if they had nothing better to do than to facilitate the pattern he prescribed for himself. In the end, it becomes difficult to exonerate Eliot from a charge of moral obtuseness.” That Eliot’s poetry knows about and registers the scenario of guilty retrospection is suggested, in Little Gidding (II), by the encounter with the declamatory ghost, which offers its disenchanting prognosis of “the gifts reserved for age”: And last, the rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been; the Of motives late revealed, and the awareness Of things ill done and done to others’ harm Which once you took for exercise of virtue. Then fools’ approval stings, and honour stains. (PTSE 1 205) Yet, how to the bone does this actually come? Its high rhetoric identifies a gestural, depersonalised guilt which, however generally true, might allow plenty of wriggle-room in the matter of who in particular is to be blamed, and for what. As Hawthorne notes of the Reverend Dimmesdale’s pulpit self-denunciations, “He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood.” This encounter with “some dead master/ Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled” (PTSE 1 204) may summon up for us that “more severe/ More harassing master,” Geoffrey Hill, with his insistence that “the juridical power of the poem is not found in utterances that are merely grandiose or imposing,” and in whose opinion the passage quoted might deserve being described as “rhetorically self-enamoured.” “Confessionalism,” Hill noted in a different context, “is not exhibitionism”. The passage’s closing delineation of the ultimately noxious vacuity of a certain kind of public approbation strikes a note heard elsewhere in Eliot: writing in The Criterion after Kipling’s death, he loftily opined that “burial in [Westminster] Abbey can be of no value to the affrighted soul on the way to its last judgement.” However sincerely felt – and most
had asserted the difference between present and past as being “that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent that the past’s awareness of itself cannot show” (SE 16), the lines from Little Gidding suggest that the present’s awareness of itself, if it is at all to justify the adjective “conscious,” must involve accounting for the past’s component contribution to what it finds itself to be: the way, that is, in which “time future” has been “contained in time past” (PTSE 1 179). And yet, balanced against the diachronic panorama of futility that “your lifetime’s effort” seems to amount to in Little Gidding, is the eternal synchronicity presented at the end of Burnt Norton: now, here, now, always – Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and (PTSE 1 184) This contrast brings me nearer to the paradoxes that are present in my with its different potential meanings of “de-utterance” and “re-utterance.” This paradoxical challenge, as embodied in Eliot’s oeuvre, has been described in an Eliot-themed issue of Religion and Literature: “His body of work excels at exploring boundaries and sketching out uncharted territory without declaring such spaces fixed, at asking questions without final answers. He demands that we look and that we keep coming back to look again as if for the first time.” It is that tension-yet-interconnection, between the act of repetition and doing something for the first time, which I want to focus on. The attempt to find reconciliation between what has already happened and doing something for the first time was the major concern of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” where Eliot asserted that real originality involved connection with, rather than abrupt discontinuity from, the monumental past. Nevertheless, repetition is in several aspects a demonstrably bad thing, as he saw the matter. Most obviously, it violated the (old) Modernist injunction to “Make It New” and was evidently something he avoided, by both precept and example.
time (presumably “the hour when we are/ Trembling with tenderness,” PTSE 1 82) and activity all cohere to point to one end, which is that of a comic-desperate improgression: Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o’clock in the morning. (PTSE 1 83: italics in original) [Critical commentary] has the paradox implicit in the fact that, as a poet, Eliot seldom repeated himself but as a self-publisher he almost invariably did, recycling volume contents, in part to make up for his scanty poetic output. But there is an additional and more interesting paradox, that if he avoided repetition at the level of the oeuvre or, within that, at the level of the individual poem (at least until the writing of the Quartets), within the individual poem, at the level, say, of line, repetition is a noteworthy feature: heard, for example, in the passage just quoted from “The Hollow Men,” as well as that quoted earlier from “Preludes,” where the repeated conjunction “and,” together with assonances of the short “a” heard there and echoed in “at” and “assured,” both rhythmically and sonically enact the behaviour defined and derided. “Evening newspapers” are one item in its litany of deadened routine, and in “The ‘Boston Evening Transcript’” that newspaper’s name, entitling this short poem and repetitively terminating its first, central and final lines, constitutes a sonic corset, as well as an ideological constraint, within which “appetites of life” (PTSE 1 22) are held rigidly in check. But in composing the later Quartets, Eliot broke decisively with the advice he had given the younger poet Barker, and that he himself had followed hitherto. East Coker, in which his apostasy from his own creed of ensuring each new poem would be “different” was first made manifest, draws attention to the fact: You say I am repeating Something I have said before. I shall say it again.
