associations. It had the additional advantage of freeing the poet from the kind of line which in the past had to be written in order to get from one part of the narrative to another; and thus it made possible a greater poetic intensity. It is this omission of transition and connection justified by psychological form that May Sinclair has in mind when she speaks of the way in which Eliot "cuts corners".

In "The Waste Land", Eliot comes to use psychological form as a means of moving rapidly about the theme itself in its significant aspects. This may be compared to being shown pictures in rapid succession of all the sides of a church. Thus at times psychological form has returned to the point where it is a part of the deliberate ordering of the poem by the poet and not a use of the mind's ways of association.

40

The difference between psychological form used for its own sake and psychological form as a way of achieving a full view of the subject is important, and can be seen in [examples from "The Waste Land"]. When the protagonist encounters Mr. Eugenides, a Smyrna merchant, the mind passes to an association with Tiresias, who was also from the Near East and who was neither a man nor a woman, as Mr. Eugenides is homosexual. So too when in the first part of the poem an unhappy woman brings back a memory of Isolde in Wagner's opera. But in the fourth and fifth parts of the poem, the poet has imposed the plan of the poem upon the order of the statements. A drowned Phoenician sailor is brought forward not because of a process of association, but because of a connection with the casting of an effigy of Adonis into the waters each spring. And in the fifth part, though processes of association are still important, the succession of the three themes is determined by the necessity of the subject, rather than merely by the movement of the mind. We get a presentation of two aspects of the subject because they are relevant aspects of the subject and not because the mind naturally moves from the suggestion of one to that of the other. And in the second part, when we go from a lady hysterical in a boudoir to a scene in a bar where cockney women discuss the plight of a woman, we can see how there is a certain loss in the emission of narrative form. For a connecting link in terms of narrative might well have been the departure of the protagonist from the lady's boudoir to a bar, a departure which has some probability as narrative, and considerable force.

26.

In "The Portrait Of A Lady", an even deeper wrong is
performed or accomplished. The lady of the poem takes advantage
of the manners of her society in order to place the young man
of the poem at her mercy. She uses the goodmanners which are
due her as a human being in order to make claims upon the
feelings of the young man to which she has no right whatever,
since in coming to tea the young man has had in mind nothing
more than a polite visit. The lady of this kind of society is

27.

23.

The concentration upon manners shifts in Eliot's second volume, and less as his career continues. In his second volume, we encounter manners as a lack of manners, that is to say, as lowness and coarseness, as the bedshaking sounds in a rooming house, the amorous successes of newly rich Jews with a European princess, the uncorseted bust of a Russian girl and the bad manners of a prostitute when she yawns and draws her stoking up in public. The essential point here is the triumph of the low and the coarse, of those who violate good manners, over those who are well-bred and hence tormented by hesitation, doubt, and scruple.

29.

The description of the young man's manners brings us to the
typist's emotion of indifference, the degradation of the
act of love, her expression of the meaningless of this act
by her automatic smoothing of her hair. Here manners and
morals are united. The coarseness or insensitivity of the
one is an expression of the poverty of the other. And the
broken fingernails of dirty hands represent not vulgarity,
but an utter defeat of mind and heart. This is even more
true of "Sweeney Agonsites", where vulgarity of manners
and banality of speech is the direct expression of an
emptiness in living: "I've been born, and once is enough",
says one of the characters.

There is a Puritan sense of life in the poetry which
shows itself at first in a heightened delicacy or what is
sometimes called squeamishness. But it is soon much more than
this, and Eliot passes far beyond any aspect of manners. In
"Thoughts After Lambeth", "thought,/sacrifice," and "a dis-
cipline of the emotions" are recommended to youth. Perhaps
this brings to the Puritan sense of life, or at any rate to
the report that as a student Eliot always did precisely those
things which he most disliked doing. Elsewhere in Eliot's prose

30.

often merely in passing perceptions of the moral life are made which in economy resemble the observations of the French moralists of the seventeenth century, authors for whom Eliot has often expressed much admiration. We are told that human beings must learn most things for themselves, that morals are a preliminary matter for a saint and a secondary matter for the poet, that the salacious and slapstick are the two most certain appetites of any audience in the theatre, but--here the moralist emerges briefly--the urgency of these appetites does not mean that they ought to be gratified. In questions of literary criticism where an author is praised for insight, it is often moral insight that is priased most of all; for example, the characterization of the heroine of Middleton's "The Changeling": "the unmoral nature saucily trapped in the inexorable toils of morality--morality not made by man but by Nature".

And then, as the concern with morality comes to be a discussion of how the moral being is/handle the good and evil in society, we are told that ultimately economic laws can be overcome "by what people want" when anything is generally accepted as desirable, economic laws can be upset in order to achieve it".

However this view may be, it makes explicit a primary assumption of the moralists: if we want anything sufficiently, we will get it; and perhaps it may even be said that what we get is really what we have wanted. So too, in speaking of the Society Union, it is as a moralist that Eliot observes that the question of whether or not the Soviet economy is a success or failure is not the first question, which is, however, this: whether we want a society which worships the Golden Calf. The moral question is, What is desirable? and not, What is useful, practicable, or successful?

36.

The Use Of Dramatic Form

Naturally some poets will try to carry over this
quality of experience into lyric poetry. The chief means is a
use of scenic form, that is, of characters in a time and place.
But in lyrical poetry the time and the place must be somehow
described. The scenic means available to the playwright are of
course absent. This leads to a greater reliance upon the speech
of the characters, and thus it naturally leads to the dramatic
monologue as the form of lyric poetry. The course of development
is illustrated by Browning who same to the dramatic monologue
after trying to write plays in verse for the stage. Eliot has re-
versed this course by going from the dramatic monologue to an
attempt to write dramatic poetry for the stage.

In separating forms of versification from dramatic
forms, we ought to remember that this separation can break
down in any given example. The reliance upon diction, meter,
and stanza pattern is not the same thing as relying upon
the actual speech of a character in a definite time and place
or upon the development of an action. But a mere phrase--

37.

"Pray you, undo this button"--- may very well be a triumph not because of the quality of the language, but because of the dramatic revelation which it embodies. The difference between relying upon event or language varies from poet to poet.

In his prose, Eliot comes close to denying this great difference when he declares that all poetry is dramatic because it presents us with a human being's actions and attitudes in a given situation. But this is to stretch the meaning of dramatic and to forget its relationship to technique. In saying that all great poetry is dramatic, the important word is great, and Eliot is affirming a view of the kind of poetry he prefers. He does not prefer the kind of poetry that Milton wrote, and this example of distaste shows very well how the use of dramatic form must be distinguished from the use of poetic form. "Paradise Lost" is not "Othello"; but if we expect it to be, then we miss the triumph of versification, the rhetorical triumph, the full richness of a mind focussed upon a famous story.

Eliot's poetry is close to the drama from the beginning. The two dramatic monologues of his first book are obvious examples; the dramatic framework of the other poems is just as important. The poet's sense of the actual and his ear for the way in which human beings actually speak would naturally tend to drama, in any case, even if there were not other influences at work. Chiefly it is by using a particular character as a medium through which the poem is delivered that Eliot comes to other kinds of dramatic form. Whether we are given the speech of only one character, or of several characters, the poem is organized by dramatic necessity as much as by the necessities of the verse form.

38.

The knowledge of how human beings speak is always a
strong support, but Eliot avoids the dangers of the dramatic
monologue, the danger that it may become a mere exercise in
language or the danger that the poet's style may annihilate
the particular subject, by moving always toward some actual
situation of the protagonist.

## The Use Of Psychological Form

From the dramatic monologue, it is but one step
to the interior monologue or the use of the ways of the
dstream of consciousness. Here the poem moves in the way that
the mind moves, and not in the way that an action takes place.
We can see the beginning of the movement from dramatic form
to psychological form in some of Prufrock's subliminal images,
his sudden expression of a wish to be "a pair of ragged claws".
This should be compared with the dramatic character of his
rehearsal of what would happen if he attempted to make love to
one of the ladies of his acquaintance.

The consequence of this natural development from
dramatic to psychological form is the suppression or abandon-
ment of the traditional ways of unifying a poem. The tradition-
al basis in all English poetry for each transition from begin-
ning to end is either the sequence of the story or the action
or the exposition.

Eliot, and Pound before him, began to go from percep-
tion to perception and from statement to statement without putting
in transitions or connectives. We ought to remember that this is
the time of *montage* in the motion-pictures, images superimposed
upon images, and of a like technique in the other arts, for if
we keep this in mind we have one way of seeing that the method

39.

Perhaps a disposition to this method began or has as one of its causes also the experience of the American in Europe. As an exile and as a traveller, he sees things in detached snapshots, and not with the continuity of the native who has seen those things in that place for many years. Another cause may well be the not-making of impressions, or the marking of quotations, great lines and great passages, a practice natural to the literary mind.

40.

The difference between psychological form used for
its own sake and psychological form as a way of achieving a
full view of the subject is important, and can be seen in
examples from 'The Waste Land'. When the protagonist encounters
Mr. Eugenides, a Smyrna merchant, the mind passes to an
association with Tiresias, who was also from the Near East
and who was neither a man nor a woman, as Mr. Eugenides was
homosexual. So too when in the first part of the poem an
unhappy woman brings back a memory of Isolde in Wagner's
opera. But in the fourth and fifth parts of the poem, the
poet has imposed the plan of the poem upon the order of the
statements. A drowned Phoenician sailor is brought forward
not because of a process of association, but because of a
connection with the casting of an effigy of Adonis into the
waters each spring. And in the fifth part, though processes
of association are still important, the succession of the
three themes is determined by the necessity of the subject,
rather than merely by the movement of the mind. We get a
presentation of two aspects of the subject because they are
relevant aspects of the subject and not because the mind
naturally moves from the suggestion of one to that of the other.
And in the second part, when we go from a lady hysterical
in a boudoir to a scene in a bar where cockney women discuss
the plight of a woman, we can see how there is a certain loss
in the emission of narrative form. For a connecting link in
terms of narrative might well have been the departure of the
protagonist from the lady's boudoir to a bar, a departure
which has some probability as narrative, and considerable force.

21.

sense, and it is distinct from the lyric quality of poetry.
Aristotle was perhaps the first to remark that in literary
criticism it was wrong to expect the same kind of precision as
one found in mathematics; the subject did not admit of such
precision. To this might be added the fact that literary criti-
cism appears to make progress only through a continual over-
emphasis and distortion of crucial terms. Thus it was perhaps
sad but necessary that Eliot should have extended the meaning
of dramatic; the over-emphasis was necessary to correct the cru-
cial critical view that poetry was to be identified with splendor
of language, a view implicit in and propagated by Matthew Arnold's
doctrine of great passages as touchstones.

The consequence of Eliot's critical concerns has been a new
the
view of history of English poetry and a revaluation of all the
poets. And if an attempt is made at a synoptic rehearsal of this
revaluation, it is not because they are in fact a system, but
because by abstracting them and setting them in systematic order
we can arrive at a clearer view of them and decide to what extent
they are acceptable.

THE TIME AND THE PLACE

Literary history often is much concerned with an author's background, with his life and with his times. Obvious in studying an author of our own time, the illumination made possible by a knowledge of the author's life and times is less available, if it is available at all. For often enough we are deceived by the present; it forces illusions of the most insidious kind upon us. For example, what Victorian would have believed that Tennyson would be regarded as a less important and less interesting poet than Gerard Manly Hopkins and Emily Dickinson, if it had been possible for the Victorian even to know of these unpublished poets?

Yet we can, become conscious, when we are really interested in an author, of our ignorance; we can name and mark out our ignorance; and we can be suspicious of our knowledge, such as it is; and we can proceed by analogy with our knowledge of dead authors.

It is not an accident that Eliot entitles one of his poems, "Melange Adultere Du Tout". The title, borrowed from Corbiere, is ironic, but the adulterous mixture of practically everything is worth careful examination and consciousness: A teacher in America, the poem begins, a journalist in England, a lecturer in Yorkshire, a literary critic in Paris, overexcited by philosophy in Germany, a wanderer from Omaha to Damascus, he has celebrated, he says, his birthday in an African oasis, dressed in giraffe's skin. To this list we may add a more literal and more general list of names and events heterogeneous as a circus or America itself: St. Louis, New England, Boston, Harvard, England, the first World War, Paris; Joyce, Picasso, Yeats, Stravinsky, Trotsky; and Charles Eliot Norton, Santayana, F.H.Bradley, Charles Whibley, Ezra Pound; London, the Church of England, the countryside of England; the Russian Revolution, the post-war period, the world crisis and depression, the Munich Pact and the second

THE TIME AND THE PLACE

It is not an accident that Eliot entitles one of his poems, "Melange Adultere Du Tout". The title, borrowed from Corbiere, is ironic, but the adulterous mixture of practically everything is worth careful examination and consciousness: A teacher in America, the poem begins, a journalist in England, a lecturer in Yorkshire, a literary vagabond in Paris, overrated by philosophy in Germany, a wanderer from Omaha to Damascus, he has celebrated, he says, his birthday in an African oasis, dressed in giraffe's skin. To this list we may add a more literal and more general list of names and events heterogeneous as a circus or America itself: St. Louis, New England, Boston, Harvard, England, the First World War, Paris; Joyce, Picasso, Yeats, Stravinsky, Trotsky; and Charles Eliot Norton, Santayana, F.H.Bradley, Charles Whibley, Ezra Pound; London, the Church of England, the countryside of England; the Russian Revolution, the post-war period, the world crisis and depression, the Munich Pact and the second

The Time and The Place/2

World War. Terely such a list should suggest how many and how many disperate (desperate) things are involved in this poet's career. And if this seems far-fetched or forced, if it seems that such a list might be made for any author, this is true of Eliot in a sense in which it is not true of many other authors, past or present. It is true in the sense that many of these things enter into the character of the poet's work either because he has put them there, or because he has made his work so significant that it must of necessity relate itself to these other important things of the time and the place.

The time of this poetry is all history. The place is international. The sensitivity of the poet is exhibited concretely in his poems is international. Though much in the poet rejects this condition and declares that such a condition is not a desirable thing, this author is a citizen of the world whether he likes it or not. (when the resty of Versailles was compressed)

The innocence of Woodrow Wilson in Europe has been compared to that of Milly Theule, the hewife of James "The Wings Of A Dove". Both Wilson and James are *presences*, so to speak, which have to do with the time and the place of Eliot's work. To compare Eliot to James, and to compare the innocence of the American in Europe to Eliot's knowledge is to see that an important change has taken place. Eliot has gone much further than James, and if his *personas* sometimes suffer in the way that James' characters do, they exist in a period when everything has broken loose, mingled, and made itself available in the kind of huge bankruptcy which we can see in "The Waste Land". It might be said and it has been suspected that Eliot made an effort to become more European than a midtwentieth-century European, or more English than the English, or more royalist than the king. By studying Eliot's essays on James (they are most available in Edmund's Wilson's anthology "The Shock Of Recognition"; footnote), we can examine one moment (probably a very important one) of his passage from America to England, from Europe to New England. What happened, however, was not the repatriation which might conceivably

have been desired, but an experience of that one would call the international scene, if the phrase did not already have a special Jamesian sense. Eliot's protagonists are

THE GOOD SOCIETY

THE IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY

It may be best to consider Eliot's view of society not in its development, but in the most explicit statement he has made about, in the small volume entitled "The Idea of A Christian Society". The reasons for beginning at the conclusion are several; for one thing, Eliot has changed his mind considerably and looked with more and more care at the problem, for another thing, the pressure of international events has had a good deal to do with his changes of mind. And, in this essay on the Christian society, he says that the shock of the Munich Pact brought him to the point where he found it necessary to "doubt the validity of a /%#%# civilization".

In the abstract, it might seem that the Treaty of Versailles should have been sufficient to bring about such a doubt. But not only does very little occur in the abstract; there are also questions of scrutiny, examination, and experience through the years. Eliot came to maturity in a literary milieu in which the author was expected to disregard political matters, and not expected to have any concept-ion whatever of the nature of a good society. Such an attitude is it-self the product of one kind of society and of a separation of art from the rest of life which is itself political (that is say, pertain-ing to the city). It fall back upon the weak origin of the term.

Then too it must be said that in several important senses Eliot had long since doubted the validity of modern civilization, especially as a poet. For here too his apprehension of the actual was far ahead of his concern with the ideal; and his acute sense of the actual may be said to have made him mistake the nature of the ideal. The old man who is the protagonist of "Gerontion" lives in a <u>rented</u> house. There is merely in that adjective a criticism of modern life, where one lives in flats or in rented houses: this is the recognition of the actual. The effort to make out the ideal is defective because

The Good Society/2/145/

there is a supposition that if one lived in a society in which houses were inhabited by one's family through the generations, a genuine transformation would occur.

