2 Practical Criticism, p. 277.
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ESSAYS O F G ENER A LI ZATION
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person like myself for Shelley's poetry i s not attributable to
irrelevant prejudices or to a simple blind spot, but is due to a
peculiarity in the poetry and not in the reader, that it is not the
presentation of beliefs w·hich I do not hold, or - to put the case as
extremely as possible - of beliefs that excite my abhorrence, that
makes the difficulty. Still less is it that Shelley is deliberately
making use of his poetic gifts to propagate a doctrine ; for Dante
and Lucretius did the same thing. I suggest that the position is
somewhat as follows. When the doctrine, theory, belief, or 'view
of life' presented in a poem is one which the mind of the reader
can accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of
experience, it interposes no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment,
whether it be one that he accept or deny, approve or deprecate.
When it is one which the reader rejects as childish or feeble, it
may, for a reader of well-developed mind, set up an almost
complete check. I observe in passing that we may distinguish, but
without precision, between poets who employ their verbal,
rhythmic and imaginative gift in the service of ideas which they
hold passionately, and poets who employ the ideas which they
hold with more or less settled conviction as material for a poem ;
poets may vary indefinitely between these two hypothetical
extremes, and at what point we place any particular poet must
remain incapable of exact calculation. And I am inclined to think
that the reason why I was intoxicated by Shelley's poetry at the
age of fifteen, and now find it almost unreadable, is not so much
that at that age I accepted his ideas, and have since come to reject
them, as that at that age 'the question of belief or disbelief', as
Mr. Richards puts it, did not arise. It is not so much that thirty
years ago I was able to read Shelley under an illusion which
experience has dissipated, as that because the question of belief or
disbelief did not arise I was in a much better position to enjoy the
poetry. I can only regret that Shelley did not l ive to put his poetic
gifts, which were certainly of the first order, at the service of more
tenable beliefs - which need not have been, for my purposes,
beliefs more acceptable to me . . . .
[iv T H E E X H A UST I V E C R I T I C
From time to time, every hundred years or so, i t is desirable that
some critic shall appear to review the past of our literature, and
set the poets and the poems in a new order. This task is not one
of revolution but of readjustment. What we observe is partly the
same scene, but in a different and more distant perspective ; there
are new and strange objects in the foreground, to be drawn
accurately in proportion to the more familiar ones which now
'86
'THE USE O F POETRY AND THE USE O F CR I T I C I S M '
approach the horizon, where all but the most eminent become
invisible to the naked eye. The exhaustive critic, armed with a
powerful glass, will be able to sweep the distance and gain an
acquaintance with minute objects in the landscape with which to
compare minute objects close at hand ; he will be able to gauge
nicely the position and proportion of the objects surrounding us,
in the whole of the vast panorama. This metaphorical fancy only
represents the ideal ; but Dryden, Johnson and Arnold have each
performed the task as well as human frailty will allow. The
majority of critics can be expected only to parrot the opinions of
the last master of criticism ; among more independent minds a
period of destruction, of preposterous over-estimation, and of
successive fashions takes place, until a new authority comes to
introduce some order. And it is not merely the passage of time
and accumulation of new artistic experience, nor the ineradicable
tendency of the great majority of men to repeat the opinions of
those few who have taken the trouble to think, nor the tendency
of a nimble but myopic minority to progenerate heterodoxies, that
makes new assessments necessary. It is that no generation is
interested in Art in quite the same way as any other ; each
generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of
art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands
upon art, and has its own uses for art. 'Pure' artistic appreciation
is to my thinking only an ideal, when not merely a figment, and
must be, so long as the appreciation of art is an affair of limited
and transient human beings existing in space and time. Both
artist and audience are limited. There is for each time, for each
artist, a kind of alloy required to make the metal workable into
art ; and each generation prefers its own alloy to any other. Hence
each new master of criticism performs a useful service merely by
the fact that his errors are of a different kind from the last ; and
the longer the sequence of critics we have, the greater amount of
correction is possible . . . .
