LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

WORKSHOP  CRITICISM:  TOWARDS  A  HISTORY OF  ENGLISH  LITERATURE

Many of the theories Eliot formulated are debatable, and invite contradiction. His opinions on individual writers are subtler and more appealing than his speculations on the nature or use of poetry and criticism. The articles he cared to reprint in volumes deal with almost all the main ages of English poetry: the Elizabethans, the metaphysicals, neo-classicism, the preromantics and the romantics, the Victorians and a few contemporaries. Eliot's essays on the nature of poetry may however prove a good introduction to those trips through the whole of English literature, in which Eliot brought older ages back to life, and conversed with previous writers, with the feeling that the whole of English literature had a simultaneous order.

As early as 1917, in Reflections on Vers Libre, Eliot expresses his belief that ‘there is no freedom in art’. Form is, as Valéry put it, ‘une décision motivée’. ‘Free’ formlessness degrades art. The absence of pattern, of rhyme and of metre discredit poetry. One cannot take liberties with one's technique unless one has mastered it very well.  It is true that a poet may waver between liberty and compulsion, but he cannot afford forgetting either. Eliot sees poetic creation as a ‘contrast between fixity and flux’, an ‘unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse’. The form of a poem is something that must be constantly suggested and skillfully evaded. The technique of a poet, his choice of a form must play upon the readers' nerves. It must tempt them into recognizing one form, and then surprise them by liberties taken against that form. It must harass the readers' expectations. A poet's technique must innovate the form he chooses. It must not totally conform to the same pattern all through the work. An innovating technique, like Eliot's own, is a ‘constant evasion and recognition of regularity’. Irregular verse is not ‘vers libre’, since Eliot clearly distinguishes between the reprehensible irregularity of carelessness, and the fruitful irregularity of deliberation. Liberties taken with the technique produce an irregularity of form, but by no means the disappearance of form altogether. Eliot, whose poetry has been called innovating precisely because it takes so many liberties with all the previously known patterns, is an ardent partisan of rigour, of an ‘artificial limitation’, which he defines in the following way:

‘... the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, an withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation’.

This self-imposed pattern is a ‘rigid verse-form’ which is, in turns, observed and disregarded, but must never be given up. As Eliot says,

‘There is no escape from metre; there is only mastery’.

No line can be deprived of metre. With rhyme it is a different matter. Many poets have successfully exploited the possibilities of rhymeless verse. Their rejection of rhyme is not seen by Eliot as a sign of facility. On the contrary, he argues,

‘it imposes a much severer strain upon the language’.

When rhyme is left aside, the poet must be a thousand times more careful in his choice and order of words. The lines become more vigorous when the regular music of rhyming words stops enveloping it. Intricate formal patterns have indeed lost their appeal. More recent poetry could not be in favour of heroic couplets, for instance. Eliot explains the disappearance of complicated poetic patterns by relating it to the state of society. A ‘homogeneous’ society, like the Greek or the Elizabethan, could carry to perfection the Greek chorus or the Elizabethan lyric. Those ages are dead. However, more recent times are far from having given up the idea of a pattern. Therefore, Eliot concludes, vers libre is a badly chosen name, since no poetry can be free from deliberate effort. In his words,

‘there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos’.

Twenty-five years later, in 1942, Eliot published The Music of Poetry. The introductory paragraph is illustrative of those revisions generated by Eliot's feeling of uncertainty, of relativity:

‘I can never re-read any of my own prose writings without acute embarrassment: I shirk the task, and consequently may not take account of all the assertions to which I have at one time or another committed myself; I may often repeat what I have said before, and I may often contradict myself’.

He then notices the poet's egotistic interest in the literature of the past, and discusses the criticism of practitioners. It seems to him that any poet who writes criticism is, in fact, interested in indirectly defining or defending his own verse. Rather than a judge of other works, he is more of an advocate. His criticism is liable to be partial and indirectly protective of his own work. The practitioner as critic is exempt from ‘impersonality’, it would seem.