Eliot was critical of modern civilization at the very start of his literary career. We may even regard his departure from America as an expression of that criticism, whatever the immediate causes of that departure and subsequent expatriation. And a criticism of modern life--of industrialism, liberalism, capitalism, and capitalism, democracy and hypocrisy--is implicit in his poems, even more and more, in his essays and in the comments he wrote as an editor. "The Idea of A Christian Society" begins by an attempt to define with some exactness what Eliot is opposed to: he is opposed to a society which is pagan, that is to say, dedicated to "materialistic" ideals, and he is opposed to a society which is liberal: a liberal society is one which may be characterized as chiefly negative, since it does not deny various ways of life and various kinds of religious belief, but on the contrary institutionalizes its tolerance of such variety.

Eliot assumes that his reader will agree as to a pagan society as being undesirable; he is not writing for such a reader, although there are many. He is writing for the reader who lives in a liberal (or on principle tolerant of various beliefs and ways of life) society, and he is seeking to persuade such a reader as to the nature of a good society and a Christian society. And the first premise of his argument is that the liberal society in which we live is doomed either to become a pagan society or to be transformed into some kind of Christian society. It cannot continue to exist in its present form. Here the fact in 1939, that this study was written/before the beginning of the Second World War, when the successes of Fascism and Nazism were in the forefront of attention, may have something, may indeed have a good deal to do with Eliot's argument.

The Good Society/3/146/

But in any case, it is clear that modern society seems to be in the
process of being increasingly **bureaucratized** to the point where prof-
essions of liberalism will be as true as most professions; and Eliot
speaks of **totalitarian democrats** with this process in mind.

Since it is necessary to choose between a pagan society and
a Christian one, the constitution of a Christian society becomes
a matter of some importance. In this essay Eliot explains what he
is not going to explain, what he is not concerned with, and what
he regards as not relevant to his subject more frequently than usual.
For example, he explains that he is not concerned with the economic
organization of such a society, although he admits that the Christian
must agree as to the evil of the profit motive. His justification for
this omission, which is a crucial one, is that the evil is the subject
of agreement and the proposed remedies are the subject of endless
dispute. We may say, however, that this must seem to be an evasion:
in modern life it is impossible to reconcile the principles of
Christianity with capitalism, or indeed with any form of society in
which the life of any class is supported by the labor of another
class. Yet Eliot's evasion on this score is one which may have unavoid-
able, given his belief in a landed aristocracy, a belief he shares with
such another great poet as William Butler Yeats. His view apparently
is that inequalities of station, property, and rank would be
corrected or purged of their evil by Christian principles. And here again
we are forced to remember that modern society is industrialized; at id-
not, as Eliot admits, going to return to an unindustrialized form of
economic production; and it thus becomes improbable or impossible that
headed by a monarchy
the kind of landed aristocracy we want which Eliot envisages can
ever come into being again, whether governed by Christian principles
or not.

The Good Society/4/147/

The Christian Society as conceived by Eliot will divide itself into three parts, the Christian State, the Christian Community, and the Community of Christians, or clerisy. The rulers of the Christian State need not of necessity be Christian, the important thing is that they regard themselves as subject to Christian principles and Christian ends. The Christian Community, constituted as it will be by the major part of the population, will be Christian chiefly in their behavior; in custom, observance, their habits, inheritances, and allegiances. Here again the actual is the model and evil genius of the author, who observes that "the capacity for thinking about objects of faith"--and the intell actual element is a most important part of religion for Eliot--is small. The consciousness of most human beings is preoccupied by work and by family life, by their relationship to the soil, the sea, or the machine. And this majority of the population will live in the country, or will live in small communities--the model here is the parish--and in the small community their center of interest will focus itself. The Community of Christians or clerisy (a term borrowed from Coleridge and extended) will be constituted by those who have a genuine capacity for the religious life in some form. This will include the monastic orders, and many teachers. As with the political state, so with the system of education; not all teachers must be Christian, but education must have in view religious principles and ends.

One point to bear in mind is the extent to which Eliot is insisting on the primary and prior necessity of a good society. The point is virtually Marxist in that it assumes most human beings' as influenced, motivated, penetrated, and by the community and the way of life into which they have been borne/. It is almost as if Eliot were preceding on the assumption that Being determines consciousness, or as with the pragmatists and instrumentalists that not only is consciousness social to a large extent, but even the self is a social product, in essence. This provides the basis for the greater tolerance

The Good Society / 4 / 148

of the dissident, sceptical or foreign individual (even the Jew!). If the
and its way of life
structure of the community/is sufficiently Christian throughout, then
the individual incapable of religious belief may nonetheless not only
be a member of the Christian society, but he may be of great use to it,
however free-thinking or alien in race. And in any case, as Eliot had
observed long before, dictated belief or compelled belief is not belief
at all.

Throughout this work it is possible to regard the author
as struggling to reconcile unreconcilables and falling back upon
and contraries
a dialectic in which opposites/balance each other. As we have seen,
this habit of mind, is a central and essential one in authorship. Here
Eliot deals with the question of a national church as against a universal
church in just this way. Both are said to be necessary, the national
church necessary because of local differences of race, custom, language,
and other particularities; the universal church to proclaim and manifest
the universality of religious principles and to overcome particular
differences. To the universal church, the Christian will owe his primary
allegiance, and to the national church only his secondary allegiance.
There will be a tension between the two claims, but this will be a
healthy and fruitful thing.

Eliot concludes his reference to the Munich Pact, his
doubt about the validity of a civilization, and a brief postscript
about the outbreak of the Second World War. And his fundamental ar-
gument appears just before this: you must choose, he says, between
God, on the one hand, and Hitler and Stalin, on the other hand. Thus
he has said previously that one must choose between a pagan society
and a religious society.

If we stand back and regard this conclusion, there is much
room for comment, more comment than is justified by the purposes of
this effort at criticism and elucidation. Eliot's basis in actual
fact is a criticism and rejection of the present nature of Western

The Good Society/5/149/

society. Within a generation, our civilization has produced two world wars. Perhaps to speak of a while civilization producing any thing is unjustifiable personification. May we not say, however, that there has been/agency in Western society which has been able to prevent the outbreak of two wars, although there is every reason to know that most human beings did not desire either war and sought to prevent it.

If we have such a regard for the actual and the ideal as Eliot at his best manifests in his work, we must recognize on the one hand that Christianity is the only system of belief which makes for the avoidance of war, but on the other hand Christianity proved ineffective in the extreme, despite the efforts of one of the Popes to bring hostilities to an early cessation. We must recognize, as James Burnham pointed out, that Christianity has had its historical chance; yet it does not follow that the truth, if Christianity is the truth, should have only one chance; surely it should have an infinite number. But who, given the actual experience of the past two generations, can confidently rely upon Christianity as a social agency?

Eliot is not concerned with Christianity merely as a social agency. He is concerned with snaking an ideal, and a qualified ideal at that, a conception of society which does not for a moment expect imperfection, but rather a necessary imperfection constantly corrected and striven against.

The same kind of liot, the snubbing of objection should emerge, the two alternatives, God or a dictator. As it happens, the course of the second World War has shown us that one dictator has been defeated largely because of the successor of another dictator. And there is some reason to suppose that in much of Western society, the choice may be between democracy and dictatorship, and annihilation. Dictatorship or a foreign one, between it and Stalin, between totalitarians or communists, totalitarian democracy, or British inflation.

And again, it is possible to suppose that belief in God is not

The Good Society/150/6/

of necessity a choice of Christianity, certainly it is possible to argue, as philosophers have, for the belief in God and not be able to accept the Christian revelation.

We cannot set the value of this book, as of much else of Eliot's, not in the drawing of the ideal, but in the important criticism of the actual which is involved in any such effort to conceive the ideal; and probably without an effort to get at the ideal, Eliot would not succeed so well in expressing his apprehension of the actual, although, on the other hand, we must also say that a genius for the actual may explain Eliot's misapprehension of the ideal, which is to say, of the possibilities of the actual. Eliot perceives as a matter of actuality the fact that most human beings are not likely to have a gift for religious devotion, and this is true of his view of how education is to be allocated. But that certain possibilities of the actual are missed becomes obvious when we remember that in England, which has been much lauded as a democracy, most human beings (checkmark 85%) do not go to school after the age of 15. Perhaps they would not be capable of becoming truly educated human beings under any conceivable set of conditions. But that remains to be seen, since the conditions under which they have lived have not made for a genuine determination of the possibility of becoming truly educated human beings, even if they had had the chance. And they certainly have not had the chance in the British Empire, (see Sinclair, cockneys).

And we can extend this judgment of Eliot's writings about modern society to his previous utterances on the subject. At every stage a man of extreme honesty, contradictory allegiances, and perfect responsibility is seeking to make clear his own sense of the crisis--a crisis up to death--in which our society is involved. If we read it as a description of many serious and important perceptions and if we disregard agreement and disagreement, we will be much rewarded.

The Moralist

Since Eliot's prose is most often concerned with literary subjects, it is possible that the extent of moral discussion --or "How to live, and what to do"--may be obscured. Obscured too by the fact that perceptions of moral life are often made in passing and briefly, with the economy of the French moralists of whom WAS certainly Eliot must have been aware.

To take account of this element in Eliot is to see that it is very important and that it is almost present in the background. "Human kind cannot bear very much reality", Eliot writes in "Four Quartets". In his criticism, when he expressly concerned with literary matters, he nonetheless brings to bear an observation of the good/evil of human nature. Writing of the way in which a play may commend itself to an audience, of the four levels of meaning the playwright may comprehend, he observes that the attention of any audience may be held by the salacious and by slapstick. And then, speaking as moralist, he says that this does not mean that these appetites of human attention ought to be gratified. Human kind cannot bear very much reality! The moralist, however, commends the effort to confront mankind with reality (and again we see how the poetry and the prose conduct a dialogue for the reader who is interested).

In "Thoughts After Lambeth", we see the moralist who, far from operating by means of preconceptions, bears with him a heavy sense of the actual. Eliot discusses the commedations of the Church of England with regard to birth control, commends the view that birth control is at times permissible, and then criticizes the particular recommendations--that special counsel/ imperative should be taken with a priest e-by observing that sex is "the most imperious of human urges", and that the human mind is extremely disingenuous/ extreme disingenuity of humanity."

2. Again we ought to note that this author is careful not to deceive himself, he knows very well the difference between the ideal and the actual, and he attempts to sustain the ideal by recognizing the actual. The prose passage on birth control in "Thoughts After Lambeth", ought to be compared to the pub scene in "The Waste Land", where we are confronted with the actual, and where a woman says "What you get married for if you don't want children?" Thus does the unity of the poet's mind shows itself. And we should consider too that the poem was written at a time long before the poet was concerned with matters of church doctrine.

"Thoughts After Lambeth" contains a recommendation to "Youth", of "Thought, study, mortification, sacrifice", and of "discipline of the emotions". These affirmations should be compared with that of "Give, sympathize, and control"--love, knowledge, and self-mastery", in "The Waste Land", and "Teach me to care and not to care, / Teach me to sit still", in "Ash Wednesday".

The question of the society in which the moral being must live becomes more and more pressing in Eliot's prose. In "After Strange Gods", when he writes of the nature of the good society, Eliot declares that "these (economic) matters may ultimately be determined by what people want; that when anything is generally accepted as desirable, economic laws can be upset in order to achieve it". Ultimately may be a very long time, even for the moralist who is, in this rare instance in Eliot, overcome by an abstraction. For in actual fact, the extent of the population is such that if the economic laws dictated by industrialism were seriously upset, a large portion of the population would no longer be able to exist. Here the actual is being disregarded; and here perhaps the distinction between grace and works is over-ridden, as it is not in another passage in the same volume where Eliot is dealing with the relationship of the

3.
author to tradition: "One cannot", he writes, "alter the habits
of a lifetime at the moment of composition". Yet Eliot apparent-
ly is willing to suppose (at this point, for in later essays
a very different view seems to be adopted) that the economic
framework of a society can be altered by the generally accepted
desires of a people.

Yet, whatever the relevance of this view to modern life,
it makes clear the moralist's assumptions: if we want anything
sufficiently we will get it. Furthermore, social questions are
questions of value and thus questions of morality. Moral questions
are prior to social questions. And thus it is that in a commentary
in The Criterion, Eliot observes as a moralist that it is not
a question of whether the Soviet Union is an economic success
or failure, but a question of whether we want a society which
worships the Golden Calf. The fundamental social and moral question,
is, What is desirable? It is not: What will succeed and what will
fail? What is practicable and what is useful?

Eliot discusses in "After Strange Gods" the difference
between his prose and his verse in one important respect: "I should
say that in one's prose reflexions one may be legitimately
occupied with one's ideals, whereas in the writing of verse
one can deal only with actuality". This is an answer to critics
who have found his prose and his verse inconsistent. And, as if thus
stated, it may seem paradoxical, or untrue. Perhaps the statement
would have been strengthened, if the double concern with ideals
and with the actual in prose had been stressed; and perhaps we
may say that Eliot is at times insufficiently concerned with
the actual in proposing and expounding the ideal. Yet the sentence
should illuminate profoundly the difference between the prose
discussion of the ideal and the way that the ideal enters into poetry.

2/Birth, Copulation, Death

pared with many other poets, as compared with St.Theresa's "God moves among the pots and pans") that we must decide how we can distinguish between the personal and the objective in Eliot as against the way we make the distinction in general.

Stated concer etely, it is the distinction between what is found in the poetry which arises because of the poet's private feelings which are his own, and no one else's and those feelings which are a part of common human experience.

The Way In Which Tradition Works

The style which Eliot learned from Bradley sometimes makes his efforts at definition seem a series of negations and qualifications which cancell each other out. This is not true, for there is always a concreteness, though sometimes hidden, beneath the discussion.

Thus concretely Eliot speaks of how the sense of the past or literature and culture can be gained not so much from omnivorous reading, passing examinations, or being primed to glittering conversation; for Shakespeare gained more from Plutarch than most men gain from the reading of many works in history.

The same distinction and concreteness is at work in Eliot's discussion of how the poet need not have mastered Shakespeare, Homer, and other great authors; but the critic must be acquainted with them. The point here involves the old distinction between how the poet works through the subliminal and with the actual: he can get a great deal merely from the period in which he exists, the things that other people know and tell him about, the exposition of learned critics, the life of his time and its hardly recognized embodiments of the past. But the critic must of necessity operate upon the level of conscious knowledge; he is concerned with ideals and with theory.

So tradition is said to be a matter of the blood, of the in- heritance of an accepted way of living from generation to generation, and "he cannot undo the damage of a lifetime in a moment", nor can one change oneself at the moment of composition. This is said in 1933, many years after the writing of his initial essay on "Tradition And The Individual Talent"; and it is mixed with a social concern which mars the working out of the basic aperçu into the nature of critical practice as distinguished from poetic practice. Yet the closer we look, the more we see how, beneath superficial contradiction and the semblance of evasiveness, the same perception of the actual relationship, of the individual to tradition has been used.

Thus concretely Eliot speaks of how the sense of the past of literature and culture can be gained not so much from omnivorous reading, passing examinations, or being primed to glittering conversation; for Shakespeare gained more from Plutarch than most men gain from the reading of many works in history.

The same distinction and concreteness is at work in Eliot's discussion of how the poet need not have mastered Shakespeare, Homer, and other great authors; but the critic must be acquainted with them. The point here involves the old distinction between how the poet works through the subliminal and with the actual: he can get a great deal merely from the period in which he exists, the things that other people know and tell him about, the exposition of learned critics, the life of his time and his hardly recognized embodiments of the past. But the critic must of necessity operate upon the level of conscious knowledge; he is concerned with ideals and with theory.

So tradition is said to be a matter of the blood, of the inheritance of an accepted way of living from generation to generation, and "One cannot undo the damage of a lifetime in a moment", nor can one change oneself at the moment of composition. This is said in 1933, many years after the writing of his initial essay on "Tradition And The Individual Talent"; and it is mixed with a social concern which mars the working out of the basic aperçu into the nature of critical practice as distinguished from poetic practice. Yet the closer we look, the more we see how, beneath superficial contradiction and the semblance of evasion, the same perception of the actual relationship, of the individual to tradition has been used.

The Subliminal

As with the perception of the moral, so with the emergence of
the depths of consciousness in Eliot's prose. They are referred to
briefly and in passing, so that the careless reader may not note how
striking they are and with careful sincerity the critic makes
use of them. In the early essay on "Hamlet", in discussing the
old question of Hamlet's insanity, Eliot speaks of "The intense
feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its
object, is something which every person of sensibility has known;
it is doubtless a subject of study for pathologists". Here we ought
to remark in passing that nowhere does Eliot express anything but
scorn for Freud or Freudianism, although there are certainly good
reasons might have found illumination there. Continuing with these
feelings, which are the feelings of a man who is well-known to the
psychiatrist, or a man who has a mind that is well-known to the
business world.
Eliot says: "the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, the
artist keeps them alive by his ability to intensify the world to his
emotions". And thus, in order to understand "Hamlet", Eliot concludes,
"we should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not under-
stand himself".

