LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

 ‘WORD OF NO SPEECH’: ELIOT AND HIS WORDS

‘End of the endless

Journey to no end

Conclusion of all that

Is inconclusible

Speech without word and

Word of no speech ...’

(Ash-Wednesday, II)

The paradox is Eliot's favourite device in matters of style. His works abound in such untrue statements, sentences ironically asserting something opposite to reality, joking falsehoods. Yet, quite often, the device gains in gravity. It becomes elliptical, concentrated into a sentence with no predicate, a juxtaposition of very few words. ‘Word of no speech’ is such an example of concentrated paradox. The effect of Eliot's concentrated paradoxes is to discredit, to weaken the reality of the words implied.

Whatever the material he holds in his hands may be, Eliot keeps fingering it distrustfully, peering beyond it. Therefore, since poetry is made up of words, the ‘essence’ of poetry (whatever that may be Eliot never ventures to explain) hides beyond mere written words, beyond commonly accepted meanings. He once spoke of a ‘poetry beyond poetry’, a poetry beyond language. His poetry never reaches that condition (fortunately). It is however heavily oppressed, often darkened by the uncertain, imprecise indirectness of a poet who swims against the current of language, a poet who mistrusts his words.

As Valéry wrote about Degas, Eliot is like a rider deeply mistrustful of his horses. A cloud of verbal insecurity hovers over his poetry and prose. Speaking about it, he says:

‘The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning’.

(The Metaphysical Poets, 1921)

Eliot's poetry ignores the traditional arrangement of words in writing. Eliot seems to hold Valéry's opinion that the meaning and order of words, the syntax of a sentence are no more than a prejudice. A mental habit which, of course, should not be totally forgotten. It must be revived from time to time. Any change of poetic idiom, any ‘dislocation’ of language betokens a change in something mysterious that lies behind the word. At times, Eliot calls that unsafe area ‘emotion’, ‘feeling’, ‘sensibility’.

Eliot's feeling of verbal insecurity does not make him shy or reticent in using words. On the contrary, he uses them excessively, beyond their limit. He establishes complicated relationships among them. He has in his head a remarkable inventory of meanings, which he combines programmatically in unexpected ways. He has a taste for innovating the use of words, for loading them with astonishing associations, for placing objects and feelings precisely in the places where they do not belong. This taste veils both words and objects. All outlines appear blurred, imprecise, uncertain. Squeezing his words in unnatural paradoxes, Eliot makes them step over the threshold of speech into the realm of those words of no speech, the land of ambiguous poetry.

                                                                    *

As early as 1920, in the essay The Perfect Critic (The Sacred Wood), Eliot expressed his fear of words, his logophobia. He complained there that words were far from having definite meanings. That, on the contrary, they had the tendency of conveying vague and indefinite emotions. That, in the course of time, they were liable to change their meanings. That what they usually lost was definite, and what they gained remained ‘indefinite’. This is the reason, why, in his prose writings, Eliot lacks belief in words. The effect of this verbal disbelief is dramatic. The instability of terms, which he feels everywhere, induces a feeling of intellectual isolation. Ideas no longer meet. Each mind follows its own track and, as a conclusion, Eliot the critic sighs cunningly: I do not know whether I understand the author's meaning ...

On the other hand, in his poetry, Eliot loads his words with the burden of ambiguity without giving a second thought to their frailty. Yet as far as other people's (especially literary critics') sentences are concerned, the words are not safe any longer, no conclusion can be final. After Eliot's etymological and semantic trips, all statements except his own are shattered. Any certainty uttered by another writer is a good starting point. Eliot's hobby is to pull it  down, by inculcating a very certain lexical doubt.

Eliot's critical game of spotting the error, the weak points, the unsafe ground trodden by other minds is amply illustrated in his essay Johnson As Critic and Poet, 1944 (On Poetry and Poets). The essay aims at discussing Johnson's criticism of poetry in relation to Johnson's poetry. Eliot does so since he thinks that the criticism of any critic who, like himself, is a poet as well, can only be understood

‘in the light of the kind of poetry that he wrote himself’.

