INTERNATIONAL

flower of the nation. Each . . . is worth
more in moral authority . . . than 100
voting robots."

The Russians sounded grumpy, as if
they just could not enjoy political sur-
prises. But most others found it a rather
relaxing interlude in a tough year—even
the Scots, who also take politics seriously.
Said one dour Scotsman who found him-
self in London last week: "I thought some-
thing silly like this might happen. I hope
it won't go to the puir wee mon's head."

UNITED NATIONS

Work in Progress

In its seventh week of Paris sessions, U.N. held some 50 meetings, aimed to finish by Dec. 8. Highlights of the week: ¶ The General Assembly decided, 40 to 6, that the U.S. atomic control plan (Barruch plan) was the one the world needed. It officially hoped (also 40 to 6) that the Big Five and Canada would find in it a basis for agreement. Said Russia's Andrei Vishinsky: "We can immediately give a reply—there is no such basis."

¶ The Security Council bade the Israelis and Egyptians withdraw all their troops in the Palestine Negeb to the positions occupied on Oct. 14, put a subcommittee to work studying what could be done about it if they refused.

¶ Andrei Vishinsky got called down by Committee Chairman Paul-Henri Spaak, of Belgium, for "insulting other delegates." Replied the Russian: "Unless I am allowed to continue without interruption I won't say another word." He was not interrupted.

PANOPLIES

Dilatory Domiciles

Even before Peter the Great built his
famed northern capital astride the River
Neva and christened it with his own name,
it was an old Russian custom to honor a
hero by calling a town after him. With the
renaming of Petrograd in honor of Lenin,
the Bolsheviks picked up the custom and
carried it on with such vigor that a Rus-
sian geography now reads like a combina-
tion Who's Who, Social Register and Roll
of Honor.

Since the October Revolution at least
ten towns, one city and three rural regions
have been named for Stalin. Molotov has
been immortalized in the names of four
Russian towns, one region, countless
streets, and a square in Soviet-dominated
Hungary. The cities of Sverdlovsk, Kali-
ningrad (formerly Königsberg), Kuiby-
shev (formerly Samara) and Kirovabad
carry the names of four more Soviet faith-
fuls across the land.

Unlisted so far in this geographical
Debrett's has been the name of Andrei
Zhdanov, Cominform chief, who died last
August. But last week that omission stood
corrected. From the Kremlin had come
orders that the following were to be re-

THE STORIES THEY TELL

At sidewalk cafés, in dreary queues, on street corners and stubble-strewn
fields throughout the world, men paused last week (as every week) to pass
a word with their fellows and lighten their burdens with a wry joke. Here
& there, as the talk shuttled, TIME'S correspondents bent an ear to listen:

In Bucharest, Rumanians forgot for
a moment the might of the Red army in
the account of the latest U.S. super-
super-super Flying Fortress. It was so
huge that the pilot, hearing a noise
behind him, had to dispatch a courier
by motorcycle to locate the trouble.
"Just a football game on the lower
deck," came the report. Another ruck-
us. "A water polo match in the swim-
ming pool." A terrific bang. "Now the
boys are furious, sir," reported the mes-
senger. "A Russian plane was trying to
buzz us. It flew in through the window
and crashed on the basketball court."

Also from Bucharest last week came
another story (true), of a U.S. diplo-
mat who had some business to conduct
with a high-ranking official of Ruma-
nia's heavily guarded Ministry of the
Interior. After several unsuccessful at-
tempts, he finally managed to work his
way into the imposing white ministry
building, and past innumerable guards,
to the top floor. There stood two doors
with a hard-boiled, armed member of
the security police posted before each
one. The American showed his creden-
tials to the guard at the first door, who
looked him over suspiciously and dis-
appeared into the official's office. The
American waited, standing first on one
foot then on the other. Suddenly the
guard at the other door glanced furtive-
ly up & down the corridor. Then, sidling
up to the astonished diplomat, he whis-
pered hoarsely: "When are the Ameri-
cans coming?"

In Communist Budapest, where the
shadow of the Kremlin grows longer
and blacker every day, they were tell-
ing an old story* to cheer themselves
up. Two workers, Ernö and Lajos
(Magyar for Pat & Mike), were dis-
cussing whether life under the people's
republic was better than the old days.
"Obviously it is," said Ernö. "Why?"
asked Lajos. "Well," said Ernö, "in the
old days you lived in a cold, dirty flat,
ate a few crusts of bread for breakfast,
and then shivered on the street waiting
for a tram. After a long, hard day you
returned to your flat and froze all night.

"Now it's different. The boss's car
takes you to work. You work in a

* The same gag, turned now against the
Communist big shots, had been chortled over
many times in Central Europe in the early
part of this century, when it was told to
describe the future of emigrants to the capi-
talistic U.S.

warm, clean office, and when the day is
done, the boss's car takes you to his
luxurious apartment. There you eat
steak, drink red wine, and, after brandy
and coffee by the fire, you go to bed in
a soft, clean bed in the boss's bedroom."

"This happens to you?" asked Lajos
in amazement. "Don't be silly," said
Ernö. "I'm talking about my daughter."

The latest plight of the parsimonious
Nizam of Hyderabad was being rel-
ished by many an Indian who had
never seen moths fly out of a tightwad's
purse in U.S. vaudeville. The Nizam,
they told one another, had stacked his
private vault with some 250,000 rupees
in Indian currency long before his
country was grabbed by India. When
he came to get it, however, the worms
had got there first and the Bank of
India refused to honor the half-eaten
bills.

A Londoner, obsessed by the high
cost of living in Britain, wrote to the
*Times* about the excesses of this year's
Guy Fawkes Day, on which London
urchins traditionally beg "a penny for
the Guy, sir?" "I do not complain at
the poorness of the floor show that they
were putting on," he wrote solemnly,
"but I recoiled to hear them cry, 'Tup-
pence for the Guy, sir?' ... I feel con-
strained to inquire whether the country
can today afford a surcharge of 100
percent for such a matter."

And from Paris came a dialogue be-
tween two Frenchmen in a bar:

*First Frenchman:* If the Russians in-
vade France, Mr. Truman will drop his
atom bombs on Russia, but not on
Paris.

Second Frenchman: *C'est ça.* Then
the Russians will deport us all to Rus-
sia, like the Germans did.

First: *C'est ça.* Then all the Russians
will come and live in France.

Second: *C'est ça.* So the best thing
is to explain the situation to Mr. Tru-
man, then he won't drop his atom
bombs on Russia.

First: *C'est ça.* Then if he doesn't
drop them on Russia, the Russians
won't send us to Russia.

Second: *C'est ça.* Then Truman
won't really need any atom bombs.

First: *C'est ça.* So what do we have
to worry about?

Second: *C'est ça.* Let's have another
drink.

