6.

Marlowe, Jonson's model, in his most mature style is the same kind of author because his poetry verges on a caricature of the actual world as Jonson's is an artificial and constructed world. Some of the metaphysical poets and some of the French symbolists must be regarded as having the same kind of relationship to actuality. Thus, writing of Mallarmé and including Poe in his description, Eliot says "Their work is an expansion of their sensibility beyond the limits of the normal world, a discovery of new objects capable of creating new emotions." Mallarmé's world is a real world; it is created by a prolongation of our sensibility, and an effort to regain "The primitive power of the word". The world of Mallarmé is a real one in that it includes "the most serious human passion"; but it is "a world of still lifes".

Two extremes become clear, the mastery of language and the assimilation of experience. These correspond to the overworked and misleading distinction between style and content. In watching the development of a poet, it is often possible to see how he often masters a style before he has a real subject-matter or content to present through the style. This is true of Pound and Yeats, in particular. And it corresponds to the hackneyed critical formula used of so many authors: "He writes well, but he has nothing to say".

Milton may not seem to resemble Swinburne in the least, but in his poetry there is a splendor of rhetoric which exists for its own sake and does not serve to express experience; "the greatest poets set before real men talking, carry you on in real events moving". Their work has a universal significance, but at the same time it bears the mark of having being produced in a definite time and place. Milton, for all his magnificence, does not express real men and real events. And the same concern with the observation of human behavior and insight

7.

into the human soul shows itself when, criticizing the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eliot finds that the abundance in the language of that poet does not correspond to a "real development in thought and feeling". Or another connection between essays may be illuminating, for in his essay on Jonson there is a passing reference to Shakespeare: Shakespeare's characters have a "third dimension": "Falstaff is not only roast Manning tree ox with the pudding in his belly; he also 'grows old', and, finally, his nose is as sharp as a pen". As this is not true of Jonson's characters, so it is not true of Milton's.

As we have seen, the poet must find "a set of objects" which will evoke the emotion he wishes to express. Hugo congratulated Baudelaire on having invented a new *frisson*. This invention was perfomed by means of the use of the imagery of common life, "the imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis" (S.E.p.341). (Here the reader ought to recall what was said of the sense of the actual and of the language of Joyce and Conrad.) Baudelaire, like Donne and like Laforgue, was almost "the inventor of an attitude, a system of feelings, or of morals" (S.E., p.251). For the moment we need not be concerned with the nature of this attitude. The important point is that it was made possible by a fundamental sincerity. (S.E., p.342). (This sincerity should be connected with the honesty praised in *Bâke*.) The poet in his use of objects must present them as they really are; as Swinburne does not present objects at all, so Massinger, when compared to Shakespeare, is general where the latter is concrete, and merely refers to the object where the latter evokes it. But the particular object must represent more than itself, and it is because Baudelaire gives a universality to the objects of modern life that he is the first great modern poet. But the fusion of concreteness and universality is the mark of the most important literary works. Middæton created

8.

real characters, and their reality is very important; but even more
important in Middleton's two great plays is that through the part-
icularity of character and situation, the dramatist expresses "a
stratum of truth permanent in human nature", "an eternal tragedy"(S.E., 142).
And again a certain moral quality of mind was necessary, for as Blake
was honest and Baudelaire was sincere, so Middleton was "without fear,
without sentiment, without prejudice", and these qualities made him
"a great observer of human nature" (S.E., p.147).

What most poets accomplish, however, is the expression
in language of attitudes and feelings. At one extreme is the poet
who merely purifies language and extends literary technique. At the
other extreme is the philosophical poet, such as Dante and Lucretius,
who find the "emotional equivalent" for a philosophical system constructed
by someone else. The originality of most poets is largely that of
the creation of feelings about their subjects.

A poet may celebrate and praise his subject; or he may
criticize and condemn it. He may feel pity, anger, love, or awe for
it; or he may exhibit, as in some very great poems, mixed, contra-
dictory, and ambivalent feelings toward his subject. The literary
question is then that of the justification of the feeling in the poem
as such. The means of this justification in language, character, situa-
tion, which is to say, by finding an objective correlative, which is
to say, the, of a, finding the set of objects adequate to evoke the emotion. In
"Hamlet", the set of objects--the characters and the situations--are
not sufficient to the emotion. In "Coriolanus", "Macbeth", and "Othello",
they are. The point can be illustrated also in a poet like Massinger whose
"feeling for language had outstripped his feeling for things; his eye
and his vocabulary were not in cooperation" (S.E., p.145.)

9.

The poet may invent new poetic techniques ar he may extend
the uses of language without inventing new feelings. But he cannot
invent new feelings without some extension or modification of poetic
form and technique. Every innovation in blank verse, for example, is
an innovation in tone and thus in feeling. Shakespeare's use of blank
verse made it "the vehicle of more varied and intense feeling than it
(S.E.,p.100)
had ever conveyed since" Tennyson, though equally a master of the tech-
nique of blank verse, was "cruder because less capable of expressing
(S.E.p100)
complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions". Since Shakespeare,
and in part because of Milton's idiosyncratic example, the use of
blank verse has suffered a retrogression which is plain enough in the
blank verse of the nineteenth century poets.

One of the chief functions of poetry is to unite experiences
which are apparently separate and unrelated. Here the reader ought to
remember that metaphor, the essence of poetry according to Aristotle,
is literally a bearing-across; and composition literally means to-bring-
together. Both words mean a uniting, which may even suggest a comparison
with love and with marriage. At any rate, the poet creates a new unity
in experience.

He brings together the parts of a young lady &
the beauty of a rose, for example.

His capacity to do so depends upon the character of his sen-
sibility. In using his senses and his intellect, which are elements in
his sensibility, he may use them together so that, as with Donne, "in-
tellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation became
(S.E.p.185)
word and word became sensation". He felt thought, on the one hand, and
on the other hand, his sensations were what they were because of the
nature of his thoughts. And in general some poems have possessed
"a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience".
Here perhaps mechanism is an unfortunate term, and any an excessive one.
The point, however, is to distinguish between poets who have enjoyed

10.

a unity of sensibility and those who have not. The disunity begins with Dryden and Milton, who cultivated certain qualities of language to the neglect of others. In Milton, there is "a hypertrophy of the aural imagination, so that the inner meaning is separated from the surface". One can enjoy Milton's splendor of rhetoric and one can study his ideas. But the rhetoric is not an expression of the ideas. The metaphysical poets and the French Symbolists have what Milton lacked, the "essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind".

When we come upon Eliot's praise of Henry James, we see what appears to be a contradiction is actually an important insight. James "has a mind so fine that no idea could violate it". This may seem to contradict the praise of the poet who transforms *his* ideas into sensations. But there is no contradiction, but merely the recognition of complication, and the variety of ways in which the mind works. Ideas, and especially received ideas, may be substitutes for the observation of experience. The author may permit an idea to dictate his emotion to him. He may not see the object as it really is because he has a preconceived idea about it. Or he may not see the object at all because of his idea of the object. Or he may respond to the object not because of the nature of the object, but because of prior political, religious, or moral ideas. To the patriot, for example, every stranger may be a barbarian or an enemy because of the nationalist idea. It is in this sense that an author is to be praised because he has a mind which no idea can violate. He has a mind which no idea can prevent from seeing what is to be seen.

On the other hand, ideas often illuminate experience, and the lack of ideas, like a lack of the sense of the past, forces the

11.

the author to invent his own philosophy: "Blake did not see enough
because he was too much preoccupied with his own ideas", "What his
genius required and sadly lacked was a framework of accepted and
traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in
a philosophy of his own". It was the fault of "the environment which
failed to provide what such a poet needed". (S.E., p.280)

This should bring the reader back to the necessity of a sense
of the past, especially of the literary past. No author and no work
exists in isolation. The very meanings of his words are an inheritance
from the past. The author can permit the dead hand of the past to
distort his experience, or to cut him off from certain aspects of it;
or the author can use his sense of his past to give him a sharper sense
not only of the present, but of what his own originality and uniqueness
can be. Just as if we do not know the past, we are bound to have an
imperfect sense of the present, so if we do not have a real knowledge
of what has been accomplished in literature, it is bound to be very
difficult for us to have a distinct notion of what can be accomplish
in the future. Most poets begin by taking fire from other poets and
most of them conclude, sadly enough, in self-imitation. The role of
a sense of the past and of literary tradition can best be seen in
that period when the poet's borrowed style is gradually altered into
something strange and new, as the glove is altered by the hand, day
by day, through the pressure of the poet's own and unique subject-
matter, his own experience. Thus Shakespeare began by imitating
Marlowe and other Elizabethans. The pressure of his own experience
transformed the borrowed style into something profoundly new.

Literary tradition is not something esoteric or high-flown.
It resembles cooking, in that the knowledge and experience of previous
generations is available for use by the new generation. No one

12.

would think of ignoring inherited experience in a daily necessity
like cooking, and there is just as little reason for ignoring it
in the writing of poetry, however elevated the latter activity may
seem. And it is important to observe in literary history how often
we come upon the paradox that the way to originality is through
imitation of great models, and also, as Eliot remarks, the imitation
of models who are not great.

Tradition, the historical sense, the consciousness of the
past: these three terms illuminate each other. A sense of tradition
is not to be confounded with mere erudition, since it is a
consciousness, not mere extensive information about the past. Nor is a sense
of literary tradition to be confounded with a mere parodying of past
models, for repetition is as deadly as novelty, and a real consciousness
of the past shows the poet how each past modified the past in
relationship to which it was present; it shows how the new developed
out of the old, not how the old was merely duplicated. In a poet
like Marvell, we can see very well how richly a sense of the past
can operate. His original lines are what they are because of a consciousness
of poems written on the same subjects by Horace and
Catullus. Taking up one of the "great traditional commonplaces of
European literature", the maxim, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for
tomorrow we die", or, "let us make love, because we will soon be dead",
Marvell "renews the theme by the variety and order of his images,"
and in some of his lines, because of his consciousness of the past,
"a whole civilization resides".

This conception of tradition can perhaps be stated more
simply as meaning only that the poet ought to be conscious of
what his predecessors have written, for if he is, he will be more

13.

likely to be a good poet. This is too simple, in a way, for Eliot
supposes that each new poem modifies all the poetry of the past,
which somehow constitutes "an organic whole". How can this can
occur, how Catullus, for example, is modified by Marvell is not
entirely clear: we know, however, that when we have enjoyed some of
Ezra Pound's satirical poems, we are better able to appreciate
certain Latin poets; and when we know Eliot's "Geronition", we are
better able to understand some of late Elizabethan dramatists.

Or perhaps the notion of the modification of all literature by each
new literary work can be stated in this way: every time a new church
is seen, every existing church has a somewhat different look to the
beholder, and every new kind of painting modifies our experience of
all previous paintings. The point can be pressed too far; it is not
clear that there is a necessity that this should occur and that
the entire art should be modified. For by the same argument, every
event would change the character of all previous events; but an
explosion in the Milky Way or a herdsman who bites his nails in
Thibet does not really alter universal history. But the important
thing is to recognize that the new literary work must exist in a
context constituted by old works of literature; and the poet gains
by being conscious of what has already been done; he gains in the
very act of writing his poem.

A consciousness of the past involves a knowledge of its
ideas and beliefs, and if this serves no other purpose, it helps
the poet to be free of deception about his own ideas and beliefs.
Such a consciousness may help a poet more positively, and we know
very well how much Dante was aided by his knowledge of medieval
philosophy, a knowledge which gave him a coherent and usable frame-
work of ideas. In comparison, we know that Shakespeare had only

14.

a makeshift grasp of Montaigne and of Stoicism through Seneca to serve
as generalizations about the nature of existence. Its Eliot observes,
this does not make Dante superior to Shakespeare. But it may be said
that Dante's task was made less difficult by his good fortune in know-
ing Aquinas. And Donne is another example, for he was able to use
only the fragments of medieval philosophy, and not a coherent system.
And Blake marks an extreme, the extreme of the poet, as we have seen,
who is thrown back upon his own resources or upon Swedenborg for a
philosophy. The consequence is that his poetry suffers very much.

To return to the concern with the observation of human
behavior and insight into the strength and sickness of the human soul:
here it is necessary to distinguish between an author's interest in
the transient and the permanent aspects of his experience. In a com-
paratively stable period, the author tends to concentrate "upon the
common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the
(differences"; while the nineteenth century novelists, who lived in an
unstable and quickly changing age, "are analysts of the individual soul
(S.E.p.178)
As it is found in a particular phase of society". The transient aspects
of human behavior and the permanent ones are both necessary aspects
of the great work. Thus a stanza of Tennyson is cited and praised
because it presents "a universal emotion in what could only be an
"english town". The local quality is just as important as the permanent
one; and as we saw, one of Milton's defects is the absence of "the sense
of a time and a place".

Here too we may connect the concern with human conduct
with an interest in dramatic quality. One of the characters in a
dialogue on dramatic poetry remarks that all great poetry is dram-
atic: "We are human beings and in what are we more interested than
in human actions and human attitudes? Even when he assaults, and with

15.

supreme mastery, the divine mystery, does not Dante engage us in
the question of the human attitude toward this mystery--which is
(S.E., p.38)
dramatic?" Here the use of dramatic is too broad, as can be seen
if we substitute for dramatic, narrative, which may be said to be
equally occupied with human actions and with human attitudes. So
too we may say that some lyric poetry, since it is concerned only
with expressing an emotion, is far from being dramatic in the way that
a scene in a play or an episode in a story is? But the question is
not that of a precision of terms, but of an elucidation of the
quality which makes for the best kind of poetry; and if we dissociate
the term, dramatic, from any connection with the theatre, if we
connect it with the sentence already quoted--"the very greatest poets
set you before real men talking, carry you on in real events moving"--
the quality which Eliot haeks when he speaks of the dramatic becomes
clear. It should also be clear that not all great poetry is dramatic
in this sense: there are neither great men, nor great events in
Lucretius. A further elucidation appears if we connect this emphasis
upon the dramatic with that upon what is actual, and both with
a remark in a Criterion commentary: "The greatest deficiency in most
of the contemporary verse which comes to my attention is the lack
of any dramatic intent, which might help to correct its imperfectly
conceived philosophies and imperfectly objectified emotions". The
function of the dramatic intent can perhaps be glossed in this way:
the ideas and the emotions of a poet corrected when they are
conected with a definite character in a definite situation. The ideas
may be wrong, and the emotions may be unjustified; their justification
can be found by attaching them to character and situation; and then
it is more likely that wrongness will make itself clear to the poet.
This is only one more way of saying that the poet must find
an objective correlative.

an objective correlative.

16.

a set of objects adequate to evoke the emotions and ideas he wishes to express. Here we can increase the exactness with which we speak of an objective correlative. To find an objective correlative for an emotion is to dramatize it in Eliot's sense of dramatic. For an emotion or an idea is expressed when it located in the being of a definite character who, in a given situation, feels such emotions or conceives of such ideas. But we see too how this emphasis on the dramatic may be misleading as well as valuable. For Eliot speaks of "the intense dramatic value of Shakespeare's songs at the points where they occur in the plays". This dramatic value makes Shakespeare's songs superior to Campion's lyrics, and not an inherent lyric superiority. Here the term, dramatic, is being used in its primary 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 criticism appears to make progress only through a continual over-emphasis and distortion of crucial terms. Thus it was sad but perhaps necessary that Eliot should have extended the meaning of dramatic; the over-emphasis was necessary to correct the crucial 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 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 rehearsal, 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 PORTRAIT OF A LADY"

In this, the second ambitious dramatic monologue of his first
book, the poet deals with a subject of great complication, and a
subject which is directly connected with the view of polite society
expressed in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock".

Here the protagonist is a young man who is not, like Prufrock,
afraid of making love, but afraid of the gestures made in his
direction by a lady of ambiguous age. She belongs to polite society
like some of the ladies Prufrock encounters. But her politeness
is a matter of surface, though the surface is never removed. Be-
neath her phrases is a barbarous effort to create an amorous
involvement the young man has not in the least encouraged by
merely coming to tea.

The chief point of the poem -- and it is expressed in the
irony and ambiguity of the title -- is that her barbarous effort
is made by means of the best and most valuable qualities of human
beings. She uses friendship. She uses sympathy and pity. They
are irresistible and undefeated weapons. And the young man is
left defenseless because he has a profound sensitivity to friendship,
sympathy and in the end righteousness itself.

