Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot

by Frank Kermode

  And hoped, and suffer'd, is but seed

  Of what in them is flower and fruit;

  Whereof the man, that with me trod

  This planet, was a noble type

  Appearing ere the times were ripe,

  That friend of mine who lives in God,

  That God, which ever lives and loves,

  One God, one law, one element,

  And one far-off divine eve11f,

  To which the whole creation moves.

  These lines show an interesting compromise between the religious attitude and, what is quite a different thing, the belief in human perfectibility ; but the contrast was not so apparent to

  Tennyson's contemporaries. They may have been taken in by it,

  but I don't think that Tennyson himself was, quite : his feelings

  were more honest than his mind. There is evidence elsewhere -

  even in an early poem, Locks ley Hall, for example - that Tennyson

  by no means regarded with complacency all the changes that were

  going on about him in the progress of industrialism and the rise

  of the mercantile and manufacturing and banking classes ; and he

  may have contemplated the future of England, as his years drew

  out, with increasing gloom. Temperamentally, he was opposed to

  the doctrine that he was moved to accept and to praise.

  Tennyson's feelings, I have said, were honest ; but they were

  usually a good way below the surface. In Memoriam can, I think,

  justly be called a religious poem, but for another reason than that

  which made it seem religious to his contemporaries. It is not

  religious because of the quality of its faith, but because of the

  quality of its doubt. Its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a

  very intense experience. In A1emoriam is a poem of despair, but of

  despair of a religious kind. And to qualify its despair with the

  adjective 'religious' is to elevate it above most of its derivatives.

  For The City of Dreadful Night, and A Shropshire Lad, and

  the poems of Thomas Hardy, are small works in comparison

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  with In Memoriam : It is greater than they and comprehends

  them.1

  In ending we must go back td the beginning and remember

  that In Memoriam would not be a great poem, or Tennyson a

  great poet, without the technical accomplishment. Tennyson is

  the great master of metric as well as of melancholia ; I do not think

  any poet in English has ever had a finer ear for vowel sound, as

  well as a subtler feeling for some moods of anguish :

  Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

  A11d sweet as those by hopeless fattC)' feign' d

  On lips that are for others; deep as love

  Deep as first love, and wild with all regret.

  And this technical gift ofTennyson's is no slight thing. Tennyson

  lived in a time which was already acutely time-conscious : a great

  many things seemed to be happening, railways were being built,

  discoveries were being made, the face of the world was changing.

  That was a time busy in keeping up to date. It had, for the most

  part, no hold on permanent things, on permanent truths about

  man and God and life and death. The surface of Tennyson stirred

  about with his time ; and he had nothing to which to hold fast

  except his unique and unerring feeling for the sounds of words.

  But in this he had something that no one else had. Tennyson's

  surface, his technical accomplishment, is intimate with his

  depths : what we most quickly see about Tennyson is that which

  moves between the surface and the depths, that which is of slight

  importance. By looking innocently at the surface we are most

  likely to come to the depths, to the abyss of sorrow. Tennyson is

  not only a minor Virgil, he is also with Virgil as Dante saw him, a

  Virgil among the Shades, the saddest of all English poets, among

  the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society

  in which he was the most perfect conformist.

  Tennyson seems to have reached the end of his spiritual development with In Memoriam ; there followed no reconciliation, no resolution.

  And now no sacred staff shall break in blossom,

  No choral salutation lure to light

  A spirit sick with perfume and sweet night,

  1 There are other kinds of despair. Davidson's great poem, Thirty

  Bob a Week, is not derivative from Tennyson. On the other hand, there

  are other things derivative from Tennyson besides Atalanta in

  Calydon. Compare the poems of William Morris with The Voyage of

  Mae/dune, and Barrack Room Ballads with several of Tennyson's later

  poems.

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  or rather with twilight, for Tennyson faced neither the darkness

  nor the light in his later years. The genius, the technical power,

  persisted to the end, but the spirit had surrendered. A gloomier

  end than that of Baudelaire : Tennyson had no singu/ier avertissement. And having turned aside from the journey through the dark night, to become the surface flatterer of his own time, he has been

  rewarded with the despite of an age that succeeds his own in

  shallowness.

