Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  1 In chapter xxii of Principles of Literary Criticism Mr. Richards discusses these matters in his own way. As evidence that there arc other approaches as well, see a very interesting article Le SJ1mbolisme et l'ame

  primitil:e by E. Cailliet and J. A. Bedc in the Rente de /itterature comparee for April-June 1 932. The authors, who have done field-work in Madagascar, apply the theories of Levy-Bruhl : the pre-logical mentality persists in civilized man, but becomes available only to or through the poet.

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  in theology arc equally significant. One voice was raised, in our

  time, to express a view of a different kind ; that of a man who

  wrote several remarkable poems himself, and who also had an

  aptitude for theology. It is that of T. E. Hulme :

  'There is a general tendency to think that verse means little else

  than the expression of unsatisfied emotion. People say : "But how

  can you have verse without sentiment ?" You see what it is ; the

  prospect alarms them. A classical revival to them would mean the

  prospect of an arid desert and the death of poetry as they understand it, and could only come to fill the gulf caused by that death.

  Exactly why this dry classical spirit should have a positive and

  legitimate necessity to express itself in poetry is utterly inconceivable to them . . . . The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to realize how extraordinarily difficult this is. . . . Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a

  concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your

  own purpose.'

  This is, we must remark at once, not a general theory of poetry,

  but an assertion of the claims of a particular kind of poetry for the

  writer's own time. It may serve to remind us how various are the

  kinds of poetry, and how variously poetry may appeal to different

  minds and generations equally qualified to appreciate it.

  The extreme of theorizing about the nature of poetry, the

  essence of poetry if there is any, belongs to the study of aesthetics

  and is no concern of the poet or of a critic with my limited

  qualifications. Whether the self-consciousness involved in

  aesthetics and in psychology does not risk violating the frontier of

  consciousness, is a question which I need not raise here ; it is

  perhaps only my private eccentricity to believe that such researches are perilous if not guided by sound theology. The poet is much more vitally concerned with the social 'uses' of poetry,

  and with his own place in society ; and this problem is now perhaps more importunately pressed upon his conscious attention than at any previous time. The uses of poetry certainly vary as

  society alters, as the public to be addressed changes. In this

  context something should be said about the vexed question of

  obscurity and unintelligibility. The difficulty of poetry (and

  modern poetry is supposed to be difficult) may be due to one of

  several reasons. First, there may be personal causes which make it

  impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure

  way ; while this may be regrettable, we should be glad, I think,

  that the man has been able to express himself at all. Or difficulty

  may be due just to novelty : we know the ridicule accorded in turn

  .to Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats, Tennyson and Browning - but

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  must remark that Browning was the first to be called difficult ;

  hostile critics of the earlier poets found them difficult, but called

  them silly. Or difficulty may be caused by the reader's having

  been told, or having suggested to himself, that the poem is going

  to prove difficult. The ordinary reader, when warned against the

  obscurity of a poem, is apt to be thrown into a state of consternation very unfavourable to poetic receptivity. Instead of beginning, as he should, in a state of sensitivity, he obfuscates his senses by

  the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something, he

  doesn't know what - or else by the desire not to be taken in. There

  is such a thing as stage fright, but what such readers have is pit or

  gallery fright. The more seasoned reader, he who has reached, in

  these matters, a state of greater purity, does not bother about

  understanding ; not, at least, at first. I know that some of the

  poetry to which I am most devoted is poetry which I did not

  understand at first reading; some is poetry which I am not sure I

  understand yet : for instance, Shakespeare's. And finally, there is

  the difficulty caused by the author's having left out something

  which the reader is used to finding ; so that the reader, bewildered,

  gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of

  'meaning' which is not there, and is not meant to be there.