The young man is wholly aware of her vicious use of the virtues
of civilized life. Yet his sensitivity is such that he is sorry
for her nonetheless, for he sees that, in addition to her aggressive-
ness, she is suffering from loneliness and the sadness of getting
older. On his three visits to her, the protagonist shifts back
and forth between his resentment and his sympathy. When her use

2.

of the virtues becomes too marked and too plain, he recoils and
holds himself back and says to himself, "this is as I had expected".
But he thinks too of her plight and he thinks of the possibility
of her death: "Well! what if she should die some afternoon?" And
he asks whether his ideas are right or wrong, whether he has a
genuine righteousness in himself; and he confesses to himself
that he does not know "doubtful, for a while/ Not knowing what to
feel or if I understand". His real plight is a lack of a set of
attitudes and manners upon which to fall back; and the comparison
with James' "Portrait Of A Lady" cannot be avoided, for Isabel
Archer, James' true lady, also knows that Gilbert Osmond viciously
uses her goodness against her and that she cannot defend herself
without becoming like him.

We should note here, once again, the use of the actual detail
which, if it is sufficiently true and relevant to all else in the
poem, becomes an inexhaustible symbol, a symbol that is to say
which, perhaps far beyond the poet's intention, expands in the
mind as we reread the poem. Consider the newspaper which the
protagonist reads in the park and the items which he finds in
it: this is the kind of an action which for the naturalist would
hardly be significant beyond itself. But here the protagonist
reads that an English countess has gone upon the stage, which is
another instance of the decay of manners and of polite society
typified less crudely but as truly by the lady who is visited by

3.

the protagonist. And then there is the use of flowers throughout
this poem as a symbol; it is a use which, especially of hyacinths
and roses, will continue throughout all of Eliot's poetry. The
lady twists lilacs in her hands as she talks, which is significant
of her own waning hold on youth and love. The young man recalls
the smell of hyacinths in a garden. The cultural symbol too recurs,
and in this poem it is Chopin as in "The Love Song Of J. Alfred
Prufrock", it was Michelangelo; and here it is Juliet as in the
previous poem it was Hamlet. The difference and the relevance to
the particular poem shows how far these allusions are from being
merely literary.

What the lady has to say, her doctrine, so to speak, is full
of profound truth. She speaks of the gulf between human beings
as in "The Waste Land" we are to hear of how each is locked in
the prison of the self, unable to communicate with other human
beings. She speaks of how much friendship means to her and implies
that there is little in life apart from friendship, or all other
goods are hardly worth much, if one does not have friends. Without
friends, life is a nightmare, she says in French. And she declares
too, with the same truth, that life is wonderful and youthful,
after all.

And it is the very truth of what she says, as it is the
genuineness of her plight, which makes the young man who is the
protagonist feel guilty: "How can I make a cowardly amends/ For
what she has said to me?" When he returns a third time, after

["4.", "an absence and just before he is about to depart for Europe, she makes him feel as if he had climbed the stair \"on hands and knees,\" she and then she continues and goes too far. As soon as she makes an explicit demand upon him, he feels free of the moral burden she has imposed on him. She suggests that he write to her from abroad. He stiffens, for it is just such an unwarranted and inappropriate request that he has expected. And then she goes on, -- the passage implies that she has seen that she has gone too far and must return to pathos and an expression of dismay -- to wonder why there has been no intimate friendship between them. This causes in him a return of pity and a sense of being unable to make the right response. He smiles falsely, and feels, as he says, like one who has suddenly and unexpectedly seen his face, and his facial expression in the looking-glass.", "He says, \"I am so sorry, my love. Can you not be more kind and helpful? You have been a great help to me, and I want to be your friend. Can you not be my friend?\" And then he says, \"Your face is beautiful, your eyes are beautiful, your expression is beautiful.\" And then he adds, \"I want to be your friend.\" And then he says, \"My love, I am your friend.\" And then he goes on, \"I want to be your friend.\" And then he says, \"My love

"The Portrait Of A Lady"

In this, the second ambitious dramatic monologue of his first book, the poet deals with a subject of great complication, and a subject which is directly connected with the view of polite society expressed in "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Here the protagonist is a young man who is not, like Prufrock, afraid of making love, but, afraid of the gestures made in his direction by a lady of ambiguous age. She belongs to a society like some of the Ladies Prufrock encounters. But her politeness is a matter of surface, though the surface is never removed. Despite her phrases is a barbarous effort to create an enormous, baroque involvement the young man has not in the least encouraged by merely coming to tea.

The chief point of the poem--and it is expressed in the irony and ambiguity of the title--is that her barbarous effort is made by means of the best and most valuable qualities of human beings. She uses friendship. She uses sympathy and pity. They are irresistible and undefeated weapons. And the young man is left defenseless because he has a profound sensitivity to friendship, sympathy and in the end righteousness itself.

The young man is wholly aware of her vicious use of the virtues of civilized life. Yet his sensitivity is such that he is sorry for her nonetheless, for he sees that, in addition to her aggressiveness, she is suffering loneliness and the sadness of becoming middle-aged. On his three visits to her, the protagonist shifts back and forth between his resentment and his sympathy. When her use of the virtues becomes too marked and too plain, he recoils and holds himself back and says to himself, "this is as I had expected". But he thinks too of her plight and he thinks of the possibility of her death: "Well! what if she should die some afternoon?" And he asks

2.

whether his ideas are right or wrong, whether he does a genuine
righteousness in himself; and he confesses to himself that he
does not know "doubtful, for a while/ Not knowing what to feel
or if I understand". His real plight is a lack of a set of attitudes
and manners upon which to fall back; and the comparison with
James' "Portrait Of A Lady" cannot be avoided, for Isabel Archer,
James' true lady, also knows that Gilbert Osmond viciously uses
her goodness against her and that she cannot defend herself without
becoming like him.

We should note here, an elsewhere, the use of the
actual detail which, if it is sufficiently true and relevant
to all else in the poem, becomes an inexhaustible symbol, a symbol
that is to say which, perhaps far beyond the poet's intention,
expands in the mind as we reread the poem. Consider the newspaper
which the protagonist reads in the park and the items which he
finds in it; this is the kind of an action which, in the naturalist
would hardly be significant beyond itself. But here the protagonist
an English
reads that a countess has gone upon the stage, which is
another instance of the decay of manners and of pplite society
typified less crudely but as truly by the lady who is visited by
the protagonist. And then there is the use of flowers throughout
this poem as a symbol; it is a use which, especially of hyacinths
and roses, will continue throughout all of Eliot's poetry. The
lady twists lilacs in her hands as she talks, which is significant
of her own waning hold on youth and love. The young man recalls
the smell of hyacinths in a garden. The cultural symbol too recurs,
and in this poem it is Chopin as in "The Love Song" of J.Alfred
Prufrock", it was Michelangelo; and here it is Juliet as in the
previous poem it was Hamlet. The difference and the relevance
to the particular poem shows how far these allusions are from

"The Portrait Of A Lady"

In this, the second ambitious dramatic monologue of his first book, the poet deals with a subject of great complication, and a subject which is directly connected with the view of polite society expressed in "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Here the protagonist is a young man who is not, like Prufrock, afraid of making love, but afraid of the gestures made in his direction by a lady of ambiguous age. She is of polite society like some of the Ladies Prufrock encounters. But her politeness is a matter of surface, though the surface is never removed. Beneath her phrases is a barbarous effort to create an emotional involvement the young man has not in the least encouraged in merely coming to tea.

The young man is wholly aware of her vicious use of the virtues of civilized life. Yet his sensitivity is such that he sorry for her nonetheless, for he sees that, in addition to her aggressiveness, she is suffering loneliness and the sadness of becoming middle-aged. On his three visits to her, the protagonist shifts back and forth between his resentment and his sympathy. "When her use of the virtues becomes too marked and too plain, he recoils and holds himself back and says to himself, "this is as I had expected". But he thinks too of her plight and he thinks of the possibility of her death: "Well! what if she should die some afternoon?" And he asks

2.

whether his ideas are right or wrong, whether he is a genuine
righteousness in himself; and he confesses to himself that he
does not know "doubtful, for a while/ Not knowing what to feel
or if I understand". His real plight is a lack of a set of attitudes
and manners upon which to fall back; and the comparison with
James' "Portrait Of A Lady" cannot be avoided, for Isabel Archer,
James' true lady, also knows that Gilbert Osmond viciously uses
her goodness against her and that she cannot defend herself without
becoming like him.

We should note here, as elsewhere, the use of the
actual detail which, if it is sufficiently true and relevant
to all else in the poem, becomes an inexhaustible symbol, a symbol
that is to say which, perhaps far beyond the poet's intention,
expands in the mind as we reread the poem. Consider the newspaper
which the protagonist reads in the park and the items which he
finds in it: this is the kind of an action which in the naturalist
would hardly be significant beyond itself. But here the protagonist
reads that an English countess has gone upon the stage, which is
another instance of the decay of manners and of polite society
typified less crudely but as truly by the lady who is visited by
the protagonist. And then there is the use of flowers throughout
this poem as a symbol; it is a use which, especially of hyacinths
and roses, will continue throughout all of Eliot's poetry. The
lady twists lilacs in her hands as she talks, which is significant
of her own waning hold on youth and love. The young man recalls
the smell of hyacinths in a garden. The cultural symbol too recurs,
and in this poem it is Chopin as in "The Love Song of J.Alfred
Prufrock", it was Michelangelo; and here it is Juliet as in the
previous poem it was Hamlet. The difference and the relevance
to the particular poem shows how far these allusions are from

3.
from being merely literary.

What the lady has to say, her doctrine, so to speak,
is full of profound truth. She speaks of the gulf between human
beings as in "The Waste Land", we are to hear of how each is locked
in the prison of the self, unable to communicate with other human
beings. She speaks of how much friendship means to her and implies
that either there is little in life apart from friendship, or all
all other goods are hardly worth much, if one does not have friends.
Without friends, life is a night mare, she says in French. And she
declares too, with the same truth, that life is wonderful and youth-
ful, after all,

And it the very truth of what she says, as it is
the genuineness of her plight, which makes the young man who is
the protagonist feel guilty: "How can I make a cowardly amends/
For what she has said to me?" When he returns a third time, after
an absence and just before he is about to depart for Europe, she
makes him feeling as he had climbed the stair "on hands and knows",
and then she continues and she goes too far. As soon as she makes
an explicit demand upon him, he feels free of the moral burden
she has imposed him. She suggests that he write to her from abroad.
He stiffens, for it is just such an unwarranted and inappropriate
request that he has expected. And then she goes on, --the passage
implies that she has seen that she has gone too far and must
return to pathos and an expression of dismay--to wonder why there
has been no intimate friendship between them. It is causes in him
a return of pity and a sense of being unable to make the right
response. He smiles falsely, and feels, as he says, like one who
has suddenly and unexpectedly seen his face, and his facial ex-
pression in the looking-glass.

/Portrait Of A Lady/

Beneath the decay of manners which is figured in
the reference, seen in a newspaper, of a Polish countess who has
gone on the stage, is a sense of goodness and a sense of guilt
which is powerful as feeling and yet lacks support. "Are these
ideas right or wrong?" the protagonist asks himself. So too he
might ask what ideas are right or wrong, and in what rightness
and wrongness consist.

What the lady has to say, her doctrine, so to speak,
is full of profound truth. She speaks of the gulf between human
beings as in "The Waste Land," we are to hear of how each is locked
in the prison of the self, unable to communicate with other human
beings. She speaks of how much friendship means to her and implies
that either there is little in life apart from friendship, or all
all other goods are hardly worth much, if one does not have friends.
Without friends, life is a night mare, she says in French. And she
declares too, with the same truth, that life is wonderful and youth-
ful, after all,

And it the very truth of what she says, as it is
the genuineness of her plight, which makes the young man who is
the protagonist feel guilty: How can I make a cowardly amends/
For what she has said to me?" Then he returns a third time, after
an absence and just before he is about to depart for Europe, she
makes him feeling as he had climbed the stair "on hands and knees",
and then she continues and she goes too far. As soon as she makes
an explicit demand upon him, he feels free of the moral burden
she has imposed him. She suggests that he write to her from abroad.
He stiffens, for it is just such an unwarranted and inappropriate
request that he has expected. And then she goes on, --the passage
implies that she has seen that she has gone too far and must
return to paths we had not intended. An expression of dismay--to wonder why there
has been unprudent friendship between them. This causes in him
a return of pity and a sense of being unable to make the right
response. He smiles fakely, and feels, as he says, like one who
has suddenly and unexpectedly seen his face, and his facial ex-
pression in the looking-glass.

In "Portrait Of A Lady", the second ambitious dramatic monologue in his first book, Eliot deals with a subject of great complication, and one united underground with the view of polite society expressed in "The Love Song Of J.Alfred Prufrock".

the young man

Here the protagonist is not concerned with his fear of making love, but he is afraid of the gestures made in his direction by a lady of ambiguous age, but unmistakable aggressiveness.

She is of polite society, too, and of a politeness which hardly falters. But the politeness is a matter of surface and means. Beneath her phrases, there is a barbarous effort to create an emotional involvement.

And the very means of her effort are the best qualities and the most valuable in human life. She uses friendship; she uses sympathy and pity; and the young man is left defenseless because he has a profound concern with righteousness.

Yet, if the protagonist is not at all unaware of her vicious use of goodness and all the qualities which partake of goodness, he nonetheless sees that he is impitable wholly apart from her representation of her loneliness:

> Well! what if she should die some afternoon,
> Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
> Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
> With the smoke coming down above the house tops;
> Doubtful, for a while
> Not knowing what to feel or if I understand

This lack of a set of feelings and attitudes to fall back upon is his real dilemma. He knows that she is using righteousness viciously just as Isabella Archer, James true lady, knows that Gilbert Osmond also uses her goodness against her.

The Wit Poems

Wit is a constant and an important element in Eliot's poetry. It appears in a pure and unmixed form chiefly in the his second volume of verse, in the poems written with quatrains which have to do with Sweeney, Pipit, the Church, Burbank and Bleistern. The same kind of poetic usages recur through these poems: a mockery of the grand style by means of ironic classical references, a use of the rhyme to cut in/cleverness (as in the flicker and snicker and modern object rhymes of "Prufrock" and "Portrait Of A Lady"); a use of terms which are intellectual, or metaphysical, or theological, and, above all, a use of a human opposition, the opposition of two different kinds of people. In general, the tone is that of that anguish, and anger; the attitude is one which may perhaps be termed "unfortunate superiority. a special sense Then too there is an important sense in which these poems ought to be entitled *vers de société*: they deal with social types and the fundamental point of view is based upon a definite station in modern society.

The use of the grand style is perhaps the least/important part/of these elements; This use helps to set the tone, in one poem it makes possible a brilliant ending, and it gives a context of gener- ality and a width of reference to the poem. Shus,in "Sweeney Erect", the reference to "a cavernous waste Shore", and to the deserted Ariadne prepares the way for Sweeney use and then neglect of the woman to whom he made love; to this added another classical comparison, the comparison of Sweeneyand his inamorata to Mausicaa and Polypheme. And in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales", a like contrast of Swee ney, who is not undone/ by women, to the great Agamemnon, who is, makes a break of lightning illuminate the shurdid cafe scene.

Rhyme functions very well in such an instance as the one in which the whole who has tried to sit on Sweeney's knees falls, over- turns a *coffee-cup*, and then yawns and draws a stocking *up*. The emphasis

to them.

2/

made possible through rhyme is contagious, if contagion is needed, for
the same emphasis spreads to the diction. Thus, when the whole falls
down, we are prepared for the sharp and yet prosaic verb in the line,
"Reorganized upon the floor", just as in "Prufrock", we encounter
the illumination of metaphor in the unexpected verb of the line,
"My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin".

Rhyme sharpens and defines the cleverness and the irony
when one of the girls who are trying to interest Sweeney in the
cafe turns to the dish upon the table: here the first rhyme word
is, withdraws: "Rachel nee Rabinovitch tears at the grapes with
murderous claws". Perhaps to say murderous claws would seem excessive, were it not for the fact of rhyme. In any case, the harshness of meaning is emphasized at precisely the point where it is hardest by the rhyme.

