mark upon English poetry, together with the rhythms of Latin,
and, at various periods, of French, Italian and Spanish. As with
I()()
ESSAYS OF GENER A lJ ZA T I ON
I 9 J o- I 9 6 5
•
human beings in a composite race, different strains may be dominant in different individuals, even in members of the same family, so one or another element in the poetic compound may be more
congenial to one or another poet or to one or another period. The
kind of poetry we get is determined, from time to time, by the
influence of one or another contemporary literature in a foreign
language ; or by circumstances which make one period of our own
past more sympathetic than another ; or by the prevailing emphasis
in education. But there is one law of nature more powerful than
any of these varying currents, or influences from abroad or from
the past : the Ia w that poetry must not stray too far from the
ordinary everyday language which we use and hear. Whether
poetry is accentual or syllabic, rhymed or rhymeless, formal or
free, it cannot afford to lose its contact with the changing language
of common intercourse.
It may appear strange, that when I profess to be talking about
the 'music' of poetry, I put such emphasis upon conversation. But
I would remind you, first, that the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning. Otherwise, Ve could have poetry of great musical beauty which made no sense, and I
have never come across such poetry. The apparent exceptions
only show a difference of degree : there are poems in which we are
moved by the music and take the sense for granted, just as there
are poems in which we attend to the sense and are moved by the
music without noticing it. Take an apparently extreme example -
the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. His non-sense is not vacuity
of sense : it is a parody of sense, and that is the sense of it. The
Jumblies is a poem of adventure, and of nostalgia for the romance
of foreign voyage and exploration ; The Yongy-Bongy Bo and The
Dong with a Luminous Nose are poems of unrequited passion -
'blues' in fact. We enjoy the music, which is of a high order, and
we enjoy the feeling of irresponsibility towards the sense. Or take
a poem of another type, the Blue Closet of William Morris. It is a
delightful poem, though I cannot explain what it means and I
doubt whether the author could have explained it. It has an effect
somewhat like that of a rune or charm, but runes and charms are
very practical formulae designed to produce definite results, such
as getting a cow out of a bog. But its obvious intention (and I
think the author succeeds) is to produce the effect of a dream. It
is not necessary, in order to enjoy the poem, to know what the
dream means ; but human beings have an unshakeable belief that
dreams mean something : they used to believe - and many still
believe - that dreams disclose the secrets of the future ; the orthodox modern faith is that they reveal the secrets - or at least the more horrid secrets - of the past. It is a commonplace to observe
1 10
THE M U S I C O F POETRY
that the meaning of a poem may wholly escape paraphrase. It is
not quite so commonplace to observe that the meaning of a poem
may be something larger than its author's conscious purpose, and
something remote from its origins. One of the more obscure of
modern poets was the French writer Stephane Mallarmc, of whom
the French sometimes say that his language is so peculiar that it
can be understood only by foreigners. The late Roger Fry, and
his friend Charles Mauron, published an English translation with
notes to unriddle the meanings : when I learn that a difficult sonnet
was inspired by seeing a painting on the ceiling reflected on the
polished top of a table, or by seeing the light reflected from the
foam on a glass of beer, I can only say that this may be a correct
embryology, but it is not the meaning. If we are moved by a poem,
it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us ; if we
are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless. We can be deeply
stirred by hearing the recitation of a poem in a language of which
we understand no word ; but if we are then told that the poem is
gibberish and has no meaning, we shall consider that we have been
deluded - this was no poem, it was merely an imitation of instrumental music. If, as we are aware, only a part of the meaning can be conveyed by paraphrase, that is because the poet is occupied
with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though
meanings still exist. A poem may appear to mean very different
things to different readers, and all of these meanings may be
different from what the author thought he meant. For instance,
the author may have been writing some peculiar personal experience, which he saw quite unrelated to anything outside ; yet for the reader the poem may become the expression of a general
situation, as well as of some private experience of his own. The
reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally
valid - it may even be better. There may be much more in a poem
than the author was aware of. The different interpretations may
all be partial formulations of one thing ; the ambiguities may be
due to the fact that the poem means more, not less, than ordinary
speech can communicate.
