Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot
Page 3
of one period or another of one's life . . . The whole study and
practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the
servant of his language, rather than the master of it . . . Dante is,
beyond all other poets of our continent, the most European. He is
the least provincial . . . The Italian of Dante is somehow our
language from the moment we begin to try to read it ; and the
lessons of craft, of speech and of exploration of sensibility, are
20
I NTRODUCT I ON
lessons which any European can take to heart and try to apply in
his own tongue.'23
The perfection of Dante's language is not independent of his
exemplary Europeanism, his faith in the Empire. Eliot's emphasis
on the need for modern men to be members of a larger polity than
that of their own province - to accept their nationality yet aspire
to membership of a more abstract empire24 embodied in Latin
Europe - is borne out by his long labours on the Criterion. In
practice obedience to Empire must, in a nation state, take the
form of Royalism ; hence Eliot chose also the Catholicism of the
English province, accepting (as he was to explain in Notes towards
the Definition of Culture) the measure of provincialism that this
entailed, but without scandal to the universality of a Church
beset, in the modern age, by heresy, standing against the corruption called, in 'Religion and Literature', secularism, in later writings liberalism.
The implications, then, of the mature positions adumbrated in
the Dante essay are not confined to poetry but extend into ethics,
politics and religion. In later, more generalizing performances,
Eliot was able to make clear how this was so. Thus his lecture on
'What is a Classic ?', and the supporting talk on 'Virgil and the
Christian World'25 explain why the Roman Empire and its
principal poet are central to our conceptions of civility and
poetry, and why these are providentially linked to the truths of
religion. And it is obvious that such implications, less explicitly
stated, had been present in much earlier writings.
Dante remained the chief exemplar long after the other
stimulants of the early poetry had lost their effect. The last major
poem, Little Gidding, contains a brilliant imitation of a canto from
the Commedia. Honouring Yeats after his death, Eliot found in
him a Dantesque impersonality - 'that of the poet who, out of
intense and personal experience, is able to express a general
truth ; retaining all the particularity of his experience, to make of
it a general symbol'.
Eliot's mind was both exploratory and retentive ; it turned to
new themes but was always loyal to its past. Thus Babbitt and
Bradley continued to engage his thought, even as it engaged the
old problems in new and shifting forms ; thus early essays, the
immaturity and even the arrogance of which he himself was the
first to detect and deprecate, are seen to be continuous with the
later thought. As he remarked, his work is not a seamless web ;
but certain deep preoccupations endure and may be observed in
this selection, and more at large in the collections he made himself, in such books as Notes towards the Definition ofCulture, in the Commentaries he contributed over the years to Criterion. However
2 1
I NTRODUCT I O N
remote we may seem to b e from those early literary formulations - in the fields of education and politics, in the advocacy of stable class systems or of asceticism as a remedy for social chaos -
we cannot escape the consistency any more than we can evade the
deliberate clarity of his thought. It is a final tribute to that
clarity, and to the delicacy with which certain discriminations are
made, that Eliot profoundly changed our thinking about poetry
and criticism without trying to impose as a condition of his gift
the acceptance of consequences which, for him, followed as a
matter of reason, as well as of belief and personal vocation.
22
NOT E S
1 . Published i n To Criticize the Critic, 1 965, 1 1-26. Eliot always
believed, though he expressed the belief less dogmatically as time
went on, in the superiority of practitioners as critics. (See 'The
Function of Criticism'.) In the early days he thought of his own
criticism as part of his work as poet : 'The poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to create poetry.' See 'Imperfect Critics' in The Sacred Wood, 1 920.
2. Eliot says this period ended in 1918 after the demise of the Egoist;
in fact that journal lasted longer, and 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' appeared in it in September and December 19 19. He
always dated his essays when he collected them ; 1917, the date he
gives for 'Tradition' is wrong.
3· 'Remembering Eliot', in T. S. Eliot: The Man and his Work,
edited by Allen Tate, 1966, 55-6.
4· Selected Essays, 1932, 3rd ed., 1951, 273.
5· On Poetry and Poets, 1 957, 107 .
6 . On the other hand, 'there is no method except to be very intelligent.' Eliot strives to distinguish between Symons's 'impressionism' and his own 'surrender'; the difference lies in the ability to elevate impressions into rules, though without ceasing to be
intelligent. 'The point is that you never rest at the pure feeling.'
7 · Selected Essays, 221-33.
8. See, for example, the passage on p. 2 1 3, where he speaks of the
Brunetto and Ulysses episodes of the Inferno as among those 'for
which I was unprepared by quotation or allusion'. Because both
of these passages possessed Eliot they became parts of the traditional knowledge of readers of poetry.