As Eliot at a later date confessed, his own criticism was at its best when dealing with authors who influenced his poetic achievement. When he pushed the metaphysicals and the Elizabethans to the front, arousing a new taste for them, he was not prompted by the desire to re-orient the literary scene. His memorable phrases were careful introspections of a critic who was first of all interested in spying on his own poetic sensibility. The ‘objective correlative’, the ‘dissociation of sensibility’, his image of literary tradition, and other widely known issues of his criticism were, he says, no more than

‘conceptual symbols for emotional preferences’.

They were mere abstractions (and we must remember how Eliot hated abstractions), originating in what he calls his concrete ‘feeling of kinship’ with certain poets. The critical impulse is in Eliot emotional. His theorizing, he said, was ‘epiphenomenal’ of his tastes. It sprang from the direct experience of those authors who had influenced his own writing. In To Criticize the Critic, 1961, he explains:

‘... thus, the emphasis on tradition came about, I believe, as a result of my reaction against the poetry, in the English language, of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and my passion for the poetry, both dramatic and lyric, of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The 'objective correlative' in the essay on Hamlet may stand for my bias towards the more mature plays of Shakespeare – Timon, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus notably (...) And the 'dissociation of sensibility' may represent my devotion to Donne and the methaphysical poets, and my reaction against Milton’.

He forgets here that any good critic always coins his own terms and, the more widely his terms are accepted, the better the critic is. A critic has the same duty as a poet towards his language. Eliot the critic felt so, and did it. His denial of youthful, well-coined concepts is only half fair.

A poet's criticism, Eliot intimates, is a side-mirror of his poetic skill. In several other essays he suggests that this workshop criticism of a poet writing about his interest in other poets (whose poems he has beforehand turned to good account in his cultured poetry) is the right, the genuine, the only true criticism. The three greatest critics of poetry in English literature, Eliot decides, were Dryden, Coleridge and Johnson. The conclusion to be drawn is that the good critic of poetry must be a poet as well. Following Eliot's own suggestion that his generalisations are to be taken cautiously, as theories meant to illuminate the temperament of the poet, we may conclude that this image of the ‘perfect’ poet-critic is just another cap to fit Eliot. He himself was first and foremost a poet, and he did not want to see his poetry elbowed by others. Consequently, he resorts to wearing the critic's mantle himself in order to lure the readers but discourage his commentators. He extols the experience of reading, but deeply mistrusts the intellectual verdicts of others, because those verdicts may be inimical. There are two leading parts in Eliot's criticism: the friendly poet-critic who knows best, and the hostile critic who is not a creator and who is steadily pushed by Eliot's arguments beyond the frontiers of criticism.

An interesting distinction is made by Eliot between Dryden and Johnson. Along with it, another theory to fit Eliot's practice is produced. Johnson's criticism, he states, was less spectacular than Coleridge's and Dryden's, because Johnson was not the initiator of a new poetic movement. His critical view is therefore ‘retrospective’. Johnson does not defend his own innovating way of writing, like Dryden, like Eliot himself. He merely comes at the end of an age, and has an eye to its past. Dryden had to pave a new way, to begin another age, to win partisans for works which swerved from the past and led into a yet unknown future. Consequently, Johnson appreciated the refinement, rather than the ‘dislocation’ of language. In the 18th century, Eliot says,

‘Eccentricity or uncouthness was reprehensible: a poet was prized, not for his invention of an original form of speech, but by his contribution to a common language’.

Johnson was proud of the common style his age had reached. Eliot spots here the 18th century critic's first error: Johnson was liable to ignore good poetry which was not law-abiding, in favour of less interesting, ‘pedestrian’ poetry which conformed. This taste for conformity in Johnson's criticism is labelled by Eliot as ‘obtuseness’. It arose, Eliot hurries to specify, from a ‘limited’ but by no means ‘defective’ sensibility. Johnson had a narrow range of interests, Eliot declares, but

‘we must not be narrow in accusing him of narrowness, or prejudiced in accusing him of prejudice’.