The aim of this introduction is to foresee and destroy beforehand any possible objections to Eliot's theory, by announcing from the very beginning that there is no theory: that his generalizations are not general, because limited to his own experience. The first of these generalizations is the idea that the first stage in acquiring the poetic skill is the imitation of another poet's lines, rather than the ‘analytical study of his metric’. A scholar may write detached and impartial criticism, in which he may discuss the quality of rhymes, the names of feet or meters, the rules of scansion. A poet will include in his criticism what can be useful to his own poetry. He will study one poet or another with the professed aim of producing some ‘recognizable derivative’ of the latter's poetry. The scholar's analysis is hardly useful to a poet since, Eliot states,

‘a study of anatomy will not teach you how to make a hen lay eggs’.

Imitation, then, cannot be cold-blooded. It does not take place at the superficial level of the analysis of style, of prosody.

The idea of imitation is left aside at this point, and the essay focuses on the relation between the music of poetry and the language of conversation. It is not uncommon with Eliot that an argument should turn out to have very little connection with the purpose of the essay. As Hugh Kenner pointed out, Eliot's essays

‘think something as he goes along, and while the last paragraph remembers the first, the first does not often foresee the last’.

Eliot often stated that poetry

‘cannot afford to lose its contact with the changing language of common intercourse’.

This idea is compelled to join the main theme of the essay, namely the music of poetry. In the meantime, Eliot deals with a number of other things. He makes subtle remarks which slow down his main idea with innumerable talkative delays.

Between brackets, Eliot explains that the meaning of a poem can elude paraphrase and interpretations, even if this poem is written in a clear language, which approximates that of plain conversation. There is nothing either subtle or new in the statement, as Eliot himself wisely remarks:

‘It is a commonplace to observe that the meaning of a poem may wholly escape paraphrase’.

The adjustment of the poetic idiom to the spoken language, the ‘immediacy of poetry to conversation’, seems to Eliot to be a complicated process. It cannot be defined. Instead of the definition, Eliot offers the image of an unending line of changes, revisions, readjustments, repeated returns to common speech.

The statement that the music of poetry is ‘latent in the common speech of its time’ is soon abandoned, to be replaced by the problem of the choice of words in a poem. From the point of view of sound alone, Eliot doubts whether there are any ‘beautiful’ words at all. He is, however, certain of the existence of ‘ugly’ words. Those are

‘the words not fitted for the company in which they find themselves’.

He sees the music of a word as a ‘point of intersection’ of its relations to its immediate context, to the general context of the poem, to other meanings it has had in other contexts, to all its possible associations. Every word is like an orchestra, and it is the poet's duty to know and make use of its richer or poorer ‘allusiveness’. The music of poetry is therefore more than a music of sound. It is seen by Eliot as a musical pattern of primary and secondary, immediate and remote meanings.

This idea is followed by a view of poetry as a cyclical adventure of approaching, then leaving, then touching again the language of conversation. The task of the poet is, at some periods,

‘to explore the musical possibilities of an established convention of the relation of the idiom of verse to that of speech; at other periods, the task is to catch up with the changes in colloquial speech, which are fundamentally changes in thought and sensibility’.

Consequently, Eliot looks upon his age as a time which calls for a ‘refreshment’ of poetic diction, an age of innovators, rather than ‘developers’, an age of a revolution in language, an age of exploration.

The conclusion of the essay comes very near to the idea of  Reflections on Vers Libre, namely that ‘no verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job’. It seems to Eliot that ‘a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse’, since 1917. There is no possible liberation from form. Eliot is as much against this kind of poetry as when he was a young critic. There is no poetry without the ‘artificial limitation’ of form. Form may be destroyed and rebuilt, but Eliot considers that

‘any language, so long as it remains the same language, imposes its laws and restrictions and permits its own licence, dictates its own speech rhythms and sound patterns. And a language is always changing; its developments in vocabulary, in syntax, pronunciation and intonation – even, in the long run, its deterioration – must be accepted by the poet and made the best of. He in turn has the privilege of contributing to the development and maintaining the quality, the capacity of the language to express a wide range, and subtle gradation, of feeling and emotion; his task is both to respond to change and make it conscious, and to battle against degradation below the standards which he has learnt from the past. The liberties that he may take are for the sake of order’.