First: *C'est ça.*

TIME, NOVEMBER 15, 1948

31

THE ARGUMENT

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

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

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

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

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

The Argument/2/

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

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

The international hero finds that he is a citizen of
the world, whether he likes it or not. And he finds that the
world as such has no laws, no government, no fixed places or
things. It is the turning world of all times and all places,
and the historical sense dominates consciousness. In his attempt
to return to a community, the citizen of the world has to go
back to a seventeenth century bishop and/or to consult the literary
critics of another country in understanding the politics of royalism.
In his attempt to express his Christianity, he has to make use
of a fourteenth century mystic's treatise on the contemplative life.

The international man when he tried to go
home/sound it necessary to/become the citizen of a foreign
country, Middleton Murry called this $hage of Eliot's career
the return of the Mayflower; but that is only part of the story
--part of the fate of a citizen of the world.

The text of his politics had to come from
a 17th century bishop and from French literary critics, even as
the inspiration of his early poetic style came from the symbolist
poetry of another country.

T.S. ELIOT AS THE INTERNATIONAL HERO

Culture hero is one who brings new arts and skills to mankind.
Prometheus was a culture hero and the inventors of the radio may also
be said to be culture heroes, although this must not be confounded with
the culture made available by the radio.

The inventor of the radio made possible a new range of experience.
This is true of certain authors, for example it is true of Wordsworth
in regard to nature, and Proust in regard to time. It is not true of
Shakespeare, but by contrast it is true of Surrey and the early
Elizabethan playwrights who invented the technique of blank verse.
Thus the most important authors are not always culture heroes. When
we speak of a new range of experience, we may think of a mountain range:
some may make the vehicles by means of which the mountain is climbed,
some may climb the mountain, and some may apprehend the new view of
the surrounding countryside which becomes possible from the heights of
the mountain.

T.S.Eliot is a culture hero in each of these three ways. This be-
comes clear when we recognize and study the relationship of his work
to the possible experiences of modern life. The term, opossible, should
be kept in mind: for many human beings disregard and turn their backs
upon a good deal of modern life. The reader of T.S.Eliot by turning
the dials of his radio can hear the capitals of the world, London,
Vienna, Athens, Alexandria, Jerusalem. What he hears will be news of
the agony of war. Both the agony and the extent of this experience
are vivid examples of how the poetry of T.S.Eliot has a direct relation-
ship to the possible experiences of modern life. The width and the
height and the depth of modern life are represented in his poetry; the
agony and horror of modern life are exhibited

THE INTERNATIONAL HERO

Prometheus was a culture hero and the inventor or inventors of the radio may also be said to be culture heroes, although this must not be confounded with the culture made available by the radio.

The inventor of the radio made possible a new range of experience. This is true of certain authors. It is true of Wordsworth and Proust. It is not true of Shakespeare, although in a sense it is true of Surrey and the early Elizabethan playwrights who invented blank verse. Thus the truly important authors are not of necessity the ones who are culture heroes.

T.S. Eliot is a culture hero in a way which grows more important, the more we dwell upon the relationship of his work to the possible experiences of modern life. The reader of T.S. Eliot by turning the dials of his radio can hear the capitals of the world, London, Vienna, Alexandria, Jerusalem. What he hears will be news of the agony of war. Both the agony and the width of experience are vivid examples of how the poetry of T.S. Eliot has a direct relationship to the possible experiences of modern life. It is not merely that the width and the height and the depth of modern life is represented in his poetry; nor is it merely that the full agony and horror of modern life is exhibited as inevitable to any human being who does not wish to deceive himself with systematic lies. M.S. Eliot in his work is most of all a culture hero because he is of the kind of sensibility which is active in his poetry.

As Philip Rahv showed how the heroine of Henry James was best understood as the heiress of the ages, so in a richer sense, the true protagonist in Eliot's poems is the heir of the ages. He is a descendant of James in that he is an American who visits Europe with a Baedeker in his hand, just like Isabel Archer. But the richer sense in which he is the heir of the ages is illustrated when Eliot describes

Eliot/2/

the seduction of a typist in a London flat from the point of view
of Tiresias, a character in a play by Sophocles. To suppose that
this is a mere exhibition of learning is a banal misunderstanding.

The important point in that Tiresias illuminates the experience of
the typist who is seduced. Hence Eliot writes that "what Tiresias sees is the
substance of the poem". The illumination of the ages is available at any moment, and when the typist's indifference and boredom
to the act of love must be represented, it is possible for Eliot
to invoke a lyric from a play by Oliver Goldsmith. Literary allusion
has become not merely a Miltonic reference to Greek gods and
Old Testament geography, but a very powerful habit of mind. More
than that, it is a habit of mind which is proportionate to the
character of modern life.

James supposed that his theme was the international theme: would it not be more precise to speak of it as the transatlantic theme? This effort at precision helps us to see more exactly what is involved in T.S. Eliot's work. Henry James was concerned with the American in Europe; Eliot is concerned with the whole world and he cannot help but be concerned with all history. He is thus the international hero; he cannot help but recognize and use the resemblance between St. Augustine and Buddha in speaking of sensuality. And thus, as he writes in the notes to "The Waste Land", "The collocation of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism, as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident". And it is not an accident that the international hero should have come from St. Louis, Missouri.

A literary work may be important in many ways, but surely one of the ways in which it is important is in its relationship to some important human interest or need. Consequently we may say that one of the ways in which "The Waste Land" is important

Eliot/3/

is in its relationship to the fact that experience has become in-
ternational. It is because we have become an international people
that an international hero is possible. The true causes of many
of the things in our lives are world-wide, and we are better able
to understand the character of our lives because we are aware of
all history, of the philosophy of history, of primitive peoples,
ancient Egypt, the French Revolution, and the unconscious mind.
Thus again it is no accident that in "The Waste Land" use is made
of "The Golden Bough", and a book on Arthurian romances and the
quest of the Grail.

The protagonist of "The Waste Land" stands on the
banks of the Thames and quotes the Upanishads. But this emphasis
upon one poem of Eliot's may be misleading. What is true of his
poetry is also true of his criticism. When the critic writes of
tradition and the individual talent, when he declares the necessity
for the author of a consciousness of the past as far back
as Homer, he is also speaking as the heir of the ages.

The emphasis on a consciousness of literature may
also be misleading, for nowhere better than in Eliot can we
see the difference between merely being literary and making
the knowledge of literature become an element in vision, that
is the way, an important moment in the process of seeing any
thing and everything. In one way, the subject of "The Waste
Land" is the sensibility of the protagonist, a sensibility
which is literary and philosophical. But this sensibility is
concerned with the common things of modern life, especially
with love and the difficulty of making love. The new aphthasia
of the lady in the dressing-room is matched in a profound
juxatoposition with the woe of the coddery lady who takes
pills to get rid of her pregnancy.

Eliot/4/

The extent to which Eliot's poetry is directly concerned with love can hardly be emphasized too much. J.Alfred Prufrock is unable to make love to women of his own class and kind because of shyness, self-consciousness, and fear of rejection. The protagonists of other poems in Eliot's first book are men or women laughed at or rejected. A girl deserted by her lover seems like a body deserted by the soul.