[v O R I G I N AND USES OF POETRY
I speak of Mr. Richards's views with some diffidence. Some of
the problems he discusses are themselves very difficult, and only
those are qualified to criticize who have applied themselves to the
same specialized studies and have acquired proficiency in this
kind of thinking. But here I limit myself to passages in which he
docs not seem to be speaking as a specialist, and in which I have
no advantage of special knowledge either. There arc two reasons
why the writer of poetry must not be thought to have any great
advantage. One is that a discussion of poetry such as this takes us
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far outside the limits within which a poet may speak with
authority ; the other is that. the poet does many things upon
instinct, for which he can give no better account than anybody
else. A poet can try, of course, to give an honest report of the way
in which he himself Vrites : the result may, if he is a good observer,
be illuminating. And in one sense, but a very limited one, he
knows better what his poems 'mean' than can anyone else ; he may
know the history of their composition, the material which has
gone in and come out in an unrecognizable form, and he knows
what he was trying to do and what he vas meaning to mean. But
what a poem means is as much what it means to others as what it
means to the author ; and indeed, in the course of time a poet may
become merely a reader in respect to his own works, forgetting his
original meaning - or without forgetting, merely changing. So
that, when Mr. Richards asserts that The Waste Land effects 'a
complete severance between poetry and all beliefs' I am no better
qualified to say No ! than is any other reader. I will admit that I
think that either Mr. Richards is wrong, or I do not understand
/>
his meaning. The statement might mean that it was the first
poetry to do what all poetry in the past would have been the
better for doing : I can hard I y think that he intended to pay me
such an unmerited compliment. It might also mean that the
present situation is radically different from any ·in which poetry
has been produced in the past : namely, that now there is nothing
in which to believe, that Belief itself is dead ; and that therefore my
poem is the first to respond properly to the modern situation and
not call upon Make-Believe. And it is in this connection, apparently, that Mr. Richards observes that 'poetry iscapableofsavingus'.
A discussion of Mr. Richards's theories of knowledge, value
and meaning would be by no means irrelevant to this assertion,
but it would take us far afield, and I am not the person to undertake it. We cannot of course refute the statement 'poetry is capable of saving us' without knowing which one of the multiple definitions
of salvation Mr. Richards has in mind. 1 (A good many people
behave as if they thought so too : otherwise their interest in poetry
is difficult to explain.) I am sure, from the differences of environment, of period, and of mental furniture, that salvation by poetry is not quite the same thing for Mr. Richards as it was for Arnold ; but
so far as I am concerned these are merely different shades of blue.
In Practical Criticism2 Mr. Richards provides a recipe which I
think throws some light upon his theological ideas. He says :
1 See his AI me ius mz the Mind. There is of course a locution in which
we say of someone 'he is not one of us' ; it is possible that the 'us' of Mr.
Richards's statement represents an equally limited and select number.
2 Second Impression, p. 290.
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'THE USE OF POETRY AND THE U S E O F CR I T I C I S M'
'Something like a technique or ritual for heightening sincerity
might well be worked out. When our response to a poem after our
best efforts remains uncertain, when we are unsure whether the
feelings it excites come from a deep source in our experience,
whether our liking or disliking is genuine, is ours, or an accident
of fashion, a response to surface details or to essentials, we may
perhaps help ourselves by considering it in a frame of feelings
whose sincerity is beyond our questioning. Sit by the fire (with
eyes shut and fingers pressed firmly upon the eyeballs) and
consider with as full "realisation" as possible -' . . .
That there is an analogy between mystical experience and some
of the ways in which poetry is written I do not deny ; and I think
that the Abbe Bremond has observed very well the differences as
well as the likenesses ; though, as I have said, whether the analogy
is of significance for the student of religion, or only to the psychologist, I do not know. I know, for instance, that some forms of ill-health, debility or anaemia, may (if other circumstances are
favourable) produce an efflux of poetry in a way approaching the
condition of automatic writing - though, in contrast to the claims
sometimes made for the latter, the material has obviously been
incubating within the poet, and cannot be suspected of being a
present from a friendly or impertinent demon. What one writes in
this way may succeed in standing the examination of a more
normal state of mind ; it gives me the impression, as I have just
said, of having undergone a long incubation, though we do not
know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting
on. To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which presses upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware
of it, what happens is something negative : that is to say, not
'inspiration' as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down
of strong habitual barriers - which tend to re-form very quickly. 1
1 I should like to quote a confirmation of my own experience from
Mr. A. E. Housman's Name and Nature of Poetr_y : 'In short I think
that the production of poetry, in its first stage, is less an active than a
passive and involuntary process ; and if I were obliged, not to define
poetry, but to name the class of things to which it belongs, I should call
it a secretion ; whether a natural secretion, like turpentine in the fir, or
a morbid secretion, like the pearl in the oyster. I think that my own
case, though I may not deal with the matter so cleverly as the oyster
does, is the latter ; because I have seldom written poetry unless I was
rather out of health, and the experience, though pleasurable, was
generally agitating and exhausting.' I take added satisfaction in the fact
that I only read Mr. Housman's essay some time after my own lines
were written.