So, while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what
can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one
person talking to another; and this is just as true if you sing it, for
singing is another way of talking. The immediacy of poetry to
conversation is not a matter on which we can lay down exact laws.
Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return to common speech. That is the revolution which Wordsworth announced in his prefaces, and he was right : but the same revolution had been carried out a century
before by Oldham, Waller, Denham and Dryden ; and the same
I I I
ESSAYS O F GENERAL} ZATION · 1 9 3 0- 1 9 6 5
revolution was due again something over a century later. The
followers of a revolution develop. the new poetic idiom in one
direction or another ; they poli'sh or perfect it ; meanwhile the
spoken language goes on changing, and the poetic idiom goes out
of date. Perhaps we do not realize how natural the speech of
Dryden must have sounded to the most sensitive of his contemporaries. No poetry, of course, is ever exactly the same speech that the poet talks and hears : but it has to be in such a relation to
the speech of his time that the listener or reader can say 'that is
how I should talk if I could talk poetry'. This is the reason why
the best contemporary poetry can give us a feeling of excitement
and a sense of fulfilment different from any sentiment aroused by
even very much greater poetry of a past age.
The music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the common speech of its time. And that means also that it must be latent in the common speech of the poet's place. It would not be to my
present purpose to inveigh against the ubiquity of standardized,
or 'B.B.C.' Engl
ish. If we all came to talk alike there would no
longer be any point in our not writing alike : but until that time
comes - and I hope it may be long postponed - it is the poet's
business to use the speech which he finds about him, that with
which he is most familiar. I shall always remember the impression
of W. B. Yeats reading poetry aloud. To hear him read his own
works was to be made to recognize how much the Irish way of
speech is needed to bring out the beauties of Irish poetry : to hear
Yeats reading William Blake was an experience of a different kind,
more astonishing than satisfying. Of course, we do not want the
poet merely to reproduce exactly the conversational idiom of himself, his family, his friends and his particular district : but what he finds there is the material out of which he must make his poetry.
He must, like the sculptor, be faithful to the material in which he
works ; it is out of sounds that he has heard that he must make his
melody and harmony.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all poetry ought
to be melodious, or that melody is more than one of the components of the music of words. Some poetry is meant to be sung; most poetry, in modern times, is meant to be spoken - and there
are many other things to be spoken of besides the murmur of
innumerable bees or the moan of doves in immemorial elms.
Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place : just as, in a poem of
any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater
and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion
essential to the musical structure of the whole ; and the passages
of less intensity will be, in relation to the level on which the total
poem operates, prosaic - so that, in the sense implied by that
1 12
THE MUS I C O F P O ETRY
context, it may be said that no poet can write a poem of amplitude
unless he is a master of the prosaic. 1
What matters, in short, is the whole poem : and if the whole
poem need not be, and often should not be, wholly melodious, it
follows that a poem is not made only out of 'beautiful words'. I
doubt whether, from the point of view of sound alone, any word is
more or less beautiful than another - within its own language, for
the question whether some languages are not more beautiful than
others is quite another question. The ugly words are the words not
fitted for the company in which they find themselves ; there are
words which are ugly because of rawness or because of antiquation ; there are words which are ugly because of foreignness or ill-breeding (e.g. television) : but I do not believe that any word
well-established in its own language is either beautiful or ugly.
The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection : it
arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding
and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context ; and
from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that
context to all the other meanings which it has had in other
contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association. Not all words,
obviously, are equally rich and well-connected : it is part of the
business of the poet to dispose the richer among the poorer, at the
right points, and we cannot afford to load a poem too heavily with
the former - for it is only at certain moments that a word can be
made to insinuate the whole history of a language and a civilization. This is an 'allusiveness' which is not the fashion or eccentricity of a peculiar type of poetry ; but an allusiveness which is in the nature of words, and which is equally the concern of every
kind of poet. My purpose here is to insist that a 'musical poem' is
a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical
pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it,
and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one. And if you
object that it is only the pure sound, apart from the sense, to
which the adjective 'musical' can be rightly applied, I can only
reaffirm my previous assertion that the sound of a poem is as much
an abstraction from the poem as is the sense . . . .