In Eliot's second volume of poems an old man's despair issues from his inability to make love, while Sweeney, a character antithetical to him, can make love but is unable to satisfy the woman to whom he makes love, although he is able, on the other hand to evade the plotting whores, such women as being great heroes, even Agamemnon.

In "The Waste Land", the theme of love as a failure is again uppermost. Two lovers return from a hyacinth garden, and the woman is overcome by despair or pathological despondency. A lady, perhaps the same woman who has returned from the hyacinth garden, becomes hysterical in her boudoir because her lover or her husband has nothing to say to her and cannot give her life any meaning. A cockney woman in a pub gossips about another cockney woman who has been made ill by contraceptive pills taken to avoid the consequences of love; which is to say that the sickness of love has struck down society in every class. 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 ruined 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, that is to say, give oneself to another human being in the act of making love.

Eliot/5

In "The Hollow Men", the hollow men are incapable of making love because there is a shadow which falls between desire and the spasm; lips that would kiss can merely preay to broken stone. Sweeney returns in a kind of musical comedy to find that there is nothing in love but copulation which like birth and death is nothing but a bore. This judgment by Sweeney should be phaced in contrast with the experience of Burbank, who encountered the princess Volupine and found himself impotent with her; a contrast should also be made between Sweeney and the protagonist of one of the poems in French who harks back to a childhood memory of love: "I tickled her to make her laugh. I experienced a moment of power and delirium." Characters who make love either suffer from what the psychoanalysts term "psychic impotence", and they make love in such a way as to leave the lady unmoved so that she is hysterical or indifferent when the episode is over. The characters who are impotent and sensitive are set in contrast to the characters who are potent and insensitive. Grishkin is a bust which gives promise of pneumatic bliss, while Burbank's kind has to crawl between dry ribs because no contact possible to flesh is satisfactory. The potent and insensitive, such as Sweeney, are not taken by the ladies, the nightingales, and the whores; but Agammemnon, like Burbank, is undone; he is struck a deadly blow, he is ruined by the ladies.

This synoptic recitation might be much augmented. The essence is expressed perfectly in "Little Gidding": "Love is the unfamiliar name." But we ought to remember that the difficulty of making love, that is to say, entering into the most intimate of relationships is not the beginning but the outcome of the character of modern life. That is why the apparatus of reference which the poet brings to bear upon failure in love involves all history and is international. The old man who is the protagonist of "Gerontion", by referring to Mr. Silvero at Limoges,

Eliot/6

Nakagawa, Madame de Tornquist, and Christ the tiger, is enabled to make a statement about all history as well as his failure in love. History is made to illuminate love, and love is made to illuminate history. In modern life, human beings are a world beyond the circuit of the shuddering gear: their intimate plight is made relevant to the agony of the apostles, the murder of Agammemnon, and children who chant that London bridge is falling down; the plight of the shy and weak Prufrock is compared, by means of a passing reference, to the strong and muscular heroes of Michelangelo. Only when the poet is the heir of the ages can he make fruitful use of so many different and distant kinds of experience. And the reason that such extensive reference is necessary emerges when we remember how many of our acts are in relation -- in obedience or violation -- to commandments set down in a book thousands of years ago. We may commit adultery, or we may refrain from committing adultery because we believe it to be wrong: whether we hold or reject this belief, we are acting in the shadow of an ancient doctrine. This has always been true, but at the present moment of history we cannot avoid or forget to be conscious of it, and the poet who writes with this consciousness active is the truly modern poet.

It is thus truly significant that Eliot should have given a quasi-autobiographical "Melange Adultere Du Tout". The title, borrowed from a poem by Corbière is ironic, but the adulterous mixture of practically everything, every time and every place, is not ironic in the least: a teacher in America, the poem goes, a journalist in England, a lecturer in Yorkshire, a literary nihilist in Paris, overexcited by philosophy in Germany, a wanderer from Omaha to Damascus, he has celebrated, he says, his birthday at an African oasis, dressed in a giraffe's skin. Let us place next to this array another list of names and events as heterogeneous as a circus or America itself: St. Louis, New England, Boston, Harvard, England, Paris, the first World War, Joyce, Yeats, Pound, Lenin and Trotsky.

Eliot/7

F.H.Bradley, Santayana, Charles Eliot Norton, George Saintsbury, London,
Church of England, the Russian Revolution, the post-war period, the world
crisis and depression, the Munich Pact, and the second World War. If this
seems far-fetched or forced, if it seems that such a rich and disorderly
list might be made for any author, the answer is that these names and
events are *presences* in Eliot's work in a way which is not true of many
authors, good and bad, who lived through the same years.

The Use Of Dramatic Technique

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

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

In Eliot's poetry there is a use of dramatic technique
which, far from brushing aside poetic technique, works very well
with it; versification aids drama, and drama aids versification.

The sense of the dramatic leads to a use of characters, --Sweeney,
Prufrock, Tiresias, thetyrpist, and the cobbrey women in "The
Waste Land"; and, such is the unity of effort which we separate
merely in critical discourse; this sense of the dramatic is
essentially involved in Eliot's sense of the actual. One need not

2.

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

The use of character of necessity involves the use of dramatic speech; and Eliot has appended/upon a fine ear for the way that how human beings speak; it is to be seen most of all in the unfinished play in verse, "Sweeney Agonistes". Elsewhere we have the speech of only one character; he is speaking to himself, as in "Gerontion"; and here too Eliot avoids the danger of the dramatic monologue, for although the character is speaking to himself, his speech is dramatic in the sense it gives of an actual situation, and in the extent to which it is speech which might be spoken to another, if a neither were present.

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

2. such as rhyme-scheme, or meter; and the actual form of the poem when it is completed. Thus when Eliot in an essay wrote of the process of composition as "the search for form", he was not speaking of overt poetic form, but of the search among already available overt forms for the combination of them which would be proper to the particular subject.

By breaking with an adherence to one overt form--one meter and one rhyme scheme, for example--and by going forward to the free use of several of them, Eliot accomplished the revolution in the writing of English poetry. This can be seen strongly in his first volume, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait Of A Lady", especially; but in the poems which succeed these in later years this plural use of poetic form becomes systematic and extreme. It is not merely a matter of varying line lengths and free rhymes; but there is a shift from style to style and from meter to meter in the course of such a poem as "The Waste Land".