The irony and the wit make severe and rich use of abstract
and intellectual terms in such an instance as the description of
the Incarnation of Christ as "superfetation of to ev", which is to
say a redundancy or a double pregnancy of Being, as such. The poet's
awareness of what he is doing shows itself in a passage which has
a different primary intention. Speaking of Grishkin, whose bust gives
promise of pneumatic bliss, he says that even "the Abstract Entities/
Circumambulate her charm". So we may say by extension that here the
poet makes the abstract entities perform pratfalls, throw custard pies,
and utter epigrams; and we are told about the effort to keep one's
metaphysics warm, as if they were cold feet: which they undoubtedly
are at times.

"Hispers Of Immortality" in particular states a distinction
between two kinds of human beings, those who are prepossessed by the
idea of death and those who are not, a distinction which corresponds
to other important traits of character, and perhaps even gives rise
to them.

LOVE AS A SUBJECT

The extent to which Eliot's poems are concerned with love directly can hardly be emphasized too much. Prufrock is unable to make love to women of his own class because of shyness and self-consciousness. The protagonists of other poems in the first volume are men laughed at by women or rejected; there is a deserted girl who seems like a body deserted by the soul. In the second volume, an old man has lost his ability to make love, unlike another character, Sweeney, who in making love is unable to satisfy his girl and who evades the plotting whores, and such women as bring great heroes --even Agamemnon--to defeat.

In "The Waste Land" the theme of love as a failure, and a frustration is again uppermost. Two lovers return from "The hyacinth garden" and the women is overcome with despair. A lady becomes hysterical in her boudoir becomes of boredom and because her lover is separated from her in spirit, although he is seated in the same room and regards her. A cockney woman in a pub gossips about another cockney women who has been made ill by contraceptive pills --to avoid the consequences of love. A Greek merchant proposes homosexual love to the protagonist. A typist is seduced by a small house agent's clerk, although she is without desire or interest in him. On the Thames bank three girls undone by love rehearse the sins of the young men who have seduced them. And in the last part of the poem, the impossibility of love, the gulfl between one human being and another, is stated in reply to the imperative, *Give*, which is to say, give one self to another in love; and this separation is figured in the allusion to Coriolanus, the type of those who are separated from love by pride.

So too, in "The Hollow Men", the hollow men who incapable of making love because there is a shadow which falls between the desire and the spasm, and lips "that would kiss" can merely pray to broken stone. Sweeney returns to affirm that there is nothing in love, but copulation, and this, like birth and death, is a great boredom.

2/

Sweeney, in his first appearance, in the poem entitled "Sweeney
Erect", is capable of making love, but not of satisfying the
woman to whom he has made love. He leaves her "pushing the frame-
work of the bed/ And clawing at the pillow slip" as he goes to
shave, unaware or indifferent as to her having had any satisfaction,
and the poet's ironic comment is that Sweeney "knows the female
temperament". In the second volume, too, we have the character
named Burbank, who in Venice meets the Princess Volupine, but
who is incapable of making successful love to her: "the God Her-
cules/ Had left him who had loved him well". Burbank is perhaps
a version of Prufrock. Where he fails, however, Bleistein, a Jew,
and Sir Ferdinand Klein, another Jew, succeeds. By contrast, in one
of the poems in French, the protagonist harks back to a childhood
memory of love. "I tickled her to make her laugh. I experienced
an instant of power and delirium". It is the loss of this power
and delirium which is the chief experience of the characters who make
love. Either they suffer from what the psychoanalysts term, "psychic
impotence", or they make love in such a way as to leave the
lady unmoved, so that she puts a record on the gramphone after
and sensitive
the episode is over. The characters who are impotent are set in
contrast to the characters who are potent and insensitive. Grishkin
has "a friendly bust",

which gives promise of "pneumatic bliss";
but those who are unlike her are possessed by death; they see
"the skull beneath the skin" and "thought" ulings to their lusts
and luxuries, luxuries presumable in the Elizabethan sense.

Again, Sweeney is not taken in by the ladies, the nightingales,
the whores or the Jewesses, who tear "at the grapes with mudder-
our claws". Agamemnon, like Burbank, is undone; he is struck a
deadly blow; he is ruined by the ladies.

3/

In "Gerontion", the difficulty is stated with directness:

I have lost my sight sense, hearing, taste, and touch,
How shuld I use them for your closer contact?

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since what is kept must be adulterated?

And the notes of age and of dryness, which are to be use again in
the later poems, are connected with this failure at love.

In "Sweeney Agonistes", we encounter Sweeney again, de-
claring the boredom of birth, copulation, and death. At both ex-
tremes of character, that of Prufrock and that of Sweeney, love is
found to be unsatisfactory. The natural life--which is figured in
the image of an egg {"You see this egg/ Well that's life one a croc-
odile isle)--is such that one can say of it, "Once is enough", and
the implication, as of Sophocles, is that it is even better not to
be born at all. For even Sweeney says that Life is death and even
Doris,his inamorata, says , "I'd just as soon be dead". And another
difficulty about love, according to Sweeney, who is not one to take
things too hard, as that "Any man has to, needs to, wants/ Once in
a lifetime do a girl in".

Then too, as "The Waste Land" underlying symbolism
has to do with fertility rites for an impotent king, so in "Four
Quartets", it is "the moment at the rose garden", the moment of
love, which evades human beings, so that, at the climax of the poem,
the poet writes:

"Who then devised the torment? Love
Love is the unfamiliar name.

And this line may well be taken as an epitome of Eliot's poetry. But
if the difficulty of love, and the failure of love in modern life
were merely a rare or special experience, if the poet were not able
to present its connections and its relations with the rest of ex-

LOVE AS A SUBJECT

The extent to which Eliot's poems are concerned with love directly can hardly be emphasized too much. Prufrock is unable to make love to women of his own class because of shyness and self-consciousness. The protagonist of other poems in the first volume are men laughed at by women or rejected; three is a deserted girl who seems like a body deserted by the soul. In the second volume, an old man has lost his ability to make love, unlike another character, Sweeney, who in making love is unable to satisfy his girl and who evades the plotting whores, and such women as bring great heroes--even Agamemnon--to defeat.

In "The Waste Land" the theme of love as a failure, and a frustration is again uppermost. Two lovers return from "The hyacinth garden" and the women is overcome with despair. A lady becomes hysterical in her boudoir becomes of boredom and because her lover is separated from her in spite of, although he is seated in the same room and regards her. A cockney woman in a pub gossips about another cockney woman who has been made ill by contraceptive pills /-to avoid the consequences of love. A Greek merchant proposes homosexual love to the protagonist. A typist is seduced by a small house agent's clerk, although she is without desire or interest in him. On the Thames bank three girls undone by love rehearse the sins of the young men who have seduced them. And in the last part of the poem, the impossibility of love, the gulf between one human being and another, is stated in reply to the imperative, *Give*, which is to say, give one self to another in love; and this separation is figured in the allusion to Coriolanus, the type of those who are separated from love by privilege.

2/

Sweeney, in his first appearance, in the poem entitled "Sweeney
Erect", is capable of making love, but not of satisfying the
woman to whom he has made love. He leaves her after completing the frame-
work of the bed/ And拔ing at the pillow slip" as he goes to
shave, unaware or indifferent as to her having had any satisfaction,
and the poet's ironic comment is that Sweeney "knows the female
temperament". In the second volume, too, we have the character
named Burbank, who do Venice meets the Princess Volupine, but
who is incapable of making successful love to her: "the God Her-
dules/ Had left him who had loved him well". Burbank is perhaps
a version of Prufrock. Where he fails, however, Einstein, a Jew,
and Sir Ferdinand Klein, another Jew, succeeds. By contrast, in one
of the poems in French, the protagonist marks back to a childhood
memory of love. "I tickle her to make her laugh. I experienced
an instant of power and delirium". It is the loss of this power
and delirium which is the chief experience of the characters who make
love. Whether they suffer from what the psychoanalysts term, "psychic
impotence", or they make love in such a way as to leave the
lady unmoved, so that she puts a record on the gramophone after
and sensitive
the episode is over. The characters who are impotent are set in
contrast to the characters who are potent and insensitive. Grishkin
has "a friendly bust",

which gives promise of "pneumatic bliess";
but these who are unlike her are possessed by death; they see
"the skull beneath the skin" and "thought" swinges to their lusts
and luxuries, luxuries presumable in the Elizabethan sense.
Again, Sweeney is not taken in by the ladies, the nightingales,
the whores or the Jewesses, who tear "at the grapes with mudder-
ous claws". Agamemnon, like Burbank, is undone; he is struck a
deadly blow; he is ruined by the ladies.

3/

I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it
Since
When what is kept must be adulterated?

And the notes of age and ofidity, which are to be use again in
the later poems, are connected with this failure at love.

In "Sweeney Agonistes", we encounter Sweeney again, de-
claring the boredom of birth, copulation, and death. At both ex-
tremes of chara ter, that of Prufrock and that of Sweeney, love is
found to be unsatisfactory. The natural life--which is figured in
the image of an egg ("You see this egg/ Well that's life on a croc-
odile isle)--is such that one can say of it, "Once is enough", and
the implication, as of Sophocles, is that it is even better not to
be born at all. For even Sweeney says that Life is death and even
Doris,haysinamorata, says, "I'd just as soon be dead". And another
difficulty about love, according to Sweeney, who is not one to take
things too hard, as that "Any man has to, needs to, wants/ Once in
a lifetime do a girl in".

Then too, as "The Waste Land" underlying symbolism
has to do with fertility rites for an impotent king, so in "Four
Quartets", it is "the moment as the rose garden", the moment of
love, which evades/human beings, so that, at the climax of the poem,
the poet writes:

Love is the unfamiliar name.

144

SEPARATION AS A SUBJECT

Since love is often difficult, the consequence is solitude. Or perhaps the reverse is true, failure in love is often the consequence of the inevitable separation of human beings. Or perhaps love and solitude are both what they are because of the character of social life in modern society. (We do not have to decide which explanation is true, for the aim of poetry is not to arrive at an explanation, but at a more intimate acquaintance of the subject.) And in Eliot's poetry, we come to an intimate acquaintance with separation on several different levels of experience.

Prufrock sees lonely men smoking at their windows, and he himself suffers from loneliness. This is not the simple absence of social life. Prufrock has a social life, and he makes many visits. But he suffers from an incapacity to enjoy the social life which is available to him. Personal defect is involved in this, for some human beings are unable to participate with happiness in any social life. But the nature of the social life may be equally a cause.

More is involved, however, than personal defect, such as self-consciousness, or social shortcoming, such as a falsity and shallowness of manners and morals. Separation is seen as inherent in the nature of reality, and the protagonist of "The Waste Land" when commanded to sympathize with other human beings, answers that each one is locked in the prison of his own being, a prison in which each one is locked by the very act of thought. A philosophical problem of knowledge and existence (which begins with Descartes) in the background of many passages about separation. And perhaps Eliot's acquaintance with this doctrine goes back to his study of philosophy at Harvard, when

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 lowliness. 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;
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 also true 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 intellectual 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 New Judgement Of Poetry

F.M.Bradley may be responsible for Eliot's sense of the profound relativity of experience (the earth as flat and the earth as round). It seems more likely, here as in his sympathy for the poetry of Jules Laforgue, that a basis of quality of temperament and spirit is the real beginning of this functioning of his mind.

He says that each age must have its own translations of the classics. And he is saying the same thing, really, when he remarks that each age must have a new evaluation of the poets and their poetry. Johnson, Coleridge, and Matthew Arnold are Eliot's predecessors in the comprehensive criticism which revises for the new age the history of poetry and the comparative value of the poems. He is superior to them in a number of respects, in that he is in possession of their own acts of revaluation; in that he has more information at his command, and in that he is held back, as if Athena were at his side, by the historical sense which was just beginning to make itself felt when Matthew Arnold flourished. This historical sense is the same thing in reference to poetry as a sense of the relativity of experience to particular conditions is to everything we may encounter.

It is but natural that a critic who is also a poet should display in his criticism the same interests and motives as his poetry does. By bearing in mind and bringing forward what has already been said about Eliot's poetry, the reader will have at hand the essential principles involved in Eliot's criticism of poetry.

Thus Swinburne's poetry is praised for the virtue of verbalism, for the cultivation of language for its own sake, or, to say the same thing in a third way, for the use of words as surface and texture

2.

separated or abstracted as far as is possible from the reference
of words to the experience of things. This praise is a kind of
damnation, except the Swinburne when compared to bad poets is
said to have accomplished this verbalism with purity where the
bad poet was at times merely verbal, at times merely concerned
with experience, and never satisfactory in either tendency in
the uses of language. The dmanation of the praise is expressed
by comparing Swinburne to Joseph Conrad and James Joyce who
unlike Swinburne were trying to digest new objects, new feelings,
and new experiences into language. The emphasis on new ness is
perhaps misleading. The important thing is that Conrad and Joyce
are using words in order to grasp experience; they are not using
words merely for their own sake.

Blake is praised for this reason too. One of his poems
expressed "the naked observation"; another, "the naked insight".
In both instances, the word contains the thing; the poem has
value as a use of language, but it has more value as a grasp of
experience. And this kind of poetry is more important to us than
poetry which is merely a pleasant exercise in the texture of
langyage.

The naked observation and the naked insight are made
possible by the peculiar and unpleasant honesty of the great
poet. This honesty, says Eliot, never exists apart from great
technical skill. Perhaps to say never is an excess, but never-
the less honesty as a quality of mind brings us back to a sense
of the actual and to the effort to put the actual into words.

3.

Milton, however, is defective in his sense of the actual. What is lacking is the feeling on the reader's part that the words have to do with a definite time and place, whatever else they concern. Milton is artificial and conventional, while truly great poetry gives real persons/in a given and place. Tennyson is praised chiefly for his great technical skill, for having the finest ear of any English poet. But Eliot's concern with the actual shows itself here too, when he singles out a stanza which is the description "of what could only be an English street". And again, Hopkins is said to be verbal in that very often his poems go forward without a real development of thought and feeling, which is nothing other than a real progress in the assimilation of the actual into words.

The emphasis upon the actuality embodied in a poem may go back in the history of poetry to the doctrine that poetry is the imitation of life. Yet Eliot does not involve himself in the procedure which would begin by adopting this abstraction of criticism and then applying to particular cases. On the contrary, what occurs is that the critic, in seeking to explain to himself the reason why he finds one poem more valuable than another, returns repeatedly to the extent to which the poem had taken hold of actual experience and by means of language brought it closer to the reader. And the critic shows his freedom from the narrowness involved in focussing upon any one aspect or quality of poetry when he praises such poets as Marlowe and Jonson, Marlowe because of his caricature of the actual and Jonson because he created an artificial world, a world which may be said to be non-Euclidean, that is to say,

4.

The same principles are involved when we are told that Falstaff
has a third dimension (that is to say, he exists in a Euclidean
world), while Massinger's Sir Giles Overreach has not. This is
true two of the principles in back of the judgement that the
images of Beaumont and Fletcher are "cut and slightly withered
flowers", as compared with those of Shakespeare, Donne, Webster,
Middleton, and Tourneur, which are actual in that they have
"tentacular roots" which reach down to "the deepest terrors and
desires".

As we have seen, a sense of the actual must be rooted
in a sense of the age, a sense of the present. This brings us
to the value of authors like Flaubert and Ezra Pound whose works
are sometimes "positive documents of sensibility, compact of
the experience in a certain time and place".

An age, however, has many transient aspects. In an
age when society is comparatively stable, the poet and the
dramatist can fix his scrupulous upon "the permanent qualities
of human nature. And when he has genuine insight into that
which is permanent and not transient, then the actuality in
his work is [permanently important]."

By returning to Blake and the way in which he was
defective as a poet, we can take hold of the unity of sensib-
ility which is another reason for great poetry. There may
be a separation between a poet's intellect and his sensibility.
His ideas about the general character of experience and his
beliefs may be different or unrelated to the way in which

5.

he takes hold of experience as a living human being from day to day. This separation existed in Blake and that is the reason for his search for religious belief. The fault was not his, but that of his age and society. On the contrary, the metaphysical poets enjoyed a unity of sensibility. Donne felt thought and thought feelings; he had a sensibility which was capable of "devouring any kind of experience".