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Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we. know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden. I agree with Bremond,
and perhaps go even further, in finding that this disturbance of
our quotidian character which results in an incantation, an outburst of words which we hardly recognize as our own (because of the effortlessness), is a very different thing from mystical illumination. The latter is a vision which may be accompanied by the realization that you will never be able to communicate it to anyone
else, or even by the realization that when it is past you will not be
able to recall it to yourself; the former is not a vision but a motion
terminating in an arrangement of words on paper . . . .
The way in which poetry is written is not, so far as our knowledge of these obscure matters as yet extends, any clue to its value . . . . The faith in mystical inspiration is responsible for the
exaggerated repute of Kubla Khan. The imagery of that fragment,
certainly, whatever its origins in Coleridge's reading, sank to the
depths of Coleridge's feeling, was saturated, transformed there -
'those are pearls that were his eyes' - and brought up into daylight
again. But it is not used: the poem has not been written. A single
verse is not poetry unless it is a one-verse poem ; and even the
finest line draws its life from its context. Organization is necessary
as well as 'inspiration'. The re-creation of word and image which
happens fitfully in the poetry of such a poet as Coleridge happens
almost incessantly with Shakespeare. Again and again, in his use
of a word, he will give a new meaning or extract a latent one ; again
and again the right imagery saturated while it lay in the depths of
Shakespeare's memory, will rise like Anadyomene from the sea. In
Shakespeare's poetry this reborn image or word will have its
rational use and justification ; in much good poetry the organization will not reach to so rational a level. I will take an example which I have used elsewhere : I am glad of the opportunity to use
it again, as on the previous occasion I had an inaccurate text. It
is from Chapman's Bussy D'Ambois :
Fly where the evening from the Iberian vales
Takes on her swarthy shoulders Hecate
Crowned with a grove �f oaks: fly where men feel
The burning axletree, and those that suffer
&
nbsp; Beneath the chariot of the snowy Bear . . . .
Chapman borrowed this, as Dr. Boas points out, from Seneca's
Hercules (Eteus :
die sub Aurora positis Sabaeis
die sub occasu positis Hiberis
'THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE O F CR I T I C I SM '
quique sub plaustro patiuntur ursae
quique fervmti quatiuntur axe
and probably also from the same author's Hercules Furens :
sub ortu so/is, an sub cardine
glacialis ursae ?
There is first the probability that this imagery had some personal
saturation value, so to speak, for Seneca ; another for Chapman,
and another for myself, who have borrowed it twice from Chapman. I suggest that what gives it such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation - I will not say with 'associations', for I do
not want to revert to Hartley - but with feelings too obscure for
the authors even to know quite what they were. And of course
only a part of an author's imagery comes from his reading. It
comes from the whole of his sensitive life since early childhood.
Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a
lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather
than others ? The sol).g of one bird, the leap of one fish, at a
particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman
on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open
window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction
where there was a water-mill : such memories may have symbolic
value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the
depths offeeling into which we cannot peer. We might just as well
ask why, when we try to recall visually some period in the past,
we find in our memory just the few meagre arbitrarily chosen set
of snapshots that we do find there, the faded poor souvenirs of
passionate moments. 1
Thus far is as far as my experience will take me in this direction. My purpose has not been to examine thoroughly any one type of theory of poetry, still less to confute it ; but rather to
indicate the kinds of defect and excess that we must expect to find
in each, and to suggest that the current tendency is to expect too
much, rather than too little, of poetry. No one of us, when he
thinks about poetry, is without his own bias ; and Abbe Bremond's
preoccupation with mysticism and Mr. Richards's lack of interest
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 12