In terms of literary influence, the model for Eliot's radical extension of metrical form and of versification in general was undoubtedly Jules Laforgue. And here we can see how literary influence is active. For if it is true that the dominant form of versification in English, the norm in fact, is blank verse, nonetheless so famous a poem as "Lycidas" is a clear example of irregular line lengths and irregular rhyming such as characterizes "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock". But if "Lycidas" seems a sufficiently fine model, this is an abstraction, however attractive; what is necessary to the poet at the beginning of his career is some overpowering contagion, and usually one not too distant from him in time or in feeling. This was provided by Laforgue, at a time when, Eliot writes, he was not sure of the exact

3.

meaning of the French whh Laforgue wrote (Dante essay; review of
Quennell's book). As body and soul, so versification and what is
versified; there was an interior and spiritual likeness between
the feelings which Laforgue used and the feelings which Eliot was
going to be able to use as a poet. Or, let us say, the encounter
with Laforgue's versification made Eliot aware of the poetic
potentialities of many of his feelings and perceptions.

*Paral*

of the prime things Eliot must have learned from


One of the prime things Eliot must have learned from
Laforgue was the possibilities of rhyme, particularly when it
occurs unexpectedly. Thus, in "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock"
and "Portzait Of A Lady", we find that "ices" rhymes with "crisis"
(and the incongruity in the realms from the two words are derived
is itself a verifiable part of the stratified and divided life
which Prufrock leads); and thus too, when"flicker" rhymes with
"snicker" what we have is a stressing of the snicker which is
ironic to begin with in connotation, but whose irony is raised
by the fact that it is prepared for by the rhyme.

But before going to examine the various uses and effects


But before going to examine the various uses and effects
Eliot obtains through a cunning and conscious use of rhyme, we ought
to define the _look_ of his versification in general. Apart from the
quadrain of his second book, which are an interesting witness of
an ability to transform an old form, Eliot's verse may very well
look loose and irregular. It does not have the superficial order
of even stanza form, or the blocked and column-like look of much
blank verse. And this impression may well be heightened by the
way in which Eliot shifts from one kind of versification to another
in many of his poems, especially in "The Waste Land". But far from
being a sign of the absence or slightness of strict poetic form, this
very impression is the effect of an exact, flexible and very powerful
control of several poetic forms; and the effect of the ability to use
many of them properly in the same poem.

The Use Of Poetic Technique

Eliot's apprenticeship as a poet coincided with the
vers libre movement, a movement in which Pound participated much
more actively than Eliot. But neither poet engaged in the ex-
cesses of the movement, and the freedom so far as Eliot is con-
cerned is a freedom from overt form, from rigorous/stanzaid
patterns and rhyme schemes which, when a poetic style is exhausted
as late Victorian poetry was, tend to block the possibilities of
certain kinds of statement instead of helping to make them pose-
ible and bringing them to the fore.

The freedom in "liot's practice has been the freedom to
make use of many different kinds of poetic form in the same poem;
it has been not a freedom from meter, but a use of different meters
in the same poem; and this is especially true in "The Waste Land".

We know that the necessity of a rhyme make bring to
the forefront of a poet's consciousness a perception or an idea
he might not otherwise have come upon, although no other mind
would have come upon that perception. Conversely, we know that
the necessity of a rhyme may prevent a poet from saying what he
wished to say. So it is with the poetic style of a period; it may
be a means of inspiration; or it may be a barrier, and a new poetic
style is the result of the pressure of new perceptions which the
outmoded poetic style bars precisely because it had been invented
to make verbal a different kind of perception, experience, attitude
or feeling.

The importance of poetic form can never be emphasized
too much. Just as the roundness of a wheel, its circular form, makes
possible its movement, so too poetic form is necessary to a poem's
existence as a poem. But here misunderstanding has often occurred,
a misunderstanding based upon the confounding of overt poetic form,

By breaking with an adherence to one overt form—one meter and one rhyme scheme, for example—and by going forward to the free use of several of them, Eliot accomplished the revolution in the writing of English poetry. This can be seen strongly in his first volume, in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait Of A Lady", especially; but in the poems which succeed these in later years this plural use of poetic form becomes a systematic and extreme. It is not merely a matter of varying line lengths and free rhymes; but there is also a shift from style to style and from meter to meter in the course of such a poem as "The Waste Land".

In terms of literary influence, the model for Eliot's radical extension of metrical form and of versification in general was undoubtedly Jules Laforgue. And here we can see how literary influence is active. For if it is true that the dominant form of versification in English, the norm in fact, is blank verse, nonetheless so famous a poem as "Lydias" is a clear example of irregular line lengths and irregular rhyming such as characterizes "The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock". But if "Lydias" seems a sufficiently fine model, this is an abstraction, however attractive; what is necessary to the poet at the beginning of his career is some overpowering contagion, and usually one not too distant from him in time or in feeling. This was provided by Laforgue, at some time when he was not sure of the exact

3. meaning of the French whi h Laforgue wrote (Dante essay; review of Quennell's book). As body and soul, so versification and what is versified; there was an interior and spiritual likeness between the feelings which Laforgue used and the feelings which Eliot was going to be able to use as a poet. Or, let us say, the encounter with Laforgue's versification made Eliot aware of the poetic potentialities of many of his feelings and perceptions.

One of the prime things Eliot must have learned from Laforgue was the possibilities of rhyme, particularly when it occurs unexpectedly. Thus, in "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock" and "Portrait Of A Lady", we find that "ices" rhymes with "crisis" (and the incongruity in the realms from the two words are derived is itself a verifiable part of the stratified and divided life which Prufrock leads); and thus too, when"flicker" rhymes with "snicker" what we have is a stressing of the snicker which is ironic to begin with in connotation, but whose irony is raised by the fact that it is prepared for by the rhyme.

But before going to examine the various uses and effects Eliot obtains through a cunning and conscious use of rhyme, we ought to define the _look_ of his versification in general. Apart from the quatrains of his second book, which are an interesting witness of an ability to transform an old form, Eliot's verse may very well look loose and irregular. It does not have the superficial order of even stanza form, or the blocked and column-like look of much blank verse. And this impression may well be heightened by the way in which Eliot shifts from one kind of versification to another in many of his poems, especially in "The Waste Land". But far from being a sign of the absence or slightness of strict poetic form, this very impression is the effect of an exact, flexible and very powerful control of several poetic forms; and the effect of the ability to use many of them properly in the same poem.

The Nature Of Literary Criticism

When at the beginning of "The Sacred Wood", Eliot says that Coleridge was the last and perhaps the greatest literary critic, when he goes even further and says that Arnold was not so much a critic as a propagandist for criticism, his judgement imply a conception of the essential nature of literary criticism. For how else would one be able to distinguish between a critic and a propagandist for criticism? And in "The Use Of Poetry And The Use Of Criticism", a definition of the nature of criticism is implicit throughout, while Eliot nonetheless denies that a definition is possible. The denial is an effort to cope with the variety of which criticism has manifested itself; and it is an effort to escape from an empty formalism in which one begins with general principles.

Yet an assumption about the nature of literary criticism is always at work, and it becomes more and more evident as "liot proceeds to speak against some kinds of literary criticism. We can take account of the variety involved by making use of Irving Babbitt's classification³ in "Masters Of French Criticism", a work which may well have been in Eliot's mind for many years.