Eliot's accusations do not usually preserve their dignity to the last. Rather than press his denial until the poet or critic discussed has to kneel down and yield, Eliot steps back, leaving the last door unopened. He ends by stating that he has simply meant to ‘unsettle’ our minds, not to pit them against anybody's ideas. The theory that emerges from Eliot's tolerant view is that Johnson lacked the ‘historical sense’. Johnson lived in an age which had only recently reached maturity, and felt no need either to renew or to look back. In the neighbourhood of this theory, Eliot's idea that a poet must fight in defence of his novelty becomes for the moment smaller and relative. Looking upon it disparagingly, Eliot meditates:

‘In a time like ours, in which novelty is often assumed to be the first requisite of poetry if it is to attract our attention, and in which the name of pioneer and innovator are among the titles most honoured, it is hard to apprehend this point of view’.

Such agility, which closely borders on contradicting oneself, imposes a similar nimbleness on the mind of the reader of Eliot's criticism.

The idea is followed by an indictment of the modern taste for the ‘exhilaratingly meaningless’, for non-conformity at all costs:

‘The modern inclination to put up with some degree of incoherence of sense, to be tolerant of poets who do not know themselves exactly what they are trying to say, so long as the verse sounds well and presents striking and unusual imagery’.

Eliot distinguishes here between a poetry of sound and a poetry of sense, a poetry of incantation and one of meaning. Of the two, Eliot complains, the modern reader prefers the melodious raving with a feebler meaning, to the ‘intelligence and wisdom set forth in pedestrian measures’, that Johnson favoured. In between them, to settle the dispute, Eliot reveals a third kind of poetry,

‘which represents an attempt to extend the confines of the human consciousness and to report of things unknown, to express the inexpressible’.

This seems to be, for Eliot, poetry proper. Yet, he withdraws without enlarging upon it, satisfied with having been able to squeeze in one of his favourite paradoxes: poetry proper (his own included) means to express the inexpressible.

Placed in this opposition with the early 20th century, Johnson is qualified as a critic who ‘forgave much to sense’, while a modern reader is rather inclined to forgive much to sound and image. Both directions are liable to exaggerate. This possible error provides Eliot with new reasons for dissatisfaction. Several other accusations follow. Johnson is blamed for failing to apply his own critical standards, for making unreasonable assertions, for failing to understand the peculiarities of dramatic blank verse, for having no ‘ear’ for the music of poetry. Eliot illustrates these failings by quoting Johnson's opinions on the methaphysicals, the Elizabethans, some sentimental poets and Milton.

The second part of the essay reveals Eliot's logophobia. First, he analyses rather grumblingly Johnson's poetry. He calls Johnson ‘only a meditative poet’, who does not have the ‘gift of structure’ necessary for a longer poem. He also calls him a ‘moralist’, whose indignation is feigned and therefore not convincing. He adds:

‘Indignation may make poetry but it must be indignation recollected in tranquillity’.

Eliot  finds ‘querulousness’ in Johnson's indictment of the city of London. Johnson's moralizing generalizations look to Eliot untrue. Eliot disapproves of Johnson's ‘disposition to the general’. What follows is a discussion of some rules Johnson set for poetry. The meanings of Johnson's terms are examined: originality, edification, poetic diction, mannerism, eloquence, invention are discussed in Johnson's own, then in more recent contexts. Some of them have changed their original meaning. Originality, for instance, has become so important in our days, that Eliot feels it has pushed criticism into declining to an ‘advertisement of preference’. Several terms which Johnson used have been lost. They are now either ridiculous or not understood any more. Eliot discloses now his first care in studying another critic. It is that of establishing between himself and the other writer a kind of verbal compatibility. He says:

‘In judging the permanence of the principles of a critic belonging to an age very different from our own, we must constantly reinterpret his language according to our own situation’.

