in 'The Perfect Critic', an essay here included as the fullest statement of Eliot's early position on the place of the intellect in criticism ; one understands his admiration for the scientific critics
Aristotle and Remy de Gourmont, here quoted. 6
Again and again one sees this third moment in the making, for
example in the Marston essay of 1934. The first moment is the
possession of a few beautifully observed lines ; the last a general
doctrine of 'double reality' in poetic drama, of 'a pattern behind
the pattern . . . the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own
lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment.' We
may then go on to observe the meaning of this doctrine in relation
to the poet's own drama, that still lay in the future, and even in
the most recent of his poetry, Ash-Wednesday. 7
The construction of such contexts must, of course, follow the
surrender. In the letter to Spender Eliot warns against doing it
the other way round - constructing a system and bringing it to the
'object' under discussion - reading to prove one's point. That is
not surrender but conquest - an objection which contributes to
Eliot's evident discontent with the use other critics have made of
his own tentative and tertiary theoretical constructions. Without
the first moment there is nothing worth having. When we observe
Eliot in the Dante essay patiently point to passages which, since
they once possessed him, he now possesses ; and when we find in
his own poetry signs that its foundations consist in part of matter
similarly achieved by surrender and meditation on surrender, we
have some idea of what he meant when he spoke of the creative
element in criticism. We should reflect further that what began
as a private motion of his sensibility has become part of the
common stock of educated feeling ; the lines from The Revenger's
Tragedy, fragments of Dante, 8 the objects of a unique creative
impulse, are now of the material of our minds, and from that we
may judge the depth and quality of the initial surrender.
The first moment, then, is one of emotional rather than
intellectual engagement, and here the critic resembles the poet.
He is not thinking ; like the poet he 'starts from his own emotions',
as Eliot argued in a striking passage in 'Shakespeare and the
Stoicism of Seneca' (1927).9 Later there comes the necessity of
'great intellectual power', necessary to the expression of 'precise
emotion'. Just so the critic, most of all in the third phase of the
operation, stands in need of intellect. That is what Eliot meant by
saying that 'the only method is to be very intelligent'. The critic
starts from his own emotions, but 'having something to say' calls
for intellect.
So, in 'Tradition and the Individual Talent', we hear of the
need to articulate the emotion we have felt in reading : to have
IS
I NTRODUCT I O N
something to say about the surrender, to understand and speak
of an intemporal experience in temporal discourse. For such is
the hypothesis : that the moments of our possession occur in the
ordinary course of time but give access to something beyond
time, to a tradition which conflates past and present and gives to
'the whole of the literature of Europe' simultaneous existence and
simultaneous order.
Eliot's idea of tradition implicitly rejects the schismatic, antipasseiste positions of such avant-garde movements as Futurism and Dada ; yet he was, on his own admission, campaigning for an
avant-garde, and he proposed a view of the past which, though far
from abolitionist, was not at all conventional. The work of the
poet will, under certain conditions, join that which exists outside
time, and speak with that voice rather than with the voice of
his immediate predecessors. History is flawed by disaster ; the
'dissociation of sensibility' which occurred, according to Eliot, in
the seventeenth century - the hypothesis had as its immediate
stimulus the need to 'say something' to explain the superiority of
the metaphysical poets over Milton - did not prevent access, by
dint of much labour, to poetry which did not divide thought and
feeling; for that poetry is not borne away by time. The effort of
the true poet must be, simply and enormously, to know 'the mind
of Europe' - to hold it, changing as it is in time, in a single
thought of the permanence that underlies all change and without
which we should be unable to apprehend change.10 This is a way
of thinking that issues from some deep place in Eliot's mind, and
is registered in his later political and ecclesiastical writings, as
well as in his poetry.
Equally profound, and also given later expression in thinking
on a more extensive scale, is Eliot's account of the means by which
the poet achieves access to the tradition ; he does so by 'a continual
surrender of himself', by 'a continual self-sacrifice, a continual
extinction of personality'. In this way a doctrine of 'impersonality'
is associated with the doctrine of tradition ; and together they
imply a third, imperfectly expressed by the formula 'objective
correlative'.