The same concern with the relation between the poetic idiom and the language of conversation is the main theme of the essay The Social Function of Poetry (1943). Poetry is here described as having several functions: to afford enjoyment, to enlarge our consciousness and refine our sensibility, and also to preserve, extend and improve the language of the nation. Eliot thinks that the main duty of the poet is towards his language. The language of a people who stops producing poets is fast dying. The social  function of poetry is to make its effects felt everywhere in the life of a nation. The idea is generous, though a trifle abstract and vaguely supported.

In almost every essay by Eliot, there is a generalization on poetry. His ideas are not numerous, and rather obsessive. His criticism becomes more relaxed and flexible when it deals with concrete subject-matter, with other poets' works. About The Metaphysical Poets, Eliot wrote in 1921, when an anthology of poems from Donne to Butler (Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century) was edited with an introductory essay by Herbert J.C. Grierson. These poets seemed to Eliot to be more often invoked than actually read, at the time. Collected in one volume, they now had, he was saying, the power to ‘provoke’ criticism. Later, in 1961 (in To Criticize the Critic), Eliot remembers the essay in the following way:

‘The critic, however, cannot create a taste. I have sometimes been credited with starting the vogue for Donne and other metaphysical poets (...). But I did not discover any of these poets. Coleridge and Browning in turn, admired Donne (...). In our own time, John Donne has lacked no publicity: Gosse's Life and Letters, in two volumes, appeared in 1899. I remember being introduced to Donne's poetry when I was a Freshman at Harvard by Professor Briggs, an ardent admirer; Grierson's edition of the Poems, in two volumes, was published in 1912; and it was Grierson's Metaphysical Poetry, sent me to review, that gave me my first occasion to write about Donne. I think that if I wrote well about the metaphysical poets, it was because they were poets who had inspired me. And if I can be said to have had any influence whatever in promoting a wider interest in them, it was simply because no previous poet who had praised these poets had been so deeply influenced by them as I had been. As the taste for my own poetry spread, so did the taste for the poets to whom I owed the greatest debt and about whom I had written. Their poetry, and mine, were congenial to that age. I sometimes wonder whether that age is not coming to an end’.

Eliot states here another of his obsessions. Each poet-critic chooses to write about poets who can influence him most. In the same way, the criticism of each is prepared to look upon that part of past literature which is more akin to it. This seems to him to be the part played by the metaphysical poets during the first decades of the 20th century.

For every author he examines, Eliot draws a profile. For each of them he finds an explanatory little theory, whose final aim is to fix the author in our minds. The result of his efforts to define an author is a critical term of his own, which is coined, supported, explained by the whole essay. As far as John Donne's poetry is concerned, the use of conceit is discussed first. It is masterfully defined as an

‘elaboration (contrasted with the condensation) of a figure of speech to the furthest stage to which ingenuity can carry it’;

or

‘a development by rapid association of thought which requires considerable agility on the part of the reader’.

He gives, as an example, John Donne's comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses, in A Valediction. On the other hand, this elaboration, this development of a comparison to the furthest limit that a short poem can bear, is used side by side with devices for concentration, such as ‘brief words and sudden contrasts’, which Eliot calls a ‘telescoping of images and multiplied associations’. Eliot treads safe ground here. All these devices are well-known to him. He himself used them in his  highly allusive, highly concentrated poems. He himself wrote a kind of poetry whose major device was a variant of the metaphysical conceit: the objective correlative.

The language of the metaphysicals is seen by Eliot as being ‘as a rule simple and pure’, although the structure of their sentences is exactly the opposite. The complicated sentence structure seems to Eliot to spring from the fidelity of these poets to their thoughts and feelings. The famous idea of the later dissociation of sensibility follows. It is continued in the essay on Andrew Marvell (1921), which proclaims John Donne to be ‘the inventor of an attitude, a system of feeling or of morals’. Eliot explains that, because of this very unity of thought and feeling, Donne is difficult to analyse. He speaks about him as the inseparable ‘Donne and his shroud’. The same as in the previous essay, the metaphysicals are considered to be a natural continuation of the Elizabethans. Out of the style developed from Marlowe through Jonson, they chose to use ‘wit and magniloquence’. Wit is defined (‘tentatively’, Eliot specifies) as ‘a tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’. With Marvell, wit has the magic quality of renewing his themes, by creating a variety and a peculiar order of images. The strategy of wit is to change pleasant into astonishing images, within quite a limited space. Surprise, which seems to Eliot to be ‘the most important means of poetic effect since Homer’ (and which he largely used in his criticism as well), ends, thus, a succession of concentrated images. Marvell's poems develop into surprise at a high speed. The idea is proved by text analysis on Marvell's Coy Mistress.