The following reinterpretation is suggested for Johnson's term ‘poetic diction’:

‘To most people nowadays, I imagine, 'poetic diction' means an idiom and a choice of words which are out of date, and which perhaps were never very good at their best. If we are temperate, we mean the use of idiom and vocabulary borrowed from poets of a different generation, idiom and vocabulary no longer suitable for poetry. If we are extreme, we mean that this idiom and vocabulary were always bad, even when they were fresh. Wordsworth, in his Preface, says: ‘there will also be found in these volumes little of what is usually called <poetic diction>. Johnson uses the term in a eulogistic sense’.

In this way, drawing inventories of meanings, Eliot lingers over each word, summing it up. He has a marked taste for discovering the ‘fluid terms’ of a writer (Andrew Marvell), those words whose meaning alters with the age. His critical appraisals suffer from lexical apprehension.

The same as Valéry, Eliot faces language in the guise of a surgeon, who cleans his hands and tools before embarking upon an operation. After which, as Huxley remarked in connection with The Waste Land, nothing else happens. The operation is not performed. The only thing done is, in Valéry's words, ‘le nettoyage de la situation verbale’ (Poésie et Pensée Abstraite). Very much concerned with starting properly, Eliot spends his energy on cleaning the area he is going to cross. At the moment the race ought to start, he is too tired to undertake it any more. He stops short, puts his pen aside, and bars his course with a full stop. This particular essay ends with the following warning:

‘... amongst the varieties of chaos in which we find ourselves immersed to-day, one is a chaos of language, in which there are discoverable no standards of writing, and an increasing indifference to etymology and the history of the use of words. And of the responsibility of our poets and our critics, for the preservation of the language, we need to be repeatedly reminded’.

In criticism, Eliot has the feeling that all the words can get the critic into trouble. That is why most of his essays have the air of simply looking for a definition, of merely trying to circumscribe, to consolidate a term. He sees himself as a preserver of words. His critical ideas emerge from behind fascinating tales of lexical history. Notes towards the Definition of Culture ends with the following confession:

‘My enquiry, therefore, has been directed on the meaning of the word culture so that everyone should at least pause to examine what this words means to him in each particular context before using it’.

Eliot brings to criticism the poet's dowry. He feels sure that composing poetry trains the mind to handle the wheel of words. He acts as a healer, a historian, a book-keeper of words. He enjoys every new change that can be nursed, fitted into place, recorded, explained. In support of this, a paragraph from the essay Can 'Education' Be Defined?, 1950 (To Criticize the Critic), may be quoted:

‘There is an obvious utility in acquainting ourselves with the history of important words, because without this understanding we are always reading modern meanings into the older texts of English literature (...) But besides the variations of meaning of the same word in the same place at different times, and the same time in different places, there is the still more important variation of meaning of the same word at the same time in the same place. Before proceeding farther, I want to suggest that this wobbliness of words is not something to be deplored. We should not try to pin a word down to one meaning, which it should have at all times, in all places, and for everybody. Of course there must be many words in a language which are relatively at least fixed always to one meaning (...) But there are also many words which must change their meaning, because it is their changes that keep a language alive, or rather, that indicate that the language is alive’.

The whole essay turns round the elusiveness of words. Eliot discusses the confusions arousing from the poor knowledge of all meanings of a word. He complains that, as the language ages, it becomes increasingly difficult for any two people to use the same meaning of the same word at once. That is, we can hardly expect to understand the exact meaning of another's utterance. This constant slipping away of language makes definitions very uncertain. Even the modest defining air of Eliot's essays turns out to be rather insecure. A definition, Eliot notices, involves the use of ‘undefined defining terms’. No word is safe, all words have to be constantly revised. Between ‘feelings’ and their expression, the critic is drowned in the quicksands of language. The only life spared is that of the poet. Poetry fuses feelings and words into an unknown substance, that escapes all limitation so far devised by Eliot. Poetry breaks free of all restrictions. Good poetry, Eliot always said, goes beyond language, beyond everything, even beyond poetry.