Babbitt distinguishes between the scientific, the impressionistic, and the classical critic; there is also a distinction between the classical and the neo-classical critic, while the term, scientific, is probably less exact than historical. For it is with the history in back of the literary work that the scientific critic is chiefly concerned. He concentrates upon the causes of a literary work, the causes in the time and the place of the author; and Babbitt's obvious example is Taine. The chief criterion of the historical

Delmore) Schwartz,
Yaddo
Bar toг. Springs, NY

THE BOOK ABOUT CATS
MR. ELIOT AS OLD POSSUM

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, By T.S. Eliot, Harcourt, Brace,
& Co., $1.25.

Mr. Eliot's new book begins with two drawings on orange paper. Presumably they were drawn by Mr. Eliot himself. The second drawing presents two gentlemen roller-skating arm in arm, one of them dressed in a top hat and spats, the other in knickers and a beard, the total effect suggesting that J.Alfred Prufrock is whatzing with an old Bohrovik. This beginning is followed by a dedication of the book to four persons whom one would suppose to be children of Mr. Eliot's acquaintance, and then come fourteen poems which were undoubtedly written for children and for no one else, a fact which the publishers might have made more explicit.

The poems are not only about cats, but about English cats. Moreover,
they are poems not for any children, but for English children, for they
refer often to such objects as pubs, area windows, the Admiralty, Indian
Colonels, and numerous London place-names. What American and especially
New York children would think of these verses is difficult to say.
suspects that the inefficiency of intricate plots, violence, and slapstick
might induce unfavorable comment in beings accustomed to the comic strip.
Mr. Eliot successfully avoids the usual vices of children's books, archness
and cuteness; for his cats are practical cats, cats engaged in getting
the genre and
something purposeful done or undone; and the versification of Edward Lear
is emulated skillfully.
One merely doubts the universality of

The reader of Mr. Eliot's previous efforts in light verse might well
have expected this book to continue the intense irony of "Sweeney Agonistes"
or of his "Dive-Finger Exercises", which sang of "How unpleasant to meet
Mr. Eliot!" (Whether his mouth be open or shut.) These verses do not
present that engaging aspect of the poet; and there is virtually nothing
in Mr. Eliot's previous writing which prepares the reader for
profoundly negative

2.

Macavity's a Mystery; he's called the Hidden Paw--
For he's the Master Criminal who can defy the Law.
He's the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad's
despair:
For when they reach the scene of crime--_Macavity's
not there!_

But the best poem of the book has to do with the naming of cats and
provides sublime advice on names and identifications in general. Here we are
told that a cat needs at least three names, a daily name, a fancy name, and
a particular, peculiar, dignified name, which is unique. Yet even these
three names fall short of defining the cat as a private individual. For a
cat, says Mr. Eliot, has another name which no one but the cat himself knows,
"the name no human research can discover". It is of this name that the cat is
thinking when he is seen in profound meditation. This ought to be a sufficient
reminder to all readers. When Mr. Eliot calls himself Old Possum in this new
and unexpected book, he is not only displaying himself in the hitherto un-
known part of a gifted friend of children; he is also thinking of the names
he has been called and reminding us of that private, peculiar, dignified,
"deep and inscrutable singular name" of himself, which he "himself knows and
will never confess". We do not know that name, but we can be sure that Old
Possum is not the correct one.

Delmore Schwartz

2.

D. Schwartz
20 Allery St.
Cambridge, Mass.

Anywhere Out Of The World

Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot, Harcourt, Brace. $2.00.

Any work by T.S. Eliot is likely to be interesting in a complicated way. But this new work compelas, at least in me, a complexity of impression unlike anything else by this author. I speak thus of my own feeling because I know how differently, and with what unmixed admiration, many other readers have greeted these new poems. Yet at the tenth reading I feel the same mixture of impression, and this after having tried to force in myself the delight of those who find these poems just what they should be throughout.

Two extended passages, a gestina made more difficult and extraordinary by rhyme and a miraculous exercise in the idiom and method of "The Divine Comedy, are equal, at least from the standpoint of technique, to anything else in modern poetry. Elsewhere in these poems there is the same invention of new rhythms, of unimagined possibilities in the movement of language, which has always marked Eliot, and which is perhaps of greater variety and originality in him than in any other poet in English.

But when this is said, the weakness of other long passages in the four poems is underscored. These passages are of two kinds: in one, the poet uses conventional forms in an effort to write the kind of lyric which is traditional to English poetry, and here what is to me the inadequacy comes chiefly from the choice of image and phrase: the earth as a hospital "endowed by the ruined millionaire" lacks the permanent surprise, shock, and uniqueness of, ( to use the used instance, permanently fresh) "April is the cruellest month". Then too the images seem made, self-imitative,

2. forced; they have the look of the artificial, and when they are intended as emblematic or established symbols, they look merely decorative.

The other kind of unsuccessful passage is composed of blocks of long lines very close to the rhythm of prose, like much of "The Family Reunion", and deliberately direct, matter-of-fact, and prosaic. Nothing is more important to modern poetry than such a use of the prosaic for its poetic quality, for nothing else can make the poet the thickness, the particularity, the full actuality of modern experience, which, more than anything else, will justify his evoked emotions and beliefs. The prosaic versification here is so much better than the same kind of thing in "The Family Reunion", partly because of a greater use of overflow, that it may mark a stage in the mastery of a new style. But in itself, it remains weak and wrong, not only in the triteness of the phrasing--"we have gone on trying", for example,--but in the effort, self-consciousness, and falsity of tone. If one hears a man trying to be modest, sincere, or frank, and if one hears the trying, rather than the modesty, sincerity, or frankness as such, one has an analogy for what is wrong with these passages both as language and as emotion:

> So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years,
> Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre
> deux guerres--

> Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
> Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
> Because one has only leapt to get the better of words
> For the thing one no longer has to say or the way
> One is no longer disposed to say it.

It is not enough, in a poem, to say, "I am unhappy", or, "I have failed", and especially in the poetry of direct statement, the common-place or colloquial statement must be lifted up to a new light, by one device or another, so that it is not merely itself, but something penetrated and understood as a symbol. The touchstones for this profound usage are Laforgue, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams,

3.

and Eliot himself; but not in these poems. And then the choice of
instances in these passages, "fruit, periodicals, business letters",
"even a very good dinner" marks a like relaxation of the poet's
sensibility, one which suggests that he is at such times the echo
of the idiom he himself discovered. Too much is often made of the
sheer texture of the language, when modern poetry is examined; but
here it is not merely texture, but the crucial instant of insight
which is betrayed by the language. Thus, at one important moment,
one gets such a weak play and shift with the meaning of a phrase
as, "Not fare well, / But fare forward, voyagers", where in "Ash Wed-
nesday", at a like moment, the poem rose to such a phrase as "Teach
me to care, and not to care".