Many of the lines Eliot quotes from various poets he examines turn up, either modified or unchanged, in his own poems. Such is

‘But at my back I always hear

Time's winged chariot hurrying near ...’,

which appears, easily recognizable, in The Waste Land, part III. Eliot's relation with the poet discussed is relaxed, never worshipping, rather a rebuking one. The poet becomes the scaffold for the demonstration of an idea that Eliot has lighted upon in connection with him. When the characterization is over, instead of the poet's profile, it is Eliot's particular theory that looms very large ahead. The personality of the poet peeps only from behind Eliot's main obsession. In the case of Marvell, the title of the essay would have been more appropriate if it had contained the word ‘wit’. Wit is here another name for the unified sensibility, which was seen by Eliot as a quality of the metaphysicals. Eliot notices that, with Marvell, it is not merely combined with, but actually fused into the imagination. Marvell's wit is more profound than just ‘witty fancy’, whose effect is simply ‘structural decoration of a serious idea’. Marvell's wit is, in fact, sadder. It is a combination of ‘levity and seriousness (by which the seriousness is intensified)’.

After an amazing wealth of associations with the most various writers (Baudelaire, Laforgue, Donne, Jonson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Cowley, Milton, Pope, Dryden, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Yeats, La Fontaine, Gautier, Catullus, Horace, Homer, Propertius, Ovid, Gray, Collins, Coleridge, William Morris, Villon, Dante), we feel, at the end of the essay, as if we had accompanied Marvell on a stroll across all European literatures. Eliot is a remarkable comparatist. When he says that the ‘perennial’ task of criticism is to bring poets back to life, he also has in mind, as the best method, the revival of a whole European literary mood. Marvell's wit, Eliot states, existed in French, Latin and Elizabethan English literatures. It is, to Eliot's mind, a ‘quality of a sophisticated literature’. It expanded to England a little before that famous dissociation of sensibility had set in, that is, ‘just at the moment before the English mind altered’. After Marvell, the sophistication disappeared from the poets' sensibility, and became a meaningless complication of the language.

After the description of Marvell's commendable use of wit, Eliot cannot resist the temptation to find reason for dissatisfaction. He discovers clumsy, ‘undesirable’ images in Upon Appleton House. The cause of failure is the over-development of an ‘absurd’, ‘misshapen’ image. The conclusion to the essay is not more illuminating than the rest. Wit has not been defined, because with Eliot definitions are impossible. Marvell has been invoked and compared. Eliot sums up:

‘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’.

In later essays, Eliot's criticism becomes more substantial than the mere suggestion of one memorable idea. Such is the case of Milton I, written in 1936. The theme of the essay is the ‘damage’ done by Milton to the English language. The demonstration is resourceful. The essay opens with the view of Milton as an ‘antipathetic’ man, ‘unsatisfactory’ from the moralist's point of view, the theologian's, the psychologist's or the philosopher's. Eliot looks upon what he calls Milton's greatness as upon a puzzle. He cannot make out what it consists in, he says. He is sensitive to Milton's faults, to the deterioration to which he subjected the language, to his ‘bad influence’ after which, as it seems to Eliot in 1936, English literature has not yet recovered.

The essay is ostensibly written for the eye of the ‘ablest poetical practitioners’ of Eliot's time, because it seems to Eliot that they alone can understand ‘derogatory criticism’ at its right value. Because they are the only ones who realize that it is more important for a poet to be good than great, and that, therefore, Eliot's view of Milton is not meant to expel Milton from the field of poetry altogether. The explanation Eliot finds for his image of Milton lies in Milton's blindness, related to his love of music. Milton is seen by Eliot as a man whose sensuousness was ‘withered early by book-learning, and whose gifts were naturally aural’. Blindness enabled Milton to concentrate on what he could do best: cultivate an ‘artificial and conventional language’, with no visual qualities, no innovations in the use of words. Milton's poetic effects are addressed mostly to the ear. He does not enrich the meaning of words. Milton's unimaginative use of words makes Eliot say that his predecessor uses English as if it were a dead language. A comparison is drawn here between Milton and Joyce. They both have

‘musical taste and abilities, (...) musical training, wide and curious knowledge, gift for acquiring languages, and remarkable powers of memory perhaps fortified by defective vision’.