In his judgments of other writers, Eliot's first care is to estimate how deeply they feel the insecurity of their words, how nimbly they can avoid the verbal whirls, how conversant they are with the meanings they use. There is such a close relationship between idea and word in Eliot's mind that he hardly ever dares to separate them. He feels that it is the style that makes the critic. Abstractions which are not melted in the critic's own memorable phrases belong to philosophy, psychology, aesthetics: never to criticism. Unamuno used to say, ‘I can only think with a pen in my hand’. Before discussing anyone's thoughts, Eliot, too, sizes their verbal body. He often says that we had better pay more attention to the ‘breeding’ of our poets, to their proficiency in the use of words, rather than to their ideas. Those ideas, Eliot suggests, may very well be borrowed. The task of the poet, Eliot stresses, demands ‘immense resources of language’ (Dante, 1950, in Selected Prose). This is the reason why Eliot's guide in his critical excursions is the verbal criterion. As early as 1928, in Lancelot Andrewes, he wrote admiringly:

‘Andrewes takes a word and derives the world from it; squeezing and squeezing the word until it yields a full juice of meaning which we should never have supposed any word to possess’.

Eliot himself has in his head an inventory of meanings, which he uses as heavy artillery every time he starts defending a theory of his own, or questioning somebody else's statements. Verbal insecurity is mostly a trap for others. Eliot the critic is very careful to avoid it. So careful that, at times, he hardly states anything. He rather points at the misfortunes of the others. Eliot the poet, on the other hand, makes brilliant use of unsafe words, building out of slippery sounds the firm land of his ambiguous poetry.

                                                        *

Eliot's treacherous words never betray him in his poetry, but they have misled quite a number of readers. Eliot never slows down the rhythm of his poems in order to explain his intentions. He does so, however, in his criticism. He races through his poems omitting all explanatory details, concentrating until his utterances become elliptical. This ambiguous juxtaposition of words, whose links with one another are rather guessed at than stated, may have simplified the composition of a poem for Eliot, but it has complicated immensely the practice of reading it. In support of a way of reading adequate to his poems, Eliot suggests the idea that a poem can be ‘felt’ and ‘enjoyed’ before it is actually understood. In his Conclusion to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933, he writes:

‘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.’

Thirty years later, in 1962, he says something similar about George Herbert:

‘With the appreciation of Herbert's poems, as with all poetry, enjoyment is the beginning as well as the end. We must enjoy the poetry before we attempt to penetrate the poet's mind; we must enjoy it before we understand it, if the attempt to understand it is to be worth the trouble’.

Somewhere else, Eliot imagines poetry to be a country which the reader's soul can enter before that reader's understanding actually has a passport in hand. This idea is closely related to Eliot's favourite paradox: a poem is a ‘word of no speech’, it expresses the inexpressible. What the inexpressible really means, Eliot never bothers to explain. The ‘inexpressible’ is a sacred word with Eliot. So is the ‘purity’ of the feeling rendered, which he often invokes. They both finally convey that there is something lurking beyond common speech and common understanding. It sounds like a provocation, that we should fumble our way into that jungle of meanings and draw the ivory emotion out. Without naming it, of course: that indiscretion would dispel its charm for good and all.

The experience of reading or writing poetry is, for Eliot, a striving to go higher, deeper, farther away. In 1933, in a lecture delivered at New Haven, he said that he wanted to write a poetry

‘... which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked to its bare bones, a poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry. Poetry so transparent that in reading it we are intent on what the poem points at, and not on the poetry’.

He wanted to get beyond poetry in the same way that Beethoven strove to get beyond music. The way to accomplish this was, for Eliot, to create a clarity of his own. This queer clarity was supposed to combine transparence with conspicuous meanings. He wanted a ‘transpicuous’ language, that should land the reader straight at the core of the poem. Valéry, too, thought that beauty was inexpressible, and that literature aimed at conveying, by means of words, the feeling that the words were insufficient. The same as Eliot, Valéry also felt that, with all the words at his disposal, the real poet, unless he created his private code (which required adequate understanding), was dumb. He said:

‘... il faut que le langage s'emploie à produire ce qui rend muet, exprime un mutisme’.