  The chief use of the 'meaning' of a poem, in the ordinary sense,

  may be (for here again I am speaking of some kinds of poetry and

  not all) to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted

  and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him : much as the

  imaginary burglar is always provided with a bit of nice meat for

  the house-dog. This is a normal situation of which I approve. But

  the minds of all poets do not work that way ; some of them, assuming that there are other minds like their own, become impatient of this 'meaning' which seems superfluous, and perceive possibilities

  of intensity through its elimination. I am not asserting that this

  situation is ideal ; only that we must write our poetry as we can,

  and take it as we find it. It may be that for some periods of society

  a more relaxed form of writing is right, and for others a more

  concentrated. I believe that there must be many people who feel,

  as I do, that the effect of some of the greater nineteenth-century

  poets is diminished by their bulk. Who now, for the pure pleasure

  of it, reads Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats even, certainly

  Browning and Swinburne and most of the French poets of the

  century - entire ? I by no means believe that the 'long poem' is a

  thing of the past ; but at least there must be more in it for the

  length than our grandparents seemed to demand ; and for us, anything that can be said as well in prose can be said better in prose.

  And a great deal, in the way of meaning, belongs to prose rather

  than to poetry. The doctrine of 'art for art's sake', a mistaken

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  one, and more advertised than practised, contained this true

  impulse behind it, that it is a recognition of the error of the poet's

  trying to do other people's work. But poetry has as much to learn

  from prose as from other poetry ; and I think that an interaction

  between prose and verse, like the interaction between language

  and language, is a condition of vitality in literature.

  To return to the question of obscurity : when all exceptions

  have been made, and after admitting the possible existence of

  minor 'difficult' poets whose public must always be small, I believe

  that the poet naturally prefers to write for as large and miscellaneous an audience as possible, and that it is the half-educated and ill-educa
ted, rather than the uneducated, who stand in his

  way : I myself should like an audience which could neither read nor

  write. 1 The most useful poetry, socially, would be one which

  could cut across all the present stratifications of public taste -

  stratifications which are perhaps a sign of social disintegration.

  The ideal medium for poetry, to my mind, and the most direct

  means of social 'usefulness' for poetry, is the theatre. In a play of

  Shakespeare you get several levels of significance. For the simplest

  auditors there is the plot, for the more thoughtful the character

  and conflict of character, for the more literary the words and

  phrasing, for the more musically sensitive the rhythm, and for

  auditors of greater sensitiveness and understanding a meaning

  which reveals itself gradually. And I do not believe that the

  classification of audience is so clear-cut as this ; but rather that the

  sensitiveness of every auditor is acted upon by all these elements

  at once, though in different degrees of consciousness. At none of

  these levels is the auditor bothered by the presence of that which

  he does not understand, or by the presence of that in which he is

  not interested. I may make my meaning a little clearer by a simple

  instance. I once designed, and drafted a couple of scenes, of a

  verse play. My intention was to have one character whose sensibility and intelligence should be on the plane of the most sensitive and intelligent members of the audience ; his speeches should be

  addressed to them as much as to the other personages in the play

  - or rather, should be addressed to the latter, who were to be

  material, literal-minded and visionless, with the consciousness of

  being overheard by the former. There was to be an understanding

  between this protagonist and a small number of the audience,

  while the rest of the audience would share the responses of the

  other characters in the play. Perhaps this is all too deliberate, but

  one must experiment as one can.

  1 On the subject of education, there are some helpful remarks in

  Lawrence's Fantasia of the Unconscious.

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  'THE USE O F POETRY AND THE U S E O F CR I T I C I SM '

  Every poet would like, I fancy, to be able to think that he had

  some direct social utility. By this, as I hope I have already made

  clear, I do not mean that he should meddle with the tasks of the

  theologian, the preacher, the economist, the sociologist or anybody else ; that he should do anything but write poetry, poetry not defined in terms of something else. He would like to be something

  of a popular entertainer, and be able to think his own thoughts

  behind a tragic or a comic mask. He would like to convey the

  pleasures of poetry, not only to a larger audience, but to larger

  groups of people collectively ; and the theatre is the best place in

  which to do it. There might, one fancies, be some fulfilment in

  exciting this communal pleasure, to give an immediate compensation for the pains of turning blood into ink. As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a

  mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the

  permanent value of what he has written : he may have wasted his

  time and messed up his life for nothing. All the better, then, if

  he could have at least the satisfaction of having a part to play in

  society as worthy as that of the music-hall comedian. Furthermore, the theatre, by the technical exactions which it makes and limitations which it imposes upon the author, by the obligation to

  keep for a definite length of time the sustained interest of a large

  and unprepared and not wholly perceptive group of people, by

  its problems which have constantly to be solved, has enough to

  keep the poet's conscious mind fully occupied, as the painter's by

  the manipulation of his tools. I f, beyond keeping the interest of a

  crowd of people for that length of time, the author can make a

  play which is real poetry, so much the better.