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  YEATS1

  The generations of poetry in our age seem to cover a span of

  about twenty years. I do not mean that the best work of any poet

  is limited to twenty years : I mean that it is about that length of

  time before a new school or style of poetry appears. By the time,

  that is to say, that a man is fifty, he has behind him a kind of poetry

  written by men of seventy, and before him another kind written

  by men of thirty. That is my position at present, and if I live

  another twenty years I shall expect to see still another younger

  school of poetry. One's relation to Yeats, however, does not fit

  into this scheme. When I was a young man at the university, in

  America, just beginning to write verse, Yeats was already a considerably figure in the world of poetry, and his early period was well defined. I cannot remember that his poetry at that stage made

  any deep impression upon me. A very young man, who is himself

  stirred to write, is not primarily critical or even widely appreciative. He is looking for masters who will elicit his consciousness of what he wants to say himself, of the kind of poetry that is in him

  to write. The taste of an adolescent writer is intense, but narrow :

  it is determined by personal needs. The kind of poetry that I

  needed, to teach me the use of my own voice, did not exist in

  English at all ; it was only to be found in French. For this reason

  the poetry of the young Yeats hardly existed for me until after my

  enthusiasm had been won by the poetry of the older Yeats ; and by

  that time - I mean, from 1919 on - my own course of evolution

  was already determined. Hence, I find myself regarding him,

  from one point of view, as a contemporary and not a predecessor ;

  and from another point of view, I can share the feelings of younger

  men, who came to know and admire him by that work from 1919

  on, which was produced while they were adolescent.

  Certainly, for the younger poets of England and America, I am

  sure that their admiration for Yeats's
poetry has been wholly

  good. His idiom was too different for there to be any danger of

  1 The first annual Yeats Lecture, delivered to the Friends of the

  Irish Academy at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1 940. Subsequently

  published in Purpose.

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  imitation, his opinions too different to flatter and confirm their

  prejudices. It was good for them to have the spectacle of an

  unquestionably great living poet, whose style they were not tempted to echo and whose ideas opposed those in vogue among them.

  You will not see, in their writing, more than passing evidences of

  the impression he made, but the work, and the man himself as

  poet, have been of the greatest significance to them for all that.

  This may seem to contradict what I have been saying about the

  kind of poetry that a young poet chooses to admire. But I am

  really talking about something different. Yeats would not have

  this influence had he not become a great poet; but the influence of

  which I speak is due to the figure of the poet himself, to the

  integrity of his passion for his art and his craft which provided

  such an impulse for his extraordinary development. When he

  visited London he liked to meet and talk to younger poets. People

  have sometimes spoken of him as arrogant and overbearing. I

  never found him so ; in his conversations with a younger writer I

  always felt that he offered terms of equality, as to a fellow worker,

  a practitioner of the same mistery. It was, I think, that, unlike

  many writers, he cared more for poetry than for his own reputation as a poet or his picture of himself as a poet. Art was greater than the artist : and this feeling he communicated to others ; which

  was why younger men were never ill at ease in his company.

  This, I am sure, was part of the secret of his ability, after becoming unquestionably the master, to remain always a contemporary. Another is the continual development of which I have spoken. This has become almost a commonplace of criticism of

  his work. But while it is often mentioned, its causes and its nature

  have not been often analysed. One reason, of course, was simply

  concentration and hard work. And behind that is character : I

  mean the special character of the artist as artist - that is, the force

  of character by which Dickens, having exhausted his first inspiration, was able in middle age to proceed to such a masterpiece, so different from his early work, as Bleak House. It is difficult and

  unwise to generalize about ways of composition - so many men, so

  many ways - but it is my experience that towards middle age a

  man has three choices : to stop writing altogether, to repeat himself with perhaps an increasing skill of virtuosity, or by taking thought to adapt himself to middle age and find a different way

  of working. Why are the later long poems of Browning and

  Swinburne mostly unread ? It is, I think, because one gets the

  essential Browning or Swinburne entire in earlier poems ; and in

  the later, one is reminded of the early freshness which they lack,

  without being made aware of any compensating new qualities.

  When a man is engaged in work of abstract thought - if there is

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  such a thing as wholly abstract thought outside of the mathematical and the physical sciences.- his mind can mature, while his emotions either remain the same or only atrophy, and it will not

  matter. But maturing as a poet means maturing as the whole man,

  experiencing new emotions appropriate to one's age, and with the

  same intensity as the emotions of youth.