It is clear that to have a good many ideas about the nature of things may be separate, in some minds, from having a very intense and vivid sense of the things to which ideas must in the end be relevant. This is often the fault of the metaphysician and the poet. And one reason is that an idea often refers to a possibility and not an actuality. In prose, Eliot says, one may be concerned with the ideal; but in poetry one must deal with actuality. And if one deals with the ideal in poetry, one may say, one must deal with it as something in relationship to what is actual. This leads us to the failing of poets like Browning at times and Tennyson, who/were concerned with the ideal in their poetry, but who merely rumminated about it. At the other extreme is a poet like Keats who may be said to have a rich sense of particular things which goes far beyond his capacity to have general ideas about his experience.

When we bear in mind that a symbol is that which is at once particular and universal, two crossed pieces of wood and the Cross itself, we see how necessary to the poet is a knowledge of particular things, on the one hand, and a knowledge of ideas, on the other. The idea is what makes possible the transformation of the particular thing into a symbol. A shortcoming in either respect is the reason for some onesidedness in a poet.

The Objective Correlative

Experience as lived through is not the same thing as experience when it is presented through the medium of some art.

Yet there is a common denominator between them: there are resemblances and the contrivance of seeming identities and equivalences.

Yet there the difference is very important too; if there were no difference, what would be the use of the art? What would be the sense of giving one's mind and art to it, when life is available everywhere?

And the difference must be an important and a good thing: what is the difference then, in general?

Art is more formal and more ordered than life. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, but in life we are in the midst of everything, a confusion of order and disorder, and the present is the time "where these dreams meet".

Furthermore, Art is life not lived-through by the ego, but perceived by the ego "from the distance of form", from a seat in the theatre, or with the book in one's lap.

Art is thus a contemplation of experience and not a living through of experience by the ego, in participation.

There is a loss in immediacy (which must not be too great and which the artist seeks to regain), but a gain in fullness, wholeness, and in-ness or insight of perception.

One of the ways in which the artist seeks to regain immediacy is through the evocation of emotion, which Eliot explains in terms of "the objective correlative", a phrase which smacks of jargon and which is perhaps also unfortunate in making possible a various ambiguity. The objective correlative is the thing or things, the experience of the actual, which, when summoned up by the artist, evokes the emotion in question: it has the sight of small green leaves might conceivably be the objective correlative of freshness, newness, and beginning

Thus we see one of the ways in which the phrase is not as well-chosen as it again. It might be, for in itself it does not seem to contain a distinction from the generic term, the symbol (which ought also to be distinguished from the metaphor).

The Objective Correlative/2/

The discussion of the objective correlative occurs in the essay on "Hamlet", where Eliot is seeking to explain the difficulty of the play, Hamlet's madness, and the failure of play, an emotion on the part of the leading character which is not justified by any objective correlative, or "set of objects, a situation, a 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". Eliot's example is Macbeth's emotion on hearing of his wife's death: the sleep-walking of Lady Macbeth is cited as an example of the objective correlative which has prepared the way for Macbeth's emotion as expressed in the speech, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow".

Hence it might be seemed as if objective correlative were merely a high-flown or quasi-scientific way of saying stimulus. Eliot objects an elsewhere to the use of this word as an example of/amateur use of the science of psychology by the literary critic. But objective correlative is similar as a derivation from logical and epistemological terminology, and the term, objective, is of course notoriously suspect. What saves us and redeems exactitude always is the specific and the concrete: a stimulus such as a punch in the nose is the objective correlative of anger; the image or the shadowed image of a hanged man evokes the emotion of fear or doom or inureble punishment.

How to return for a moment to a discussion of the nature in general of art, literature, and the artistic experience:

What we get from a work of art most of all, perhaps, is relation in, a bringing together of things which in ordinary experience are separate, or set apart, or seemingly removed from each other. The term, metaphor, means literally a bringing across, or a bearing between, or a uniting (what else is love?). The term, composition, means

The Objective Correlative/3/

a putting-together (what else is love?). A symbol, like a crossed pair of sticks, is a relationship or a putting-together of a particular and a universal. And the over-all literary forms, the acts of the play, the stanzas of the poem, the octet, sestet or final couplet of the sonnet, the beginning, the middle, and the end of each complete literary work demonstrate the bringing-together or putting-together which is the benefit or goodness of form.

Experience thus attains to a higher degree of order and a new kind of order each time that the work of art is performed.

But an important reservation must be made: the experience must be that of both the poet and the reader.

To say that a poet is private or personal is a damning term. It means that the experience which is his subject-matter has not been related to common human experience in such a way that the reader recognizes or summons up his own private experience in the fictive or personal experience invoked by the poet in the poem.

Here then we see how the objective correlative (and in like ways, the symbol, the image, and the metaphor) are of crucial importance in the work of art: for the objective correlative makes the private emotion in the poem something which the reader can recognize as being akin to his own experience. The poet seeks in common human experience when he seeks for objective correlatives. They are the bridges so to speak between the subjectivity of the poet (each in his prison, like Coriolanus) and the subjectivity of the reader.

It is perhaps through accidents of literary development (which so often turn out not to be accidents at all, for they happen only to those to whom it is natural that they should happen) that Eliot tended to think that the objective correlative was to be found through images, through a connection with the evidence of the senses", and especially through the visual. The accidents of literary development are

The Objective Correlative/4/

Renyde Gourmont and the Imagist Movement. And if the emphasis on that which is visual or in terms of the senses is perhaps too narrow, if it represents a turning back from the moral generalities of Victorianism, it is nonetheless true that, since the senses are our chief ways of grasping experience, ("there is nothing in the mind not first in the senses"), such an emphasis must prove fruitful.

How fruitful it may prove we can see if we examine the most difficult example in the analysis of poetry, the question of poetry which depends upon or asserts beliefs which are not our own. This has not only concerned Eliot in his criticism, but it is a point which comes up for many readers--indeed for every reader--in the reading of his poetry. "Ash Wednesday" affirms a belief in Christianity, and two earlier poems, "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Services", and "The Hippopotamus" not only deny such a belief, but appear to take for granted the denial of such a religious avowal: to consider it with irony, and contempt. The three poems are not comparable in general, since they make use of different means and of different length; and "Ash Wednesday" is by far the best of the three. But what makes them usable for the point in question is the fact that they are all good poems, despite their difference of belief.

How can a good poem be based upon a false belief? What is the goodness of three poems which in their essential view of life and of one institution, the Church of England, contradict each other? What is poetic goodness, in short, and how can it bontain falsity?

The answer is almost pat, in terms of the objective correlative when we emphasized the sensory and especially the visual interpretation of the word. If the belief, whether true or false, is given (an inadequate word perhaps) the right objective correlative, then the poem is good. In other terms, the goodness of a poem is the relationship between its theme (its generalization, belief, attitude or emotion) and its particulars.

The Objective Correlative/5

If the objective correlative is visual, we have a quick way of making
this answer concrete. No matter what our beliefs, we cannot deny the
visual fact of points of view (even if all vision is illusion, even if
all sense experience is appearance, yet there are different illusions,
different appearances). To an ignorant savage, the cross is merely two
sticks of wood: the image of the two sticks of wood is the objective
correlative of his point of view, which is to say of his experience.
To a Christian, the cross is a visual thing too, but also a historical
and supernatural event which refers to many values, attitudes and emotions.
In terms of vision, or, to use the technical term, in phenomenological
terms, both images, though very different, are authentic. The question
may be raised about the assertion of belief in any poem is the same as
the question as to the representation of an emotion: is it given an
embodiment adequate to stand alone as a point of view, or emotion? Or the
abstract truth of the emotion we are no more concerned than we are
concerned, let us say, with the propriety of the emotion of self-pity,
or the good sense of the point of view gained by standing on one's head.
In a more general sense, stepping outside of the poem, we may say that
a belief which condemns all experience as illusion, or an emotion which
is that of self-pity, or the point of view of standing on one's head
are not likely to make possible a poem or poems which have a very wide
degree of reference: but this is a question of scope, and not, as Eliot
says in speaking of Marianne Moore's poetry, a question of genuineness.

The dialogues of criticism and poetry, of theory and practice,
is to be found here too. The essay in which the statement of the objective
correlative appears was written in 1919: in "Geronimo", as in other
poems of the same period, but perhaps less strikingly, we ought to note
the effort to find the objective correlative:

> The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;
> Rocks, moss, stonecrop, merds.

6/
This unity of sensibility existed in English poetry
until the period of Dryden and of Milton. It existed in Donne,
for example, who felt thoughts, and thought feelings; for whom
the apprehension of a thought was as a sensuous thing as the
fragrance of a rose. We may well feel at this point that there is
much in Eliot's use of the terms of thought and feelings which
would not bear close examination by the trained psychologist. But
it is pedantry not to see how much is being said because the terms
have some of the vagueness of common sense discourse. And we ought
to remind ourselves once more of Aristotle's dictum that literary
criticism is not susceptible of the same kind of exactitude as
mathematics.

The break in sensibility which takes place in Milton
and Dryden provides Eliot with abasis for describing English poetry
from that date forward. From that time until the present, Eliot
wrote in 1922 (cf), thought and feeling have been separated in the
dissociation
poet. This/is one of the shortcomings of the Romantic poets; and
perhaps we can add to Eliot's argument by noting the conscious
search for a philosophy, for a system of thought, not only in Blake,
but also in Coleridge. For when the poet must go looking for ideas,
when he begins to find, as did Coleridge, that his thinking is
a block to the writing of poetry, certainly "a dissociation of sens-
ibility" is present. During the Victorian period, such a dissociation
widens, and Tennyson and Browning, Eliot says in this early analysis,
"Merely ruminated". Thomas Hardy, William Morris, and William Butler
Yeats provide further examples, although not precisely suitable to
what Eliot had in mind when he wrote the essays on Marvell and on
the metaphysical poets which are the locus for his crucial theory
of the dissociation of sensibility.

One ought to bring in the necessity of a sense of the
past and the necessity of being aware of ideas as elements in any

7/ unity of sensibility. And the two kinds of awareness meet, for one may or may not a sense of the intellectual and religious past. It was Blake's lack of a sense of traditional Western philosophy which made it necessary for him to invent his own system. It was the intellectual disorder of the Elizabethan period which circumscribed Shakespeare in such a way that his use of ideas was very different from Dante's. Dante stands as the essential instance of who was able to make use of a poet in the sense of the past, an environment full of coherent ideas, and an inherited intellectual system. And here, when Shakespeare and Dante are opposed to each other--when, that is, Eliot's discussions of Shakespeare and Dante are counterposed, we may see how unity of sensibility is of necessity a broad and inexact conception. For this contrast suggests that Shakespeare did not enjoy a unity of sensibility, if a coherent set of ideas is necessary to such a unity.

A good deal of technical analysis occurs in the course of making these distinctions and evaluations among poets. And technical discussion is never permitted to become too distant from analysis of subject-matter, of the poet's attitudes, and of his characteristic gifts. Thus if Blake is cited for "peculiar home sty", the unpeasant honesty of observation and insight into the human soul, it is also pointed out that this honesty "never exists apart from technical mastery"; never is perhaps an excess, but it is obvious enough that technical mastery must be an aid to the effort of the poet's mind at all times; for a lack of mastery would prevent him from saying what he wished to say, or what he might have lead to say by the necessity of the mastered form. So too, the question of influence is kept close to questions of and insight, technique. Blake at first imitated the ruling eighteenth century style. Shakespeare imitated Marlowe, at first, and he used Montaigne.

3A

THE THOUGHTS OF THE JEW WHO SQUATS

Recurrent in Eliot's poetry is an animus against Jews which expresses itself in several figures. In "Gerontion" the Jew squats on the window sill and is the owner of the rented house: the fact that he is the owner is important, just as the fact that the house is rented. In a poem in the same volume, Bleistein succeeds Burbank, presumable a tourist from New England, in the affections of a Princess.

The extent to which a very strong personal feeling is in question becomes clear when we see how even the animus against the Irish, which is figured in the character of apeneck Sweeney, is less than the animus against Jews, for in 1933, in prose, when he writes of the good society, Eliot declares not only that excessive tolerance is to be deprecated, but that in such a society a large number of free-thinking Jews would be undesirable--"for reasons of race and religion" in combination. The Irish, although Celtic, were not discussed.

This statement in the spring when Hitler came to power in Germany, was quoted perhaps as much as any single line in Eliot's with the exception, perhaps of his declaration of Anglo-catholicism, classicism, and royalism. And in the reviews of the book, *After Strange Gods*, hardly a reviewer fail to demur--perhaps *as much* against the explicit statement *on* against the feeling.

This question of racial prejudice is important in several ways. For one thing it stands as one of the barriers to the understanding of Eliot: the word, anti-semitic, is pronounced and this is felt to be a conclusion. But more than that, it is not a simple matter of discounting the prejudice and then going on to another aspects of the work. It is a part of the pattern of feelings in the work which lead to an adherence to royalism, on the one hand, and on the other to the view taken of many of the

3/ Three of their leading characters are Swann, Naphta and Leopold Bloom; and perhaps we may gain a better characterization of the modern Jew by considering wherein they resemble each other and wherein they differ, not just on the windowsill, but also on the walls. But again it should be said in qualification that the feeling and observation is genuine and original in Eliot as in Adams and James; and we ought to consider the differences between, on the one hand, Eliot and James, and on the other, Joyce, Proust and Mann. Since Proust was Jewish himself, since Joyce was Irish, and suffered his own kind of alienation; and since Mann suffered--and celebrated the alienation of the artist, there is a sympathy to be remarked which we must not expect of James and Eliot; and this sympathy too must be considered as a possible squint and distortion.

which are

The interested reader can find shreds and fragments, difficult to interpret with certainty, of this feeling about the Jews in remarks and passages both before and after the statement about the absence of the Jews from the good society. Thus, the work which Eliot wrote immediately after the essay on the good society, "The Rock," which is a church pageant, contains a passage in which Fascists or Brown Shirts are satirized for their feelings about Jews, or at any rate--in this way, it is difficult to interpret,--about their attack on Christianity as a Jewish religion. But again, and more definitely, Eliot wrote in a Criterion commentary in 1937, about the necessity of the English language's reinvigoration by foreign strains. He was writing about the occasion of the poet's greatness of Yeats on his seventieth birthday. Yet he chose as his example of how the English language was reinvigorated by foreign strains the poet Isaac Rosenberg, and if again an abstract conception of race was involved in this passing mention, as also in Eliot's discussion of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, nonetheless it marked a serious qualification of the feeling about the Jew. Am it should be said that if the word, Jew, was sometimes capitalized, and

4/

sometimes left in small letters both by Eliot and by other authors in The Criterion, it is also true that Eliot did not identify his magazine review with the good society, nor did he hesitate to publish authors who were Jews at the same time as he published expressions of anti-Semitism. Here practice was somewhat superior to theory; and no literary ghetto was declared.

The whole question of race renewed itself when the invasion of Ethiopia occurred. Eliot had obviously been thinking seriously for some time about tradition as something inherited through the blood, and through a landed aristocracy's whole way of life. Confronted with a war which was justified by the declaration that one race was superior to another, the Italian to the Ethiopians, Eliot's attitude was difficult and mixed. He was unable to accept the racial justification as it was accepted by some authors. And yet his view of the inferiority of some races, and of the actuality of race --which no sociologist can now accept--persisted not only in the face of his dislike of this justification of a war, but in the face of the important religious view that all men are equal in the eyes of God. With typical Bradleyan strategy, Eliot committed himself to a contradiction in which God's view of all men was made distinct from the view of human beings, even, though they are committed to a religious vows. He affirmed also that some races were superior to others, he affirmed the religious view, that is to say, God's view, and he condemned the invasion of Ethiopia.

This is indeed having and eating of one's cake on a large scale. In attempting to understand Eliot, we ought to remember that in Eliot's favor again it should be said that there are differences among peoples, and there are inherited patterns of behavior. In his sense of the actual made this clear to him. But on the other hand, in the present, in modern life, the idea that the differences, superiorities and inferiorities of peoples, the very inheritance of patterns of manners and morals, --this idea is

3A/

THE THIESE OF THE JEW WHO SQUATS

Recurrent in Eliot's poetry is an animus against Jews which presses itself in several figures. In "Gerontion" the Jew squats on the window sill and is the owner of the rented house: the fact that he is the owner is important, just as the fact that the house is rented. In a poem in the same volume, Bleistein succeeds Burbank, presumable a tourist from New England, in the affections of a Princess.