However, there can be no doubt about the satisfaction
and the success to be found in the modified sestina, the Danteque
interview, and the organized movement of the poems as movement.
"Specially the encounter with a dead master just before morning
in London in war-time strike one with such astonishment and admir-
ation that some grand rhetorical statement seems properly; so that,
as Cocteau declared of the motion-pictures, "At last the theatre
has an airplane", one wishes to say, "At last Dante has been trans-
lated into English and into modern life". This literally true in
that Eliot has accomplished the effect of terza rima in English
by alternating masculine and feminine endings without rhyme, thus
evading the comparative poverty of rhyme in English and this in-
structing future translators and poets. But the renovation of
Dante is more than a matter of versification:

Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering or hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
I caught the sudden look of some dead master...

4.

And the organized movement of each of the four poems makes the title of quartets more than the stock analogy of music with poetry. Perhaps late quartets would be still more exact, for as in Beethoven, the movement from part to part goes from lyrical, quick, joyous, and exalted; to, suddenly slow, turned in upon itself, by variation or repetition of the same thought, hovering over divided parts of the same symbol or idea, harsh, flat, discursive, and tortuous; and then, once more, quickened to certainty, difficult conviction, and the explicit declaration and direct chant of belief.

The belief, made clear by the use of phrases and doctrines in the Bhagavad-Gita, Heraclitus, and St. John of the Cross, is that the only meaningful event in history is the Incarnation, and all else, --"the moment in the rose-garden", the place of one's forbears, the practice of poetry, and the whole of one's life--illusory, deceptive, empty, vain, and without meaning except in relationship to the Incarnation. Seen in that light, everything else still remains false and of little worth, except as a phrase to be endured. All that is natural and merely human contradicts itself, love is not love, time is not time, the end of life is the beginning of life, exaltation and despair are the same thing, all desire, effort, and action must be transformed into passages of patient waiting--"waiting without hope"--to be wholly disengaged from everything in this life. Here, as in Eliot's poetry from the start, what declares itself above all is an overwhelming desire to be free from "birth, copulation, and death", to be rid of the love of created things, to be utterly out of the world. In this rejection and renunciation preoccupies each of the poems to such an extent that the affirmation of belief seems only lyrical after-thought. The Incarnation is true for the sake of the rejection of this life, not the renunciation because of the Incarnation. And this suggests once more

5. that Buddhism is perhaps a doctrine just as suited as Christianity to the poet's mind of mind; perhaps more suited in that the doctrine of reincarnation in some form of natural life becomes true and inexhaustible damnation, given Eliot's vision. To say this is to recognize that the poet's hatred and rejection of this life is something beyond any belief whatever. It must have some personal and private source, but it exists for all readers both as a profound criticism of life, and as a necessary phase in the life of the spirit. If there is a phase superior to it, as most Christians, (now different on the Christology of St. Francis and Thomas Aquinas) at least, must suppose, the rejection and renunciation which Eliot celebrates is prior and not to be evaded, if one is to be in the full sense a human being. To see that this is true, one has only to remember such very different actualities as the moral disilusionment of our time and the present world; and in literature, such wholly different authors as Céline and Rilke, for "The Duino Elegias" have a close resemblance to these poems, And these poems, however different in subject-matter from Céline's exhaustion of cynicism and despair, are also a journey to the end of the night, insufficient only when the journey is discussed and commended, and not endured.

Delmore Schwartz

Preface

The method of this book is circular. After writing three versions of it, I discovered that by combining parts of the three versions and adding essays and reviews I had written about Eliot, I arrived at what was to me an adequate version.

When we want to look at a building, we employ a circular method, walking around the building and seeing the same thing again and again from different points of view. The reader of this book should discover that the repetitions of the same quotation or the same observation in a different context reveal something new about what is being observed and indeed the observation itself.

Eliot's work is complex, inexhaustible, and ambiguous. He changes his mind very often and often for good reasons, but this makes the task of anyone who writes about his work a special kind of task. For example, in his recent lecture on Poe, Eliot said of that fascinating author:

"I am not concerned with any possible psychological or pathological explanation".

It is not easy to say that there are good reasons for being unconcerned with psychological or pathological explanations, especially when one is dealing with Poe. Be that as it may, Eliot continues by saying in the very next sentence:

"It is enough for my purpose to record that the work of Poe is such as should expect of a man of very exceptional mind and sensibility, whose emotional development has been in some respect arrested at an early age. His most vivid imaginative realisations are the realisation of a dream: significantly, the ladies in his poems and tales are always ladies lost, or ladies vanishing, before they can be embraced."

A statement

Now if this is not based upon a psychological or pathological fact, it is meaningless. But note that Eliot has made an acute observation, one which illuminates Poe as much as anything I know. And the fact that he attempts to disavow the basis of this

2.

observation is misleading only if one is unwilling to attempt
to cope with the essential complexity and ambiguity of his
utterances.

What is necessary and what has been attempted in this
book is a method adequate to Eliot's complexity and ambiguity.
But not just one method, after all. For, as in all methods to
see anything, one sometimes uses opera glasses, sometimes one
uses a telescope, sometimes one climbs to the roof, sometimes
one goes down to the cellar, sometimes one goes so far as to stand
one's head, sometimes one uses a magnifying glass, and sometimes
one just looks with a simple and direct gaze.

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

Consequently, I must say how much I owe to the
utterances of other people. I owe more to R. P. Blackmur and
Meyer Schapiro than to anyone else. Students of Meyer Schapiro
will recognize immediately how great my debt to him is, so far
as method is involved. And I am also indebted in a variety of
ways to Conrad Aiken, William Barrett, John Berryman, Andrew
Chiappe, the late H.W. Eliot, Elizabeth File, Milton Klonsky,
James Laughlin, George Palmer, William Phillips, W.G. Van Keuren,
Mark Van Doren, and all the authors quoted in the text.

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

To find the essential unity of any complicated subject,
one must walk around the subject, around and around and around.

II

I begin this critical essay in this way not to cast con-
tempt upon popular judgement and not because of a fondness for memoirs;
but because by returning to specific occasions and by being as concrete
as possible, one gains some check upon critical theory; or at the very
least, some of the causes of one's critical errors are made plain.

But for the moment, I should now like to go to the other
extreme of discourse and to say, in utter abstractness, that the
essential thing about any literary work is that it is the union of
a form and a subject, and that the specific character of the relation-
ship of the form to the subject defines the specific literary charac-
ter of the work. Just so, one might say that the essential thing about
any house was its purpose of providing shelter.