It is unlucky, I think, that this important element in Eliot's
theorizing about poetry was stated so briefly, and in one of his
least impressive essays, 'Hamlet'.11 It suffers from imperfect
articulation, and of all the 'notorious phrases' that, as Eliot
remarked with amusement, 'have had a truly embarrassing success
in the world', this is the one he was least concerned to defend.12
Yet the objective correlative has its importance, especially in
relation to Eliot's own poetry. It is a clumsy expression, first used,
as has several times been pointed out, by the American artist
16
I NTRODUCTI O N
Washington Allston i n the mid-nineteenth century ; but Allston
meant something different.13 Perhaps the expression stemmed
from a remote memory of Santayana's 'object correlative'. The
difficulty arises from the fact that what the object is correlative
with is the emotion of the poet ; and this correlation was, in
Eliot's own opinion, the least interesting thing about it to anybody
except the poet himself. For although every poet starts from his
own emotions, his struggle must be 'to transmute his personal
and private agonies into something rich and strange, something
universal and impersonal'. 14 Purged of naive expressiveness, as of
all relation to 'the logic of concepts', the poem achieves an impersonality which established its relation to the tradition at the expense of its correlation with the suffering of its author. In short,
its objectivity, accomplished at the expense of its correlativity, is
the measure of the poet's success, his surrender to the tradition.
An adequate objective correlative would be the most effective
mask of its relation to the originating emotion ; and of course it is
an inadequacy in this regard that Eliot complains of in Hamlet.
In later years he sometimes referred to the personal nature of The
Waste Land, but by then he could do so
without harming the
good reader's reaction to that work precisely because of the
effectiveness of the mask ; nor does information posthumously
made available concerning the composition of that poem, and
Eliot's emotional disturbances at the time, affect the situation.
The great poet, as Eliot went on to say in the Seneca essay, 'writes
his time', not himself. He was to remark of his poem that 'to me
it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse
against life . . . just a piece of rhythmical grumbling' ;15 but the
important words in that sentence are to me.
In 'The Three Voices of Poetry', a lecture delivered in 1953,
Eliot commended Gottfried Benn's Probleme der Lyrik for its
understanding of his 'first voice', which is 'the voice of the poet
talking to himself - or to nobody'. Benn explains that poetry of
this sort begins with 'an inert embryo or "creative germ" (ein
dumpfer schopferischer Keim) and, on the other hand, the Language, the resources of the words at the poet's command. He has something germinating in him for which he must find words ; but
he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the
words ; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order.
When you have the words for it, the "thing" for which the words
had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem.' The
process is painful. 'When the words are finally arranged in the
right way - or in what he comes to accept as the best arrangement
he can find - [the poet] may experience a moment of exhaustion, of
17
I NTRODU CTION
appeasement, of absolution, and of something very near annihilation, which is in itself indescribable. And then he can say to the poem : "Go away ! Find a place for yourself in a book - and don't
expect me to take any further interest in you." '16
This passage seems to account more satisfactorily for the process by which the surrender of the personality produces the impersonal objective correlative, and to emphasize the importance
of the idea for a certain kind of poetry. The argument seems to
owe something to Mallarme's sonnet 'Don du poeme'. There
needs only a reminder that the birth of such an impersonal poem
requires a submission to something outside oneself; and to make
such a submission implies the existence of external authority. The
reward for such submission is great, and not only in the making
of poems ; and we shall see that Eliot began to develop more than
the merely aesthetic implications of this fact.
'The Function of Criticism' restates the need for sacrifice to
something outside oneself, and expresses in consequence a
preference for the classic over the romantic, for external 'Catholic'
authority over the 'inner voice', for tradition over self-sufficient
novelty. And the role of the critic is to contribute to 'the common
pursuit of true judgment', a task undertaken with the 'possibility
of arriving at something outside of ourselves, which may provisionally be called the truth'.
Clearly that 'surrender' to a line or a poem, which is the first
moment of both poetry and criticism, and the construction of a
'generalization' - the having something to say about one's
'contact with the individual object' - are both essential constituents of the act ·of criticism. That is why the dividing line between 'generalizations' and 'appreciations' is so vague ; and
though Eliot himself thought the latter would survive longer, the
former are just as surely based, in so far as they are valuable,
upon an initial encounter with a line, a stanza, a poem, or an
ceuvre.