I think that a poet may gain much from the study of music : how
much technical knowledge of musical form is desirable I do not
know, for I have not that technical knowledge myself. But I
believe that the properties in which music concerns the poet most
nearly, are the sense of rhythm and the sense of structure. I think
that it might be possible for a poet to work too closely to musical
1 This is the complementary doctrine to that of the 'touchstone' line
or passage of Matthew Arnold : this test of the greatness of a poet is the
way he writes his less intense, but structurally vital, matter.
I IJ
ESSAYS O F GENER A L I ZA T I O N
1 9 3 o- 1 9 6 5
•
analogies : the result might be an effect of artificiality ; but I know
that a poem, or a passage of a poe�, may tend to realize itself first
as a particular rhythm before it ·reaches expression in words, and
that this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the image ; and I
do not believe that this is an experience peculiar to myself. The
use of recurrent themes is as natural to poetry as to music. There
are possibilities for verse which bear some analogy to the development of a theme by different groups of instruments ; there are possibilities of transitions in a poem comparable to the different
movements of a symphony or a quartet ; there are possibilities of
contrapuntal arrangement of subject-matter. It is in the concert
room, rather than in the opera house, that the germ of a poem may
be quickened . . . .
WHAT I S A CLAS S I C ? 1
The subject which I have taken is simply the question : 'What is
a classic ?' It is not a new question. There is, for instance, a
famous essay by Ste. Beuve with this title. The pertinence of
asking this question, with Virgil particularly in mind, is obvious :
whatever the definition we arrive at, it cannot be one which excludes Virgil - we may say confidently that it must be one which will expressly reckon with him. But before I go farther, I should
like to dispose of certain prejudices and anticipate certain misunderstandings. I do not aim to supersede, or to outlaw, any use of the word 'classic' which precedent has made permissible. The
word has, and will continue to have, several meanings in several
contexts : I am concerned with one meaning in one context. In
defining the term in this way, I do not bind myself, for the future,
not to use the term in any of the other ways in which it has been
used. If, for instance, I am discovered on some future occasion, in
writing, in public speech, or in conversation, to be using the word
'classic' merely to mean a 'standard author' in any language -
using it merely as an indication of the greatness, or of the permanence and importance of a writer in his own field, as when we speak of The F�fth Form at St. Dominic's as a classic of schoolboy
fiction, or Handley Cross as a classic of the hunting field - no one
should expect one to apologize. And there is a very interesting
book called A Guide to the Classics, which tells you how to pick
the Derby
winner. On other occasions, I permit myself to mean
by 'the classics', either Latin and Greek literature in toto, or the
greatest authors of those languages, as the context indicates. And,
finally, I think that the account of the classic which I propose to
give here should remove it from the area of the antithesis between
'classic' and 'romantic' - a pair of terms belonging to literary
politics, and therefore arousing winds of passion which I ask
Aeolus, on this occasion, to contain in the bag.
This leads me to my next point. By the terms of the classicromantic controversy, to call any work of art 'classical', implies 1 The Presidential Address to the Virgil Society in 1944· Published
by Faber & Faber 1945.
1 1 5
ESSAYS O F GENERAI.J ZATION · 1 9 3 o- 1 9 6 5
either the highest praise or the most contemptuous abuse, according to the party to which one belongs. It implies certain particular merits or faults : either the perfection of form, or the absolute zero
of frigidity. But I want to define one kind of art, and am not concerned that it is absolutely and in every respect better or worse than another kind. I shall enumerate certain qualities which I should
expect the classic to display. But I do not say that, if a literature
is to be a great literature, it must have any one author, or any one
period, in which all these qualities are manifested. If, as I think,
they are all to be found in Virgil, that is not to assert that he is
the greatest poet who ever wrote - such an assertion about any
poet seems to me meaningless - and it is certainly not to assert that
Latin literature is greater than any other literature. We need not
consider it as a defect of any literature, if no one author, or no one
period, is completely classical ; or if, as is true of English literature,
the period which most nearly fills the claf.sical definition is not the
greatest. I think that those literatures, of which English is one of
the most eminent, in which the classical qualities are scattered
between various authors and several periods, may well be the
richer. Every language has its own resources, and its own limitations. The conditions of a language, and the conditions of the history of the people who speak it, may put out of question the
expectation of a classical period, or a classical author. That is not
Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot Page 16