It has not been fashionable for some time to speak of the
essential character of any class of things; and for the reader who
is too disturbed by any mention of the essential--because it may seem

7A/

The term, sensibility, is used loosely in literary criticism. Yet the looseness is often of the kind inevitable to literary criticism, the subject-matter of which does not admit of the same kind of exactness as mathematics, as Aristotles sensibility (observed. It is a quasi-metaphysical term, and signifies the awareness of which a mind is capable. But it also signifies, --and this is one reason for loose usage--the equipment which the mind brings to bear upon experience and the kind of awareness it manifests. We speak of a painter's sensibility, which is different from that of a philosopher's. And we speak of the sensibility of a European as against that of an "american. Again, a child in a museum does not see the same things as an adult. And a man from Thibet will not see the same things in the same way on Broadway and 42nd Street as a citizen of the metropolis.

Eliot himself in his criticism uses the term sensibility in two important ways. He speaks of how the metaphysical poets, unlike the Victorian poets, had a "mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience", while "in the seventeenth century, a dissociation of sensibility set in", a dissociation in which the thoughts or the general ideas of a poet had no immediate relationship to his perceptions and feelings. Donne, on the other hand, is said to have been able/feel thoughts and to think feelings. The other important discussion of sensibility occurs in an early essay in which Eliot praises Henry James as having a sensibility which no ideas could violate. The two discussions rest upon the same notion of sensibility, although they may seem very different. The notion is that in the grasping of experience, the mind does not block its view with general or received ideas, nor is it on the other hand lost like an animal in a blooming, buzzing confusion of particulars and surfaces. The unified sensibility is such

8/

that it perceiving the inner essence of particulars, and the ideas
which it entertains are never separated from their particular
embodiments. Or, to make the same point in a very different way,
the powers of the whole being
in any act of perception, all the powers of the mind are active.

When we apply this conception of sensibility to Eliot,
a good deal of qualification is necessary. We must remember that
the sensibility which makes his poetry possible is one which
was
had to be gained not through education in an integrated culture,
but on the contrary this sensibility had to grow and become
mature in opposition to many tendencies which make the modern
new
sensibility disordered or narrow. Thus the humanist as well
as the new religionist and the mechanical Marxist suffers from
a sensibility which strips the literary work of many essential
for example,
qualities in order to get at its general ideas; / but its
view of moral choice, or its partisanship in the class struggles
These are but two of the many ways in which the modern sensibility
is made weak or powerless.

We may separate out, in analysis, two of the chief aspects
of Eliot's sensibility, his sense of the actual and his sense of
the past, as being especially relevant to the international char-
acter of modern life.

9.
decay or disappear in the distance like a receding harbor, then
love ceases to be an act which is in relation to the life of
the community, and in immediate relation to the family and to
other human beings. Love becomes purely personal and the strength
or weakness of the individual becomes crucial. On the other
hand, since love is isolated from all other relationships, since
it is no longer celebrated, evaluated, and given a status by the
community, love does become merely copulation. The protagonist of
"Gerontion" uses of the most significant phrases in Eliot's work
when he speaks of himself as living in a rented house. He lives
in a rented house, he is unable to make love, and he knows about
history's cunning corridors. The nature of the house, of love, and
of history are interdependent aspects of modern life.

And we should also bear in mind that only one who has
known the deracination and the alienation of modern life fully
can make so deliberate an effort at regaining his ties with the
traditional community as Eliot makes in attaching himself to
Anglo-Catholicism and Royalism. Coming back may well be the same
thing as going away; or at any rate, the effort at a return
exhibits the same predicament as the fact of departure. The most
significant thing of all is that it was new necessary to cross the
Atlantic in order to make the effort, or even to conceive of it.
Can

Modern life may be compared to a foreign country in
which a foreign language is spoken. The words of our own old
language must be translated into the foreign language, and words
must be invented for the new objects and the new relationships
of old objects which we encounter. Eliot is the international
hero because he has recognized the foreign country, attempted
the translation of the foreign language, and sought to express

9a.

decay or disappear in the distance like a receding harbor, then
love ceases to be an act which is in relation to the life of
the community, and in immediate relation to the family and to
other human beings. Love becomes purely personal and the strength
or weakness of the individual becomes crucial. On the other
hand, since love is isolated from all other relationships, since
it is no longer celebrated, evaluated, and given a status by the
community, love does become merely copulation. The protagonist of
one "Gerontion" uses/of the most significant phrases in Eliot's work
when he speaks of himself as living in a rented house. He lives
in a rented house, he is unable to make love, and he knows about
history's cunning carridors. The nature of the house, of love, and
of history are interdependent aspects of modern life.

And we should also bear in mind that only one who has
known the deracination and the alienation of modern life fully
can make so deliberate an effort at regaining his ties with the
traditional community as Eliot makes in attaching himself to
Anglo-Catholicism and Royalism. Coming back may well be the same
thing as going away; or at any rate, the effort at a return
exhibits the same predicament as the fact of departure. The most
significant thing of all is that it was necessary to cross the
Atlantic in order to make the effort, or even to conceive of it.

10.

the nature of the new life in the foreign country. And since
the future is bound to be international, if it is anything at
all, we are all bankrupt heirs of the ages, and the moments
of the crisis which is expressed in Eliot's work will resemble
the crises of our own future lives in regard to love, religious,
nature of the
beliefs, good and evil, the good life, and the community.

10.

the nature of the new life in the foreign country. And since
the future is bound to be international, if it is anything at
all, we are all bankrupt heirs of the ages, and the moments
of the crisis which is expressed in Eliot's work will resemble
the crises of our own future lives in regard to love, religious,
nature of the
belief, good and evil, the good life, and the community.

2.

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

4.

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

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

For the sake of clarity, let us assume that the purpose of
the author is to find "the verbal equivalents of states of mind
(S.B.,p.348)
and feeling". This clarity is gained only at the expense of a
certain crudeness of definition, as we shall see when we come to
examine the sense in which a poet may said to find the verbal
equivalent of such a state of mind as a religious belief. But at
any rate, the emphasis upon the finding of verbal equivalents
leads us forward to language as the medium of literature. Words
refer to things or the relations of things; language derives its
meaning from its reference to some actual state of affairs. But
words may be used inexactl... they may gain accidental or misleading
associations, or they may be used for their own sake: nonsense
poetry represents this last extreme. On the other hand, the exact
use of language may make possible an insight into the human soul
which is not otherwise possible. Mastery of language and psychological
insight, however, are not inseparable. Milton and Dryden are masters
of insight, but indifferent psychologists. The converse is not true,
and the author with great insight into human conduct is always a
master of language. Thus the greatness of Blake's poetry is based

5.

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

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

(S.E.,p.136)

Analogous to the author who cultivates language for its own sake and in isolation from its reference to actual experience is the author who constructs a world of his own, instead of attempting to represent the actual world. Zen Jonson as a dramatist is Eliot's example. Where the words of Shakespeare, Donne, Webster, and Tourneur "have a depth, a third dimension", and "tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires", Jonson's language does not but it is not intended to, for the purpose of his language is to create a world within which has a logic of its own, "a logic which illuminates the actual world because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it". (S.E.,p.135)

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 Mellarmé 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." Mellarmé'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 Mellarmé is a real one in that it includes "the most serious human passion"; but it is "a world of still lives".