It is natural to set this early statement against the
one in "The Use Of Poetry And The Use Of Criticism", which has
already been quoted for a different purpose: "the sudden lifting
of the burden of anxiety/which presses upon our life so steadily
that we are unaware of it--the breaking down of strong habitual
barriers--which tend to re-form very quickly". Here again the sublim-
inal is being described. And both passages in prose may be made to
illuminate the kind of feelings in the poetry, especially in "The
Waste Land". Is not the woman in the second part of the poem, suffering
from a feeling ecstatic and terrible, without an object or exceeding
an object?

5.

THE MOTIVES AND THE REASONS FOR EXPATRIATION

It must seem on the surface both fascinating and peculiar
that one of the great poets and critics of our time should have been
born in St. Louis, Missouri--in "front of the gas works", as his
friend Pound remarks at one point--and should have crossed the At-
lantic after attending Harvard College, settled in London, and
lived most of his mature life in England, becoming an English cit-
izen and becoming an advocate of royalism, classicism, and anglo-
catholicism. Perhaps the acid nt of place has something to do with
the exotic look of the passage and migration, for surely St. Louis
appears to be one of the most unlikely places for such a career to
begin. Actually the surface facts are deceptive. The poet's father
was the president of a college, and there is much in his New England
background to make his career far from an unlikely one. And apart
from New England, there are very strong reasons why only by such a
journey, such a process of expatriation, repatriation, and return
that the substance could have been accomplished; although, on the
other hand, it should be borne in mind that this process was only
a necessary condition or basis of his work, which was accomplished
by this author and not the other authors such as Pound who have
made a like journey.

The nature of expatriation is thus an important thing,
and the relationship of the author in America to Europe in as always
been an important one. The classic expression of what is in question
is the much quoted paragraph by Henry James, who is Eliot's forbear
in this way as in many others, when he writes about the America which
confronted Nathaniel Hawthorne:

"When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life,
of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago
(James is writing in 1879); and when we think of a young man of
beautiful genius, with a love of literature and romance, of the psc-
turesque, of style and form and color, trying to make a career for

5.

2.

himself in the midst of them," compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment

James speaks then as a keen psychologist of the life of the artist when he writes that

"there are a thousand ways of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most innocent. But for all that it connects itself with the idea of pleasure. He proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must first get it".

FurtHER more, 'in the America of Hawthorne.'s time, as in the America from which Eliot departed,

"the interest in literature was yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not to be 'in business'.

Yet, on the other hand, the conditions which foster literature are of a different character and belong to a different kind of community:

"The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation".

And finally, in the classic locus James says:

"If Hawthorne had been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infrequently more various. The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life, until it should be a wonder to know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name, no sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys; nor little Norman churches; no great Universities; nor public schools;--no Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, nor novels, no museums, no pictures, no political

5.

3.

society, no sporting class--no Epsom nor Ascot!
As a description of the conditions in which the artist must exist,
this should be compared with what Eliot has to say about the Am-
erica of his youth, writing a commentary in the Criterion on the
death of Irving Babbitt.

Mostly usually before, in the agoist, in a brief review
of a book of poems by Conrad Aiken, Redoat a time when the question
of expatriation must have been a lively one and perhaps an undecided
one, Eliot remarks of that time that he would benefit as a poet "from
being exposed to European civilization". Perhaps as a conscious motive
this was uppermost in his mind when he decided to remain in England,
though we know very well that only rarely does such a motive solely
determine a choice.

Yet the connection of Hawthorne, James, and Eliot
requires further discussion. For expatriation of the kind that
James and Eliot accepted is often misunderstood as the expression
of snobbery, social climbing, an idyllic view of Europe and the
aristocracy of Europe; and worse yet, it is taken to be a betrayal
of one's country. This is the view of Van Wyck Brooks, among others;
and it is reinforced by squint at professions of interest in royalism
and religion, especially the Church of England.

Such views are more prejudice; they are expressions
of a deep-rooted insecurity which need not be named in detail here.
And literary nationalism, so-called, is often a disguised version of
the thorough misunderstanding of work different than one's own. This
can be shown to be true directly in the instances of James, for nowhere
is rottenness and evil shown more explicitly than in

5.

4.

novels. And so too with Eliot: the idea of an idyllic view of Europe is contradicted again and again, as well as the view that an idyllic or golden or Arcadian past is being placed in contrast with a decadent present (we should note that the Shavian irony about the past may be involved in the sensibility of readers who adopted this view).

James is speaking of himself when he speaks of Hawthorne; and Eliot, we may presumed, is speaking of himself when he speaks of in two ways, at least,abbitt. It is possible/to miss the point and to be blind to the situation which they feel to the depths of their being. First, one may say that there was a great richness of experience confronting each of these authors. Hawthorne lived in the time of Emerson and Thoreau; and it was the time also of Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams. From our own comfortable point of view, which is that/retrospect, we can make an abstraction of each period in which there were very many things an author might write about, or ought to have been interested in during his days. And we know that if Hawthorne withdrew for a long period of seclusion, he did on the other hand deliberately seek out experience. So too with James and with Eliot. At the time of the writing of the book of Hawthorne, or soon thereafter, James was in Washington with Oscar Wilde, and we can see how much he did not see by reading in the letters of Mrs. Henry Adams (quote). Eliot's instance is perhaps more difficult, since his gift was poetic and critical, rather than for fiction, where the claims of a rich and vivid scene are more obvious. But here too, we may make an abstraction and suppose that the agony of modern life which is Eliot's general subject until "The Waste Land" was written might well have been drawn from the modern cities of America, as, in fact, "Prufrock" is, for detail and background. Eliot's remark, as quoted by F.O., Mat-

5.

thiessen, is that Boston was a (semi-civilized) barbarism.

But this view and this critiom of the author in relation-
ship to his experience is not only a false abstraction of the
life in which they existed, but it depends upon a false view of
the nature of literature, the view which is sometimes entitled
the realistic one. It assumes that the author is a kind of cam-
ere and that he can take pictures of whatever landscape is before
him. The more specific we are about each example, and about liter-
ature as it comes into being, the more we see how wise James's re-
mark is, that the artist must get pleasure, in order to give pleasure.
 Pleasure is perhaps a misleading word for a complicated but necessary
experience. It is the experience of other authors who are interested
in the same kind of things, and this is one of the genuine reasons
for literary schools; it is the experience of a certain sympathy and
receptivity upon the part of readers. And then, at the very essence
of the matter, it is a question of the kind of experience which can
be significant to the author, given his initial gift. Hawthorne had
to turn to the past of New England. The present was not significant
as experience because the attitudes and beliefs which made signif-
icance for him were not lived by in the society of his time. This is
the reason for the failure of "the Blithedale Romance", as it is the
reason for the failure of "The Family Reunion", where perceived ex-
perience of the supernatural is not available in the period in which
the characters live.

We shall see more exactly how this issue of Eliot as
it was true of James when we come to examine the experience cosmo-
politan and international which, given Eliot's literary impetus,
made expatriation a necessity, although it was not apparently a
conscious choice at the start. And we can see much illuminating
likeness and difference by comparing Eliot with other expatriates,
and others who remained in America.

it/7a

11

To speak of the future is a necessary foolishness. It is foolish
because it is very difficult to know if one is in the least correct and
it is necessary because we are going to live in the future. The only
guard against other foolishness is to say that we are speaking of what
the future may be like.

Speaking in terms of what may be, then, may we not suppose that the
future of Western man will be one in which a great part of the populace
resumes mutatis mutandis the experience of the modern poet from Baude-
laire to Eliot?

The general social reasons for this picture of the view are the
likelihood of an extension of education and of leisure to a great part
of the population. No sanguine view of unexampled benevolence on the part
of those who rule our society is necessary to make this view of the life
of the future a likely one. Both democratic socialism and a capitalism
which is imperialistic abroad and liberal or paternalistic at home will
of necessity enforce such strong tendencies as the technological ad-
vances which must lead to more and more leisure in the lives of the
populace. Where there is leisure, there is education for its own sake;
and where there is leisure, there is also boredom. Sidney Hook observed
in 1933 that in a socialist regime man will stop suffering as an animal
and begin to suffer only as a human being. Now this must be true too of
any society, whatever its political form, in which a great part of the
populace enjoys and suffers from leisure, and has some measure of an
education in the arts and the humanities.

Granted that the experience of the symbolist poet or for that matter
the modernist painter -- is the outcome of his status in modern society,
and of pressures, conflicts, and compulsions native to modern society, the

liot/8

hypothesis is that in the future, many human beings will enjoy the
same status as the modern poet and be subject to the same compulsions:
the populace as a whole will be deracinated, alienated, and thrown back
upon the inner resources of the individual. The need of understanding
one's own being, the question of the nature of the good life, and the
problem of religious or philosophical belief will become immediate and
daily things.

It would be wrong to suppose that this view of the future is an es-
pecially happy one. On the contrary, it should suggest such unhappiness
as is represented in the lives of the characters of "The Waste Land".
The difficulty of being a human being is heightened and not lessened
by education and leisure.

CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM OF ELIOT

What is more fascinating, and what is a better illustration in the Platonic sense of dialectic/than the contemporary view s of author in the course of his career? The fact is that every kind d view is bound to be represented fairly soon, and in the instance of an author like Eliot, one so likely to quicken prejudice, resentment, unwarranted enthusiasm, and sheer parroting, the upshot is an epitome of the errors of literary criticism.

Ezra Pound wrote that he has sent "The Love Song Of J. Al-
fred Prufrock" to Harriet Monroe, editor of _Poetry: A Magazine Of_
 Verse"three times before it was accepted. Subsequently, in this editor's
book of criticism, "Poets And Their Art", one of the chief modes of
banal misunderstanding of Eliot, and indeed of many authors, shows itself:
Miss Monroe identifies Prufrock with the poet (despite obvious differences,
such as the fact that the poem was written when the poet was twenty-one
years of age, and Prufrock has begun to be bald), and then proceeds to
pigeon-hole Eliot's poetry on the evidence of Prufrock's weak character,
so that the poetry is said to fail as a withdrawal just as Prufrock fails
(check)
in making love. So too with Amy Lowell at approximately the same time;
in her "Critical Fable", she writes

T.S. Eliot's a very unlikely proposition

...Eliot's sure he's a poet when he's only pedantic

...lives like a snail in his shell, pen protruding,

...tortures his soul with a dream of perfection

...has mo e brain than heart. . .dreads the least

commerce with the man in the street..Eliot's poetry ..a blend of
inensive/And elegant satire witha would-be offensive/ Kind of virulent
diatribe...the poet's not half of him..What the fellow's contrive to stuff
into his skull/ May certainly be classed as a pure miracle,/But the way
he imparts it is terribly dull/

2. Contemporary Criticism Of Eliot,

To some extent, Harriet Monroe and Amy Lowell are reflecting the
Renaissance of American Poetry in which they were very much in-

They were comparing Eliot to Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsey.
volved as editors and patrons. Yet these two views--the direct
autobiographical view of Eliot's poetry and the view that he is
a highbrow, an intellectual, too cerebral (derived in part from
the character of his criticism and a reading of the poems in terms
of the criticism)--have bince been repeated too often too to be
mistaken for transitory misunderstandings. Thus Edmund Wilson, in
insights, incapaces
an essay otherwise full of apercus, particularly with regard to
Eliot's sense of rhythm, identifies Eliot with "the aged eagle" in the
first poem of "Ash Wednesday". And the moment when Eliot affixed his
belittling royalism, catholicism and classicism inspired "a veritable
spate" of psychologizing about the author's personal motives: the in-
teresting and significant thing about such psychologizing is that it
always revealed the limitations of the critic's mind, rather than
revealing much about Eliot. Nostalgia and snobbery and a yearning for
death (the latter was Waldo Frank's view); these were the motives
attributed to Eliot. The ignorance in question shows itself when we
bear in mind
remember the long development and questioning, for almost a generation,
Eliot's
which preceded the author's avowals. Nostalgia is not so concerned with
exercises of the critical intelligence; snobbery does not wait so long
(cf. Eliot, climbing, M.G.Wells, 1940, N.E.W.)
before connecting itself with the social levels to which it aspires;
and those who merely yearn for death, who are merely oppressed by a
sense of emptiness, do not practice the craft of poetry with so much care.
And in any case, human motivation is never as simple as it is made out
to be by critics who are psychologizing about an author whom they
regard with disfavor. Not only is the genetic fallacy involved (the
opposition
hero and the villain are both subject to the motive of self-interest); what
most
matters/is the actual character of their action); but these critics
have no way of distinguishing between Eliot and others who resemble

3. Contemporary Criticism Of Eliot

him in one respect, but not in others; for example, G.K. Chesterton,
Ezra Pound, Henry James (so often supposed to be a snob about Europe),
Ernest Hemingway, and since Eliot has been accused of Fascism, Sir
Oswald Mosely.

Perhaps the most acute insight into Eliot is to be found in
E.M.Forster, who says that upon reading his poems immediately after the
first World War, the reader knew that here was one who had looked into
the abyss (check).
And he had also spoken of how
the first poems of Eliot were like a cache of perfume which pervades
the entire drawing room.

Another view of Eliot which often gains support is to be
found in Van Wyck Brooks: "Eliot's mind was a mirror of Boston Alexandriane
ism, and its learned religiosity evoked in him later a singular
mode of Christianity", "Eliot's characteristic note was a sneer
suggesting the cold east winds at the tip of Nahant?" This is from
"New England: Indian Summer". In "The Opinions Of Oliver Allston", in
the course of a full-scale attack upon what Brooks entitles "dotorie
literature" as contrasted with primary literature, which is written
by those authors who have made themselves "voices of the people",
Brooks accuses Eliot of being one of those who are in love with
death, belonging a part of the "the death-drive" or whiging" for a
"pure past", of being "immature". Worse yet, the writers among whom
Eliot was an leading author might be accused of ruining the nation:
"Had not these writers poisoned the minds of their readers?--and how
could a world that was sapped by these negative feelings resist the
triumphant advance of the powers of evil? France, sapped by negativism,
had gone down before Hitler; and Allston had eagerly watched the
defiance of England". This is not far from the assertion, by Alfred
Noyes, that Proust caused the fall of France; and indeed Bernard
De Voto said that the truth of "The Waste Land" was denied by the

4. way in which "the young man carbuncular" of that poem and the typist stood up with courage in the blitz.

In part, this kind of response is typical in "american literature. It is part of the recurrent trumpet-call to didacticism, and it can be seen in the criticism which Henry James suffered very often, both in his lifetime and in the writing of Van Wyck has Brooks, who was never able to forgive the authors who departed from this country.

For the sake of contrast, it is worth quoting an English and Bloomsbury view of Eliot, that he spoke English with hardly any American accent. No wonder, then, that Eliot has often returned to F. H. Bradley's metaphysics of appearance and reality, in which all reality is constituted by appearance, not to say, libel.

Then there is suspicious perplexity. Th his journal, Arnold Bennett, whom Eliot had consulted about the writing of plays for the so-called commercial theatre, reports a conversation in which he asked Eliot if "The Waste Land" were a hoax? Others were less dubious about their own feelings and declared with conviction that it was a hoax, a view merely strengthened by the appearance of the notes to the poem, notes added because, according to Extra Pound, the American publisher felt that the poem was too short to be given a whole volume. At this extreme too, there is the instance which Eliot himself mentions in which he and Pound were accused by Arthur Waugh of being "drunken helots", which is not far from the accusation of Kulturbolshevismus. The inability to understand what a poet is writing confronts a reader with two unpleasant alternatives: he must admit his own incapacity or he must decide that the poet is incapable. The temptation to the latter choice is obviously very strong.

## 5. Contemporary Views Of Eliot

There have also of course been numerous followers of Eliot, and in America particularly a whole school of criticism has developed Eliot's ideas with unmistakable strength and originality. An interesting question is this: why did no such following develop in England? The members of this school, who are far from being merely followers of Eliot as a critic, are Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and Cleanth Brooks. There are others, and for a time The Hound & Horn was the organ which published the kind of criticism which grew out of Eliot's method of discussing literature. The differences here are as important as the resemblances, and we shall see how extreme the difference can be in examining the later criticism of Yvor Winters. In each of these critics, the influence of Eliot is mixed not only with a strong original talent, but also with influences of another and conflicting kind. In the instance of Winters, it is the New Humanism, or, more exactly, the new academicism. In Tate and Ransom, the Agrarian movement has in many respects the basis for the initial interest in Eliot. An important comparison must also be made of those critics and poets who followed (a weak word: perhaps one should say were most interested by) Pound: this meant a certain sympathy for what Eliot was doing, but a greater interest in Pound: and in fact it meant for the most a certain superficiality of method. The literary historian may be interested in comparing the Agrarians with the Objectivists, Louis Zukofsky with Allen Tate, and R.P. Blackmur with Dudley Fitts.