  One form, a perfect form, of development is that of Shakespeare, one of the few poets whose work of maturity is just as exciting as that of their early manhood. There is, I think, a

  difference between the development of Shakespeare and Yeats,

  which makes the latter case still more curious. With Shakespeare,

  one sees a slow, continuous development of mastery of his craft of

  verse, and the poetry of middle age seems implicit in that of early

  maturity. After the first few verbal exercises you say of each piece

  of work : 'This is the perfect expression of the sensibility of that

  stage of his development.' That a poet should develop at all, that

  he should find something new to say, and say it equally well, in

  middle age, has always something miraculous about it. But in the

  case of Yeats the kind of development seems to me different. I do

  not want to give the impression that I regard his earlier and his

  later work almost as if they had been written by two different men.

  Returning to his earlier poems after making a close acquaintance

  with the later, one sees, to begin with, that in technique there was

  a slow and continuous development of what is always the same

  medium and idiom. And when I say development, I do not mean

  that many of the early poems, for what they are, are not as

  beautifully written as they could be. There are some, such as Who

  Goes with Fergus ?, which are as perfect of their kind as anything

  in the language. But the best, and the best known of them, have

  this limitation : that they are as satisfactory in isolation, as

  'anthology pieces', as they are in the context of his other poems

  of the same period.

  I am obviously using the term 'anthology piece' in a rather

  special sense. In any anthology, you find some poems which give

  you complete satisfaction and delight in themselves, such that you

  are hardly curious who wrote them, hardly want to look further

  into the work of that poet. There are others, not necessarily so

  perfect or complete, which make you irresistibly curious to know

  more of that poet through his other work. Naturally, this distinction applies only to short poems, those in which a man has been able to put only a part of his mind, if it is a mind of any size. With

  some such you feel at once that the man who wrote them must

  have had a great deal more to say, in different contexts, of equal

  interest. Now among all the poems in Yeats's earlier volumes I

  find only in a line here or there, that sense of a unique personality

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  YEATS

  which makes one sit up in excitement and eagerness to learn more

  about the author's mind and feelings. The intensity of Yeats's

  own emotional experience hardly appears. We have sufficient

  evidence of the intensity of experience of his youth, but it is from

  the retrospections in some of his later work that we have our

  evidence.

  I have, in early essays, extolled what I called impersonality in

  art, and it may seem that, in giving as a reason for the superiority

  of Yeats's later work the greater expression of personality in it, I

  am contradicting myself. It may be that I expressed myself badly,

  or that I had only an adolescent grasp of that idea - as I can never

  bear to re-read my own prose writings, I am willing to leave the

  point unsettled - but I think now, at least, that the truth of the

  matter is as follows. There are two forms of impersonality : that

  which is natural to the mere skilful craftsman, and that which is

  more and more achieved by the maturing artist. The first is that<
br />
  of what I have called the 'anthology piece', of a lyric by Lovelace

  or Suckling, or of Campion, a finer poet than either. The second

  impersonality is 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.

  And the strange thing is that Yeats, having been a great craftsman

  in the first kind, became a great poet in the second. It is not that

  he became a different man, for, as I have hinted, one feels sure

  that the intense experience of youth had been lived through - and

  indeed, without this early experience he could never have

  attained anything of the wisdom which appears in his later writing.

  But he had to wait for a later maturity to find expression of early

  experience ; and this makes him, I think, a unique and especially

  interesting poet.

  Consider the early poem which is in every anthology, When you

  are old and grey and full of sleep, or A Dream of Death in the same

  volume of 1 893· They are beautiful poems, but only craftsman's

  work, because one does not feel present in them the particularity

  which must provide the material for the general truth. By the

  time of the volume of 1 904 there is a development visible in a very

  lovely poem, The Folly of Being Con!forted, and in Adam's Curse ;

  something is coming through, and in beginning to speak as a

  particular man he is beginning to speak for man. This is clearer

  still in the poem Peace, in the 1 9 1 0 volume. But it is not fully

  evinced until the volume of 191 4, in the violent and terrible epistle

  dedicatory of Responsibilities, with the great lines

  Pardon that for a barren passion's sake,

  Although I have come close on forty-nine . . .

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  And the naming o f his age i n the poem i s significant. More than

  half a lifetime to arrive at this freedom of speech. It is a triumph.

  There was much also for Yeats to work out of himself, even in

  technique. To be a younger member of a group of poets, none of

  them certainly of anything like his stature, but further developed

  in their limited path, may arrest for a time a man's development

  of idiom: Then again, the weight of the pre-Raphaelite prestige