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 theme 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 abugdance in the language of that poet does not correspond to a "real development in thought and feeling". On 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 Mening 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 performed 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 Blake.) The poet in his use of objects must present them as they really are; as Swinburne does not present objects at all, so Messinger, 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. Middleton created

9.

The poet may invent new poetic techniques or 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
had ever conveyed since" Tennyson, though equally a master of blank-
verse technique of blank verse, was "cruder because less capable of expressing
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.

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
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 poet 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".
The conversationalist upon Eliot's preface 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 priase of the poet who transforms
observations into states of mind, and 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 adpoeef
to an object 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 it
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: "I lake did not see enough
b cause 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.B., 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 himself 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 po ts 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. In any case, no poet exists by himself
alone, and nothing exists without him. Thus Shakespeare began by imitating
what he himself had done, and nothing exists but that existence.
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 a me how 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
author would change the character of all previous authors; but an
explosion in the Milky Way dowa headmashingly happens upon us 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 serve 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 Soneca 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 know from
who has thrown back upon his own resources during 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
(S.E.179)
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 Milenau'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
diary 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.58)
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
to express 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 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 seeks 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. Affurther elucidation appears if we connect this emphasis
upon the dramatic with that upon what is actual, and both with
a remark in a Crierion 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
concerned 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.

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

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

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

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

2.

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

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

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

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

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

3.

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

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

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

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

Three.

4.

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

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

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

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

Three.

5.

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

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

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

The first metaphor in T.S.Eliot's first book is in
a sense the beginning of modern poetry in English.

It does not matter who came first in the order of
time; this metaphor is a beginning in the sense that it is this
is what the untutored reader in most likely to encounter when
he begins to read modern poetry.

After a quotation from The Divine Comedy, "The Love
Song Of J.Alfred Prufrock", begins

"Let us go then, you and I,

When theevening is stretched outaga/inst the sky

Like a patient etherised upon the table"

To compare the evening to a patient upon an operating
table is perhaps in itself a forced comparison.

For it is necessary to invert the visual image which
we have of such a thing: we/look down at a patient upon a table,
and we must look up at the sky.

But let us consider the metaphor not in itself, but
as an illustration of the profound change in the writing of poetry
which begins here.

Although Keats studied medicine, he could not have written
such a line.

Neither Tennyson, Swinburne, Rosetti, nor the poets of
the Nineties were capable of such a line, although Swinburne and
the poets of the Nineties studied Baudelaire, who is Eliot's for-
bear in the use of such images.

A conception of poetry and of the nature of the poe tic
prevailed which prevented these poets from that kind of image.

This very conception of the nature of poetry was itself
installed by W. R. D. W. and Coleridge in the effort to be free
from the barrier imposed by the eighteenth century view of poetic
style and diction.

Two.

This is the way then that poetry proceeds from age to age.

We should remember, when we consider this fact, that the romantic and the neoclassic views of the nature of poetry made possible kinds of poetry which are barred by the modern kind/ view.

We cannot look north and look south at the same time.

But we can refrain from scorning the southern view because we are looking north.

Such a point of view acorn is natural because it is natural to be partisan and because the reigning taste takes for granted and proclaims its universality, forcing upon the Romantic poet a rejection of the neoclassic poet and upon the modern poet a scorn of the Romantic poet.

Then there is the natural sense of uncertainty in what is a new way of feeling and seeing; and the necessity of perceiving the shortcomings of the old way as a means of perceiving the new way.

A strong sense of the shortcomings and a turning away from the virtues of late Victorian poetry was a means of arriving at a state of sensibility where it would be possible to compare an evening to a patient etherized upon a table.

The quality of this image does not rest upon the new thing, for it tests not in its use of that which is new/ to modern life, although this kind of representation of that which is new has often been taken as one of the duties and virtues of poetry, so that poets have been praised because they wrote about automobiles and about stockyards.

It is the poet's function to hold up a mirror to nature, but not in a sense which means that he must take into account every new surface of the nature of his age.

Three.

Another serious error of the same kind is to suppose
that the poet ought to represent his age as such; but this is
to confound the poet with the journalist, the photographer, and
the historian.

The capacity to use such an image, which joins two
distant kinds of experience, is important because it is a grasp-
ing of the actual.

The sense of the actual and the supreme power to grasp
the actual as such is the remarkable thing about Eliot's poetry
at the very start.

The actual is that which exists; it is not that
which we would like to exist, nor what we hope will exist, nor
what we are taught should exist, and the failure to distinguish
these things from what is actual is the cause of much weakness
and blindness.

The actual is important in itself and it is important
as a means of perceiving and formulating the ideal and the poss-
ible.

In poetry and in many other matters, it is the degree
to which the actual is grasped that determines our grasp of the
ideal.

Unless we know what exists, we are not likely to be
very right about our idea of what ought to exist.

And if we are interested in commending the ideal,
there is no more powerful commendation than an apprehension of
the actual.

Here again we come upon one of the important aspects
of Eliot's work, that its grasp of the actual penetrates to
such depths that we recognize the ideal; the limitations of
the actual bring us to an apprehension of what ought to be.

2.

The Sensibility As A Culture Hero

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

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

This religious awareness is important in estimating

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

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

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

APPLIES TO FUTURE AS well

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

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 universality 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 poets. 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

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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 that Swinburne when compared to bad poets is
said to have decomphed 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 diction 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
language.

The naked observation and the naked insight are made
possible by the peculiarity 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.

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 find 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诗 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,

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The same principles are involved when we are told that Fakataff
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 attention 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

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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
and Tennyson, who/were concerned with the ideal in their poetry,
but who merely ruminated 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 opacity to have general ideas
about his experience.

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

PREFACE

The method of this book is circular. After I had written three different versions of it, I discovered, as I think the reader will discover, that by combining relevant portions of the book and adding essays and reviews I had written about Eliot's work, a desirable way of regarding his work is made possible.

When we want to look at a building, we employ a circular method, walking around the building and seeing the same thing again and again from different points of view. Thus the reader will, I hope, discover that the repetitions of the same point in a different context reveal something new about the point.

This method was made necessary by the fact that Eliot is complex and inexhaustible. For example, one thing that in Eliot's undergraduate poems (recently reprinted by The Harvard Advocate), there is the beginning of perceptions and themes which are to preoccupy Eliot all through his literary career. In a poem published in 1907, he wrote:

> If space and time, as sages say,
> Are things that cannot be,
> The fly that lives a single day
> Has lived as long as we.

Now for all the difference in style (and I do not mean to underestimate the importance of style), the thought in this stanza is very close to the philosophical mediations on time which are one of the leading motives of "Four Quartets".

Given this kind of fact about Eliot, and many more of a like kind, one is faced with the problem of uncovering the essential unity which exists amid so much complexity. And the way to solve this problem is to walk around the subject around and around and around. It is by such a repetition of circular