The difference lies in the fact that Joyce has, besides his auditory imagination, visual imagination as well. Milton, on the other hand, shows nothing that could look real. It seems to Eliot that Milton ‘may be said never to have seen anything’. Joyce's later rhetorical style comes closer to Milton's concentration on sound. In 1936, they both look to Eliot like a ‘blind alley for the future development of the language’.

Eliot's point is that Milton's poetry is dissociated into sound and meaning. Its ‘inner meaning is separated from the surface’. It must be read either for the sound, or for the meaning. The two cannot be grasped at once, as they are in Shakespeare or in Dante.

With great poets, Eliot concludes, there is no ‘interruption between the surface and the core’. Milton draws the reader into ‘mazes of sound’, and leaves him there. There is a division, a dissociation in him, between the thinker (the philosopher, the theologian) and the poet. Milton's concentration upon the auditory imagination is also liable to degenerate into a poetry that looks like a ‘solemn game’. A fragment full of strange proper names and no meaning whatever is judiciously provided by Eliot, as illustration.

Once all these errors have been spotted and clustered round the only idea that Milton split Shakespeare's language into two, choosing the worst (non-conversational) direction, the essay ends. In 1947, Milton II appears, with the professed aim of correcting a previous error of judgment, because, as Eliot says,

‘no one can correct an error with better authority than the person who has been responsible for it’.

The second essay views Milton from a more sympathetical point of view. Eliot forgets his previous statement that Milton was an ‘unwholesome influence’, and a good but not a great poet. He then sets out to prove that Milton is ‘a great poet and one whom poets to-day might study with profit’. He mainly talks now of Milton's ‘predicament’, not of his mistakes. Milton's influence is no longer bad; it is merely strong. Eliot changes his mind concerning the damage done by Milton to the language. He now feels that Milton merely ‘exhausted’ one of its possibilities. That is, Milton made a great epic impossible for many generations of poets after him.

The theory devised by Eliot in order to correct his previous censure of Milton claims, on second thought, that Milton did not exhaust his direction forever. Poetry being a cyclical development, imitation of Milton may no longer be so harmful three hundred years after his death. Eliot's benevolence looks upon Milton from the point of view of a practitioner who has become willing to learn a new lesson in poetic technique. Eliot seems to imply that his view has changed because he now leaves aside the critic's judgment and examines Milton from a fellow-creator's position. Eliot quotes himself saying earlier that Milton's technical influence was disastrous. He claims he is no longer ‘prepared’ to say that, and decides that the issue itself is of no importance whatever. The previous idea of a dissociation in Milton's sensibility has the same fate. Both theories are so well revised that nothing is left of them. The question of style is brought up instead. Eliot discerns in Milton's poetry a style that does not rely upon common speech or prose; a style which does not aim at any direct communication of meaning. This style is a ‘maximal, never the minimal, alteration of ordinary language’. The alteration of the language (no longer called damage or deterioration) is seen as a merit this time. Milton is looked upon as an innovator:

‘Every distortion of construction, the foreign idiom, the use of a word in a foreign way (...), every idiosyncrasy is a particular act of violence which Milton has been the first to commit. There is no cliché, no poetic diction in the derogatory sense, but a perpetual sequence of original acts of lawlessness’.

By doing violence to the language, Milton joins the generation of modern difficult poets. Eliot's theory has no more errors to spot, therefore no more memorable phrases are coined in this essay.

Milton is described as ‘the greatest of all eccentrics’. He creates his own rules for writing, and observes no previous ones. The fact that he invents his own poetic language, which is remote from ordinary speech, is now viewed as a quality. Another newly discovered quality is Milton's sense of structure, seen in the pattern of his works and in his syntax. Eliot praises Milton for making the best use of his gifts, and perfectly concealing his weaknesses. For instance, Milton had

‘little interest in, or understanding of, individual human beings’,

so he chose his subject matter accordingly. In a subtle way, Eliot now turns this limitation into an advantage:

‘In Paradise Lost he was not called upon for any of that understanding which comes from an affectionate observation of men and women. But such an interest in human beings was not required – indeed its absence was a necessary condition – for the creation of his figures of Adam and Eve. These are not a man and a woman such as any we know: if they were, they would not be Adam and Eve. They are the original Man and Woman, not types, but prototypes (...) Were they more particularized they would be false, and if Milton had been more interested in humanity, he could not have created them’.