The extent to which a very strong personal feeling is in question becomes clear when we see how even the animus against the Irish, which is figured in the character of apeneck Sweeney, is less than the animus against Jews, for in 1933, in prose, when he writes of the good society, Eliot deahares not only that excessive tolerance is to be deprecated, but that in such a society a large number of free-thinking Jews would be und sirable--"for reasons of race and religion" in combination. The Irish, although Celtic, were not discussed.

This statement in the spring when Hitler came to power in Germany was quoted perhaps as much as any single line in Eliot's with the exception of a few lines of his declaration of Anglo-catholicism, classicism, and royalism. And in the reviews of the book, "Other Strange Gods", hardly a reviewer fail to demur--perhaps as much against the explicit statement as against the feeling.

This question of racial prejudice is important in several ways. For one thing it stands as one of the barriers to the understanding of Eliot: the word, anti-semitic is pronounced and this is felt to be a conclusion. But more than that, it is not a simple matter of discounting the prejudice and then going on to another aspects of the work. It is a part of the pattern of feelings in the work which lead to an adherence to royalism, on the one hand, and on the other to the view taken of many of the

2/ of the human beings who appear as characters. If it were an isolated feeling or a merely personal one without reference or connection with the whole of the poet's and the critic's vision of life, there would not be the clear bond with the critic's belief in a landed aristocracy, in tradition as something which must be lived through --and which is, he says, inherited in the blood (quotation), and in civilization as something which is produced by the way of life which has been formed generation after generation.

So too with the poetry: his satirical view of modern life makes a natural transition/or inclusion of the Jew who is a financier (we ought to remember that Marx, although a Jew, was anti-semitic for this reason). And the poet's sense of the actual, --here we have the actual as European civilization at a particular moment in time when social strata were being broken down and entered by outsiders--makes it natural and indeed inevitable that he see the Jew in this light. If we refer back to Henry James and Henry Adams, we can see the same kind of feeling asserting itself a generation before this and for the same reason.

In pointing to this, the intention is not by any means to defend race prejudice of this kind or any kind. What must be admitted from the point of view of the criticism of poetry is that the poet is expressing a genuine and significant feeling, one which springs from observation and not from a received idea, although that may be present too.

But the genuineness of the observation is tant of the squint. If one squints, it is inevitable that one see certain things in a given way. And this is the squint compelled by the circumstances of modern life in authors of a certain kind. By contrast, we ought to summon to mind the vision of three other authors, Mann, Joyce, and Proust.

3/
Three of their leading characters are Swann, Naphta and Leopold Bloom; and perhaps we may gain a better characterization of the modern Jew by considering wherein they resemble each other and wherein they differ, than by looking at Eliot's squatting one. But again it should be said in qualification that the feeling and observation is genuine and integral in Eliot as in Adams and James; and we ought to consider the differences between, on the one hand, Eliot and James, and on the other, Joyce, Proust and Mann. Since Proust was Jewish himself, since Joyce was Irish and suffered his own kind of alienation; and since Mann suffered--and celebrated the alienation of the artist, there is a sympathy to be remarked which we must not expect of James and Eliot; and this sympathy too must be considered as a possible squint and distortion.

The interested reader can find shreds and fragments, difficult to interpret with certainty, of this feeling about the Jews in remarks and passages both before and after the statement about the absence of the Jews from the good society. Thus, this work which Eliot wrote immediately after the essay on the good society, "The Rock, which is a church pageant, contains a passage in which Fascists or Brown Shirts are satirized for their feelings about Jews, or at any rate--in this way, it is difficult to interpret,--about their attack on Christianity as a Jewish religion. But again, and more definitely, Eliot wrote in a Criterion commentary in 1937, about the necessity of the English language's reinvigoration by foreign strains. He was writing about the occasion of the poet's greatness of Yeats on his seventieth birthday. Yet he chose as his example of how the English language was reinvigorated by foreign strains the poet Isaac Rosenberg. And if again an abstract conception of race was involved in this passing mention, as also in Eliot's discussion of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, nonetheless it marked a serious qualification of the feeling about the Jew. And it should be said that if the word Jew was sometimes capitalized, and

4/

sometimes left in small letters both by Eliot and by other authors in The Criterion, it is also true that Eliot did not identify his review with the good society, nor did he hesitate to publish authors who were Jews at the same time as he published expressions of Anti-Semitism. Here practice was somewhat superior to theory, and no literary ghetto was declared.

The whole question of race renewed itself when the invasion of Ethiopia occurred. Eliot has obviously been thinking seriously for some time about tradition as something inherited through the blood, and through a landed aristocracy's whole way of life. Confronted with a war which was justified by the declaration that one race was superior to another, the Italian to the Ethiopians, Eliot's attitude was difficult and mixed. He was unable to accept the racial justification as it was accepted by some authors. And yet his view of the inferiority of some races, and of the actuality of race --which no sociologist can now accept, --persisted not only in the face of his dislike of this justification of a war, but in the face of the important religious view that all men are equal in the eyes of God. With typical Bradleyan strategy Eliot committed himself to a contradiction in which God's view of all men was made distinct from the view of human beings, even though they are committed to a religious vows. He affirmed also that some races were superior to others, he affirmed the religious view, that is to say, God's view, and he condemned the invasion of Ethiopia. This is indeed a having and an eating of one's cake on a large scale.

In Eliot's favor again it should be said that there are differences among peoples and there are inherited patterns of behavior. His sense of the actual made this clear to him. But on the other hand, in the present, in modern life, the idea that the differences, superiorities and inferiorities of peoples, the very inheritance of patterns of manners and morals, --this idea is

5/

in some contexts a vestige, in other contexts an abstraction, an abstraction
became the differences which actually exist cannot be attributed to
the existence of distinct races, or the existence of a landed aristocracy.
The sense of the actual in Eliot is not strong enough, it may be said,
to perceive what the actual present and likely future of any landed
aristocracy, in England or elsewhere, has been and will be.

The Revaluation Of English Poetry

Comparison and analysis are the two tools of the critic, Eliot says. And this is a concise description of just what Eliot engages in when he writes about poets. But both comparison and analysis require, by necessity, certain prior assumptions. And the one which Eliot depends upon most is an assumption which can hardly be argued about, or argued for. It is an assumption which is identical in source with the sense of actual we have stressed so much as the substance of Eliot's poetry, namely, that poetry is most valuable and most important when it grasps experience as such, experience as something lived through and not experience as something heard about.

Thus Swinburne is defended as a poet whose real virtue was his verbalism, his use of words for their poetic texture and surface abstracted, as nearly as possible, from their reference. But, says Eliot, defining his judgement by comparison, the poetry or creative literature which is most important to us is that which is continually trying to digest new objects, new feelings and new experiences, such as the work of Conrad and Joyce. The word new, is misleading here (as we saw in discussing the sense of the actual). But it is the reference to the thing by the word which is important.

This is the reason he is praised; one of his poems expressed "the naked observation"; another, "the naked insight". In both instances we are referred from word to thing; and the quality of mind which thus manifests itself is that of honesty, which, says Eliot, never exists apart from great technical skill (here perhaps never is an excess).

By contrast, Milton is found defective in his sense of the actual; what is lacking is the sense that the words have

2/

to do with a definite time and place, whatever else they may deal with.

Tennyson is pegised for great technical skill too; but again
the use of the actual, the mastery of the actual for the sake of
reinforcing the poem itself, is the criterion for citing with praise
a stanza (quotation) which is a description of an actual place, an
conventional;
"english street. Milton is artificial and (enamelled;) and these terms
proceed from a sense of the actual, a feeling for the expression of
perceived experience in words, which is almost always in back of
Eliot's comparisons. Tennyson too is often artificial and conventional;
and thus Eliot is pressed to praise him mainly for his skill at
versification, a skill declared to be unequalled in some things.
What is in question, --the emphasis is necessary because nothing could
be more various and multitudinous than the way that the actual is used
by the poet,-- whether or not the lines examined give ""the feeling of
being in a particular place at a particular time"'. And this is
illustrated by a quotation from Shakespeare.

JOSEPH

The sense of the actual and the ability to muse it in
a poem goes back, in the history of criticism, to the doctrine that
poetry is the imitation of life. But Eliot is far from any procedure
in which one begins with a critical abstraction and then applies it
to particular cases. On the contrary, the subtly with which he
distinguishes the actuality in the poet, the particularity which gives
it, breadth,
height and depth and fleshto the universal, and to the poet's thoughts
and feelings, this extreme sensitivity can be seen in the instances
where Eliot finds that the poet--Jonson and Marlowe, in particular--
is engaged in a caricature of the actual, or in the creation of a
world of his own, a world which is artificial ("Not Euclidean", says
Eliot, thus removing the poem's impact from the impact of the actual
world). So too, we are told that Falstaff has a third dimension, which
Massinger's Sir Giles Overreach has not. The images of Beaumont and

3/ Fletcher, "the blossoms", are "cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into sand" as against those of Shakespeare, Donne, Webster, Middleton, and Tourneur --who also have a depth, a third dimension (thus the spatial metaphor recurs), and have "tentacular roots" (again the plant-life metaphor) which reach down to "the deepest terrors and desires". These remarks occur in the essay on Jonson, where we see that if he lacked these qualities, this fullness of the actual, he had something else, a world of his own and not the actual world.

A sense of the actual is rooted in a sense of the age, as we have seen; and thus this criterion enables us to recognize the value of authors such as Flaubert and Pound whose works are sometimes "positive documents of sensibility", contemporaneous social and moral history (to translate the phrase of Flaubert which is often quoted by Pound and quoted by Eliot in praise of Pound's poem, "Homage to Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (quotation)).

The age, however, has many transient aspects. In an age when Sensibility is comparatively stable and the surface does not change with great speed, the poet and the dramatist can fix his scrutiny upon the permanent qualities of human nature. And when he has insight into that which is permanent and not passing, his work is important indeed: it/this kind of insight that Middleton is credited with in "The Changeling". /S/ Anne Bradbury

The quality and character of a poet's sensibility (a quasi-psychological term which we may define as the poet's awareness, for the moment) is important in estimating the character of his work. There may be a separation between a poet's intellect and his sensibility; or there may be a unity; Donne and the other metaphysical poets were gifted with such a unity of sensibility in that they were capable of "devouring any kind of experience" and they apprehended ideas--Donne, in particular--

5/

by a sense for the actual and the particular which exists without
much regard for the general and the universal.

Now if we remember that a symbol is that which is at
once particular and universal, two crossed pieces of wood and the
Cross itself; and if we remember that the poet's chief purpose is
to transform the particular into the symbol; and if we see how
necessary for such a transformation is a sensitivity both to par-
ticular things and to ideas--then we can see how important it is
for a poet to have a sensibility which is not channelized in such
a way that the apprehension of things is separate from the apprehension
of ideas.

So too we must bear in mind that experience, apart from
art, is in essence subjected to a certain disorder and unrelatedness
and unconnectedness. The pressure of need and the necessity imposed
by practical purposes not only separates and distorts things, and
not only creates its own kind of disorder; but presses us to separate
idea from thing, the surface of the thing from the essence of the
the thing, the use of the thing from the thing as such, the idea and
the possibility of the thing from the thing as we touch it in
passing.

The poet, however, when he enjoys a unity of sensibility
discovers or creates a unity for experience. Eliot sets the poet's
apprehension of experience against that of the ordinary man; the
ordinary man eats, drinks, makes love, and reads Spinoza without
finding it necessary to connect these things; the poet by nature
seeks to find the connection or the relatedness between these ex-
periences. Hence, just as the unity of thought and thing is bound
up with the symbol, so too the connection and the relatedness of
experiences is bound up with the nature of metaphor, which is
literally a bearing across, a bringing together, a uniting.

C/

The Use Of Psychological Form

From the dramatic monologue as conceived by Browning, who no doubt thought that he was emulating Shakespeare, it is but one step to the use of a stream-of-consciousness technique. And of this technique we may say as Voltaire said of God, if it did not exist it would have to be invented all over again, so much did the inner order of experience demand it.

We can see the beginning of the technique as used by Eliot in Prufrock's subliminal images, his wish to be a crab, and his evocation of the mermaids. In literary influence, this method might have been learned from Browning, especially in the "Sordello" which moved Pound so much; and a source closer to Eliot, especially in versification, is the poetry of Jules Laforgue, which Eliot has spoken about several times in his prose. We may say that the model helped the new poet to realize certain tendencies which were already strong in him.

As a natural and compelled process of development, there is the ever increasing suppression or abandonment of disregard of or traditional the usual/links between perception and perception, between statement and statement, in a poem.

The traditional basis of unity as we go from line to line, / part to part, is narrative or is it drama; or in lyric verse, it derives from the development of a statement about a situation, (and this has falsely been named, logical unity: falsely because argument is only one of several kinds of statement possible to the lyric poet).

Eliot and Pound before him (and there are equivalents of a significant kind in the other arts) be gin to go from perception to perception without putting in transitions or connectives (this is the time of montage, which is to say, images superimposed on images, in

2/

the film).

The leap to the hallucinatory image in "Prufrock" is duplicated and extended in "Gerontion"--which also is a dramatic monologue, but that where we can see this Browningesque form is changing in nature--in such images as that of the goats who coughs overhead, and the Jew who squats on the window sill.

Perhaps the process began with the impressions of the expatriate sensibility--which sees things in detached snapshots, and not with the usedness and continuity the native knows. Or perhaps it began with the notetaking of impressions or the marking down of quotations, great lines and great passages, which is a practice natural to the literary mind. One cause obviously can support or generate the other.

At any rate, this method, as it was pressed ever further, revealed new possibilities of rhetoric, structure, arrangement, tone and mood to both Eliot and Pound. It made possible a dramatic surprise, a rhetorical flashback or flash forward, and a mystery of incantation of impression, so to speak, which was a source of poetic excitement, although perhaps at times a specious one. It had the additional and great advantage of freeing the poet from the kind of line which had to be written merely to get from one part of the narrative to another; or from one part of the drama or statement to another.

"In "The Waste Land", Eliot comes to use psychological form as a method of moving rapidly about the theme itself, in its many aspects (as one might show one after another photograph of a church). Thus he goes beyond psychological form; not the process by which the mind slips from thought to thought, or impression or association or memory determines the succession of the poem, but

3/4

the necessity of the theme determines the succession, and this
allows for much variety.

For example, in "The Waste Land" there is an unconnected
transition (unconnected by drama or narrative) between the scene
ina lady's boudoir and the pub scene. In each we hear about women
who suffer from sickness in the relationship of love. Now this
transition might well have been a matter of psychological from,
or equally of narrative form, for what would be more likely
than the man who listens in hard silence to the lady's hysteria
--"What shall I do now? what shall I ever do?"--should then proceed
as in a story or in play, to a pub where he can get a drink and
where he overhears the cockney conversation which duplicates, on
its own level, the lady's neuarasthenia.

Or again, from the point of view of psychological form,
a memory of
the lady's sickness of heart might lead, by contiguity of assoc-
iation, to a memory of the cockney conversation and of the
cockney's like plight: "What you get married for, if you don't
want children?" These methods may even have been props, removed
in the course of conversation, for we are told that Pound (this is
significant indeed) told Eliot to reduce "The Waste Land to two-
thirds of its original length."

The final version, however, is a direct presentation,
without transition or connection, of two aspects of the subject.
The analogy with musical form presents itself in several ways:
we may say that the music here has no program; or that here we
have two variations on a theme; or a gain, here are two phrases
as phases presented and developed for their own intrinsic quality
without reference to any thing but the theme of the poem, the
waste land of modern life.

C/

The Use Of Ps ychological Form

Eliot and Pound before him (and there are equivalents of a significant kind in the otherarts) be gin to go from perception to perception without putting in prepositions or connectives (this is the time of montage, which is to say, images superimposed on images, in

2/

the film).

The leap to the hallucinatory image in "Prufrock" is duplicated and extended in "Gerontion"--which also is a dramatic monologue, but that where we can see/this Browningesque form is changing in nature--in such images as that of the goats who coughs overhead, and the Jew who squats on the window sill.

At any rate, this method, as it was pressed ever further, revealed new possibilities of rhetoric, structure, arrangement, tone and mood to both Eliot and Pound. It made possible a dramatic surprise, a rhetorical flashback or flash forward, and a mystery of incantation of impression, so to speak, which was a source of poetic excitement, although perhaps at times a specious one. It had the additional and greater advantage of freeing the poet from the kind of line which had to be written merely to get from one part of the narrative to another; or from one part of the drama or statement to another.