Curiously enough, the rising generation in England, the generation of Auden, Spender and Louis MacNeice show much less of the influence of Eliot; this is partly because they reacted severely to their university education, and partly because of an interest in Marxism inspired by the depression. But undoubtedly there are local or national reasons for the difference of influence which are not yet

6. Contemporary Views Of Eliot

clear, or at least not clear from the vantage-point of America.
In any case, there can be no question about the admiration felt
toward Eliot nor the unequalled extent to which he was a
model for these authors and many others in different degree.

In an early poem, Auden wrote of "unhappy Eliot". There
is an early essay by R.P. Blackmur on T.S. Eliot in "The Hound &
Horn", an essay very different from the one in "The Double Agent".
Waldo Frank's attack of Eliot in The New Republic, as one who had
turned back to the past, was answered by Francis Fergusson in "The
Hound & Horn". A book entitled "Mr. Eliot "mong The Nightingales",
an exercise in logic-chopping by Louis Grudin who took as his text
an essay by Eliot entitled "Poetry & Propaganda", was subsequently
dismissed in The Hound & Horn by Henry Bamford Parkes, another ad-
mirer of Eliot. In 1929, in Exiles, a little magazine edited by
Exza Pound, Pound declared that he did not want to receive any con-
tributions which were merely imitations of his own work or Eliot's;
and he went on to say that Eliot had, e.g., developed a peculiar
system of his own, which was fine for him, but no one else. So too
Pound comments on Eliot's religious adherence and Joyce's in an
idiosyncratic fashion. It was natural obviously for Pound to feel
that "W eeney Agonistess was the work of Eliot's which ought to be
included in his "Active Anthology", e.g. Later, Pound's growing
lack of touch, in a literary sense, was illustrated by his comment,
a very favorable one, on "The Family Reunion".

FEBRUARY 23, 1945

TRIBUNE

15

BOOKS AND THE PEOPLE

WHAT IS A CLASSIC?

By Julian Symons

WHAT IS A CLASSIC? By T. S. Eliot. Faber.
3/6.

A CLASSIC, I should reply at once, is a "standard author"; but, so far as goes this essay, my reply would not be to the point. Mr. Eliot is not concerned here with the classic in the sense of a standard author, any more than he is concerned with "a very interesting book called *A Guide to the Classics*, which tells you how to pick the Derby winner." I cannot help feeling that this is a pity; the problem *What is a standard author?* is an interesting one, and even a statement of it would, I think, carry its critical reward; it is a problem on which, rather reluctantly, I turn my back.

The sense in which Mr. Eliot uses the word "classic" in this essay (which was an address delivered before the Virgil Society) is restricted, and a little curious. Maturity is one key: "If there is one word on which we can fix, which will suggest the maximum of what I mean by the term, 'a classic,' it is the word maturity... A classic can only occur when a civilisation is mature; when a language and a literature are mature; and it must be the work of a mature mind." It will be apparent that there are not very many classics, and that a great deal rests on our assessment of the maturity of individuals and languages and civilisations. Here Mr. Eliot is not very helpful; it is, he tells us, almost impossible to define maturity without assuming that the hearer already knows what it means. To maturity of mind, in any case, must be added maturity of manners (there is a sense in which Congreve is more mature than Shakespeare); maturity of language, it is suggested, may be gauged by the acceptance of a common style, which has not become monotonous; and a balance must exist in a classic age between the tradition of past literature and "the originality of the living generation."

The achievement of a classic writer (I am broadly paraphrasing Mr. Eliot) is that he expresses a certain peak period in a civilisation; and in expressing that period and in using the language of his time in its perfection, he also exhausts the language. At the same time we have to take account not only of a writer who is able to use and exhaust a language in its perfection; it is plain also that "an exhaustible language is the kind which may produce a classic poet." Every great writer uses up as it were a particular vein, which is no longer available to his successors (so Shakespeare exhausted blank verse for us, Pope the heroic couplet); "the classic poet, on the other hand, exhausts, not a form only, but the language of his time." After a classic period a literature frequently collapses. We should not be sorry, Mr. Eliot suggests, that there has been no classic writer, and no classic period, in English. "Our classic, the classic of all Europe, is Virgil."

I think the point at which one joins issue with Mr. Eliot is in the importance he attaches here by implication, and in many other essays explicitly, to past literature. By comparison with our grandfathers we are cultural barbarians today; the percentage

of the literate population which has an intimate acquaintance with the two great dead languages, Latin and Greek, is very much smaller than it was a hundred years ago; and it seems to me that any cultural theory which ignores that fact has merely scholastic interest. This is, I admit it frankly, a barbarian view: but it seems an appropriate corrective to the dead literary calm of Mr. Eliot's essay. How nearly, I could not help wondering while reading, does this whole argument about a classic writer "for all Europe" touch reality today? What is the value for us of the "critical criterion" which it is claimed that Virgil gives us? Why, as Mr. Eliot suggests, should we measure every individual work of literature by the classical standard? What shall we gain by the discovery that Shakespeare is not a classic, because the Elizabethan age—and the English language—had not reached that mysterious maturity which it is "perhaps impossible" to make "really appreciable" to the immature?

Like many Socialists, but a little more strongly than most, I hold a view of literature which gives it a powerful part in the expression of the total consciousness of mankind as a social entity. It follows from this point of view that the current of literature in any period pivots upon social conditions. It seems to me that it would not be absolutely impossible, in terms of Mr. Eliot's theory (given one's own interpretation of "maturity"), for a "classic writer" to exist or have existed in Nazi Germany; yet we know that the existence of such a writer would be precluded today by the social conditions that obtain in that country. To talk of "immaturity" instead of social conditions is surely beside the point. Proceeding from this point of view, it is clear that a criterion of value (which is finally what Mr. Eliot's essay sets out to provide) can be found by the analysis and elucidation of any work of art in terms of its full relation to our lives and society. This is, in fact, the value of literature; and it is a value with which the character of Virgil as "the classic of all Europe" has little directly to do. To put the same point, which I am making with barbarian clumsiness, in another way: the values of literature are not eternal, nor even, in the last resort, literary. They are social values; and therefore the value of Virgil as a classic has not the permanence which is attributed to it by Mr. Eliot.

When all this has been said, it is necessary to make some qualifications. A Socialist view does not exclude, nor ignore, the importance of "classic periods" in literature: it is pleasant to go along with Mr. Eliot in agreement that "the development of a classic prose is the development towards a common style," in the sense of a community of taste which breeds agreement in the means and manner of expression. A classic age "will be an age when society has achieved a moment of order and stability of equilibrium and harmony": as Mr. Eliot says, these characteristics are illustrated most nearly, in English literature, in the eighteenth century, and in poetry, most in the poetry of Pope. Where Mr. Eliot bases the equilibrium of the eighteenth century on its "maturity," however, I should base the maturity itself on the belief in settled social conditions which pre-

vailed in England at that time. Speaking of the narrowness of Pope, of all that he sacrificed in literature for a classical style, Mr. Eliot says with characteristic caution that although "English society and English letters were not provincial, in the sense that they were not isolated from, and not lingering behind, the best European society and letters... Yet the age itself was, in a manner of speaking, a provincial age." I should be inclined to say here, with barbarian simplicity, that Pope's mind was narrow because he was an intelligent member of a society which adhered to a positive code of moral values in which its adherents were no longer able fully to believe; so that he wrote from a position of intellectual doubt which he was never able completely to express.

When one has finished and thought about Mr. Eliot's essay one is grateful for some illuminations: but they are illuminations by the way, and that slightly misleading question on the dust-jacket, *What is a Classic?* remains still unresolved. We are not likely to see a classic age, or a classic writer, in my time; but the most probable binding element for the next classic age of literature will be Socialism. A Socialist society would iron out most of the differences that separate Mr. Eliot's view and my own. It would achieve more than "a moment" of equilibrium and harmony; writers under Socialism would find, and quickly, a common style; perhaps also, when we live under that "potential human culture," the barbarian will shed his armour of ignorance, and the scholar will feel, and welcome, the touch of reality.

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"Doros Alastos' admirable VENIZELOS... Few thrillers can compete with this study by flashlight of this Cretan... Here is a detective story written in the facts of history, the threads of its solution in the hands of fate and God.—Notes and Queries.

LUND, HUMPHRIES & CO., LTD.

The Ariel Poems/

The subject of "The Fortune Of The Magi" is an attitude toward Christianity. The wise man who has come to Bethlehem in expectation of some birth, some transformation of this life, finds that the world has been transformed by a Death. The implications of the poem are that Christ and Christianity represent the coming not of a Golden Age or Arcadia, but difficulty, suffering, and pain, struggle on the highest level of all. The first part of the poem, which shows the influence of Pund's "Cangos" and versifies a passage quoted by Eliot in his sermon on Lancelot Andrewes, describe the journey of the magi in such a way that the way of life of paganism is clear: the magi regret "the summer palaces," and "the silken girls bringing sherbet". The diction of the poem is remarkable as a mixture. When the wise man speaks of the place of Nativity as "(you may say) satisfactory", and when he says "There was no information", we have the use of passive diction—for its poetic quality which is one of Eliot's essential notes. Yet the poem also makes use of sensuous images "a temperate valley/ Wet below the snow-line, smelling of vegetation", and "three trees on the low sky", which is more emphatic than Eliot usually is in his use of the sensory, and the use is more obviously poetic in the decorative sense.

The poem ought to be compared with Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" and with Yeats' poems of Christianity for the sake of marking the development in the attitude toward Christianity and an accepted view of life in Western society. Arnold speaks of the sea of faith as withdrawn and love alone as a sanctuary; he is an intellectual in the middle of the 19th century, impressed by the argument about the Book of Genesis and the Darwinian theory. Yeats' "The Magi" is close to Eliot's poem, and perhaps a better poem. The Magi are unsatisfied by Calvary's turbulence, and by "the uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. Elsewhere in "The Second Coming", Yeats expresses a notion of recurrence and of the function of the Messiah as the myth of a culture which is part of the historical

3/

the secular and naturalist view of life partly as something
which he cannot avoid and partly as something which he uses as
a means to search his own religious emotion. The despair en-
countered in the entertainment of this view helps him to the
necessary
humility which is one of the/stages of religious experience.

Whether the protagonist accepts the view or whether he uses
it only as a means for arriving at a contempt of this life,
he is brought to despair and to humility, and to the necessity
of prayer. Thus it is right that this part should end with a
prayer, echoing various prayers.

The second poem is at once an invocation of a Lady--
whether one who is loved, Mary, or a saint, does not, in this
instance not ter--and an imagination of death. The protagonist,
summons to mind a hallucatory vision of death in which his
bones are scattered in the desert, after having been consumed
by three leopards. Again, we are confronted with the symbol of
deliberate ambiguity, for the leopards may be sin, lust, and
sensuality (as pointed out by William Gorman, the allusion may be
to both Dante in the Inferno, Canto 1, 1, 32 and to Jeremiah V.6),
or they may be symbols of more generality--the world, the flesh,
and the devil. No specific interpretation is necessary, which is
true of other such symbols in this poem and in other poems and
which is an aspect of the poet's fundamental simplicity. For the
three leopards have consumed the body; they have fed to satiety;
the force of this act is sufficient for the emotions which are
made explicit by the protagonist in this invocation. He says
that he is glad that he is scattered and dead, for in this
dissolution lies forgetfulness, atonement, devotion and con-
centration.

That which is left/the
protagonist after the exhaustion

["more false"). And in the same preface, the target is made clear when Eliot writes: \"certainly poetry is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics; and nor more is it religion, or the equivalent of religion\". The pressure of the world upon literature is constant, gross, and destructive; demanding that literature be serious, and be \"related to life\", the nature of literature is denied or ignored; or it is brushed aside under the general term, form and technique.", "It is easy to mistake Eliot's later discussions of the relationship between literature and belief for a change of mind, of theory, or of heart. But this is not so; we can see that it is not so if we read with care and sympathy, and if we do not merely juxtapose one quotation against another in the interest of demonstrating inconsistency, contradiction and a changed mind. The essay on \"Religion and Literature\", which appears in \"Essays Ancient And Modern\" (a revised selection of the essays in \"For Lancelot Andrewes\"), contains much which might be the subject of unsympathetic misunderstanding; but it also contains this important sentence (in which the reader of ill will and also the reader of good will might with ease overlook the all-important dependent clause): \"The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it literature or not can be determined only by literary standards\".", "And this sentence ought to be counterposed to the one in the essay on the poetry of Marianne Moore, as explication or gloss: \"In greatness even are involved moral and social relations...which may be said/to be created in the process of history\". But \"genuineness is something which we have some war rant for believing that a small number,...can recognise\". Now it is genuineness which can be determined by solely literary standards; and if Eliot does not name these, if in naming them the relationship between style and subject mould make for difficulty, none the less to exist on verbal precision or precision of def-"]

8.

Definition where the subject is a complicated one is often (as "whitehead, a logician, observes in speaking of being muddled and clear), is often to miss the important distinction in things which is being made. Those who are governed by a primary interest in religious belief or in moral standards; and those who are governed by an aversion to religious belief and moral standards both lose a good deal in literature and the criticism of literature by forgetting this distinction, which is one which does not, above all, suppose that style exist in itself or that to judge by purely literary standards is to adopt the doctrine of art for art's sake.

When Eliot shifts to criticism in which he is writing as a Christian critic, as a man with a definite religious belief, he says that he is writing from that point of view (if point of view is the proper and neutral phrase). This naming of criticism by its proper name and this careful separation of different kinds of criticism is exemplary and rare. There is an immediate stage in the development of Eliot's criticism when he makes the transition from his first method to essays in which his religious position is predominant; and in this stage of transition he writes often of Poetry and Belief, Poetry and Propaganda, and the nature of criticism (cite essays where they appeared).

Yet we have not named the kind of criticism Eliot practises as such; and if we accept the name of classicism from the preface to "For Lancelot Andrewes," nevertheless a simpler and more general meaning is intended here than in Eliot's use of the word. Setting aside all questions of literary reference or literary schools, may we not say that the classical critic is the critic who has an intimate knowledge of the classics, of many other previous great works; and who uses, who is able to use this knowledge in judging the newly encountered work?

9.

The two tools of the critic--and his chief tools--are comparison and analysis. Where but from his previous reading is he to get the proper works with which to compare the new work? So too with analysis: it is in the degree that his experience is rich that he is able to recognize and separate out the elements in the new work.

The connection with Eliot's doctrine of the necessity of a knowledge of tradition should be obvious; and obvious too should be the connection with one of the passing remarks (which so often prove to be full of an inexhaustible significance) in a commentary in the Criterion): that a poet might get along well enough if he did not know Dante, Homer, and Shakespeare; but a knowledge of these authors was a necessity for the critic. We see then that for the critic a knowledge of tradition is even more important than it is for the poet. But this must be qualified because we know, and Eliot observes again in passing, that a poet can acquire what he needs of tradition in various ways which are not sufficient for the critic; for example, a poet can learn what he needs to learn about Latin poetry of a certain kind by reading a poet of his own time, such as Ezra Pound in a poem such as "Sextus Propertius". But a critic must proceed from a conscious knowledge he cannot use the habitual knowledge, the knowledge known to the whole being, which the poet not can but must use (I mean by habitual knowledge the kind we depend upon when we use our native tongue, or the kind which exists in an old friendship).

Comparison depends thus in a variety of complicated and deep-rooted ways upon the reading of the critic. And Sainte-Beuve remarks that what the critic gives us is the benefit of his reading. He shows us how to read; and he shows us how he has read. He has read more than most readers; and from experience, which is not so much a teacher as a textbook, he knows all about reading.

10.
This is the reason Eliot finds it necessary to use so many literary allusions in his criticism; to mention the names of so many authors in discussing one author. Such allusiveness has been criticized with some justice by Edmund Wilson in "Axel's Castle". The just ice inheres in the tacit assumption, which Eliot would not of course affirm, that his reader has read all the important works of the past; or perhaps the assumption is that the critic is writing only for the reader of suitable learning; which is again a mirage of sorts. But it is often wise to use such illusory assumptions.

In any case, the classic method, examined as Eliot uses it and in its aspect of comparison, means that Eliot will refer to Horace in analysing Marvell, Dante in discussing Blake, Shakespeare in discussing Dante. The comparison becomes what Wilson makes it out to be when the reference is to an obscure author and to an author only by name. In this use of comparison, as in metaphor, everything depends upon the specific justice of the comparison. And some of the followers of Eliot in criticism illustrate very well how amiss such comparison can be when they compare authors of very different kinds; when they compare Eliot himself as a poet to Ben Jonson as a lyric poet; or when they use Henry James to prove that Thomas Hardy is a worthless author. And "Eliot too is deceased by his own comparisons, perhaps, when he uses Dryden in order to condemn the romantic poets. But, again as with metaphor, it is not of necessity the far-fetched wide-ranging and unexpected comparison which is of necessity the one which fails. Thus Eliot uses Laforgue to illustrate and define the wit of the metaphysical poets. Another fault at times is one already mentioned in another connection, that of ripping the author soottly from his context and operating with an abstract conception of poetic validity that the poet is really ignored. But this occurs for the most part only when the poet is bound up with his period in the very texture of his poetry; thus Eliot condemned Byron at one point as an uninteresting mind; but

11.

some (number) years after, he was able to do justice to him; when, in fact, the axe of a particular poetic method was no longer one of the things the critic was seeking to grind. On the other hand, the use of historical or other context is also a means of distortion, as we can see in Eliot's highly involved effort to rehabilitate the verse, as he calls it, of Kipling.