It is in the earliest works that the relation between the emotional stimulus and the act of intelligence is closest. Later the manner grows more discursive, and this is partly a consequence of
the demand for longer pieces - the eight or so thousand words of
a lecture, or the substantial contribution to some collection of
essays. Many of these works are retrospective in character, as if
to recall a time when the critic's relation to poetry was more
spontaneous and more engaged. For the commitment to external
authority, when, in 1927, it took a more intelligibly doctrinal
form ('The general point of view may be described as classicist in
18
I NTRODUCT I O N
literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic i n religion')17
could hardly be made without some reduction in spontaneity -
which is not at all to say that the general pattern of Eliot's critical
activity was altered.
What is surprising - especially to readers who erroneously
suppose that a conversion is not founded in a habit of mind, a
temperament already established - is that this change is not
accompanied by any marked discontinuity of literary interest or
method (the Dante essay, arguably the centre of Eliot's critical
work, recapitulates in many respects his earlier criticism, and
carefully refrains from insisting on a political and theological
context, as it might easily, and without palpable loss, have done).18
Perhaps the opening words of 'Religion and Literature' (1 935)
could not have been written very much earlier : 'Literary criticism
should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and
theological standpoint.' A critic so early committed to external
authority against the inner voice ; to the surrender of self to something greater ; to permanence as the opposite and measure of change ; to the intemporal as opposed to merely sequential time
and history - such a critic, as 'The Function of Criticism' suggests, would almost necessarily be drawn to a religion, an ethic, a politics that accorded with such convictions. The classicist in
literature might, for a time, rest content with the traditionalist,
even elitist humanism of Babbitt ; but there was an element of
mysticism also, and a scholastic sense of the complexities of time
and eternity, that impelled him to a Catholic Christianity and a
conservative-imperialist politics.
Having seen the individual poet as subordinate to a timetranscending tradition, Eliot extended the idea of submission and became a citizen of that Empire which constituted the political
aspect of the mind of Europe and of the Church which represented its spiritual being. It need not surprise us that he chose the variants proper to his province ; he had always seen the historical
necessity of accepting the Empire in the divided form time liad
imposed upon it, and a vernacular church as similarly entailed ;
though he once said that England was a Latin country, it had not
a Latin language or a Latin church. Appropriately he announced
his conversion in a book called For Lancelot Andrewes (rgz8).
Andrewes he took to be the greatest of the early Anglican bishops,
and he gave reasons why we should admire both the Elizabethan
episcopate and the accuracy and force of Andrewes's vernacular
style.
Henceforth, perhaps, there could be no denying that poetry,
though still in some senses what he called 'a superior amusement',
nevertheless 'certainly has something to do with morals, and with
19
I NTRODUCTION
religion, and even with politics pe
rhaps, though we cannot say
what.' 19 Some hardening of this formula is visible in After Strange
Gods ( 1934) in which Eliot was willing to call certain of his contemporaries, Pound and Lawrence included, heretical - not in the sense that they expressed unacceptable doctrine - Marlowe, he
said in 1927, was 'the most blasphemous (and therefore, probably,
the most Christian) of his contemporaries'20 - but because of a
heterodoxy of sensibility.
The Dante essay is not concerned with censures of this kind,
but gives most satisfactory expression to the relation between
poetry and those other matters from which it cannot ultimately
be separated. Obviously it has many affinities with the earlier
work, for Dante was always important to Eliot, and had provided
many bewildering minutes ; but he was also the poet of the
catholic, the imperial, and the illustrious vernacular. He could
communicate, as good poetry can, before he was well understood ;
but the language in which he did so was the volgare illustre, which
inherited the universality of Latin. His Tuscan had a quality
Eliot valued above all others ; though founded in the common
speech, it possessed an extreme poetic lucidity, and was versatile
enough to encompass the whole range of human experience. This
range and lucidity make him the most important model of all
European poets ; and Eliot himself was engaged throughout his
poetic career in emulating them.
He spoke, in an unpublished lecture at New Haven in 1933, of
his long ambition to 'write poetry which should be essentially
poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its
bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the
poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry . . . .
To get beyond poetry, as Beethoven, in his later works, strove to
get beyond music . . . .
' And he goes on to speak of the 'forty or
fifty original lines' he has written which approach this condition. 21
He was probably, as Matthiessen remarks, thinking of part of the
last section of The Waste Land, which he elsewhere singles out in
the same way. 22
This was a Dantesque enterprise, and it continued throughout
his subsequent poetry. 'The kind of debt that I owe to Dante is
the kind that goes on accumulating, the kind which is not the debt
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 2