"In "The Waste Land", Eliot comes to use psychological form as a method of moving rapidly about the theme itself, in its many aspects (as one might show one after another photography of a church). Thus he goes beyond psychological form; not the process by which the mind slips from thought to thought, or impression or association or memory determines the succession of the poem, but

3/4

"ASH WEDNESDAY"

"Ash Wednesday" appeared in 1930, eight years after the publication of "The Waste Land". It is perhaps the best of Eliot's poems, and although certain parts of "The Waste Land" suggest the lyrical method of this poem, it is very different in every important way. The despair which marked "The Waste Land" has been succeeded by a complex religious emotion in which despair is involved but transformed.

The development from "The Waste Land" to "Ash Wednesday" can be followed by reading such poems as "Sweeney Agonistes" and "The Hollow Men", "The Fortune Of The Magi", and "Animula"; and it can be glossed by reading certain essays which appeared during these eight years, in particular, the essays on Dante, Läncelot Andrewes, and Irving Babbitt. But it is better to examine the poem itself before connecting it with the long scrutiny which culminated in the poet's explicit religious avowal, although without that avowal the poem would obviously not have been written.

In "Ash Wednesday" as in "The Waste Land", the reader is confronted with passages which have no narrative, expository or logical unity. Again, the reader must arrive at a certain purity of mind, if he is to read the poem without false expectations. And again the best way to look at the poem is to regard it first of all as a series of utterances, sentences, prayers, and images, which have become important to the poet and among which he has discerned an emotional unity. The poem succeeds largely because the poet has honored the subliminal; he has recognized what is meaningful to him, although what is meaningful does not fit into any usual frame of meaning, such as narrative or argument. And he has felt the power of the subliminal sufficiently to know that what might be imposed upon it from the top of the mind, so to speak, would falsify it.

2.

The first part of "Ash Wednesday" is a lyrical statement of the protagonist's resignation of all hope, the hope of renewal and transformation, the hope of the gift and scope of other men, the hope of knowing and enjoying the beauty and the power of this life. His emotion is complex to such an extent that he must entertain the worst possible view of existence, the view that "what is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place". This view may not be true, but it is necessary that the protagonist entertain it seriously to try his faith.

If what is actual is limited to time and to place, then the protagonist must "renounce the blessed face", he must renounce all supernatural faith, and he must suppose that his religious belief is merely a construction or fabrication motivated by the desire to have something in which to believe. The nature of these thoughts is such that the protagonist moves to the words of a prayer, a prayer that these very thoughts --"these matters that with myself too much discuss"--be forgiven him. The prayer brings the protagonist back to resignation and the surrender of all hope, and this in turn brings the protagonist back to a prayer in which a profound insight is stated in a brief phrase: "Teach us to care and not to care". Some poets have celebrated love and some have celebrated indifference, resignation, and the renunciation of love. Here the poet perceives and expresses with perfect economy the necessity of both love and indifference. For it is possible to love too much as it is possible to love too little; it is possible to care for the wrong thing and to be indifferent to the right thing. The protagonist moves from this to a quotation from the Mass in which Mary is asked to pray for those who appeal to her now "and at the hour of death". And this conclusion leads to the second part, which is an imagination of death.

3.

The protagonist has conceived of the most sterile and consummate death, a death in the desert after which his body is devour-ed by three white leopards. All that remains is his scattered bones which chirp their hatred of the past life and praise a saintly lady, a lady of goodness and loveliness to whom this part of the poem is addressed. The scattered bones which are the irreducible remnant and ruin of the protagonist's being declare their acceptance of death and their rejection of life. The protagonist affirms his desire for ob-livion and forgetfulness. God, as if in response, says, "Prophesy to the wind", and then the bones begin an extraordinary chant which is a paraphrase of the litany to the Virgin Mary: she is praised as the consummation of all opposites and contradictions: speech and silence, movement and rest, energy and exhaustion, the pain of desire and the pain of satisfaction. She represents to the protagonist the life which is truly beyond life because it is in her being that "all loves-end". Thus she is a supernatural actuality, an actuality which is beyond time and place.

After the chant, the bones again declare their preference of death to life--"We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other", and their satisfaction with the inheritance of oblivion. As in the first part, the protagonist was brought by utter hopelessness to prayer, so in the second part, the idea of death brings him to the praise of a saintly lady and of Mary as the type of every holy lady who might intercede for the redemption of those who have sinned. In this part a kind of bleak joy lifts itself above the emotion of hatred of this life and desire to escape from it. And Stephen Spender has rightly compared this part to passages in Beethoven's late quartets where tortuous music is followed by a thin, weak, and yet triumphant melody which suggests reconciliation and acceptance after all suffering has been endured, all hope disappointed, and all love wasted.

4.

In the third part of the poem, the protagonist returns from hopelessness, death, and forgetfulness to the struggle with his emotions in this life, making use of the metaphor of striving up a stairway to express the character of these emotions.

The reader may or may not remember the stairway in Dante's "Purgatorio". Whether he does or not, this is a good illustration of how a literary beginning does not require the support of literary knowledge. The reader need only bear in mind an ordinary human experience, that of climbing a stairway. It is true that the passage might not have been written as it is written without, first, the poet's knowledge of Dante, and second, his experience of an actual stair, his knowledge of literature and his sense of the actual. And the emphasis upon the *turning* of the stair unites with the emphasis on *turning--* changing, being renewed and transformed, becoming other and more than one is--in the first part of the poem; and this use of *turning* is perhaps inspired by a knowledge of Dante. But the reader can arrive at an immediate experience of the emotions of the protagonist without having heard of Dante.

The protagonist tells of his struggle as he ascended a stairway. The stairway is at once any stairway, the stairway of the years of this life, and any effort toward a desired object or state of being. "At the first turning of the second stair", the protagonist saw a struggle between the devil of the stairs and some other being, who may be at once the protagonist, the reader, or any human being. The devil of the stairs imposes his evil through hope and despair, both deceptive emotions. And in the line, "The deceitful face of hope and despair", the poet achieves a double insight of the same kind as when he saw the double necessity of love and of being free from love: "Teach me to care and not to care". In fact, the emotional unity of the poem shows itself

5.

in the way in which the two insights are consistent with each other and
point to the main subject of the poem, the mastery of human emotion.

"At the second turning of the second stair" (here, as before,
the figure of the stair lends itself to the formal idiom of the poem,
which depends very much upon the variation and repetition of the same
phrase and the same word), all is hopeless darkness, nothing can be seen,
no other beings are present, and the stair itself resembles an old man's
mouth or a shark's gullet: that is, it resembles the voracity, degradation,
and decay of nature.

The third stair, at the first turning, has a window which shows
the deceptive beauty of this life, the beauty of May, of music, and of a
woman. This too is a distraction and illusion, just like the hopeless
darkness of the second stair, for it depends upon the love of one human
being for another. Such love must of necessity fade; what is necessary
is "strength beyond hope and despair", the mastery of the emotions and
a freedom from them. Again, the protagonist concludes with the words of
a prayer, declaring his unworthiness and his desire that the word be
spoken, a reference which does not require that the reader remember the
story of the Centurion in the New Testament from which it is derived.

The fourth part returns to the holy lady who by her goodness
and her intercession redeems this life and those who have sinned. The
identity of this lady is not important; she is of the type of the Virgin
Mary, she walks in Mary's color, she moves between sleep and waking, she
walks in white light through the years, and she is thus the lady to whom
the vision of death has already been addressed.

It is because of her that the protagonist sees the necessity of
regaining "the unread vision in the higher dream", a phrase which is
to be glossed by what Eliot says of the higher dream in his essay on
Dante. The higher dream is the dream of supernatural states of being.

and of a supernatural realm. It is a dream because it cannot be
understood except through analogy and symbol. And it is a dream
because it requires faith to be believed. But whether the belief
is true or false, it is the dream which represents supreme human
aspiration. This should be sufficient for any reader, whatever
his beliefs. The lady through the dream manifests itself and who
is herself a part of the dream is silent. But her presence is
the reason for the flowing of fountains and the singing of birds.
The lady exists between the yews which signify death and behind
the garden-god which signifies the natural world, the world of
the blossoms, the flutes, and the years. It is because of her that
the bird sings and pleads that the dream be redeemed and be believed
until the moment of death. Hence the poem ends in prayer again,
repeating the words which end every Catholic Mass, and which appeal
to the Virgin Mary, even as the protagonist has addressed himself
to a holy lady.

The fifth part of the poem begins in an extraordinary
rhythm which plays upon the meaning that the word, *word*, may have,
and mounts to an affirmation of the Word which is God. The Word of
God and the Word which is God sustains itself amid the turning,
changing, shifting, illusory darkness and death of the turning world.
But after the glory of affirmation comes the memory of sin and un-
worthiness. There is an extreme shift in emotion; and to the immutable
eternity of the Word is set in contrast with the difficulty of finding
and believing in the Word. One question after another, marked by inter-
nal rhyme, declares through doubt the difficulty of finding the Word
which is God, which is to be found nowhere in this life, in no climate,
no time, and no place, and certainly not among those who deny its
existence.

7.

The protagonist is consequently moved to appeal to the holy
lady once again, and the question is asked, Who will she pray for? and
the kinds of human beings who need her intercession are named, those
who are in the darkness, those who are torn, those who wait, those who
are children, those who cannot pray, those who deny their faith after
affirming it, those who are terrified: which is to say, all human beings.
A vision of death returns, and now it is a vision of "the desert in the
garden and the garden in the desert", "the last desert between the last
blue rocks". Throughout this part, the protagonist returns to Christ's
outery, "O my people, what have I done unto thee?" and this question
and the affirmation of the power of the lady leads to the last part of
"Ash Wednesday".

Here the beginning of the poem is repeated, but with a
significant variation: "Because I do not hope to turn again", has
become, "Although I do not hope to turn again", which is to say that
the resignation has been accepted in a new way. The protagonist has
surrendered all hope, and he knows that this life is "a dream-crossed
twilight". But now the nature of his resignation is such that the
beauty and glory of this life are renewed as, looking from a window
at the granite shore of a seacoast, he sees the sails of ships
flying seaward and resembling unbroken wings, a metaphor which should
bring the reader back to the wings unable to fly in the first part.
Seeing the unbroken wings of the ships, his lost heart and his weak
spirit once more take pleasure in the earth and the sea, in bird, beast,
and flower. And a granite shore, a place where earth and sea meet, is
a just site for such a renewal, for it is the place where ships
set forth, and where human beings are between two kinds of experience.

The protagonist moves forward to a general statement about
this life: it is a place of solitude "where three dreams cross", the
three dreams, we may assume, of the past, the present, and the future.

8.

The general statement leads to the conclusion of prayer again,
a prayer to the mother and the sister who have already been invoked and
to the spirit of the fountain and the garden, the divinities governing
natural life. The protagonist asks that he be helped not to deceive him-
self, that he be capable of love and free of love, that he be free of
the desire for change and able, even amid the rocks of this life, to
find his peace in God's will, and that he be not separated from all other
beings, the worst of all evil and pain. This conclusion ought to be com-
pared with the imperatives, "Give, sympathize, and control", which come at
the end of "The Waste Land", and to which the reply is one of helplessness.
Here, however, affirmation and hope and prayer are the conclusion, and
the separation of each ego from every other ego which declared itself in
"The Waste Land" has been succeeded by a prayer, in which a hope is im-
plicit, "Suffer me not to be separated".

The development from "The Waste Land" to "Ash Wednesday" can be followed by reading such poems as "Sweeney Agonistes" and "The Hollow Men", "The Fortune Of the Magi", and "Ambula"; and it can be glossed by reading certain essays which appeared during these eight years, in particular, the essays on Dante, Lénoclot Andrews, and Irvingabbitt. But perhaps better to examine the poem itself before connecting it with the long scrutiny which culminated in the poet's explicit religious avowal, although without that avowal the poem would obviously not have been written.

In "Ash Wednesday" as in "The Waste Land", the reader is confronted with passages which have no narrative, expository or logical unity. Again, the reader must survive at a certain purity of mind, if he is to read the poem without false expectations. And again the best way to look at the poem is to regard it first of all as a series of passages which, in themselves, prayers, and images, which have become important to the poet and among which he has discerned an emotional unity. The poem succeeds largely because the poet has honored the subliminal; he has recognized what is meaningful to him, although what is meaningful does not fit into any unpalatable frame of meaning, such as narrative or argument. And he has felt the power of the subliminal sufficiently to know that what might be imposed it upon it from the top of the mind, so to speak, would falsify it.

2.

The first part of "Ash Wednesday" is a lyrical statement of the protagonist's resignation of all hope, the hope of renewal and transformation, the hope of the gift and scope of other men, the hope of knowing and enjoying the beauty and the power of this life. His emotion is complex to such an extent that he must entertain the worst possible view of existence, the view that "what is actual is actual only for one time/and only for one place". This view may not be true, but it is necessary that the protagonist entertain it seriously to try his faith.

If what is actual is limited to time and to place, then the protagonist must "renounce the blessed face", he must renounce all supernatural faith, and he must suppose that his religious belief is merely a construction or fabrication motivated by the desire to have something in which to believe. The nature of those thoughts is such that theyprotagonist moves to the words of a prayer, a prayer that these very thoughts —"these matters that with myself too much discloses"—be forgiven him. The prayer bridges thingsprotagonist back to resignation and the surrender of all hope, and this in turn brings the protagonist back to prayer in which a profound insight is stated in a brief phrase: "Teach us to care and not to care". Some poets have celebrated love and some have celebrated indifference, resignation, and the renunciation of love. Here the poet perceives and expresses with perfect economy the necessity of both love and indifference. For it is possible to love too much as it is possible to love too little; it is possible to care for the wrong things and to be indifferent to the right thing. The protagonist moves from this to a quotation from the Mass in which Mary is asked to pray for those who appeal to her now "and at the hour of death". And this conclusion leads to the second part, which is an imagination of death.

3.

The protagonist has conceived of the most sterile and consummate death: a death in the desert after which his body is devour-ed by three white leopards. All that remains is his scattered bones which chirp their hatred of the past life and praise a saintly lady, a lady of goodness and loveliness to whom this part of the poem is addressed. The scattered bones which are the irreducible remnant and ruin of the protagonist's being declare their acceptance of death and their rejection of life. The protagonist affirms his desire for oblivion and forgetfulness. God, as if in response, says, "Prophesy to the wind", and then the bones begin an extraordinary chant which is a paraphrase of the litany to the Virgin Mary: she is praised as the consummation of all opposes and contradictions: speech and silence, movement and rest, energy and exhaustion, the pain of desire and the pain of satisfaction. She represents to the protagonist the life which is truly beyond life because it is in her being that "all love end". Thus she is a supernatural actuality, an actuality which is beyond time and place.

After the chant, the bones again declare their preference of death to life--"We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other", and their satisfaction with the inheritance of oblivion. As in the first part, the protagonist was brought by utter hopelessness to prayer, so in the second part, the idea of death brings him to the praise of a saintly lady and of Mary as the type of every holy lady who might intercede for the redemption of those who have sinned. In this part a kind of bleak joy lifts itself above the emotion of hatred of this life and desire to escape from it. And Stephen Spender has rightly compared this part to passages in Beethoven's late quartets where tortuous music is followed by a think weak, and yet triumphant melody which suggests reconciliation and acceptance after all suffering has been endured, all hope disappointed, and all love wasted.

4.

The reader may or may not remember the stairway in Dante's "Purgatorio". Whether he does or not, this is a good illustration of how a literary beginning does not require the support of literary knowledge. The reader need only bear in mind an ordinary human experience, that of climbing a stairway. It is true that the passage might not have been written as it is written without, first, the poet's knowledge of Dante and second, his experience of an actual stair, his knowledge of literature and his sense of the actual. And the emphasis upon the turning of the stair unites with the emphasis on turning--changing, being renewed and transformed, becoming other and more than one is--in the first part of the poem; and this use of turning is perhaps inspired by a knowledge of Dante. But the reader can arrive at an immediate experience of the emotions of the protagonist without having heard of Dante.

The protagonist tells of his struggle as he ascended a stairway. The stairway is at once any stairway, the stairway of the years of this life, and any effort toward a desired object or state of being. "At the first turning of the second stair", the protagonist saw a struggle between the devil of the stairs and some other being, who may be at once the protagonist, the reader, or any human being. The devil of the stairs imposes his evil through hope and despair, both deceptive emotions. And in the line, "Thy deceitful face of hope and despair", the poet achieves a double insight of the same kind as when he saw the double necessity of love and of being free from love. "Teach me to care and not to care". In fact, the emotional unity of the poem shows itself

5.