2.

the justice with which one may speak of a culture hero when one speaks of the sensibility made manifest in "The Waste Land", and in the poems written after that poem.

A culture hero is one who has introduced new arts and skills; Prometheus was such a one; and by extension I think it may be maintained that the sensibility realized in "The Waste Land" represents a new kind of awareness of experience, an awareness which must be arrived at by much of the Western world, now that experience in so many ways is likely to be international, cosmopolitan, expatriate (in the sense of being no longer truly tied to a single community and in the sense of the decay of nationalism), and haunted by a conscious knowledge of history.

To speak thus of the future is both dramatic and perilous; yet if we consider such phenomena as the radio, the plane, the technological unemployment which is inevitable and which is bound to create much leisure for large portions of the population, and the possibilities not only of travel from country to country, which will serve to create a sense of the international, but also of the likelihood of an awareness of a number of languages which the radio will provide--then the social basis of a new order and span of experience seems obvious.

"The Waste Land" presents, in its subject, the kind of crisis the international man is likely to pass through as a human being--deracinated and left without the traditional supports of community and religious belief. But further, in its technique, it presents a method of coping with such crises and with such a width and chaos of experience. For example, the very reference to some past event in history or literature, if it is part of the complication and difficulty of/experience, is also a method of generalizing that experience, of seeing it apart from the pressure of the ego, and thus of achieving an understanding of it and a freedom from it.

3.

The distinction is in part a question of origin. Sweeney is Irish, and some of the other offensive characters--or the characters of the offensive class are Jews./This class succeeds where the other class, the class of Pipit and of Burbank fails. Pipit is an old maid, and Burbank is unable to make love to the Princess Volume. So too, in a leading poem of this second volume, the unnamed old man who shares many traits with Burbank, lives in a rented house and the house is owned by a Jew. And Grishkin owns a maisonette.

It comes almost to a difference between the right kind of people and the wrong kind of people. The wrong kind adjust themselves to life, they get along, they are vulgar, they offer and enjoy a pneumatic bliss, they are not afraid of preoccupied with death, their manners are gross, they are too friendly, they sit in the bathtub on Sunday morning when they might be in church. The right kind of people are shy, aware of the skull beneath the skin, troubled by a sense of mortality, unable to adjust themselves to the exigencies and vulgarities of the rooming house, displaced by the wrong kind of people, concerned with their relatives, their great-aunts, lonely, and deserted by the rest of the world.

Added definition and qualification is to be found by looking back to the poet's first volume and forward to subsequent instances of satirical characterization. In "Sweeney Agonistes", we meet the wrong kind of people again, Sweeney, his girl friend Doris, Swarts, Klipstein--who is undoubtedly a relative of Bleistein--and Krumpacker. In "The Waste Land", there is Mrs. Porter and the small house agent's clerk, Mr. Eumenides, and the fortune teller. In this modern world, they get along very well, they are on top, they triumph over the right kind of people.

Looking back to Eliot's first volume, however, we encounter the right kind of people who are in many ways wrong; and wrong in the same way as the wrong kind of people. And Mr. Apollinax, when he meets

Eliot's Kind Of Literary Criticism

The first sentence of "The Sacred Wood" declares that
--and perhaps the greatest--
Coleridge was the last/literary critic in English and that
Arnold was hardly more than a propagandist for criticism. Implicit
in such a judgement is an assumption about the nature of literary
criticism as such; and there are many such judgements in Eliot,
without an explicit definition which would distinguish literary
criticism from the kinds of discourse which habitually overlap--
or encroach, the verb often changes--upon it.

It is convenient, given Eliot's development as a prose
essayist, to draw upon the classifications used by Irving Babbitt
in "Masters Of French Criticism". They are used unjustly, to some
extent; but they provide a place of reference which not only takes
us outside of Eliot's text, but also is helpful because Babbitt's
classification may well have been in the back of Eliot's mind for
many years.

Babbitt distinguishes between the scientific critic and
the impressionistic critic; probably, the term, historical, would
have been superior, and scientific might well have been reserved
for some other critical function.

The scientific or historical critic --laine is Babbitt's
example--is concerned about the causes of a literary work, the
causes in the time and place of the author, and the causes in the
author's life. Hence, his chief criterion is significance, that is
to say, the extent to which the work represents or makes clear
these causes. Obviously, then, the historical critic looks through
the literary work as such to its genesis. And in this sense, he
tends to be irrelevant. Many years after Babbitt's distinction were
made, Eliot applied Babbitt's criticism to a history of American
literature, writing an editorial in The Criterion in 1933.

2. observing that the historical critic, who is in this instance the Marxist critic, cannot distinguish or explain the differences between two authors of genius who are "the product" of the same environment; nor can such difference, we may add, be explained interms of family or personal life, for we have only to summon to mind two brothers, such as William and Henry James, and then compare them to their two younger brothers.

Eliot's essays in literary criticism touch upon the field of historical criticism in several ways which are important. First, the historical sense, the sense of the past which Eliot invokes, is to some extent an abstraction (Burnham: Symposium, 1932) because Eliot conceives of the past as free, for the contemporary reader, of historical compulsions and the old historical framework. This limitation of vision explains such a passing superficiality as Eliot's statement that the eighteenth century style rejected and attacked by Wordsworth and Coleridge was what it was because such deterioration occurs to any style "when it falls into the hands of people who can not even be called mediocrities". This is a kind of rugged individualism which is just as false as a social or cultural determinism; for surely it was neither accident nor the absence of genius which made the 18th century style inadequate to two men of genius such as Wordsworth and Coleridge: we have seen the same thing in the instance of Eliot and Pound.

And elsewhere, in the passage explaining Blake's homemade philosophy, and also in describing how tradition continues to exist, Eliot on the contrary emphasizes the dual functioning of peculiar genius and the environment in which the genius must exist; which is a version, in a way, of the theological doctrine of grace and works for which Eliot expresses sympathy in his essay on Pascal (CF). Hence it may be said that Eliot does not sufficiently make use of

3. the historical critic; and in evaluating poets, in seeking to place them, his emphasis is on the permanent, the permanent insight into "the mystery of life", or the permanent invention or extension of a technique. This too makes him abstract the poet from the historical context which might often illuminate or give value to words, sentences, allusions, attitudes, and all the other things which are at times inspired by his time and his place as the historical plays of Shakespeare were inspired, in part, by Elizabethan patriotism and by the Elizabethan this necessity conception of kingship. And Eliot affirms the necessity of this when he writes of the Greek authors and expresses amazement/s that it should be supposed possible to understand them without a knowledge of Greek as a language or of Greek history.

The impressionistic critic works at the other extreme. He is concerned chiefly with the effects of the literary work upon himself. Since these effects may be private, personal, a matter of temperament, a matter of the year in the critic's life or of his own mood, there is a great deal of room for irrelevance, and in particular it is likely that the critic may mistake what is in himself for what is the literary work. Symons is the impressionistic critic whom Eliot singles out, "Mr. Symons is living through the play as one might live through it in the theatre". The reason for this kind of criticism is often the desire of the critic to be creative, his feeling that criticism is inferior to creative writing. Substitution of any kind is suspect in the arts, since it is their uniqueness which is always important, and Eliot will come, as his career continues to protest especially against the substitution of literary works for religious studies. And the impressionistic critic is sometimes very valuable, since his sensitivity makes him aware of most readers are. Eliot credits Symons' book on new things before the general audience of readers

the Symbolists "as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation", however one's own impressions may differ from the critic's.

4.

Moreover, one never as a reader escapes from impressions, either one's own or another's; and Stranger en lois ses impressions personelles, c'est from de Gourmont le grand effort d'un homme, s'il est sincere" is the quotation/which begins Eliot's essay on "The Perfect Critic". It should be noted, nonetheless, that this is a question of sincerity; given the sincerity, other things are necessary in the critic. Industry in reading, for example, is likely to increase the base of the critic's sincerity.

In general, it is the confounding of personal impressions caused by the literary work with personal impressions caused by some aspect of the critic himself as a person which marks the pitfall of impressionistic criticism. The error at both extremes, historical or impressionistic, is that of failing to see the work itself, seeing more than it contains, or disregarding what it contains except as a sign of something outside of it.

So far as the error of the impressionist goes in Eliot's own literary criticism, we may perhaps detect it in his condemnation of Hardy as merely a minor poet, his estimation of some of Pound's poetry, particularly "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley", and his evaluation of Milton. The personal impression and the private feeling which intervenes between the art and the literary work can be/roughly/identified in each instance. In Hardy, it may be the dogmatic atheism, and thus a question of the critic's religious beliefs; in Pound, especially in the poem praised as "a document of sensibility, compact of the experience of a certain time and place", it may be the experience of the critic, which is close to that of the poet; and in Milton, both religious belief and the strong pleasure and admiration in poetry with another purpose, especially the dramatic verse of the Elizabethans, may be the barrier between the critic and the work itself. But such failures, if they are failures, are few in a critical career in which every period of English poetry except the Chaucerian has been

5.

Reviewed with unquestionable freshness of judgement.

Babbitt does not mention the neo-classic critic, such as Boileau or Dryden, by that name; but both Eliot and Babbitt are very much aware of that kind of criticism, and Eliot credits Johnson with the production of a masterpiece of judicial criticism. The neo-classic critic may be described in general as the one who abstracts from masterpieces what he believes to be the formula or the necessary framework for that kind of literary work. Thus he requires the unities of time, place, and action; or, like Johnson, he declares that grief cannot be sincerely expressed in the form or kind of poem which the pastoral is. His error is that of all those who are so to speak in advance of experience. The neo-classic critic is deceived by his expectations, and he thinks that he knows how the future masterpiece ought to resemble the past; masterpiece in detail. But, says Eliot in "After Strange Gods", "the classical is just as unpredictable as the romantic ... most of us would not recognize a classical writer if he appeared, so queer and horrifying he would seem even to those who clamour for him."

(Now this, for example, is just what occurred, even on the part of as sympathetic a critic as Eliot, when Joyce's classical masterpiece, "Finnegans Wake" began to appear.)

The mention of Babbitt and of the misconstructions or foolish expectations of those who desire the classics to repeat themselves in the old garb and toga brings us naturally to the kind of didactic criticism practised by Babbitt, by More, and by most critics in America when Eliot was coming to maturity. This kind of criticism is important in relation to Eliot because with his affirmation of a religious faith, the question of the truths and beliefs of literary works comes to concern him very much in such matters as religious poetry and poetry which is based on alien

6. beliefs in politics. His concern with this kind of criticism often takes the form of an examination of the nature of belief in poetry: and again, the question is raised again, in a comparison of Dante and Shakespeare, in a discussion of Shelley, and then directly in an essay entitled "Religion And Literature". Eliot's view as it emerges from a careful, and indeed hesitant scrutiny of the problem appears to be this: that the literary critic is justified not in judging any belief as a belief, (for then it would follow that there was no such thing as literature); but his question as a literary critic, his requirement and criterion must be the effect of the belief, religious or political, upon all the other elements of the work, its form, its characterizations, observations, and denouement. Hence, James Joyce is cited as an instance of a Christian author, since the effect of Christian belief is to fructify his work, and to give resolution to the great story, "The Dead". This choice of an example is a perfect one precisely because Joyce as a person is incapable of assenting to the belief which nonetheless plays a crucial part in his story, and indeed in much of his work.

It should be remembered at this point that the period during which Eliot has written most of his criticism has been marked by constant reappearance in masked forms of didactic criticism. The controversy over the New Humanism is but one striking example; and it was followed by the renewed appearance of social consciousness in the form of the doctrine that art is a "weapon in the class struggle", and that the artist must take identity with the class which represents the progressive forces in society. The denial of this form of didacticism always engenders the accusation that the nay-sayer inhabits an ivery tower; and those who deny didacticism of this or any other sort are often forced to the poor extreme of saying as Eliot says in the second preface to "The Sacred Wood", that poetry is a "superior or amusement" ("not because that is a true definition, but because if you call it something else, you are likely to call it something still")

When the reader has accepted "The Waste Land" in the light of this examination, he will find Eliot's poetry recognizable and often easy of access. But more than that, Eliot's criticism will also appear in a new light. The contradiction which some readers find between the theory of the critic and the practice of the poet will reveal itself as the misunderstanding it actually is. There are contradictions in Eliot's criticism, as in that of every other critic; and his poetry is at times defective, as is that of every other poet. But between his poetry and his criticism there is an extraordinary unity. Sometimes this unity suggests that the critic was moved to consider certain problems and questions because of poems recently composed. Sometimes the poet has been inspired by quotations in his criticism to certain passages in his own poetry: the reader will find a good example of this by comparing the essay in which a sermon by Lancelot Andrewes is quoted and the beginning of the poem entitled "The Journey Of The Magi", and the fifth part of "Ash Wednesday". And sometimes the critic was making use of perceptions about the nature of poetry which have come to him in the process of the writing of his poetry. But at all times the practice of the poet is consistent with the theory of the critic because the source of both the criticism and the poetry is the same bent of mind and the same interests. And when the critic's theory changes or shifts to different and new concerns, a like change or shift occurs in the character of his poetry. Thus as Eliot became more and more concerned with the relationship of literature to society and with religious belief, his poetry had a religious subject and two of his plays in verse were written for specific religious and social occasions.

Many of Eliot's critical essays are reviews of books; or rather, the immediate occasion of the essay was the appearance of

2.

a book which Eliot was reviewing or to which he was writing an intro-
duction. The subsequent collection of some of these reviews and in-
troductions into books of critical essays hardly alters the fact that
the reader for the most part encounters not a book on one subject, but
a collection of essays on related subjects. The fact that they were
initially composed as introductions and reviews enters into the very
method of the criticism and the style of the critical prose. In the
collection entitled "For Lancelot Andrewes", the essays were chosen to
illustrate the critic's new acceptance of royalism and anglo-catholicism;
and thus a unity was imposed upon them. But subsequently, in the second
edition of the book, the imposed unity was abandoned as well as the
title. The reader must look beneath the imposed unity expressed in
the title for the essential unity of Eliot's criticism. Even when, as
in "The Use Of Poetry" and "After Strange Gods", Eliot attempted to
devote himself to one subject, his habits of mind and of style are such
that each chapter of these works is, in effect, a separate essay just
like those contained in such a collection as "The Sacred Wood". And
the volume of "Selected Essays, 1917-1932" suggests the form which all
of Eliot's criticism is read; that is to say, the reader will encounter
a collection of essays on a variety of literary subjects and subjects
related to literature. In this variety there are passages devoted to an
explicit discussion of the general principles of literature and literary
criticism, such as the discussion of the relationship of poetry to
religious belief in the essay on Dante. But it is significant that both
in "The Use Of Poetry" and "After Strange Gods", where such an explicit
discussion of general principles is the intention of the critic, the
chief value of both books is as a discussion of individual authors,
a discussion identical in kind with those essays which were written
merely as book reviews. One reason, as Eliot explains, is "inertia or

3.

or laziness requiring an immediate stimulus, or the a habit formed by
early necessity of earning small sums quickly"; but I shall try to
show how in the use of this form there is involved a profound habit
of thought.

Yet if Eliot's critical essays begin as book reviews, they
invariably
proceed in their own way to a depth where general principles are in
question. And here the reader ought to distinguish between the explicit
discussion of general principles explicitly affirmed by the critic--if,
indeed, Eliot may be said ever to affirm any general principle without
extraordinary reservation--and those principles which are actually af-
firmed in the critic's judgement of literary works. The general principles
explicitly affirmed are often at one with those involved in the judgement
of literary works, but there is a considerable difference in the quality
of affirmation. In his explicit discussion of general principles, Eliot
exercises a systematic caution--for example, "I have not attempted any
definition of poetry because I can think of none which does not assume
that the reader already knows what it is, or which does not leave out
much more than it can include"--while in the judgement of particular
works there emerges a positive and unqualified view of what literature
ought to be and what it is, and the use of definite standards becomes
clear,
as in his essay on Marianne Moore.

To grasp these standards--and it is in his application of
them to various authors much more than in his explicit theorizing that
Eliot is the best critic in English in the sense I have already stated--
the reader must rearrange the order of Eliot's criticism. What must be
remarked is the recurrence of certain concerns and certain judgements,
and their inner coherence. The reader must connect Eliot's essay on
Swinburne with his essay on Blake, Milton, and Dryden. When such connections
are made, the essential consistency of Eliot's criticism becomes clear

4.

and the standards which are involved in Eliot's judgements can be
compared with his explicit statement of general principles.

