by T. S. Eliot
Nymph and the Fawn,” or even from the “Horatian Ode”; but it is perhaps
justified by the desire to account for that precise taste of Marvell’s which
finds for him the proper degree of seriousness for every subject which he
treats. His errors of taste, when he trespasses, are not sins against this
a n d r e w m a r v e l l
1 5 7
virtue; they are conceits, distended metaphors and similes, but they never
consist in taking a subject too seriously or too lightly. This virtue of wit is
not a peculiar quality of minor poets, or of the minor poets of one age or
of one school; it is an intellectual quality which perhaps only becomes no-
ticeable by itself, in the work of lesser poets. Furthermore, it is absent
from the work of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats, on whose poetry nine-
teenth-century criticism has unconsciously been based. To the best of
their poetry wit is irrelevant:
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Amongst the stars that have a di¤erent birth,
And ever changing, like a joyless eye,
That finds no object worth its constancy?45
We should find it diªcult to draw any useful comparison between these
lines of Shelley and anything by Marvell. But later poets, who would have
been the better for Marvell’s quality, were without it; even Browning seems
oddly immature, in some way, beside Marvell. And nowadays we find occa-
sionally good irony, or satire, which lacks wit’s internal equilibrium, because
their voices are essentially protests against some outside sentimentality
or stupidity; or we find serious poets who are afraid of acquiring wit, lest
they lose intensity. The quality which Marvell had, this modest and certainly
impersonal virtue—whether we call it wit or reason, or even urbanity—
we have patently failed to define. By whatever name we call it, and however
we define that name, it is something precious and needed and apparently
extinct; it is what should preserve the reputation of Marvell. C’était une
belle âme, comme on ne fait plus à Londres. 46
p r o s e a n d v e r s e 1
o n t h e s u b j e c t o f prose-poetry I have no theory to expound; but as I find I cannot state my position merely by denying the existence of the
subject-matter, I may be excused for explaining it at greater length than
a simple denial requires. I have found it convenient to put my remarks
in the form of disconnected paragraphs. The present condition of English
literature is so lifeless that there surely needs no extenuation of any re-
search into past or possible forms of speech; the chief benefit of such a
symposium as the present is not the verdict but the enquiry: an enquiry
which might help to stimulate the worn nerves and release the arthritic
limbs of our diction.
The Definition. —I have not yet been given any definition of the prose
poem, which appears to be more than a tautology or a contradiction. Mr.
Aldington, for example, has provided me with the following: “The prose
poem is poetic content expressed in prose form.”2 Poetic content must be
either the sort of thing that is usually, or the sort of thing that ought to be, expressed in verse. But if you say the latter, the prose poem is ruled out;
if you say the former, you have said only that certain things can be said
in either prose or verse, or that anything can be said either in prose or
verse. I am not disposed to contest either of these conclusions, as they
stand, but they do not appear to bring us any nearer to a definition of the
prose poem. I do not assume the identification of poetry with verse; good
1 5 8
p r o s e a n d v e r s e
1 5 9
poetry is obviously something else besides good verse; and good verse
may be very indi¤erent poetry. I quite appreciate the meaning of anyone
who says that passages of Sir Thomas Browne are “poetry,” or that Den-
ham’s “Cooper’s Hill” is not poetry.3 Also, the former may be good prose,
and the latter is certainly good verse; and Sir Thomas is justified for writ-
ing in prose, and Sir John Denham for writing in verse. Mr. Aldington
would say that there are two kinds of prose— that of Voltaire or Gibbon,
on the one hand, and that of “Gaspard de la Nuit” or “Suspiria de Profun-
dis” on the other.4 Perhaps he will admit, what seems to me equally likely,
that there are two kinds of verse: we may contrast Poe and Dryden, Baude-
laire and Boileau.5 He might fairly say that we need a fourth term: we have
the term “verse” and the term “poetry,” and only the one term “prose” to
express their opposites. The distinction between “verse” and “prose” is
clear; the distinction between “poetry” and “prose” is very obscure. I do
not wish to quibble over “content”; I know that it is not a question of “sub-
ject-matter” so much as of the way in which this subject-matter is treated,
apart from its expression in metrical form.
The Value of Verse and Prose. —I take it for granted that prose is allowed
to be, potentially or actually, as important a medium as verse, and that it
may cost quite as much pains to write. Also that any enjoyment that can
be communicated by verse may be communicated by prose, with the excep-
tion of the pleasure of metrical form. And there is an equivalent pleasure
in the movement of the finest prose, which is peculiar to prose and cannot
be compensated by verse. It may, for all that we have yet decided, be proper
to call this prose poetry; but if we deny that all of the best prose is poetry, we have got no farther; and we have still to find two qualities or sets of
qualities, and divide the best literature, verse and prose, into two parts
which shall exemplify these two qualities. Each group of works of litera-
ture will comprehend both verse and prose.