9· He goes on to say that poets express belief only incidentally, or
even accidentally. 'The poet makes poetry, the metaphysician
makes metaphysics, the bee makes honey, the spider secretes a
filament ; you can hardly say that any of these agents believes :
he merely does' (Selected Essays, 1 37-8). What is called 'the
problem of belief' - in this essay described by Eliot as 'very
complicated and probably insoluble' - continued to engage him,
especially because of the contemporary investigations of I. A.
Richards, whom he tackles directly in a Note to Section II (here
23
NOTES
omitted) of his 'Dante' and in The Use of Poetry and the Use of
Criticism. In the Note Eliot expressly denies 'that the reader must
share the beliefs of the poet in order to enjoy the poetry fully' ; to
maintain the converse is to deny poetry. On the other hand it is
clear to him that 'full understanding' (he confesses that the word
full is obscure) will terminate in belief: thus increased understanding of Dante's Ia sua voluntate e nostra pace brings him to the point of recognizing it as 'literally true'. He came to believe that
there was, in some extended sense of the word, an orthodox,Y in
poetry, and that this distinguished the best of the 'tradition'. This
view made him unhappy about much contemporary literature, as
he explains in After Strange Gods (1933) and in 'Religion and
Literature' ; the same strain of thought continues in The Idea of a
Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition ofCu/ture.
and intellectual lucidity ; The Use of Poetry explains that 'what a
poem means is as much what is means to others as what it means
to the author,' calls meaning the meat the burglar brings along to
quiet the housedog, and insists that poetry originates in the depths
of feeling, where 'certain images recur, charged with emotion' -
emotion, not meaning.
On the whole it is reasonable to say that Eliot continued faithful
to the distinction he drew on the concluding page of his Dante
essay : 'The English reader needs to remember that even had
Dante not been a good Catholic, even had he treated Aristotle or
Thomas with sceptical indifference, his mind would still be no
easier to understand ; the forms of imagination, phantasmagoria,
and sensibility would be j ust as strange to us. We have to learn to
accept these forms: and this acceptance is more important than
anything that can be called belief' (Selected Essays, 277). A year or
so earlier, feeling towards this position in the Preface to the 1 928
edition of The Sacred Wood, he had written : ' . . . certainly poetry
is not the inculcation of morals, or the direction of politics ; and
no more is it religion or an equivalent of rel igion. . . . And
certainly poetry is something over and above, and something quite
different from, a collection of psychological data about the minds
of poets, or about the history of an epoch . .. .' For later observations see the remarks on Shelley below, pp . 8 1 ff., and The Use of Poetry, 87-102.
10. As to the critic, his business is to see literature 'not as consecrated
by time, but to see it beyond time' (Introduction to The Sacred
Wood, 1920). On Eliot's commitment to permanence see a revealing
letter to Bonamy Dobree, dated 12 November 192 7 : 'I should say
NOTES
that it was at any rate essential for Religion that we should have
the conception of an immutable object or Reality the knowledge of
which shall be the final object of the will ; and there can be no permanent reality if there is no permanent truth. I am of course quite ready to admit that human apprehension of truth varies, changes
and perhaps develops, but that is a property of human imperfection rather than of truth. You cannot conceive of truth at all, the word has no meaning, excep t by conceiving of it as something
permanent. And that is really assumed even by those who deny it.
For you cannot even say it changes excep t in reference to something
which does not change ; the idea of change is impossible without
the idea of permanence.' ('T. S. Eliot : A Personal Reminiscence',
in Allen Tate, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Man and His Work, 1966,
75).
1 1 . It crops up again in the Tourneur essay of 193 1 : 'The cynicism,
the loathing and disgust of humanity, expressed consummately in
The Revenger's Tragedy, are immature in the respect that they
exceed the object. Their objective equivalents are characters
practising the grossest vices ; characters which seem merely to be
spectres projected from the poet's inner world of nightmare,
some horror beyond words.' The whole passage is interesting, and
I have sometimes suspected that it is a covert self-critique of The
Waste Land. See Selected Essays, 1 89-i)O.
12. 'The Frontiers of Criticism', 1956, in On Poetry and Poets, 1957,
103-18. In 'To Criticize the Critic' he says it 'may stand for my
bias towards the more mature plays of Shakespeare', just as the
'dissociation of sensibility' represented his devotion to Donne and
his reaction against Milton ( H)--20). But this latter idea is, though
qualified, defended in 'Milton I I', whereas the 'objective correlative' gets no explicit support in the later work.
13. In 1955 Eliot told an Indian enquirer that he thought he had
coined it, adding that he was no longer 'quite sure of what I meant
35 years ago'. In a Preface to the Harvest paperback Essays on
Elizabethan Drama (1955) he says, speaking of 'objective correlative' in the course of explaining why he excludes 'Hamlet'
from the collection, that the 'phrase, I am now told, is not even
my own but was first used by Washington Alston (sic)'.