"At the second turning of the second stair" (here, as before,
the figure of the stair lends itself to the formal idiom of the poem,
which depends very much upon the variation and repetition of the same
phrase and the same word), all is hopeless darkness, nothing can be seen,
and therefore being present, and the stair itself resembles an old man's
mouth or a shark's bullet: that is, it resembles the voracity, degradation,
and decay of nature.

The third stair, at the first turning, has a window which shows
the descriptive beauty of this life, the beauty of May, of music, and of a
woman. This too is a distraction and illusion, just like the hopeless
darkness of the second stair, for it depends upon the love of one human
being for another. Such love must of necessity fade; what is necessary
is "strength beyond hope and despair", the mastery of the emotions and
a freedom from them. Again, the protagonist concludes with the words of
a prayer, declaring his unworthiness and his desire that he should be
spoken of, a reference which does not require that the reader remember the
story of the Centurion in the New Testament from which it is derived.

The fourth part returns to the hold lady who by her goodness
and her intercession redeems this life and those who have sinned. The
identity of this lady is not important; she is of the type of the Virgin
Mary, she walks in Mary's cold, she moves between sleep and waking, and
walks in white light through ten years, and she is thus the lady to whom
the vision of death has charred and the paradox satisfied.

and of a supernatural realm. It is a dream because it cannot be
understood except through analogy and symbol. And it is a dream
because it requires faith to be believed. But whether the belief
is true or false, it is the dream which represents supreme human
aspiration. This should be sufficient for any reader, whatever
his beliefs. The lady through the dream manifests itself and who
is herself a part of the dream is silent. But her presence is
the reason for the flowing of fountains and the singing of birds.
The lady exists between the yews which signify death and behind
the garden-god which signifies the natural world, the world of
the blossoms, the flutes, and the years. It is because of her that
the bird sings and pleads that the dream be redeemed and be believed
until the moment of death. Hence the poem ends in prayer again,
repeating the words which end every Catholic Mass, and which appeal
to the Virgin Mary, even as the protagonist has addressed himself
to the holy lady.

The fifth part of the poem begins in an extraordinary
rhythm which plays upon the meaning that the word, *word*, may have,
and mounts to an affirmation of the Word which is God. The Word of
God and the Word which is God sustains itself amid thestending,
changing, shifting, illusory darkness and death of the turning world.
But after the glory of affirmation comes the memory of sin and un-
worthiness. There is an extreme shift in emotion; and to the immutable
eternity of the Word is set in contrast with the difficulty of finding
and believing in the Word. One question after another, marked by inter-
nal rhyme, declares through doubt the difficulty of finding the Word
which is God, which is to be found nowhere in this life, in no climate,
no time, and no place, and certainly not among those who deny its
existence.

This inspires an emotion of

The protagonist is consequently moved to appeal to the holy lady once again, and the question is asked, who will she pray for? and the kinds of human beings who need her intercession are named, those who are in the darkness, those who are torn, those who wait, those who are children, those who cannot pray, those who deny their faith after affirming it, those who are terrified: which is to say, all human beings. A vision of death returns, and now it is a vision of "the desert in the garden and the garden in the desert", "the last desert between the last blue rocks". Throughout this part, the protagonist returns to Christ's outcry, "O my people, what have I done unto thee?" and this question and the affirmation of the power of the lady leads to the last part of "Ash Wednesday".

Here the beginning of the poem is repeated, but with a significant variation: "Because ¹ do not hope to turn again", has become, "Although I do not hope to turn again", which is to say that the resignation has been accepted in a new way. The protagonist has surrendered all hope, and he knows that this life is a dream-crossed twilight. But now the nature of his resignation is such that the beauty and glory of this life are renewed as, looking from a window at the granite shore of a seacoast, he sees the sails of ships flying seemed and resembling unbroken wings, a metaphor which should bring the reader back to the wings unable to fly in the first part. Seeing the unbroken wings of the ships, his lost heart and his weak spirit once more take pleasure in the earth and the sea, in bird, beast, and flower. And a granite shore, a place where earth and sea meet, is a just site for such a renewal, for, as it is the place where ships set forth, and where human beings are between two kinds of experience.

The protagonist moves forward to a general statement about this life: "It is a place of solitude "where three dreams cross", the three dreams, we may assume, of the past, the present, and the future.

"Ash Wednesday"

"Ash Wednesday" deserves extended exegesis because it is one of Eliot's best poems, perhaps indeed the best; because it is obscure in a sense, although in one sense its obscurity is merely the effect of great simplicity; and because in many ways it marks an extremely important point in Eliot's career.

Between 1922 when "The Waste Land" was published and 1930, the date of the publication of "Ash Wednesday", a gradual and profound change had taken place in Eliot as an author. It is foolish to suppose that Eliot's conversion to Anglo-Catholicism is a recantation of any kind. This is one of the stock notions about Eliot as a poet and one of the notions which relieve the critic from the necessity of seeing what faces him. "The Hippotamus", a satirical poem about the Church, is the instance used most often to show that if Eliot as a clever young poet was not taken in by the Church, but on the contrary, even this poem and certain -ly passages in other poems in the first two volumes show an interest in religious reading and thought which is not likely in the true atheist, agnostic, or inoaclast. And, if there were no previous evidence, certainly the conclusion to "The Waste Land" as well as some previous passages, shows that this poet is one who is as even such a one as E.L.Mencken remarked at the time, a mind which is naugliter Christian; or let it be so, by nature religious, no matter what particular interpretation we make of the religious adhesions of human beings.

The development to the point where/explicit religious avowal was possible had taken place during a time when Eliot's reputation as a poet and a critic was securely established; and when he was editing *The Criterion*. In prose, we can follow the development quite explicitly in such essays as the one on "Dante".

and in the periodical apocarance of the essays which constitute the
volume entitled "For Langlot Andrewes", which appeared the year
before "Ash Wednesday"

In verse, the poems which succeeded "The Waste Land" look
at first as if the poet's gift were dividing into two roads, one
the scrutiny of the colloquial and the actual, which is to be found
at its most intense in "Sweeney Agonistes"; and the other, the bare
lyric abstracted from any definite time and place which is to be
seen in "The Hollow Men". The two methods which had been joined in
the poet's previous work were now set apart. But the oneness of emo-
tion is obvious, for there is despair in both "S.A.", and "TM",
despair of the most irreducible kind.

In style and method, "Ash Wednesday" succeeds upon "The Hollow
Men". It is bare and lyrical; and the use of the particulars of the
actual world which we saw at its height in "The Waste Land" has
been transformed into something new, partly by the use of the idiom
of ritual; and partly by a use of emblematic symbols; and partly
by a generalized use of such particulars as a seacoast. It should be
noted that whatever the personal roots of this development in style,
it bears a strong resemblance to the work of other artists, in part-
icular to Strainsky's "Symphony of Psalms".

The first part of "Ash Wednesday" is the statement of a
complicated deair, mixed with that one takes to be/ironic
and paradoxical. The protagonist has given up the hope of turning
again, the hope the gifts of others and the striving to such
things as "theusu reign". He has given up "the infirm glory of
the positive hour"; he knows that present, past, and future are
transitory, the act is passing, each human being is bound and
limited to his own time and place. Here the directness of statement
appears to project a ambiguity. The protagonist is entertaining

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What the bands sings what the human being desires in the finality
of death, is a reconciliation of opposites --of memory, forgetfulness;
exhaustion and vitality; anxiety, serenity; love satisfied and unsat-
isfied; travel and conclusion; speech and silence. And this ultimate
reconciliation is to be only "in the Garden/where all love ends"/.

the antinomies,
This theme of the thrones, and poles of this life as to be trans-
cended, risen above, or reconciled is a theme which is to be mount
in Eliot's subsequent poetry. It has its equivalent in the charac ter
of his prose, in his careful use of both extremes which he learned
from Bradley. And as a theme it represents a further development, a
new stage, and a more profound one (profound in a sense I shall ex-
plain) in the heart of this life and this world which we saw in
Prufrock.

The third part of "Ash Wednesday" uses the figure of the
stair to set forth the spiritual crisis of the protagonist. "At the
first turning of the second stair", the struggle of the soul is
with the decision--the deception and the illusion--which the evil
powers can impose upon the soul through hope and despair. It is
important to note that despair as well as hope is part of the evil
which must be overcome; for despair is as deceptive as hope. And here,
as in the use of Caribbeanus for Hamlet, we have another example of
Eliot's freshness of insight.

Mounting on the stair, the next stage is one of emptiness
--of "no more faces", of darkness; it is perhaps the period in
which despair has for the moment won out; and the stair is like
an old man's mouth, like an old man, and like a shark's mouth, like
a shark, images of being old, destroyed, and dead.

And then, succeeding the emptiness, is the stage in which
the heart of this life, the wonder of sexual love (which is figured
in "the slotted window bellied like the fig's fruit") presents itself

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in all its power to the soul. From the window of the stair, the
protagonist sees the hawthorn blossom and the pastoral scene;
and he knows the beauty of a lady's blown brown hair. But, since
he is upon the stair, he knows that this is/distraction, it is
a station on the way to something further (quote Eliot on Bautel-
aire and love between man and woman), it is merely a step and a
stop. What is necessary, and what has been sought from the first
part forward, is: "strength beyond hope and despair". And as he
remembers this, the protagonist remembers his own unworthiness,
and again turns to prayer, asking that be given the word only,
even though he is unworthy.

The fourth part deals with a saintly personage who is
not referred to by name; and who, in the unity of the poem, may
be identified with the Lady invoked by the protagonist in the
second part. The effect of this one, lady, or saint, or holy
spirit, is to move between the flowers and the years and to
renew the things of this life, and to "redeem yhe unread vision
in the higher dream", which is to sny, the unread vision of a
supernatural realm which is apart from this life and yet exer-
cises its influence upon this life and penetrates it. The refer-
ence to the higher dream can, like so much else in Eliot's verse,
be glossed by a reference in his prose, here by the discussion of
the higher dream in the essay on Dante, which was written during
the period when "Ash Wednesday" was composed. I take the phrase to
mean also that any view of the supernatural is but a dream, but
a metaphorical reaching for what is, of necessity, inconceivable.

The lady, the silent sister, moves in the time between
sleep and waking; is sheathed with white light; and although she
says no word, her presence is the reason why the fountain springs
up, the bird sings, and the song of the bird becomes a plea to

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redem the time, remember the higher dream, and remember the word until
the moment of death, of which the yew, shaken by the wind, is a symbol.

Here, as in the previous parts, the abstract and formal
quality given to the symbols should be observed. Violts, riddles,
flutes, the talk of trivial things, the dry rock, the sand --these
things are so referred to and so used in the context and by the con-
text that they have the same distant and Byzantine formality as the
jewelled unicorns, the yews and the garden god. In fact, it may be
said that the reference to jewelled unicorns clinches the particular
look which the symbols are supposed to have.

The fifth part of the poem begins in an extraordinary
rhythm which plays with a kind of passionate repetition upon
meanings that the word, *word*, can have, and mounts to an affirmation
of the Word which is God. The Word of God and Word which is God
sustains itself amid the transience, darkness, and death of this
world. Here again a passage in Eliot's prose exhibits why was
probably the *literary* source of the passage in worse, for in his
essay on Lancelot Andrewes, the following quotation occurs.//

After the glory of affirmation, however, comes the
memory of unworthiness and sin again. There is an extreme shift
in emotion; and to the constant eternity of the World is placed,
in contrast, in the form of a question as the previous affirmat-
ion took a conditional form, the question as to where the Word is
to be found and heard. It is to be found nowhere in this life,
in no climate, no time and no place; it is not be found among
those who deny its existence, certainly.

Despair, in this way, gives rise to or brings the protag-
onist back to the veiled sister who has already been invoked twice.
The power of this figure becomes more evident as it appears for the
the third time, aided by the passages which have already spoken of her

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As in the second part of the poem, she was the lady of silences, here she is the veiled sister; she is silent, she is sheathed about by white light, and she is veiled: these attributes define her apart- of whom she will pray for ness. And the question/becomes extended to many different kinds of human beings, those who are in the dark, those who are divided between choice and opposition, those who are torn, those who wait, those who are children, those who have offended, are terrified, affirm first / and then deny their faith in the end, "between the last blue rocks", and in "the desert in the garden, the garden in the desert", a statement which brings us back to the invocation on the second part and the allusion to the garden where all love ends.

before the world

Throughout this part, the protagonist is brought back to outcry, "O my people, what have I done unto thee" by the nature of other thoughts and emotions. And the question of the power of the lady and her capacity to pray for human beings in different kinds of plight leads naturally to the sixth and final part of the poem. It is, in a sense, an answer to the question and an affirmation of the power of the lady.

This part

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This part
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begins by stating the resignation of the protagonist. Once more, as at the beginning of the poem, he renounces his hopes in this world, although it should be noted that a significant shift in tone is produced by changing "because" to "although" while otherwise reproducing the first three lines of the first part. Even though the protagonist has given up any hope of this life, which is "a dreamcrossed twilight", and even perhaps because of the change wrought by this resignation, the glory and the beauty of this life presents itself to him. Looking from the window by a seacoast, he sees the sails of ships, and his lost heart and his weak spirit once more takes pleasures in flowers, sea sounds, sea birds and "the salt savour of the sandy earth"

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The choice of place, the granite shore, is important
in two ways: first, in that as a granite shore, it is not the likely
or expected place where this life and this earth will present their
savour once more; and second, because it is, in a way, a central
place, the place between the earth and the sea. Here, in passing,
it is worthwhile making the distinction between the objective and
the personal meanings of any given reference. For Eliot, the granite
shore is the New England coast; for the reader, it may be the New
England coast, especially if he has been there and if he knows some-
thing of the poet's biography. But in the poems for reader and poet
alike, the objective meaning of the granite shore is the place where
earth and sea meet, where ships set forth, and where, in general,
a human being is between two kinds of experience, between them in
such a way that he is able to grasp both of them and compare them.
This is an aid to the affirmation which this passage makes; and
the fact that it is a granite shore, that it is difficult on the
surface to suppose that here the savour of this life would be
renewed here, aside the powerfulness of the passage.

Briefly, a general statement is made about this
life; it is a place of solitude where "three dreams cross", the
three dreams presumably of the past, the present, and the future.
The blue rocks like the ivory gates are symbols of extreme generality.
For example, the blue rocks may signify the sky which surrounds this
life; and the ivory gates may signify

This does not prevent their functioning in other ways; and it is in fact
unnecessary for the reader to assign a specific meaning to them because
the context is simple and direct enough it is clear that the poet
is writing about attitudes toward life which every reader knows very
well: hope, redgnation, the renewal of hope, suffering changed to
enjoyment, and the attitude toward death. "Ash Wednesday" is obscure
chiefly in being extremely simple, too simple for most readers.

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The poem concludes with a prayer of extraordinary beauty and insight, a prayer to the sister and the mother who have been invoked before this, and to the spirits of the fountain and the garden, which are of this life. The protagonist asks that he be helped npt to deceive himself. He asks that he be able to care for what he ought to care and yet not to care too much and thus, in a sense, not to care at all. Here the insight into the difficulty of human emotion is hardly surpassed by any poet. For some poets have celebrated love and some poets have celebrated indifference, resignation, or the renunciation of love. But in this brief line, Eliot perceives and expressed the sense in which both love and renunciation are necessary. The next line, "Teach us to sit still" again reaches to the depths of the human psyche, to the unrest, dissatisfaction, and desire to start again, try elsewhere, run away, and seek out novelty which is one of the chief illnesses of the mind and the heart. It is proper then to echo Dante's most famous line, "In his will is our peace"--which Eliot shifts to "Our peace in His will"-- then repeating for the second time in four lines the phrase "these rocks" as a symbol of this life, and then returning to direct prayer and invocation to the beings who preside over the natural and over the supernatural, and saying again that to be separated is the worst of all pains, "Suffer me not to be separated", and suggesting the like passage in "The Waste Land", in which a broken Coriolanus turns the lock in the key of the prison of the ego.