Language and versification; observation of human behavior
and insight into the human soul; the expression of attitude and
the expression of feeling; a sense of the past and a sense of lit-
erary tradition; a unity of thought and sensibility: these are
the primary concerns which recur throughout Eliot's examination
of literary works. To state them thus, however, is to fail to
make clear the complexity of relationship between these qualities
of the literary work.

For the sake of clarity, let us assume that the purpose of
the author is to find "the verbal equivalents for states of mind
(S.E.,p.248)
and feeling". This clarity is gained only at the expense of a
certain crudeness of definition, as we shall see when we come to
examine the sense in which a poet may said to find the verbal
equivalent of such a state of mind as a religious belief. But at
any rate, the emphasis upon the finding of verbal equivalents
leads us forward to language as the medium of literature. Words
refer to things or the relations of things; language derives its
meaning from its reference to some actual state of affairs. But
words may be used inexactl, they may gain accidental or misleading
associations, or they may be used for their own sake: nonsense
poetry represents this last extreme. On the other hand, the exact
use of language may make possible an insight into the human soul
which is not otherwise possible. Mastery of language and psychological
insight, however, are not inseparable. Milton and Dryden are masters
of insight, but indifferent psychologists. The converse is not true,
and the author with great insight into human conduct is always a
master of language. Thus the greatness of Blake's poetry is based

5.

an honesty of mind, which makes him capable of "the naked observation" and "the naked insight". This honesty, however, "never exists apart from great technical accomplishment", and when the author is a master of language and capable of such honesty of vision, he "exhibits the essential strength or sickness of the human soul". (S.E.,p.275)

Swinburne exemplifies the poet who is a master of language and of nothing else. Language and versification are used for their own sake in his poetry. Swinburne uses words for the sake of their pleasant sounds and their interesting associations, not for the sake of speaking about some particular thing. The word has been divorced as far as is possible from the object to which it refers. And this separation of word from thing makes possible poetry of a certain value. But language has more important and more valuable uses; for example, Joseph Conrad and James Joyce use language to express, to find the verbal equivalent for "new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects" (S.E., p.285). And Racine and Baudelaire, the two greatest masters of diction in French poetry "are also the greatest psychologists, the most curious explorers of the human soul". (S.E.,p.249)

Analogous to the author who cultivates language for its own sake and in isolation from its reference to actual experience is the author who constructs a world of his own, instead of attempting to represent the actual world. Ben Jonson as a dramatist is Eliot's example. Where the words of Shakespeare, Donne, Webster, and Tourneur "have a depth, a third dimension", and "tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires", Jonson's language does not but it is not intended to, for the purpose of his language is to create a small world which has a logic of its own, "a logic which illuminates the actual world because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it". (S.E.,p.136)

3.

for the more thoughtful the character and the conflict of character,
for the more literary the words and phrasing, for the more musically
sensitive the rhythm, and for auditors of greater sensitiveness
and understanding a meaning which reveals itself gradually ... the
sensitiveness of every auditor is acted by all these elements
at once, though in different degrees of consciousness."

"Sweeney Agonistes," in its two published fragments, does
not present a character whose sensibility and intelligence is that
of the most cultivated reader or spectator. But in an obvious
sense there is a level of meaning -- a level of symbolic quality --
which is directed at the consciousness of the most intelligent
members of the audience.

The theme of the two published fragments is desperation of
an extreme kind, a desperation inspired by a contempt close to
Swift for human beings. This is stated in the two quotations which
prefix the play, one from Aeschylus, one from St.John of the
Cross. The Aeschylan quotation, which is a speech of Orestes,
suggests that the heroic intelligence of the plays was to be some
equivalent of Orestes. In the prologue two young ladies, Dusty
and Doris, discuss Pereira who -- though this is but a guess --
may have been intended to take the Orestean part. Pereira pays
the visit for Doris' apartment, but she does not like him. She prefers
Sam Wauchope, who, unlike Pereira, "is a gentleman through and
through." When Pereira calls Doris on the telephone, Dusty answers,
having been instructed by Doris to tell him anything in order to
prevent his visit. Dusty tells him that Doris has a chill, in a

4.

speech which defines the vulgarity of the two girls while it duplicates exactly the accents of actual speech. Then Doris, who is nervous and distracted, begins to tell her fortune, using a deck of playing cards. And it is here that actual speech remains actual, remains perfectly faithful to a direct representation of modern character, and yet mounts to a general significance, and at the same time, by a use of rhyme, makes use of musical comedy style. "We're all hearts," says Doris, "You've got to know what you want to know," as she deals out the cards and interprets their meaning, discussing the two of spades as a coffin, and the six as signifying "A quarrel, An estrangement, Separation of friends."

In the midst of the fortune-telling, Sam Wauchope comes to call, bringing with him three of his friends, Horsfall, Klipstein, and Krumpacker. Sam is a Lieutenant in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and Horsfall is a Captain; Klipstein and Krumpacker have both been in the World War too, but they are introduced as "American gentlemen here on business." Again, as in the telephone conversation between Dusty and Pereira, the immediate effect is that of a presentation of actual speech which by means of selection and emphasis reveals the hideous vulgarity and stupidity of modern life, particularly on the lower middle class level: London is said to be a "fine place to come for a visit," a slick place, a swell place. But, Klipstein explains, it is a little too gay, although he is anxious that the girls understand that he does not mean "anything coarse."

5.

What should be marked here above all is the use of the colloquial (here as in the pub scene in "The Waste Land") with an exactitude -- "an imitation of life" -- which a police reporter or a stenographer might find hard to surpass -- and the actual as a symbol through its cunning selection and through the repetition made possible by the popular verse-form. Klipstein and Krumpacker, on being introduced to the girls, both respond with modern colloquialisms; yet there is a minute variation which indicates that the poet has penetrated his subject (he has not merely been folk-slumming, like so many realists). For Klipstein declares: "I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance," and Krumpacker, who would have said the same words had he spoken first, must now vary this statement, or in the situation, his response will seem somewhat comic to himself. Hence he says: "Extremely pleased to become acquainted," and the shift to the passive voice suggests a greater effort at refinement on Krumpacker's part. And the introduction as a whole, having a perfect exactitude, becomes significant of modern manners, ridden by banality, slogans, received ideas (London -- or New York -- is fine for a visit, but I would not like to live there), and a diction which is typified by Krumpacker's characterization of Captain Horsfall as "a real Britisher" instead of Englishman.

The second scene goes much further than the first one in making use of musical comedy style. The pretense at a realistic background is abandoned and Sweeney and Doris sing a duet to each other upon life on a cannibal isle, where, as Sweeney remarks, life resembles

6.

an egg, and there are no telephones, automobiles, or phonographs,
but only the fruit-trees and the sound of the surf, and "birth,
copulation, and death." Here for the auditor of the most sensitive-
ness and understanding, there will be a recognition which ties this
remark to what he knows of modern naturalism. He will recognize
the egg as a symbol of the process of nature and of life as bio-
logical. And when Sweeney expresses distaste for life on this
level-- which, as a naturalist, he finds to be exhaustive ( "that's
all the facts when you come to brass tacks"), the auditor of most
understanding may well feel that Sweeney has stepped out of char-
acter. Life as birth, copulation, and death is boring, says Doris,
and Sweeney goes further, he declares, like the chorus in "Oedipus
Rex", that as for life, "once is enough".

This duet is succeeded by a song in which the minor characters
sing an old Australian song revised by the poet for his own pur-
poses. A reference to Gauguin ("THE Gauguin maids who wear palm-
leaf drapery") extends the reference for the most acute auditor:
he recognizes the modern yearning for the simple and the primitive,
for the South Seas and a life in which the instincts are fulfilled.
Doris comments on this celebration of the natural life by saying
that she does not like eggs and she does not like life on a croco-
dile isle, and then Klipstein and Krumpacker sing a song which
mimics Tin Pan Alley's idion about making love and augments the
theme of modern life surrounded by the fangs of industrialism as
compared with life on a simple island where "we won't worry what

7.

to do," and "we won't have to catch any trains." Again Doris comments on this, saying that she would rather be dead than live such a life, to which Sweeney appends the startling remark that life is death. What the audience apart from the auditor of "greater sensitiveness and understating" would make of this is far from clear. But the generalization is illustrated by a story Sweeney then tells, about a man who "did a girl in". As Sweeney tells the story, the other characters make remarks of much import.

It is the story of a man "who does a girl in" and keeps her in a bath for a "couple of months". Any man, says Sweeney, or every man has to or wants to do this once in his life. Doris remarks that "a woman runs a terrible risk," Swarts affirms that such criminals always get caught, and Snow denies this, saying that some don't get caught. Sweeney continues, creating an image of the man who has done the girl in and lives alone for months, the girl in the bathtub, taking in the milk and paying the rent. Swarts wants to know what the man did with his time and Sweeney explains that such a question has no relevance to such a situation, for the man was really not of the living, he did not know if he was living or dead (here there is an echo of "The Waste Land": I was neither/Living nor dead and I knew nothing"), for he was alone in a separation which removed him from this life, although he visited Sweeney, who gave him a drink. Sweeney concludes by saying, as the poet is to say more and more frequently that language is inadequate to express his emotion, and by announcing

8.

that "Death is life and life is death", an identity of opposites which is also to become more marked in Eliot's later poetry.

The play concludes with a full chorus in which all the characters speak of what the psychoanalysts term nervous anxiety: waking in the middle of the night in nameless fear without knowing if one is alive or dead. The crime of which Sweeney speaks is an effort to arrive at the objective correlative of the emotion of nameless fear or anxiety. Sweeney's feeling that the proper words for the emotion do not exist is related to the poet's difficulty in arriving at the objective correlative (here again is a dialogue between Eliot's prose criticism and his poetry.) Moreover, the fascination with crime and with the murder of a woman recurs: it takes a very different form in "The Family Reunion", but it is the murder of a woman. Then too there is a connection with the poet's interest in detective stories and with the quotation from Aeschylus at the head of the unfinished play for perhaps this man alone of whom Sweeney speaks was intended as the Orestes of the play (as the hero of "The Family Reunion" is an Orestes figure).

As it exists, in its unfinished form, the play is a lyric, though one which might well be very effective on the stage; and it is one of the poet's best lyrics, despite its unfinished and fragmentary character. It presents the desperation, the obsession with nameless guilt, the horror of modern life and of the actual which are at the heart of Eliot's poetry. And it uses the actual with a surface and a profundity which exemplify the canons Eliot has

9.

stated for the modern play in verse.

In a like way, "The Rock" attempts to fulfill the poet's con-
ception of what the poet ought to do in his relation to society,
the church, and the stage. It is admirable for just this reason,
but unfortunately hardly admirable in any other respect. In "The
Uses Of Poetry", in the chapter where he has stated the rationale
of "Sweeney Agonistes", Eliot says that the poet would like to
"have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in society
as worthy as that of the music hall comedian... Poetry is not of
course to be defined by its uses. If it commemorates a public
occasion, or celebrates a festival, or decorates a religious rite,
or amuses a crowd, so much the better." "The Rock" is a direct
effort to decorate a religious rite. It is a pageant play about
building a church in London in which occurs a succession of histor-
ical scenes in the history of London churches, and a church founda-
tion in process. It was written on "behalf of the forty-five
churches fund of the diocese of London", and Eliot states in his
preface that he is not responsible for the scenario -- had he not
said so, some would have nonetheless suspected as much or suspected
a hoax; he is responsible for the words written for scenes already
decided upon and he is responsible for the choruses. The play,
then, may be disregarded except for a brief summation, namely
that it is made up of scenes which follow the history of the church
through the ages and alternate scenes in which cookneys of the
present day converse about the building of a church and many modern

10.

problems and issues, such as Social Credit, Fascism, Communism, and divorce. It must be said that the humility Eliot elsewhere praises as a virtue must be in part responsible for the poet's willingness to affix his name to scenes of such unbearable and incredible triteness, as the one in which "Young Women" tells "Young Man" who is about to depart on one of the Crusades "We were going to be married so soon. Life was going to be so lovely until you went and listened to that preacher," to which "Young Man" replies: "I shall be true to you, dearest. I could never look at anyone else, and I shall think of you always." On the other hand, some of the historical scenes have a fine dignity, although they do not amount to very much more than a surface version of the great men and events with which they deal.

The Choruses to the play are on an entirely different level; their faults are in part those of a great poet in his attempt at a new style. The new style is chiefly inspired by the old model of the Bible, but also by the idiom of the choruses in Greek tragedy. And in both efforts to assimilate and renovate old idioms, they are very much worth careful study. Their inad equacy is also that of a sententiousness hitherto not to be found in Eliot, a sententiousness which seems to have its cause in an effort to make use of the actual for the purposes of moral and satirical pronouncement.

O weariness of men who turn from God

To the grandeur of your mind and the glory of your action,

11.

To arts and inventions and daring enterprises,

To schemes of human greatness thoroughly discredited,

Binding the earth and the water to your service,

Exploiting the seas and developing the mountains,

Dividing the stars into common and preferred,

Engaged in devising the perfect refrigerator.

Here the last three lines represent a leap in style which is not successful because the Biblical idion has not prepared the way for the satirical lines about the stars, the seas, the mountains and the perfect refrigerator. The object of satire does not as a matter of *actual fact* divide the stars into common and preferred, so that we may well suppose that the fault is an inadequate command of the actual, a lapse from a genuine apprehension of the actual to a literary simulation of such an apprehension; so too it is not the invention of a perfect refrigerator which represents adequately the triviality of technical, industrial, and mechanical preoccupations in modern life.

Yet it is only when this attempt is made to amalgamate or bring together modern references and prophetic pronouncements that the choruses are at fault. When the poet is concerned only with his own development of Biblical style, the result is a genuine innovation in the writing of English verse. Eliot manages to use the long and balanced line of Biblical rhythm without the quality of pastiche characteristic of most imitations of the Bible and he manages to use rhyme and differences of line-length in a

12.

way never before accomplished in English versification. There are
verses of extraordinary beauty and insight, such as "Ecstasy is
too much pain," and there are two fine lyrics, one beginning "In
the vacant places," and one beginning "Shall arms hang straight."

"The Rock" certainly ought to be read for several good reasons;
for what is genuinely good in it, which is chiefly a matter of
passages in the choruses; for its place in the development of the
choric style of "Murder In The Cathedral"; for the poet's deliberate
submission to a task imposed from without; and for an illustration
of how badly a great author can write when he is attempting a work
which is not inspired by or based upon the interests and the know-
ledge of the author's whole being.

The subject of "Murder In The Cathedral" is Christian martyr-
dom. In Part One, the action is simple and direct. Thomas a Bocket
is tempted by four tempters, he preaches a sermon on Christmas
morning, and then he is murdered by four knights. The very simple
and uncomplicated nature of the action strengthens the choruses,
which are recited by the poor women of Canterbury who express in
their common humanity a Christian view of the emptiness and the
difficulty of this life, and who, in dramatic terms, make clear
the growing sense of doom and expectation of death. The first
Tempter presents the Archbishop with the good life of the senses
and of fellowship -- "wit and wile and wisdom." The second Tempter's
bribe is that of temporal power, if the Archbishop will submit
to the King. The third Tempter proposes an alliance with the barons

13.

against the King, which is again an offer of temporal power, and
which Thomas rejects because of his fundamental loyalty to the King.
The fourth Tempter, the most important one, surprises Thomas pro-
foundly, because his temptation is that of spiritual glory, "the
glory of Saints", and it is addressed to spiritual pride; and the
Tempter repeats Thomas' very words in his effort to seduce him.
Thomas is bewildered then; he finds that all ways seem to lead
to damnation through pride: "The last temptation is the greatest
treason." And then, when the chorus pleads that Thomas save himself,
he sees a way beyond the four ways presented by the Tempters: which
is to submit wholly to the will of God, to be God's instrument,
to desire nothing but to be used by God. This is the gist of his
Christmas sermon, which is on the subject of sainthood, and in
which he says, "The martyr no longer desires anything for himself,
not even the glory of martyrdom." And the prose beauty of the sermon
suffices to convince the reader or the audience that this state
of mind is indeed genuinely different from the fourth temptation
of spiritual glory. We believe and we see in Part Two that Thomas
has submitted to "the design of God." Here four Knights (who balance
thus by obvious design the four tempters) come to the Archbishop's
Hall, demand that Thomas retract the anathema he has pronounced
on the King's actions, particularly the coronation of the King's
son. Thomas refuses, and the Knights threaten him with death.