  I have not attempted any definition of poetry, because I can

  think of none which does not assume that the reader already

  knows what it is, or which does not falsify by leaving out much

  more than it can include. Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage

  beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm ; hyperbolically one might say that the poet is older than other human beings - but I do not want to be tempted

  to ending on this sort of flourish. I have insisted rather on the

  variety of poetry, variety so great that all the kinds seem to have

  nothing in common except the rhythm of verse instead of the

  rhythm of prose : and that does not tell you much about all

  poetry. Poetry is of course not to be defined by its uses. If it

  commemorates a public occasion, or celebrates a festival, or

  decorates a religious rite, or amuses a crowd, so much the better.

  It may effect revolutions in sensibility such as arc periodically

  needed ; may help to break up the conventional modes of perception and valuation which are perpetually forming, and make 95

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  people see the world afresh, o r some new part o f it. It may make

  us from time to time a little m.ore aware of the deeper, unnamed

  feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we

  rarely penetrate ; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of

  ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world. But to

  say all this is only to say what you know already, if you have felt

  poetry and thought about your feelings. And I fear that I have

  already, throughout these lectures, trespassed beyond the bounds

  which a little self-knowledge tells me are my proper frontier. If,

  as James Thomson observed, 'lips only sing when they cannot

  kiss', it may also be that poets only talk when they cannot sing.

  I am content to leave my theorizing about poetry at this point.

  The sad ghost of Coleridge beckons to me from the shadows.

  REL I G I ON AND L I TE RATURE

  What I have to say i s largely i n support of the following propositions : Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint. In so far as in any age

  there is common agreement on ethical and theological matters, so

  far can literary criticism be substantive. In ages like our own, in

  which there is no such common agreement, it is the more necessary for Christian readers to scrutinize their reading, especially of works of imagination, with explicit ethical and theological

  standards. The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined

  solely by literary standards ; though we must remember that

  whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary

  standards. 1

  We have tacitly assumed, for some centuries past, that there is

  no relation between literature and theology. This is not to deny

  that literature - I mean, again, primarily works of imagination -

  has been, is, and probably always will be judged by some moral

  standards. But moral judgments of literary works are made only

  according to the moral code accepted by each generation, whether

  it lives according to that code
or not. In an age which accepts

  some precise Christian theology, the common code may be fairly

  orthodox : though even in such periods the common code may

  exalt such concepts as 'honour,' 'glory' or 'revenge' to a position

  quite intolerable to Christianity. The dramatic ethics of the

  Elizabethan Age offers an interesting study. But when the common code is detached from its theological background, and is consequently more and more merely a matter of habit, it is

  exposed both to prejudice and to change. At such times morals

  are open to being altered by literature ; so that we find in practice

  that what is 'objectionable' in literature is merely what the present

  generation is not used to. It is a commonplace that what shocks

  one generation is accepted quite calmly by the next. This adaptability to change of moral standards is sometimes greeted with 1 As an example of literary criticism given greater significance by

  theological interests, I would call attention to Theodor I laecker : Virgil

  (Sheed and Ward).

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  satisfaction as a n evidence o f human perfectibility : whereas it is

  only evidence of what unsubstantial foundations people's moral

  judgments have.

  I am not concerned here with religious literature but with the

  application of our religion to the criticism of any literature. It may

  be as well, however, to distinguish first what I consider to be the

  three senses in which we can speak of 'religious literature'. The

  first is that of which we say that it is 'religious literature' in the

  same way that we speak of 'historical literature' or of 'scientific

  literature'. I mean that we can treat the Authorized translation of

  the Bible, or the works of Jeremy Taylor, as literature, in the

  same way that we treat the historical writing of Clarendon or of

  Gibbon - our two great English historians - as literature ; or

  Bradley's Logic, or Buffon's Natural History. All of these writers

  were men who, incidentally to their religious, or historical, or

  philosophic purpose, had a gift of language which makes them

  delightful to read to all those who can enjoy language well written