In fact, this concluding passage ought to be compared with the concluding passage which is a sermon in "The Waste Land". There the imperatives of "Give, Sympathize and Control" are answered by negatives of helplessness. Here, on the contrary, the poet concludes with affirmation and hope; and these new attitudes are convincing because of the quality of the verse; the same reason why the despair of "The Waste Land" was convincing.

"CORIOLAN"

"Difficulties Of A Statesman" 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, reference, organization.

The return of Coriolanus as a symbol of pride and power which brings 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: in the first, "Triumphal March" he appears in an Armistice Day parade or Roman victory march, 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 Statesman", 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 (Baudelaire's title) recurring 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.

* Perhaps one of the titles of this poem is: "Difficulties Of An Editor".

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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 phrases as "among these busts, all _correctly_ inscribed,"
which closely resembles "there was no _information_ and so we _con_
_tinued_," 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 the poet's choice of words.

Eliot's Prose Style

As Eliot is a great poet, so he is a great writer of prose. The
resemblances and the differences between his poetry and his prose are
interesting, significant, and illuminating.

For one thing, for the very first thing, in fact, it is clear
that his prose is close to his poetry in two important ways. First, in
that some of his prose is an explication or a defense of his methods in
poetry. The essay on "The Metaphysical Poets" contains, for example,
a defense--in this instance not a good one--of the difficulty of modern
poetry. Second, in that some of the words, phrases, sentences, and qua-
tations in the prose are the beginning --or perhaps at times the echo--
of what is to be found in the poems. Thus in the essay on Lancelot
Andrewes, we may the beginning of passages in "The Journey Of The Magi"
and "Ash Wednesday". This is less important than the explication of
poetic method in the critical essays, but it is worth taking account of
for reasons which must be discussed at some further point of this essay.
And the connection, the kinship, reminds us that we are dealing with the
products of one mind, a trained and a disciplined mind. How false them,
as we shall see in detail, and how superficial is the view that Eliot's
prose theory is somehow in contradiction to his poetic practice.

Unlike most of his poetry, which always bears the look of
a careful and long dedication to the subject, Eliot's prose often
bears the mark of an occasion, a review of a new edition, an intro-
duction to a new edition, an editorial comment, or as in "Thoughts
After Lambeth", the meeting of a church body. The quotations and
the observations of a periodical reviewer are certainly present often
enough, especially at the beginning of an essay. And this may be one
of the ways in which Eliot's prose style formed itself. The influence
of a training in philosophy, of the reading of philosophical papers,
and of the philosophical style of Bradley is also unmistakable. Yet

these marks are lifted beyond their usual appearance, especially as
the critic proceeds. They become a manner, /a stage presence, and/ an
air of unquestionable individuality. If they were used at first be-
cause of the character of an imposed task, they were made into some-
thing quite different and quite new.

The tone which at first seems dryasdust and thinlipped,
constrained and impersonal and disdainful, in the end reveals a mind
capable of, capable of passionate intensity, and/ an irony which leaves its target
pierced once and for all.

The beginning of an essay will often be offhand and
matter of fact. There will be introductory remarks of an apparent
casualness which deal with the particular edition of the author who
is being discussed and which set the stage for the kind of compar-
sion and analysis-- the two tools of the critic according to Eliot--
which will lift the essay to a level of generality no one not famil-
iar with the author would have expected.

As an example of an offhand or matter-of-fact beginning,
here is the opening of the essay on "ancelot Andrewes:

"The Right Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Bishop of
Winchester, died on September 25, 1626. During his lifetime he enjoyed
a distinguished reputation for the conduct of his diocese, for his
ability in controversy displayed against Cardinal Bellarmine, and
for the decorum and devotion of his private life".

The uninformed reader may not recognize the rhetoric
and the deliberate idiosyncrasy involved in this beginning, although
the giving of the exact date of death, the 25th of September may
provide the necessary hint. There then follows, and this again is
very brief
typical, a history of the opinions which have had to do with Andrewes
and a placing of him with regard to other authors and ministers of the
period.

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In diction especially we may see the deliberate cultivation of the prose quality of language, the use of the word which is matter-of-fact, seemingly a matter of protocol, conversational, the notation of a passing detail. If we watch with care, we can see how this cultivated prosaicism becomes poetic in itself, like the rigorous simplicity of some objects of use. A parallel development takes place in Eliot's poetry, in the passages where prose usages are drawn upon. Thus in the poetry words like "organized" and "asserted" are given an extreme poetic function; and in the prose, we encounter such a reference as "D.M. Lawrence and James Joyce, those/serious and improving authors", where such a word as "improving" has both the exactness, the shock and the surprise which Eliot has prais ed as a poetic quality. And this kind of prose should obviously be compared with the kind that it has at times been expected that a poet would write, the poetic prose, let us say, of Yeats or of Yeats' peers in the nineties. Indeed, Yeats too also cultivates the colloquial and the prosaic; but in his prose what we get is, although often of extraordinary beauty, is a mannered simplicity.

Both poets in writing prose seek to be conversational; and at a given point, in mid-career perhaps, at the point when there was no longer any question as to Eliot's importance as a poet and a critic, some of the constraint and much of the impersonal tone vanishes. As a matter of directness, of being conversational --and also of being sincere by stating one's personal impressions, Gourmont's recommendation,-- the critic begins to use the first person, and even, as he proceeds, to speak of personal impressions and experiences. Consequently, some of the dryness and the deliberateness--greyness interesting in itself--is replaced by a tone of intensity, a vigor of example since personal impressions are used, and an increasing fluency of expression. We then come upon an irony which is no longer always angry, a humor of great

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great charm, and even purple passages.

Thus it is not until 1933 that such a passage as the following is to be expected in Eliot's prose: "Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, and felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a particular time and place, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, sixth ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small railway junction where there was a watermill". (Here, in passing, we may observe that there is much that psychoanalysis can illuminate in this character of sensibility, as well as other predominant aspects in Eliot--especially his description of Hamlet's difficulties and his description of inspiration: "To me it seems that at these moments (of inspiration), which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it--") Another instance of the pure prose stylist permitting himself a flight is to be found at the end of "Thoughts After Lambeth":

"The world is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide".

The restraint and the constraint are still present, but the lifting up in tone is clear even in the punctuation, the pauses, and the capitalization of such a word as World.

The fact that the norm is pitched low helps to set off these moments of flight/particular sharpness. We gain the impression that the critic might have written on this level much

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more often, if he had not been possessed by a rigorous conception of
the purposes and the proper usages of prose.

What this conception was, in the beginning at least, is made
explicit in the essays in "The Sacred Wood" entitled "The Perfect
Critic", and "Imperfect Critics". In these essays, Arthur Symons
is criticized for his impressionistic prose, which is an attempt,
says Eliot, to be creative in a substitute and inferior way instead
of attempting to "criticize, arrange, and expound". In the same
way the diction of a statement about the nature of poetry, that it
"is the most highly organized form of intellectual activity" is
commemned because of its vagueness and its abstractness (here Eliot
comes close to identifying abstractness and vagueness, but in the
context his distinction, derived from Gourmont is a genuine one).
Some words are wrongly used because, since they are abstract, they
tend to become identified with indefinite emotions. Other words are
wrongly used because, with the immense growth of technical fields,
"there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are
used with different meanings...that it becomes increasingly difficult
for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about". Con-
creteness is one of the ways in which such difficulty is avoided, and
one important word which may well stand for the whole situation of
language is "cause", which cannot mean the same thing in history, for
example, as it does in physics. And this concern with exactitude of
language will be dominant in the work of the critic throughout. In fact,
it emerges as one of the themes of his poetry, in "Four Quartets", even
as again and again poets are praised by the critic because they helped
to preserve, purify, extend and renew language. Such poets as John
Dryden and Marianne Moore are both praised for this reason and poetry
itself is termed the 'highest point of consciousness, its greatest
power, and its most delicate sensibility".

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The scrutiny of the meaning of particular words,--the questioning of their exactness and the search for accurate definition--becomes a weapon, and one closely akin to the use of irony. The irony is not far removed, also, from the sacrificial moments in Eliot's poetry. And if it is sometimes unjust, if it is always effective, it is also sometimes unjust. Eliot refers to the Huxley Brothers. It may be a misunderstanding abetted by the gulf of the Atlantic Ocean which makes this seem irony and unjust to one reader. For it is as if one said--almost--the Smith Bros. or even the Marx Brothers; and the verbal shift from Julian and Aldous Huxley to the Huxley Brother hardly expresses a just criticism of the views which are being attacked.

Elsewhere, however, the irony contains within itself its own justification, and the target is exposed sufficiently. One typical example is in "The Function of Criticism" and has to do with J. Middleton Murry. The particular desugGESTion Murry's statement that writers, divines, statesmen who are English "inherit no rules from their forbears; they inherit only this: a sense that in the last resort they must depend upon the inner voice." Eliot, having quoted this sentence, then says: "This statement does, I admit, appear to cover certain cases; it throws a flood of light upon Mr. Lloyd George. But why 'in the last resort'? Do they, then, avoid the dictates of the inner voice up to the last resort? enough My belief is that those who possess this inner voice are ready to hearken to it, and will hear no other. The inner voice, in fact, sounds remarkably like an old principle which has been formulated by an elder critic in the now familiar phrase 'doing as one likes'. The possessors of the inner voice ride ten in a compartment to a football match at Swansea, listening to the inner voice which breathes the eternal message of vanity, fear, and lust". Here analysis and patient development of an attitude, culminating in a perception of the actual as always when Eliot is at his best, perfoms an act of judgement which persuades as the reference to the Huxley Brothers does not, and cannot.

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In some of his latest essays, Eliot expresses misgivings about the character of his prose style, saying that "I can never re-read my own prose without embarrassment", and then, in an essay which appeared a year after this sentence was printed, the same sentence reappeared--as if to prove the failure to reread--but on this occasion, "embarassment" becomes "acute embarrassment". The sentiment is far from singular. An author so different from Eliot as Andre Gide says the same same thing. And a self-consciousness--what one may even term a squeamishness--is one of the diseases of the occupation of writing prose.

The point worth stressing is this feeling as a cause of the tone of the prose. What is taken for coldness and dryness is perhaps the restraint and the constraint of an author seeking to avoid the and other faults failure of tone/which the prose writer fears.

So it is that Eliot, in writing a new preface to the second edition of "The Sacred Wood" speaks of "faults of style which I regret; and especially a stiffness and an assumption of pontifical solemnity which may be tiresome to many readers."

The interesting thing is the extent to which, for the careful and devoted reader, these faults, which are faults of surface, at first are not present (in the sense that he is not aware of them, he is too interested in what the critic is saying). Then these faults appear, to his surprise, as his own growth of critical consciousness mounts. Then there is a third stage, and the best one, when these faults are no longer at all important, although he notices them, from time to time. For the truly mature and trained reader has learned not to place too much value upon style as such in critical discourse. But another thing is involved too, the passage of time. Like the mannerisms of 17th or 18th century prose style, the mannerisms of the critic fade from view as the period takes shape and becomes an historical whole. By now, some of Eliot's essays are a generation old. And the

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pontifical solemnity to which Eliot refers, which was undoubtedly resented by Eliot's early readers to whom he was a youthful critic, now exists in a very different context, a context in which the critic has the authority which permits and perhaps even requires that he be solemn in an authoritative way.

In any case, such qualities of the texture of critical style do not really concern the subject-matter of the prose. The reader who permits himself to be concerned with them and to allow them to be a part of what he is reading about is in truth depriving himself of the important part of the critic's essays. The important question is whether the critic has illuminated his subject or not.

However, there is another aspect of the style which is the consequence of a habit of mind and a way of examining the subject; and which is the cause of passages which are to be regretted because they result sometimes in emptiness, sometimes in a kind of withdrawal of judgement.

Perhaps this habit of style which is a habit of thinking can be exhibited best by quotation (Poetry); or by the excess of parody. Eliot will say, to attempt the illumination of parody, such as it is, that we must not say that Poetry is A; he will say perhaps in the very next sentence that we must not on the other hand deny that Poetry is sometimes A; or if we do, we run the risk of omitting a half-truth; so that perhaps we had better commit ourselves to a general statement (such as that poetry is a "superior amusement") which is certainly untrue, but untrue in such a way that it prevents us from committing the more important errors involved in making a specific definition of poetry.

Continuing, Eliot will arrive at the point at which he says that Poetry--or whatever the subject of discussion is--cannot

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be defined. Now this is a kind of dialectic which can be very valuable; it often is; but on the other hand it does often result in a complete cancellation of meaning. In an effort not to say too much, the critic ends up by saying nothing. And if it sometimes well to say nothing, it is sometimes a waste of time. By moving between extremes, by denying them, by negating the articulations of other critics, the critic comes to the point of avoiding issues (Kipling, Shakespeare, Belief).

Two other aspects of the texture of Eliot's prose style are worth inspecting. One is the excellent use of quotation, and the other, from which it is by no means separated, is the use of paraphrase. "The Church of England washes its dirty linen in public", begins the essay, "Thoughts After Lambeth", and then this reference is stressed and developed: "In contrast to some other institutions both civil and ecclesiastical, the linen does get washed". And, since the point is both striking and fruitful, Eliot continues and concludes by arriving at a witty phrase: "To have linen to wash is something; and to assert that one's linen never needed washing would be a suspicious boast".

a
And thus there is/gain in the colloquial, in ease, and in concreteness.
Again, writing of the New Humanism of 1929, Eliot permits himself a paraphrase which is a paradox: "For the spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life". Perhaps we might maintain that this reversal is too much for the sake of a rhetorical emphasis; and that it is is untrue; that what should have been said was that the letter giveth life was well as the spirit; or that, in certain conditions, the letter is more reliable and sustaining than the spirit; Yet we can see how removed from rhetoric for its own sake this paraphrase is, if we compare it to like usages in such an author as G.K.Chesterton; and if we remember how the letter, the word, the literary tradition, the text and the quotation are one of the central motives in all that Eliot has written and all that he had cared to commend and praise.

ELIOT'S PLAYS

Eliot's interest in the drama preceded by a good many years the publication of his first play "Sweeney Agonistes", which is only a fragment, but which in some respects is superior to his three later efforts. The essays in "The Sacred Wood" are full of references to playwrights and to the theatre, and one of them, "The Possibility Of A Poetic Drama" shows Eliot's interest in the theatre as creative author. In this essay the main point is connected with the opposition of the actual and the ideal; Eliot criticizes attempts at playwriting by poets and men of ideas -- such as Shaw -- because they present ideas instead of presenting a vision; they do not sacrifice their philosophy or their thought to their drama; the ideas do not become transformed into the actuality of a drama and thus they commit what James called so properly the mere platitude of statement (as P.P. Blackmur has said, "Anyone can have ideas"). Or on the other hand, they are engaged in facsimile realism, the attempt to present exactly the surfaces of behavior in a given time and place.

Eliot's concern with the drama in this sense should be carefully distinguished from his use of the term, dramatic, as a term for a quality in all poetry. The two uses are of course closely connected, but by not keeping the distinction clearly in mind the conclusion is reached, (for example) that Milton is not dramatic, hence Milton is not really a good poet; or the defects of Milton are said to be a lack of drama, although they are in fact these defects of another kind of poetry.

2.

At the end of the essay on the writing of a poetic drama, Eliot hints or suggests that the music hall might well provide a framework for the modern poetic dramatist. The rationale of this suggestion is in part historical; it springs from a view of the relationship between sensitive and intelligent actors, and it reveals itself gradually: the music hall comedian not only has an eager audience, but he has one which does not demand the strict naturalism which has long reigned on the contemporary stage. This is prepared for and willing to be curious about any shift in time or place or device, provided that it is interesting or amusing. And this is illustrated all the time which is directed at the consciousness of the most intelligent by Hollywood.

This suggestion is developed and expanded in later essays, particularly in "The Use Of Poetry", where the plan of "Sweeney Agonistes" is described: My intention was to have one character whose sensibility and intelligence should be on the plane of the most sensitive and intelligent members of the audience; his speeches should be addressed to them as much as to the other personages of the play who were to be material, literal-minded, and visionless, with the consciousness of being overheard by the former (the audience). There was to be an understanding between the protagonist and a small number of the audience, while the rest of the audience would share the responses of the other characters in the play.

And then, just preceding this passage, is the already quoted description of the four levels on which a literary work, especially a play, may be written: "In a play by Shakespeare", you get several levels of significance. For the simplest auditors there is the plot,