There follows a chorus in which the notes of premonition and physical
horror reach a pitch of overpowering illustration — "the savour

14.

of putrid flesh," "the horn of the beetle," "corruption in the
dish, incense in the latrine," and the "horror of the ape" arms
for the chorus knows as the audience knows that the Archbishop
is going to be killed. The Priests beg Thomas to withdraw, and
when the four Knights return, they bar the door. Thomas insists
that the doors be unbarred and the Knights admitted: he has chosen
martyrdom. There is a certain unintended self-righteousness and
sententiousness such as marred the choruses of "The Rock" in his
"You argue by results, as this world does/ To settle if an act
be good or bad/" but the action itself has the necessity it should
have when Thomas says "We have fought the beast/ And have conquered.
We have only to conquer/ Now, by suffering." The Knights chant
a ballad as they murder the Archbishop, after he has again refused
to absolve those he has excommunicated, and then again the chorus
expresses its response at length in verse full of loathing and
horror of this life.

This is succeeded by a remarkable and daring dramatic moment,
the four speeches of the four Knights to justify their actions by
addressing the audience. Their arguments are full of stereotypes
of speech and attitude, and the effect is one of overwhelming
irony. Whether this moment is not an interruption in the course
of the play may be questioned: for the effect has been that of.
the ritual, the chant, and the ceremonial. Evidently the audiences
which witnessed the performances of this play in England and America
did not find it a break, but a heightening by contrast, which is

15.

resolved in the conclusion of the play, a Te Deum in which the
chorus praises God and prays for the sacrifices of the saints and
defines itself as "the type of the common man./ Of the men and
women who shut the door and sit by the fire."

The simpleness and directness of the action is marked: temptation
four times, the walling of the chorus, resistance to temptation,
the sermon, the threat of murder, the walling of the chorus, the
murder, the self-justification of the knights, and the chorus'
acceptance of the murder and the martyrdom. And the play ought
not to be judged in comparison with masterpieces such as "Othello"
or "Coriolanus" where the method is different and the complication
of motive and incident is part of the method as well as part of
the subject. Precisely the simplification and the emphasis upon
the explicit statement of motive makes the play what it is as a
play in verse. Thus the sermon and the choruses become part of
the effect of a ceremonial, the sacrifice of a man to the will
of God, and the success of "Murder In The Cathedral" is that of
a kind of ballet or ritual.

This should direct our attention to the versification and to
the choruses in particular, where the poet has extended previous
usages and devised new ones. The choruses make the success of the
play. Without them, without the emotion created by their incan-
tation, the remainder becomes thin, bare, and almost empty. And
in the choruses, Elliot depends to a greater extent than in any
of his previous efforts upon alliteration, internal rhyme, and

16.

what may be called consecutive rhyme, the long and predominantly
anaplastic line, which is varied by very short lines, and the repe-
tition of single words, turning upon their meaning. Here as else-
where, as, indeed everywhere but "The Family Reunion", we see
how important a part of the poet's genius is his ear for words,
what he has himself termed "The dural imagination." It should be borne in mind that in the writing of English verse,
the departure from the habitual iambic norm has almost invariably
been the cause of bad writing. Either the meaning disappears in the
movement (that is to say, /meter of the word/) as in Swinburne;
or the meaning does not submit to the measure and movement of the
collapses
words and the result is verse which xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxx
into prose, of which one example might be Whitman and the imitators
of Whitman. In that of an extended dramatic lyric, not of a play.

No other poet in English has succeeded in writing lines like
The New Year waits, breathes, waits, whispers in darkness
which is very like the beginning of "Triumphal March" about, Eliot
had attempted, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves horse's heels
over special Over the paving. Object of the play is the hero's gradual
From a purely technical standpoint, the succession of accented
words is something new in English verse. But of course it is not a
question of feet or versification, but of the use made of them;
and the use in "Murder In The Cathedral" is the perfect expression
of relevant emotion: fear, foreboding, horror, acceptance, and
incantation. The success of the choruses may be judged by comparison

17.

with other and like efforts in previous poets and by a comparison
with the choruses in "The Rock"; which, ΜΕΝΗΣΙΑΣ ΜΕΝΗΣΙΑΣ --
particularly in the last chorus ... come close to the power of
the choruses in "Murder In The Cathedral."

The verse of the characters' speeches is less remarkable;
and when it does not make use of the heavy accentuation gained
through alliteration and repetition, it is sometimes good as a
deliberate submission to the dramatic necessity -- to the necessity
of not using the verse for its own sake, but for the sake of the
action; which is the avoidance of another temptation and pitfall
of much of the writing of plays in verse by poets since the Pur-
itans shut the theatres in 1643.

On the whole, we may say that the success of "Murder In The
Cathedral" is that of an extended dramatic lyric, not of a play.

"The Family Reunion" is about Orestes in England, the same
subject which "Sweeney Agonistes" was supposed to be about. Eliot
had attempted to use the Orestes story in modern terms and for his
own special purposes. The subject of the play is the hero's gradual
understanding of the sin and the guilt which have afflicted his
family and resulted in his own unspeakable awareness of evil. What
happens, in the course of a family reunion, is that the hero learns
or seems to learn the reason for the evil which hunts him down
and what he must do about it. He must depart from his house, reject
his position as head of the family, kill his mother (though indirectly),

18.

and pursue the spectres who have been pursuing him just as the furies hunted down Orestes, where he is to go is unknown, but the direction is undoubtedly a Christian one without being named so, for the hero departs from his country house for the new life, saying:

> I have not had the precise directions.

> Where does one go from a world of insanity?

> Somewhere on the other side of despair.

> To the worship in the desert, the thirst and deprivation,
> for the pure, A stony sanctuary and a primitive altar.

The play itself does not appear to have "had the precise directions." The family guilt, which the hero must expiate, is the crime committed by his mother; she has abused and degraded his father and driven him from the house. It is the crime, perhaps, of the domination, for the sake of domination, of one human being by another. The emphasis is on the intention of the will; adultery and murder are hinted at but never confirmed. The "Orestes" of Aeschylus, by contrast, was guilty in a more adequate way from a dramatic standpoint: he had actually killed his mother, and he was hunted by spectres with an exact religious meaning, whatever their truth. He was not being pursued by the ghosts of another religion. In "The Family Reunion," the crime is left faint and indecisive, though it is meant to justify the major crisis of the play, the fact that supernatural beings are actually present. The same indefiniteness blurs the entire play.

19.

Probably there is an immense difficulty in the subject, a peculiar and special difficulty of modern times. In trying to dramatize the presence of the supernatural in natural life, in trying to display upon the stage a character's progressive awareness that he has to deal with supernatural beings, and not with the result of too much drinking, Eliot is faced with the problem of the disbelief inherent in most contexts of modern life, of what is actually believed everyday and not only on Sunday. It is not so much a question of what the modern audience is prepared to believe, for any audience will believe anything from Jules Verne to Walt Disney for the pure sake of seeing what happens to the protagonists. A modern audience will even believe in the supernatural, if the protagonists are shown as acting and suffering in ways which are a plausible extension of the common denominator of human experience. But Eliot fails to find X plausible extensions; he finds few extensions of any kind. The audience would be willing to assume the existence of what the hero sees, namely, the Furies standing in the window embrasure, if the hero's emotions during the play were with sufficient vividness related to and induced from what we all know of emotion, especially the emotion of nameless guilt. But the best that Eliot can do to get the experience of the supernatural upon the stage is such a speech as the announcement by the hero's chauffeur that he too has seen the Furies, or the hero's continual explanation that he cannot explain what he feels, and no one else can see what he sees. The first-night audience in London which laughed at the wrong time was justified, although wisdom

20.

perhaps would have dictated tears; for modern characters, in the
scene as given, do not see the supernatural without undergoing
more radical changes -- of heart, of mind, of interest -- than
do Eliot's characters. Perhaps this difficulty of grounding the
supernatural in modern life made Eliot attempt to get into the
dialogue so much of the idiom of modern speech. All the dialogue,
is supposedly versified, but it is very hard to accept very much
of it as verse at all, strange as this may seem to anyone ac-
quainted with the rest of Eliot's poetry. What can one make of such
a passage as this, which is a fair sample of all but one or two
passages;

Nevertheless, Amy, there's something in Violet's suggestion.
Why not ring up Warburton and ask him to join us?
He's an old friend of the family, it's perfectly natural
That he should be asked. He looked after all the boys
When they were children. I'll have a word with him.

This speech gains nothing from the division of the sentences into
verse lines and possesses little rhythm which is not that of prose,
a fact which can be established by printing it as prose. The
an
emphasis of/emotion, the heightening of an attitude or a tone,
the exact suggestiveness and the double irony which can be attain-
ed by the use of a regular and fixed meter are wholly absent.
Modern speech has defeated the poet (although it did not in
"Sweeney Agonistes" and "The Waste Land"), just as modern belief
or disbelief has defeated the dramatist.

Since the locus of guilt is an upper-class English
country house, one might suppose that this *f/f/f/f/ play is*
significant of a new period in Eliot's mind, a reflection of
the royalism and the conservatism which he affirmed in 1929
as the only secular complement of anglo-catholicism. And this
rejection might seem related to the poet's sense of what the

21.

tient to which the English ruling-class was responsible for
the Munich Pact, so that the inadequacy of the play would
flow fundamentally from the poet's new and as yet inadequate-
ly considered revulsion and perplexity. Actually, however,
the poet of "Ash Wednesday" also seemed to see "the worship
of the desert" in the Church of England, and there has al-
ways been an obsessed horror of natural life, and modern
society, in Eliot's poetry.

We can say for certain then that the failure of
this play (as compared with the success of "Ash Wednesday")
indicates only that it is possible to accomplish a Christ-
an work of art when the subject is personal emotion. When
the subject becomes family relationships and supernatural
beings in connection with one's experience with other human
beings (in a time and a place in which neither Christianity
nor any other value can be assumed as genuine and unquestion-
ed), the modern author is dealing with a problem which is in-
soluble in its very nature. In our time no belief can be taken
for granted, but only the effort of belief in the face of
disbelief.

THE ARIEL POEMS

"The Fortune Of The Magi"

The subject of "The Fortune Of The Magi" is an attitude toward Christianity. The wise man who has come to Bethlehem in expectation of some birth, some transformation of this life, finds that the world has been transformed by a death. The implications of the poem are that Christ and Christianity represent the coming of a Golden Age or the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, but difficulty, suffering, and pain, struggle on the highest level of all. The first part of the poem, which shows the influence of Pound's "Cantos" and versifies a passage quoted by Eliot in his sermon on Lancelot Andrews, describes the journey of the Magi in such a way that the way of life of paganism is clear: the wise men regret "the summer palaces," and "the silken girls bringing sherbet". The diction of the poem is remarkable as a mixture. When the wise man speaks of the place of Nativity as "(you may say) satisfactory," and when he says "There was no information," we have the use of prose diction and prose phrasing for its poetic quality which is one of Eliot's essential notes. Yet the poem also makes use of sensuous images "a temperate valley/ Wet, below the snow-line, smelling of vegetation," and "three trees on the low sky," which is more emphatic than Eliot usually is in his use of the sensory, and the use is more obviously poetic in the decorative sense.

2.

the sea of faith as withdrawn and love alone as a sanctuary; he
is an intellectual in the middle of the 19th century, impressed
by the effect upon the Bible of the argument about the Book of
Genesis and of the Darwinian theory. Yeats' "The Magi" is close
to Eliot's poem, and perhaps a better piece of versification.

The Magi are unsatisfied by Calvary's turbulence, and by "the
uncontrollable mystery of the bestial floor". Elsewhere in "The
Second Coming," Yeats expresses a notion of recurrence and of
the function of the Messiah as the myth of a culture which is
part of the historical insight, the insight into the relative
character of a culture, which has been made possible by the
universal studies of the 20th century. It is as if both poets
could have written their poems only after the publication of
Frazer's "The Golden Bough".

"A Song For Simeon"

"A Song For Simeon" is another Christmas poem and in form
Eliot has again made use of the dramatic monologue. The literary
basis of the poem is Luke,2,25-35; Simeon is an old man of eighty
who has no future and no personal hope. In attitude, we may say
that this poem is a continuation of "Gerontion"; it is as if the
protagonist of the earlier poem had become a Christian. He too
is old, tired, and without "the ultimate vision". He does not
expect "the ecstacy of thought and prayer". He has seen the Christ
child, and now he wishes only peace and to depart.

3.

Here for the first time the influence of the Bible becomes
strong in Eliot's verse. Some of the lines are a versification of
the passage in The New Testament and the versification of the
whole poem is a mixture of Biblical rhythms with those of Eliot's
vers libre style, which uses rhyme irregularly and in departing
from the iambic base of most poetry in English depends upon a
perfect ear for unilambic variation.

The important thing to see in the poem as related to Eliot's
other poems is that the same despair which motivates "The Hollow
Men" and "The Waste Land" remains, even though there has been an
accession of Christian belief; "I am tired with my own life and the
lives of those after me". On the other hand, we should also
remember that in the early poetry, which seemed to some critics in
such direct contradiction to Eliot's oxigismx affirmation of
religious belief, there was always a religious note -- or perhaps
we should say a religious desire. Thus in his very first book
Eliot seems to be thinking of Christianity when he writes of tated
"The notion of some infinitely suffering/ Infinitely gentle thing".
And there are Biblical references in this first book as in "The
Waste Land" there is also a direct religious concern, however
distant from the moment of belief.

And the first line of this poem is interesting in detail; the
reference to the Roman hyacinths renews the concern with flowers
and hyacinths and the adjective, Roman, has just the right connota-
tions for the historical background of the poem.

4.

"Animula"

"Animula", the third of the Christmas poems, is perhaps the best of all his poems. Certainly it is his most direct, most lucid, and most concise statement of a vision of life. As so often elsewhere, this poem too has a literary basis, Canto XVI, 1.85-95, of the "Purgatorio", and a comparison of the two passages may very well suggest to the interested reader that the modern poet has surpassed his source, although perhaps without the source the new poem might not have been written.

The first half of the poem rehearses the stages of existence from birth, when the soul is simple in several senses -- untainted, ignorant, and not yet self-marred -- through infancy and childhood, at this point we come to distribute between those poems who are literary in the old sense, and those who are not.

The fragrant brilliance of the Christmas tree to manhood and adulthood when choice, fear, lack of resolution, begin to accomplish self-ruin. The conflict of will and desire which first appeared in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," is stated again: "Unable to fare forward or retreat," and this is followed by lines which should remind the reader of D.H. Lawrence or becomes a substitute for the thing. This does not mean that the word is not important, but only that the word or the idea and the thing are not both ought to be important.

Fearing the warm reality, the offered good,

Denying the importunity of the blood

And yet the conclusion of this complete statement is a Christian one; the soul truly is first alive after the last rites of the Church have been administered.

The second half of the poem is a daring break or outburst,

5. inspired perhaps by a dramatic intention. The method of direct statement is changed to that of prayer for different kinds of human beings, for one "avid of speed and power," one of great wealth, one destroyed in a violent accident, and one destroyed by a boarhound which may signify sensuality. Three invented names, Guiterriez, Boudin, and Floret are mentioned; they are perhaps too poetic a choice, as Eliot said of Tennyson's "Ulysses". Apart from this, the poem is an unquestionable triumph of statement and the statement of emotion.

### "Marina"

"Marina" again has a basis in literary inspiration, and perhaps at this point we ought to distinguish between those poets who are literary in the good sense, as Eliot almost always is, and those poets who are literary in the bad sense. Poets are literary in the good sense when the word or the passage leads them to reality -- to the thing, to the experience; they are bad in the literary sense when the word or the passage leads them away from thing and experience, or blocks their apprehension of it, or blurs, or dimes or becomes a substitute for the thing. This does not mean that the word is not important, but only that the word or sign and the thing signified both ought to be important parts of the expression.

A Latin quotation is translated as the beginning of "Marina", and the literary reference or basis is Shakespeare's "Pericles", Act V, Scene II, where Pericles, at sea, finds his long-lost

6.

daughter. Eliot's poem uses the image of a return to a native
land by sea. And some have said that this poem symbolizes for
Eliot his return to America in 1933. But it transcends such personal
connections. The return is one by means of which a great deal
which is evil -- strife, sensuality, contentment, which all lead
toward the death of the spirit -- are for the moment banished.
Behind the mask of Pericles, making use of the literary allusion
as a dramatic-monologue form, the protagonist of the poem speaks
of being renovated in heart and mind. The images of sea and shore,
like those of a comparable passage in "Ash Wednesday," suggest
New England. The mask of Pericles dictates the symbol of the re-
gained daughter. But the daughter is of the most general application
and significance; she is a symbol of all renewal, rejuvenation,
and discovery, since any child is, in a sense, the meaning of this
life, and the justification of generations. Naturally then the
protagonist plunges to the depths of the subliminal, speaking of
"Under sleep where all the waters meet". The daughter is a symbol
of the concerns of the libido, of all that might have been, of
all that may yet come to pass, of the sublimation of hope and of
self-sacrifice for another being.

"Marina" is remarkable both in imagery and in rhythm. Again
Eliot manages to transform the iambic base of English versifica-
tion with new uses of line-length and variation of accent. And
in imagery the self-concern of the protagonist is expressed in a

7.

complication of references to old ships and new ships, a sea shore,
the distance of the stars and the nearness of the eye, (the eye
is an obsessive symbol in "The Hollow Men"), memory and hallucin-
ation -- "whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying
feet".