Milton's power of visualisation is no longer seen as weak. Eliot mentions an imagery suggestive of ‘vast size, limitless space, abysmal depth, and light and darkness’, in Paradise Lost. The image of light in Eden even impresses Eliot more than everything else:

‘... the impression of light – a daylight and a starlight, a light of dawn and of dusk, the light which, remembered by a man in his blindness, has a supernatural glory unexperienced by men of normal vision’.

Since Eliot's theory on Milton is being totally revised and reversed, all the side-ideas have the same fate. It is a good thing, Eliot claims this time, that, in reading Milton, we are not expected to see anything clearly. Thus Milton suggests to us an original experience of literature. One in which

‘our sense of sight must be blurred, so that our hearing may become more acute’.

The same as Joyce in Finnegans Wake, Milton requires of the reader to readjust his apprehension, and pay more attention to sounds and words than to meanings or ideas.

As far as Milton's versification is concerned, Eliot considers its minimal unit to be the ‘period, the sentence and still more the paragraph’. The length of these minimal utterances makes Milton's texts hardly analysable line by line. Milton's sense of structure in syntax (which was accused by Eliot in the former essay) gives a ‘perfect and unique pattern’ to every paragraph, to every larger ‘musical unit’. In short, what was before confusion and harmful, artificial, conventional language, is now proof of poetic ability:

‘The peculiar feeling, almost a physical sensation of a breathless leap, communicated by Milton's long periods, and by his alone, is impossible to procure from rhymed verse. Indeed, this mastery is more conclusive evidence of his intellectual power, than is his grasp of any ideas that he borrowed or invented. To be able to control so many words at once is the token of a mind of most exceptional energy’.

In a way, the second essay does not really contradict the first. Eliot enjoys to oppose and indict, yet he usually takes his time after having spotted an error. He examines more carefully, enlarges his rebuking into appreciation and, when he has gone far enough to face the author closely, his toughness gives way. He is unable to dismiss lightly any author whom he has examined deep enough. The reason Eliot gives for accusing Milton at first is that, when Eliot wrote that first essay, Milton was of no use to Eliot's contemporary poets, who tried to extend their poetry towards the non-poetic, both in language and subject matter. The reason he finds for revising that accusation is that, time having gone by, Eliot has come to see Milton as a master of ‘freedom within form’. Milton teaches modern poets a lesson of ‘justified irregularity’, a lesson that can at last (in 1947) be safely and profitably studied.

In 1921, Eliot wrote his first essay on Dryden. John Dryden is seen as a successor of Marlowe and Ben Jonson, and the ancestor of 18th century poetry, even of Byron and then of Poe. Dryden's satires are examined, although Eliot considers Dryden to be much more than a satirist. Eliot praises the ‘sustained display of surprise after surprise of wit from line to line’, in Mac Flecknoe. He notices that Dryden constantly turns the ridiculous into poetry, by enhancing his object ‘in a way contrary to expectation’. His method is close to parody. The grandeur that he attaches to his characters makes them laughable, but it does not belittle them. Dryden's poetic ability turns ‘the small into the great, the prosaic into the poetic, the trivial into the magnificent’. Eliot discovers in him a true sense of creation when he remarks that Dryden creates the reality which he contemplates.

An interesting distinction is formulated between Dryden and Milton, concerning both writers' tendency to magnify:

‘The great advantage of Dryden over Milton is that while the former is always in control of his ascent, and can rise or fall at will (...), the latter has elected a perch from which he cannot afford to fall, and from which he is in danger of slipping’.