also a recurrence that is different in kind, which might be better understood as “echo.” “Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle” (UPUC 155), Eliot notes, and his intriguing relation to that “savage” has been explored by Robert Crawford. But the more nutritive relationship is that with “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country,” as “Tradition and the Individual Talent” put it, whereby a writer’s “historical sense” involves awareness “not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (SE 14). Albeit that “the sad ghost of Coleridge” haunts the very end of The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, there are ghostly recurrences that are a source of strength: “We are born with the dead:/ See, they return, and bring us with them” (PTSE 1 208). Not only does this echo, as has been noticed, Pound’s early poem “The Return” (which evokes the vanished classical gods), it reprises and alters its own earlier lines: History may be servitude, History may be freedom. See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern. (PTSE 1 206) Although one way to understand the figure of echo, via Ovid, would be as a type of inauthenticity, in Eliot’s theory and practice – as in his allusions to the writing of others and also to his own writing – it tends to function, rather, as survival or renewal, an act of which involves “the communication/ Of the dead” (PTSE 1 202). The mention of “allusion,” however, necessitates further distinctions. Mary Trevelyan recorded Eliot’s protest that “People are so afraid of repetition – they don’t seem to realise it is the essence of poetry;” allusion is a species of repetition; but just as there is good and bad repetition, there are different categories of allusion, whose practise was likewise essential to Eliot’s poetry. In a letter of 1949, he speculated:
I wonder whether a pertinent distinction could be made between allusion and borrowing. The two may somewhat overlap or indeed the same quotation may serve both purposes. In the line taken from Mallarmé, for example [“To purify the dialect of the tribe”], my direct intention was merely to borrow. It seemed to me a very happy translation of his line and it gave me exactly the words that I wanted to say. The secondary purpose in this case is the allusion. If readers recognize the source, so much the better. One might be able to find other quotations of which the primary purpose is allusion and borrowing the secondary. (quoted PTSE 1 1021) In a letter written in 1960, he similarly affirmed as “an important distinction” the difference between “straight borrowing” and “allusive borrowing” (quoted PTSE 1 734). However, just as he asserted in his Turnbull lectures that “poetry is incantation as well as imagery” (quoted PTSE 1 913), so his stress on the purposive nature of allusion, above, needs to be modified by an additional awareness of the degree to which – and perhaps at its most powerfully resonant – it is for Eliot less a matter of authorial choice, than of being chosen; less a matter of conscious remembering than of involuntary recall. “Things have a way of sticking in the memory” (quoted PTSE 1 732) he acknowledged, and lines could lodge themselves independently of any intention to remember: “a tone, a few lines and phrases, which re-echo in the mind for a lifetime;” “their words linger and echo in the mind;” “the phrase burns itself in” (quoted PTSE 1 840, 909, 1012). This third level of allusion he represented by the metaphor of “saturation,” and used to explain his own repeated evocations (“[I] have borrowed it twice”) of a passage from Bussy d’Ambois: “I suggest that what gives it such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation (...) with feelings too obscure for the authors even to know quite what they were” (UPUC 147-8). As opposed to the purposive nature of some of his allusive practice, this to define a necessary ignorance; “flashing phrases which never desert the memory” (quoted PTSE 1
the nature of “now,” radiantly confirmed when “always” recurs at the poem’s close: “Quick now, here, now, always” (PTSE 1 184). “Re-cantation,” when most poetically effective, evokes such resources, akin to what Eliot described to Hayward as “some acute personal reminiscence (never to be explicated, of course, but to give power from well below the surface)” (quoted CFQ 67). But just as Burnt Norton’s epigraph from Heraclitus affirms the commonality of the “Logos,” this matter lying well below the surface is “not the experience of one life only/ But of many generations” (PTSE 1 196): Eliot’s insistence that the emotional charge of recurrent images happens “for all of us” is significant. In the inexplicable “personal reminiscence” accruing “power” through archetypal connectedness, individual impulse has become collectively validated, “in another pattern & recreated & reconciled,” as his note for Little Gidding suggested. That this happens “through the poet” is, presumably, because – reverting to Heraclitus – unlike “most men” he does not mistake this as “a private wisdom of his own” (quoted PTSE 1 905-6), but embraces its reverberant contextuality. When bells ring in Eliot, they are characteristically “reminiscent,” and even Doris’s telephone repeats its “Ting a ling ling” (PTSE 1 70, 116); the buoy-bell’s silence, in The Dry Salvages, merely marks the interval between its repetitions, “the stillness/ Between two waves of the sea” (PTSE 1 209). His hypothesis that “all is always now” (PTSE 1 183) is one that, textually, implies a dynamic interrelation between past and present writings, both his own and others’; for Eliot’s is above all a poetics of resonance, in which an “unhurried/ Ground-swell” underlies the vividly immediate as well as its recurrences, recovered as it were from the of the sea: “Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet/ Under sleep, where all the waters meet” (PTSE 1 194, 107).