                              (Le Beau Est Négatif)

Most of Eliot's ideas concerning the use of words in poetry are to be found in his Conclusion to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1933. As everywhere else, opinions on the poetic idiom are mingled with various others. The essay opens with the announcement that critical speculations, general theories of poetry may increase our understanding, but will add nothing to our enjoyment of a poem. Therefore Eliot, who is first and foremost interested in the reader's emotional response to a poem, does not care to go too far from it, to generalize it into an abstract statement, like Valéry, like Poulet, like so many other contemporary critics. He suggests that theorizing about the nature and essence of poetry (‘if there is any’ – he says) belongs to the field of aesthetics (whose existence Valéry himself vehemently denied). Eliot even warns that the self-consciousness accompanying aesthetical studies might ‘violate’ the frontiers of consciousness. Eliot claims that his interest in this respect is limited. He coyly confesses that he suffers from an ‘incapacity for abstruse reasoning’, because of which he has never produced an all-embracing theory of his own. The statement is comfortable for a critic like Eliot, whose criticism lives on self-questionings, self-contradictions, self-revisions. ‘I have no general theory of my own’ is a profession of faith which enables him to flirt with other people's theories, without lingering in any of the places he visits. Eliot feels free to prowl around any theory he comes across. He circumscribes and consolidates his position in criticism by invariably opposing whatever words come his way.

The essay continues with a discussion of the poet's mastery of words. He speaks without enthusiasm about the poetry of incantation, an outburst of words in the making of which the poet's planning plays an insignificant part. He does not venture to state that such ‘mystical’ inspiration as that which produces automatic writing is inappropriate to poetry. He even confesses that he himself has been visited by it several times:

‘To me it seems that at these moments, which are characterized by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear which press upon our daily life so steadily that we are unaware of it, what happens is something negative: that is to say, not 'inspiration' as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers – which tend to re-form very quickly. Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure, than a sudden relief from an intolerable burden’.

This effortless creation requires a long period of ‘incubation’, Eliot says, and

‘we do not know until the shell breaks what kind of egg we have been sitting on’.

It is the effortlessness that Eliot mistrusts. He is a true contemporary of Valéry, who venerated the intellectual effort. Valéry used to say that obstacles, poetic rigour and difficulties were like the sun of creation. Eliot also felt that, the more numerous the obstacles, the rules the poet invented for himself were, the better his poetry would emerge. Profound poetry, as far as Eliot and Valéry were concerned, would not come as an unexpected gift. It could not be written without concentration. It was not granted to minds which did not strive to achieve it. Bad poets, Eliot warns, are unconscious when they should be conscious. They alone can depend upon such ‘capricious releases’ as mystical inspiration. Good poets, Valéry also concludes, consciously cultivate every resource of their poetry.

Great poets, like Shakespeare or Dante, Eliot explains, may sometimes be surprised by the lines that come to them. Yet, most of the time, they are conscious that they load their words with all kinds of meanings and associations. Memories of past emotions, of books once read, of incidents experienced, flood their minds all at once and are concentrated in only one word. Such a word, Eliot suggests, can carry an even stronger intensity if the poet borrows it from another poet: if he ‘re-creates’ an image already ‘saturated’ by another sensibility. In fact, he says (Reflections on Contemporary Poetry, 1919), when a poet strongly appeals to another poet, there is no danger of imitation (plagiarism) involved:

‘We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of a changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition’.

This is one of the explanations devised by Eliot for the use of echoes from so many writers in his own poetry. It is his theory of the ‘reborn image’. He illustrates it with the example of an image he himself borrowed twice from Chapman, who, in his turn, had borrowed the same image from Seneca:

‘There is first the probability that this imagery had some personal saturation value, so to speak, for Seneca; another for Chapman, and another for myself (...) I suggest that what gives it such intensity as it has in each case is its saturation (...) with feelings too obscure for the authors even to know quite what they were’.

Eliot is obviously interested in a poetry which extends the notion of clarity. He feels called upon to defend the ‘modern difficult poetry’. He endeavours to prove that there is a new kind of clarity in the associative vagueness which his contemporary writers impose upon words. He lists several reasons why a poem may be difficult. First, he speaks of

‘personal causes which make it impossible for a poet to express himself in any but an obscure way’.