14. 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', Selected Essays, 1 37.
Compare : 'one is prepared for art when one has ceased to be
interested in one's own emotions and experiences except as
material' (Introduction to Paul Valery, Le Serpent, 1924, 12).
15. The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts
. . . ed. Valerie Eliot, 1 97 1 , p . 1 . Eliot's words in 'Thoughts Af ter
Lambeth' may seem to suggest that he was not 'writing his time',
at any rate as his time thought he was : ' . . . when I wrote a poem
2 5
NOTES
called The Waste Land some of the more approving cri tics said
that I had expressed the "disillusionment of a generation", which
is non<;ense. I may have expressed for them thei r own illusion of
being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my i ntention.'
(Selected Essa_ys, 368.) Usually he disavowed the author's intentional control, as in his argument with Richards in The Use of Poetry. Of course to express unintentionally an illusion of bei ng
disillusioned may be to 'write one's time'. See below, p. 243.
r6. On Poetr_y and Poets, 1 06-7. There is, of course, no inconsistency
in holding these views and also being interested in the process of
composition. The essay on Pascal (see the extract below) is an
indication of such interest ; it may reflect the poet's own experience
in writing the last section of The Waste Land; see Mrs. Eliot's
edition, p. 1 29, n. r to p. 7 1 . In an unpublished lecture on Ulysses,
given in 1933, he said that 'in some minds certain memories, both
from reading and life, become charged wi th emotional significance.
All these are used, so that intensity is gained at the expense of
clarity' (quoted by F. 0. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S.
Eliot, 3rd edition, paperback, 56). In The Use of Poetry, delivered
in the same year, he specifies (see below, pp. 8g-go) some of his
own memories of this kind, clearly i ntending to distinguish between the proper use of such memories and that condemned by Hulme i n the passage quoted immediately afterwards. See also
'The Perfect Critic', i n which he refers again to the process by
which such memories are made into poems : 'In an artist . . .
suggestions made by a work of art, which are purely personal,
become fused with a multitude of other suggestions from multitudinous experience, and result in the production of a new object which is no longer purely personal, because it is a work of art
itself.'
1 7. Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, 1 928. Later, Eliot was to regret
the emphasis of this remark, but not, of course, to deny its
authority.
r8. Thus Eliot rightly remarked, in his Preface to the 1 928 edition of
The Sacred Wood, that he had discovered, on contemplating a
revision of the contents of that book, 'that what had happened in
my own mind . . . was not so much a change
or reversal of opinions, as an expansion or development of interests'.
rg. 1 928 Preface to The Sacred Wood, viii, x.
20. 'Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca', Selected Essays, 1 33.
21. Matthiessen, go. This may be the second of his recorded remarks
on his desire to emulate Beethoven. See also a letter of 28 March
1 93 1 to Spender about the Beethoven A minor Q!iartet : 'I should
like to get something of that into verse before I die' (Tate, ed.,
T. S. Eliot, The Man and his Work, 54). Later, when the Q!iartets
26
NOTES
were written, he spoke at more length on the subject in 'The Music
of Poetry' (1942).
22. In letters to Bertrand Russell and Ford Madox Ford ; the latter
specifies 'the 29 lines of the water-dripping song'. See Mrs.
Eliot's edition of the Waste Land manuscripts, 129.
23. 'What Dante Means to Me' (1950), in To Criticize the Critic,
125-35·
24 . Commending Kipling's imperialism he speaks of a vision 'almost
that of an empire laid up in heaven' (On Poetry and Poets, 245)recalling a passage in Plato's Republic ix which evidently meant much to him.
25. On Poetry and Poets, 135-48.
PART ONE
LITERARY CRITICISM
ESSAYS OF GENERALIZAT I O N
Before 1918
REFLECTION S ON VERS LIBRE1
Ceux qui possUent leur vers fibre .Y tiemzent:
on n'abandonne que Ie t•ers fibre.
DUHAMEL ET V I LDRAC.
A lady, renowned in her small circle for the accuracy of her stoppress information of literature, complains to me of a growing pococurantism. 'Since the Russians came in I can read nothing
else. I have finished Dostoevski, and I do not know what to do.'
I suggested that the great Russian was an admirer of Dickens, and
that she also might find that author readable. 'But Dickens is a
sentimentalist ; Dostoevski is a realist.' I reflected on the amours
of Sonia and Rashkolnikov, but forbore to press the point, and
I proposed It Is Never too Late to Mend. 'But one cannot read the
Victorians at all !' While I was extracting the virtues of the proposition that Dostoevski is a Christian, while Charles Reade is merely pious, she added that she could not longer read any verse