Intensity. —This is sometimes held, implicitly or explicitly, to be a char-
acter of poetry and not of prose. It must not be confused with concentration,
which is stating or implying much in proportion to the space occupied,
or with length, which is a di¤erent matter from either. The feeling commu-
nicated by a long piece of prose may be more intense than that of a short
poem: Newman’s Apology is thus more intense than a poem of Anacreon,
but this intensity of feeling cannot be extracted from select passages; you
must read the whole book to get it.6 I should not care to deny intensity to
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
Gibbon’s history; but this intensity is slowly cumulative, and required
seven volumes for its communication.
Length. —While the preceding paragraph has pointed to what I believe
a valued and useful qualification, it has also come near to juggling with
the term. No long work can maintain the same high tension throughout,
and although Gibbon’s history, or Newman’s Apology, leave a single intense
feeling behind, they have in their progress a movement of tension and
relaxation. This leads us to Poe’s law: that no poem should be more than
one hundred lines.7 Poe demands the st
atic poem; that in which there
shall be no movement of tension or relaxation, only the capture of a single
unit of intense feeling. We are, most of us, inclined to agree with him: we
do not like long poems. This dislike is due, I believe, partly to the taste of
the day, which will pass, and partly to the abuse of the long poem in the
hands of distinguished persons who did not know how to employ it. No
one who is willing to take some trouble about his pleasures complains of
the length of the Divine Comedy, the Odyssey, or even the Aeneid. Any long poem will contain certain matter of ephemeral interest, like some of Dante’s
divine processions, but this does not imply that the long poem should not
have been written—that, in other words, it should have been composed
as a number of short poems. The poems I have just mentioned have, in
di¤erent degrees, the movement toward and from intensity which is life
itself. Milton and Wordsworth, on the other hand, lack this unity, and
therefore lack life; and the general criticism on most of the long poems
of the nineteenth century is simply that they are not good enough.
Verse and Prose Again. —It might be suggested that the proper form
would be one which combined verse and prose in waves of intense or re-
laxed feeling. We have not, however, committed ourselves to the statement
that intensity of feeling should be expressed in verse, or that verse should
always be intense. And such a mixture of prose and verse would sin against
a di¤erent kind of unity. A single work must have some metrical unity.
This may vary widely in practice: I see no reason why a considerable variety
of verse forms may not be employed within the limits of a single poem;
or why a prose writer should not vary his cadences almost indefinitely;
that is question for discretion, taste and genius to settle. We seem to see
clearly enough that prose is allowed to be “poetic”; we appear to have over-
looked the right of poetry to be “prosaic.” On the other hand, if we admit
the long poem, we surely ought to admit the short “prose” (we cannot
p r o s e a n d v e r s e
1 6 1
speak conveniently in English, as we can in French, of “Proses” in the
plural). And the short prose is, I believe, what most people have in mind
when they speak of “poems in prose.” (But shortness is evidently not a
suªcient characterisation, else we should have to denominate the writ-
ings of Mr. Pearsall Smith as “poems” in prose.)8
Another Sense of “Poetic” and “Prosaic.” —I have spoken only of verse
in which there is a more or less periodic movement between intensity and
relaxation, but there is another kind of verse which is disparaged. Is Absa-
lom and Achitophel, is the “Letter to Arbuthnot,” poetry?9 These are great
literature; and I cannot see that it matters much whether we call them
poetry or prose. In any case, they do something that great poetry does:
they capture and put into literature an emotion: we may say, in Dryden’s
case, the emotion of contempt, and in Pope’s case, the emotion of hatred
or spite. In this sort of verse also there is movement between greater and
less intensity.
