Book Read Free

The Waste Land

Page 23

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

  1 6 0

  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

  1 6 2

  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.

 

‹ Prev