Of these Ariel poems, as of Eliot's writing throughout, the
effort at composition -- the revision, patience, and effort at
perfecting -- are patent. Each of these poems appeared to have
been the product of a whole year's effort. And the process is one
which is not customary, not only because of that impatience which,
as Kafka observes, is a form of laziness, but because of the
deceptiveness of inspiration. We may perhaps say that Eliot probably
knew just how to trust and to distrust inspiration, and was perhaps
aided in this habit and discipline of mind by being less spontaneous
than other poets, or less often spontaneous, or often inspired
by a literary text. Eliot's brief passages on the subject of the
composition of poetry suggest such a view of his method of work.
Obviously it is better to write one important poem a year than to
write a volume of slipshod poems.

The Ariel Poems/

The subject of "The Fortune Of The Magi" is an attitude toward Christianity. The wise man who has come to Bethelehem in expectation of some birth, some transformation of this life, finds that the world has been transformed by a Death. The implications of the poem are that Christ and Christianity represent the coming not of a Golden Age or an age of opprobrium, but difficulty, suffering, and pain, struggle on the highest level of all. The first part of the poem, which shows the influence of Pund's "Cantos" and versifies a passage quoted by Eliot in his sermon on Lancelot Andrewes, describe the journey of the magi in such a way that the way of life of paganism is clear: the magi regret "the summer palaces," and "the silken girls bringing sherbet". The diction of the poem is remarkable as a mixture. When the wise man speaks of the place of Nativity as "(you may say) satisfactory", and when he says "There was no information", and prose phrasing we have the use of improse diction—for its poetic quality which is one of Eliot's essential notes. Yet the poem also makes use of sensuous images "a temperate valley/ Wet, below the snow-line, smelling of vegetation", and "Three trees on the low sky", which is more emphatic than Eliot usually is in his use of the sensory, and the use is more obviously poetic in the decorative sense.

Ariel Poems/ A Song For Simeon/

"A Song For Simeon" is another Xmas poem and in form Eliot has again made use of the dramatic monologue. The basis of the poem is Luke, 2, 25-36; Simeon is an old man of eighty who has no future and no personal hope. In attitude, we may say that this poem is a continuation of "Gerontion"; it is as if the protagonist of the earlier poem had become a Christian. He too is old, tired, and without "the ultimate vision". He does not expect "the ecstacy of thought and prayer". He has seen the Christ child, and now he wishes only peace and to depart.

Here for the first time the influence of the Bible becomes strong in Eliot's verse. Some of the lines are a versification of the passage in The New Testament and the versification of the whole poem is a mixture of Biblical rhythms with those of Eliot's vers libre (Poue essay) style, which uses rhyme irregularly and in departing from the iambic base of most poetry in English depends upon a perfect ear for unianimal variation.

The important thing to note about the poem as related to Eliot's other poems is that the same despair which motivates "The Hollow Men" and "The Waste Land" remains even though there has been an accession of Christian belief: "I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me". On the other hand, we should also remember that in the early poetry, which seems to some critics in such direct contradiction to Eliot's religious affirmation, there was always a religious note--or perhaps we should say a religious desire. Thus in his very first book Eliot seems to be thinking of Christianity when he writes of "The notion of some infinitely suffering/ Infinitely gentle thing". And there are Biblical references in this first book as in "The Waste Land" there is also a direct religious concern, however distant from the moment of belief.

The first line of this poem is interesting in detail; the reference to the Roman hyacinths repeats the concern with flowers and hyacinths and the adjective, Roman, has just the right connotations for the historical

The Ariel Poems/Animula/

"Animula", the third of the Xmas poems, is perhaps the best of all his poems. Certainly it is his most direct, the most lucid, and the most concise statement of a vision of life. As so often elsewhere, this poem too has a literary basis, Canto XVI of the "Purgatorio", and a comparison of the two passages may very well suggest to the interested reader that the modern poet has surpassed his source, although perhaps without the source the new poem might not have been written.

The first half of the poem rehearses the stages of existence from birth, when the soul is simple in several senses--untainted, ignorant, and not yet self-marred--through infancy and childhood, which are described in some of Eliot's most beautiful sensuous lines

The fragrant brilliancy of the Christmas tree to manhood and adulthood when choice, fear, lack of resolution, begin to accomplish self-ruin. The conflict of will and desire which first appeared in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", is stated again: "Unable to fare forward or retreat", and this is followed by lines which should remind the reader of D.H. Lawrence

Denying the importunity of the blood of this complete statement

And yet the conclusion is a Christian one; the soul truly is first alive after the last rites of the Church have been administered.

The second half of the poem is a daring break or out burst, inspired perhaps by a dramatic intention. The method of direct statement is changed so that of prayer for different kinds of human beings, for one "avid of speed and power", one of great wealth, one destroyed by a violent which may signify sensuality. in an accident, and one destroyed by a boarhound. Three invented names, Guiterriez, Boudin, and Floret are mentioned; they are perhaps too poetic a choice, as Eliot said of Tennyson's "Ulysses". Apart from this, the poem is an unquestionable triumph of statement and the statement of an emotion.

The Ariel Poems/Marina/

"Marina" again has a basis in literary inspiration, and perhaps at this point we ought to distinguish between those poets who are literary in the good sense, as Eliot almost always is, and those poets who are literary in the bad sense. Poets are literary in the good sense when the word or the passage leads them to reality--to the thing, to the experience; they are bad in the literary sense when the word or the passage leads them away from thing and experience, or blocks their apprehension of it, or blurs/dims or becomes a substitute for the thing. This does not mean that the word is not important, but only that the word or sign and the thing signified ought to be both important parts of the expression.

A Latin quotation check is translated as the beginning of "Marina", and the literary reference or basis is Shakespeare's "Pericles", Act V, Scene II, where Pericles, at sea, finds his long-lost daughter. Eliot's poem uses the image of a return to a native land by sea. And some have said that this poem figures for Eliot his return to America in 1933. But it transcends such personal connections. The return by means of is one of which a great deal which is evil--strife, sensuality, contentment, which are all pointed toward the death of the spirit--are for the moment banished. Behind the mask of Pericles, making use of the literary allusion as a dramatic-monologue form, the protagonist of the poem speaks of being renovated in heart and mind. The images of sea and shore, like those of a comparable passage in "Ash Wednesday", suggest New England. The mask of Pericle's dictates the symbol of the regained daughter. But the daughter is of the most general application and significance; she is a symbol of all renewal, rejuvenation, and discovery, since the child is, in a sense, the meaning of this life, and the justification of generations. Naturally then the protagonist plunges to the depths of the subliminal, speaking of "Under sleep where all the waters meet".

Ariel Poems/Marina 2/

of the concerns of the libido,
The daughter is a symbol of all that might have been, of all that
may yet come to pass, of the sublimation of hope and of the self-
sacrifice for another being.

"Marina" is remarkable both in imagery and in rhythm.
Again Eliot manages to transform the iambic base of English vers-
ification with new uses of line-length and variation of accent.
And in imagery the self-concern of the protagonist is expressed
in a complication of references to old ships and new ships, a
sea shore, the distance of the stars and the nearness of the eye,
(the eye is an obsessive symbol in "The Hollow Men"), memory
and hallucination--"whispers and small laughter between leaves and
hurrying feet".

Of these Ariel poems, as of Eliot's writing throughout,
the effort at composition--the revision, patience, and effort at
perfecting--are patent. Each of these poems appeared to have been
the product of a whole year's effort. And the process is one which
is not customary, nor only because of that impatience which as
Kafka observes, is a form of laziness, but because of the deceptive-
ness of inspiration. We may perhaps say that Eliot probably knew
just how to trust and to distrust inspiration, and was perhaps
aided in this habit and discipline of mind by being less spontaneous
than other poets, or less often spontaneous, or often inspired by
a literary text. Eliot's brief passages on the subject of the com-
position of poetry suggest such a view of his method of work. Ob-
viously it is better to write one important poem a year than to
write a volume of slipshod poems.

Coriolanus

"Difficulties Of A Statesmen" and "Triumphal March", two parts of an unfinished long poem, belong in their available form with the Ariel Poems. They make use of the same method in versification and in reference and in organization.

The return of Coriolanus as a symbol of pride and power bringing isolation will make the reader remember the broken Coriolanus of "The Waste Land", revived for a moment by aethereal rumors. In these two poems, Coriolanus figures forth the statesman in two dramatic scenes, to be spoken: in the first, "Triumphal March" he or Roman Victory March appears in an Armistic Day parade, and he is apart from the populace, His eyes "watchful, waiting perceiving, indifferent. The point of view of the poem's voice is that of one who is gazing from the crowd, and who perceives the horror of war, and a child's mistaking of the Host in church for the making of crumpets."

In "Difficulties Of A Statesmen", the statesman himself assumes the dramatic monologue, rehearsing the details of his office, committees, salaries, public works, fortifications, remembering how all flesh is grass, appealing to his mother and wishing to be with her once more, and concluding by a desire to resign his office. In both poems the note of *anywhere out of the world* (which is Baudelaire's title) recurs in the figure of "the still point of the turning world", and in both poems the emotion of desperation and despair is strong. So too the fusion of the ancient and the modern, the Roman and the English provides much of the detail of both poems. And the poetry of pedestrian or quotidian diction, the most familiar aspect of Eliot's style and one of the most powerful, asserts itself in such lines as "among these busts, all correctly inscribed", which closely resembles "there was no information and so we continued", and "it was (you may say) satisfactory". The words I have italicized show to what an extent this aspect of style is achieved by means of diction.

*Perhaps one of the titles of this poem is: *Difficulties of an Editor*.

THE HOLLOW MEN

Goethe remarked of Wordsworth that he knew too well why each line was written. This famous remark, famous because quoted by Matthew Arnold in his essay on Wordsworth, may be variously interpreted. For our present purposes, one interpretation may prove illuminating, the sense in which it refers to the subliminal, to that which arises from the depths of the poet's being, to images and attitudes which are not *youlu*, factitious, or dictated by the poet's notion of what he ought to say, but come from the experience which has affected him so profoundly and with which he has lived so long that he knows it in the way that we know the connotations of the slang or the irrational idioms of our native tongue, such as "How do you do?" and "What are you up to?"

This truth of the necessity of the subliminal does not make true the excess of the surrealist or the dadaist who deliberately refuses to permit the intellect to order, arrange and make coherent what has risen from the pit of the unconscious. And it may be that Eliot had something of the sort in mind when in an early essay he wrote that the bad poet is conscious at the wrong time, way, and unconscious in the wrong time, way, while the good poet reversed this process.

Eliot may be said to have honored and awaited the subliminal; and in some poems the deliverances of the subliminal appear to be what Eliot has identified with the objective correlative. This is true especially of "The Waste Land", and it should explain his method in general and such poems as "The Hollow Men" particularly.

2.

Here the reliance upon the objective correlative and subliminal
images is devoured or separated more sharply than ever from the
narrative or expository framework of most poetry. From another
point of view, the images and statements in "The Hollow Men"
resemble like "Gerontion" the crucial dramatic moments of a
play in verse; but the play has been omitted or purged for the
sake of the poetry. This is not merely an analogy; Eliot's sense
of the dramatic is at work in ordering the subject and in deter-
mining the very character of the ending both of this poem and of
"The Waste Land".

"The Hollow Men" consists of five lyrics which state the forms
and aspects of despair. Like the trimmers in "The Inferno", they
are merely empty soulds, not "violent souls", whose voices are "quiet
and meaningless" as the wind. One of the hollow men speaks in the
second part; he is obsessed with his inability to look at the
eyes of another, even in dreams; and the images of eyes which
look -- "in final meeting" -- is a subliminal one, for the eyes
become a symbol for, among many other things, the difficulty and
intimacy of relationship between human beings. And the hollow
man expresses his desire to be far from eyes and voices.

In the third lyric, this theme is extended, and augmented
by the image of stone and of cactus. "This is the dead land,"
the land of cactus; and the separation and isolation of being is
such that when one wakes alone "trembling with tenderness," "lips
that would kiss/ form prayers to broken stone". In the fourth
lyric, the image of the eyes is developed further. In the dead

3.

land, there are no eyes, all is blindness, and eyes reappear only
as distant stars. The fifth part shifts into a different key;
here Eliot's dramatic sense is at work, and there is a paraphrase
or version of a popular song followed by a series or sequence of
polarities which defeat and frustrate human life, polarities or
opposites such as the idea and reality, motion and act, conception
and creation, emotion and response, potency and existence, essence
and descent. A prayer intervenes in an antiphonal fashion. And
then becomes the mockery of a prayer. As "The Waste Land" ended
with a deliberate incoherence of allusions to express chaos, so
what Yvor Winters named "the fallacy of imitative form" is again
illustrated in the lines "For Thine is/ Life is/ For Thine is/
to express the feebleness and whimpering which is the being of
the hollow man.

And we should note that if this imitation of the emotion in
the actual phrasing is really a fallacy, it is only so when it
is not controlled and given dramatic coherence by a context which
is not in itself constituted by imitative form. So too we ought
to say that the method of free association is wrong not in itself;
it is a question first of the character of the associations; and
the second question is whether the subject justifies the method
of free association. Often enough it does not; but surely it often
does in these poems.

The Hollow Men/

Goethe remarked of Wordsworth that he knew too well why each line was written. This famous remark, famous because quoted by Matthew Arnold in his essay on Wordsworth, is subject to varying interpretation. For our present purposes, one interpretation may prove illuminating, the sense in which it refers to the subliminal, to which arises from the depths of the poet's being, to images and attitudes which are notVOULU, or dictated by the poet's notion of what he ought to say, but from the experience which has affected him so profoundly and with which he has lived so long that he knows it in the way that we know the connotations of the slang or the idioms so irrational of our native tongue, such as "How do you do?" and "What are you up to?"

This truth of the necessity of the subliminal does not make true the excess of the surrealist or the dadai st who deliberately refuses to permit the intellect to order, arrange and make coherent what has risen from the pit of the unconscious. And it may be that Eliot had something of the sort in mind when in an early essay he wrote that (check) the bad poet is conscious at the wrong time, way, and unconscious in the wrong time, way, while the good poet reversed this process.

Eliot may be said to have honored and awaited the subliminal; and in some poems the deliverances of the subliminal appear to be what Eliot has identified with the objective correlative. This is true especially of "The Waste Land", and it should explain his method in general and much poems as "The Hollow Men" particularly. Here the reliance upon the objective correlative and subliminal images is divorced or separated more sharply than ever from the narrative or expository framework of most poetry.

The Hollow Men/2/

From another point of view, the images and statements in "The Hollow Men" resemble like "Gerontion" the crucial dramatic moments of a play in verse; but the play has been omitted or purged for the sake of the poetry. This is not merely an analogy; Eliot's sense of the dramatic is at work in ordering the subject and in determining the very character of the ending both of this poem and of "The Waste Land".

"The Hollow Men" consists of five lyrics which state the forms and aspects of despair. Like the trimmers in "The Inferno", they are merely empty souls, not "violent souls", whose voices are "quiet and meaningless" as the wind. One of the hollow men speaks in the second part; he is obsessed with his inability to look at the eyes of another, even in dreams; and the images of eyes which look --"in final meeting--" is a subliminal one, for the eyes become a symbol for, among many other things, the difficulty and intimacy of relationship between human beings. And the hollow man expresses his desire to be far from eyes and voices.

In the third lyric, this theme is extended, and augmented by the image of stone and of cactus. "This is the dead land", the land of cactus; and the separation and isolation of being is such that when one wakes alone "trembling with tenderness", "lips that would kiss/ Form prayers to broken stone". In the fourth lyric, the image of the eyes is developed further. In the dead land, there are no eyes, all is blindness, and eyes reappear only as distant stars. The fifth part shifts into a different key; here Eliot's dramatic sense is at work, and there is a paraphrase or version of a popular song followed by a series of sequence of polarities which defeat and frustrate human life, polarities, such as the idea and reality, motion and act, conception and creation, emotion and response, potency and existence, essence and descent. A pray

The Hollow Men/3/

intervenes in an antiphonal fashion, it becomes the mockery of a prayer.

As "The Taste Land ended with a deliberate discoherence of allusions to express chaos, so what Yvor Winters named "the fallacy of imitative form" is again illustrated in the lines "For Thine is/ Life is/ For Thine is/" to express the feebleness and whimpering which is the being of the hollow man.

And we should note that if this imitation of the emotion in the actual phrasing is really a fallacy, it is only so when it is not controlled and given dramatic coherence by a context which is not in itself constituted by imitative form. So too we ought to say that the method of free association is wrong not in itself; it is a question first of the character of the associations, which is to say of the mind which utters the associations; and the second question is whether the subject justifies the method of free association. Often enough it does not; but surely it often does in these poems.