One Kind of “Poetic” Prose. —A number of prose works, especially sev-
eral of the seventeenth century, are spoken of as “poetic.” Namely, the
writings of Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor.10 We agree with Remy
de Gourmont’s assertion that it is only the style that preserves literature;
but we must emphasise the “preservation,” and ask what is preserved.11
Possibly by some prejudice or narrowness of taste, I have always held
these writers to be of a mediocrity of mind which forbade my taking any
keen pleasure in their style. I find them di¤use, and precisely lacking in
that intensity which raises the history of Newman’s religious doubts to
the highest importance even for the otherwise alien reader. But let us ex-
amine a passage of one of these authors, which is not unjustly celebrated
as a piece of poetic prose:
Now since these dead bones have already out-lasted the living
ones of Methuselah, and in a yard underground, and thin walls
of clay, out-worn all the strong and spacious buildings above
it; and quietly rested under the drums and tramplings of three
conquests: what prince can promise such diuturnity unto
his relics, or might not gladly say, “Sic ego componi versus in
ossa velim?” Time, which antiquates antiquities, and hath
an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these minor
monuments.12
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e l i o t ’ s c o n t e m p o r a r y p r o s e
I recognise the beauty of the cadence, the felicity and Latin sonority
of the phrase; and I am hard put to it to justify my aªrmation that the
substance of this passage is but a pinch of dust, and therefore there is not
really great style. Even if it be “poetry,” it is not great poetry like such sepul-
chral things as the Grave Digger Scene in Hamlet (which is prose, besides),
or certain poems of Donne, or Bishop King’s “Exequy” for his dead wife.13
I believe that in each of these a human emotion is concentrated and fixed,
and that in the prose of Sir Thomas Browne only a commonplace senten-
tiousness is decorated by reverberating language.
We have to face the puzzling fact that in English literature there are
a number of writers—Milton, Tennyson, Sir Thomas Browne, and others
—whose style, far from “preserving” the content, appears to survive and
to seduce quite apart from the content. It is “style” in this restricted sense,
that it is not the incorporation of any interesting personality; it is the sort
of style which is a dangerous temptation to any student who is anxious to
write good English. It is language dissociated from things, assuming an
independent existence. And unless Milton and Tennyson are the authors
of the most “poetical” verse in English, how can we say that Sir Thomas
Browne’s is the most “poetical” prose?
The conclusion is, that we shall not find the prose poem in the “purple
patch.” Launcelot Andrewes is, I think, a great prose writer, but you cannot
really get at the poetry in his prose unless you are willing to read at least
one of his sermons entire; his style preserves the content, yes, but you
cannot get the pleasure of the style unless you interest yourself in some-
thing more than the words.14 Donne also is a great prose writer, but even
the passages which Mr. Pearsal Smith has judiciously selected remain
only selections.15 There is no question of separating wheat and cha¤, dig-
ging jewels out of mud; they serve as a sample, a taste.
If there is such a thing as prose poetry it is not a poetry of verbal beauty
merely. “Verbal beauty” is probably never, in literature, a beauty of pure
sound; I doubt whether there is a beauty of pure sound. What Pater tries
to do in prose is much like what Swinburne often does in verse: to arouse
indefinite evocation, depending as much upon literary association as upon
the beauty of the rhythm.16 “This is the head upon which all the ends of
&nb
sp; the world have come, and the eyelids are a little weary.”17 Compare this
whole passage about La Gioconda with the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, and
see the di¤erence between direct suggestiveness by precise reference, and
p r o s e a n d v e r s e
1 6 3
the meretricious suggestiveness of vague literary association. There is
more essential poetry in Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches, even in translation, than in the whole of Sir Thomas Browne or Walter Pater.18
De Quincey and Poe. —Here are two prose writers who seem to me to
deserve a very di¤erent distinction. They were both men of very great in-
tellectual power, of much greater intelligence than Browne, or Pater, or even
Ruskin.19 What is remarkable is their range: in other words, their courage
and adventurousness in tackling anything that had to be expressed. The
di¤erence between De Quincey’s “Dream Fugue” and Browne’s Urn Burial
is that De Quincey aims to express a content of some intensity, and that
he is not diverted into verbal suggestiveness.20
“If, as a musician, as the leader of a mighty orchestra,” he said to
Lamb, “you had this theme o¤ered you—‘Belshazzar the King gave a
great feast to a thousand of his lords,’—or this, ‘And on a certain day Mar-
cus Cicero stood up, and in a set speech rendered thanks to Caius Caesar
for Quintus Ligarius pardoned and Marcus Marcellus restored’—surely
no man would deny that in such a case simplicity, though in a passive
sense not lawfully absent, must stand aside as totally insuªcient for the
positive part.”21
The Image. —But the wide range of subject and treatment of Poe and
De Quincey makes it diªcult to draw any line between what is prose, in
their writings, and what is “prose poetry.” I suppose that the “Murders in
the Rue Morgue” would be called prose, “Shadow” prose poetry, and “The
Assignation” perhaps something between the two.22 This suggests the sus-
picion that the distinction between prose and poetry upon which the term
“prose poetry” is based, is probably the old assertion that poetry is the lan-
guage of emotion and imagination—proceeding by concrete images—
and that prose is the language of thought and ratiocination—proceeding
by argument, by definition, by inference, by the use of abstract terms.