The statement itself is obscure. Eliot's conclusion to it, namely that we should be glad that ‘the man has been able to express himself at all’, is far from convincing. A second cause of difficulty, Eliot continues, may be the critic's dislike of novelty in literature. Eliot repeatedly imagines that ‘hostile’ critics enjoy finding new poets difficult. Eliot complains that such critics ridicule new poetry by calling it ‘silly’. The third reason he gives is a sequel to the second. Poetry may indeed seem difficult to a reader who has been warned that he will find it obscure. Because of the critic's false warning, the reader reacts in excess. He tries to prove that he is cleverer than the author. He turns the poem into a riddle, for the pleasure of solving it.

The first three observations describe the effect of so-called poetic difficulty. Eliot looks upon difficult poetry from the outside. Only the fourth reason he formulates makes recourse to the nature of difficult poetry, to the way in which it is written. The ‘seasoned’ reader, Eliot begins, does not bother about understanding when he first reads a poem. This new image of a reader who enjoys before he has realized what he is reading, is in keeping with what was new in the way of writing at the turn of the 20^th century. The novelty lies in the poet's consistently leaving out of the poem something that the reader is used to finding there. A ‘kind of meaning’, Eliot says, is willfully put aside, and its absence bewilders the reader. Eliot gets rid of that clarity which makes the paraphrase of the poem possible. He does so in the same way that experimental novelists tried to do away with that plot that could be retold, and the characters that could easily be summed up. Joyce's Ulysses cannot be retold in the form of a mere narrative. In a similar way, Eliot's poems can hardly be paraphrased. There is always something behind chronology and incidents for Joyce. There is always something behind the clear meanings of words for Eliot. An undercurrent of half-suggested hints replace the traditional meaning which ought to feed on our understanding. The meaning of such a ‘difficult’ poem is, in fact, a group of tentative meanings. The clarity of a unique, consistent meaning is replaced by the uncertain ambiguity of numberless hints. The reader is prompted to take them all in at once, without stopping to question too hard any of them. Any questioning insistence upon one meaning alone would ruin the others, and the poem would wither.

In this new experience of reading, understanding is not totally replaced by enjoyment, as Eliot seems to imply. Understanding is as present as ever, and even with more effort than before. The reader is more dependent on the author when the latter produces understatements, than when the whole poem is one clear statement. Guessing is inciting. It involves more than the passive acceptance of a plain meaning. The modern poem is a simultaneity of meanings, an ambiguous understatement which points at a number of things at the same time. In this multiple meaning of the modern poem originates the multiple reading of it. Here is Eliot's own description of it:

‘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’.

Eliot's theorising on difficult, ambiguous poetry does not go any further than stating that is exists. His main intention is to persuade us that such poetry deserves to be carefully read. In 1910, Valéry (Cahier B, 1910) was of a different opinion. He suspected that any artful maker of verse could simulate the depth of meaning, by means of verbal incoherence. He mistrusted obscurity, and was willing to part with the advantages of ambiguity, if they could not be had together with clarity. He used to say

‘something really profound is bound to be clear’ (‘la véritable profondeur est la limpide’).

As for poems which resemble riddles, Valéry feels there is always the danger that the reader should give, in reading it, more than he really receives. The danger that the mere pleasure of solving the linguistical puzzle should replace the enjoyment of poetry proper. Yet we must not forget that, somewhere else, the same Valéry praises the re-creation of the poem into something unknown to the author. As a reader, he exclaims:

‘The real author is my own error of understanding!’ (‘C'est mon erreur qui est auteur!’)

Eliot's opinions never sound so final. Whenever he generalizes on poetry, out of the corner of his eye he looks upon the ‘sad ghost of Coleridge’, beckoning to him from among the shadows. Because, Eliot once said,

‘poets only talk when they cannot sing’.

In anything but poetry, Eliot is painfully aware that words are treacherous. His is a tentative style. His criticism is a lesson in intellectual nimbleness, a lesson of belief and disbelief in our own as well as in everybody else's statements: an initiation in the use of so many words of no speech.