The same as the essay on Dryden, the essay on Blake (1920) turns round one idea: Blake's isolation. Eliot notices in Blake a peculiar ‘unpleasant’ honesty, combined with a technical accomplishment. Early apprenticed to engraving, Blake seems to Eliot to have chosen to read only what was congenial to him. Blake was under no compulsion to acquire a literary education. Consequently, he could  concentrate on what he was interested in, and Eliot thinks this to be the reason for the genuineness of Blake's lines. Instead of genuine, Eliot calls him ‘innocent’, which means not influenced by outside literary or social ambitions. His form, simplified and abstract, proves his solitary struggle against deadening ‘education’, against what Eliot calls ‘the continuous deterioration of language’.

Blake is a solitary poet, who escaped the influence of ‘parasitic opinion’, of conformity to knowledge acquired. He is well educated in his art, but his mind is independent, ‘unclouded by current opinions’, eager to see the world with fresh eyes, and convey emotion in fresh words. As Eliot puts it,

‘He was naked and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal’.

This sincerity caused by isolation, this faithfulness of Blake's to his own mind and art, his pride of remaking the world with his own two hands had, however, one disadvantage which Eliot does not fail to spot. It is true that Blake's philosophy, visions, insight, technique are his own. But, being his own, they tend to become more important to him than the poems themselves. Blake has no humility in him. His ideas often stifle the poetic form, pushing his poetry towards a formlessness which Eliot abhorred. On the other hand, Blake's own ideas being so peculiar, so different from other people's, he comes very close to being an ‘eccentric’. Eliot states that Dante's borrowed philosophy injured his work less than Blake's philosophy, which at times obliterates Blake's poetry. ‘Blake's occasional marriages of poetry and philosophy’, Eliot remarks, ‘are not so felicitous’. Blake's fault is that, becoming too much concerned with his ideas, he ended by stripping them naked of the poetry we were led to expect.

Using Blake's ‘home-made’, Robinson-like philosophy as a pretext, Eliot develops an interesting theory on the lack of cultural continuity in England. He notices in Blake a ‘meanness’ of culture, manifested through his eccentricity. Blake's qualities (understanding of human nature, original sense of language, a ‘gift of hallucinated vision’) needed a sure ‘framework of accepted and traditional ideas’. In that case, instead of focussing his interest upon creating his own philosophy, Blake would have paid more attention to his craft as a poet. He would have avoided the ‘confusion of thought, emotion and vision’, which appears in his poems. Blake lacks, Eliot concludes, the concentration which would have resulted from an inherited framework of mythology, theology and philosophy.

The aim of Eliot's essay on Byron (1937) is to open a line of critical revisions of Byron's poetry. As Eliot himself puts it, it is an ‘attempt to start the ball rolling’. From the very beginning, Eliot (the author of a concentrated poetry, who only published one book of poetry and who collected in several volumes only a quarter of the essays he ever wrote) notices the bulk of Byron's poetry. It seems to him that this bulk is ‘distressing’ when compared to the quality of all Byron's lines. He sees there a particular way of looking upon poetry. Byron appears to him to be the messenger of a forgotten generation of poets, whose writing was extensive, rather than intense and ‘distilled’.

Eliot also suggests as a possible image of Byron that of a ‘touring tragedian’. He concludes that Byron's being ‘so thorough-going an actor’ provided him with his peculiar knowledge of the world, ‘superficial’ but ‘accurate’. Eliot sees Byron as a man so much occupied with ‘the figure he was cutting’ that nothing else besides could have had any reality. Byron's interest was all absorbed by his own ‘make-up’, so to say, which Eliot defines as ‘diabolism’ or a ‘sense of damnation’. His characters feed on Byron's own egotism and, as inconsistently as their author, they think of themselves as both supremely bad and supremely good.

If Byron's characters are rather artificial, static and monotonous, his narrative skill, on the other hand, seems to Eliot to be remarkable. Eliot, the same as his contemporaries, the experimental novelists, could not tell a story in plain words. He therefore cannot help admiring Byron's skill as a tale-teller. His tales have a simple plot, and his lines are well adapted to it. There is fluency and variation of verse in his narrative poems, and there is also a ‘genius for divagation’. Eliot notices Byron's ability to digress from the story to the story-teller, and to use this self-centred narrative device in order to enhance our interest in the story itself. Eliot imagines that, while Byron was alive, the attraction of his personality must have acted upon readers like an ‘enchantment’.

The plot of The Giaour is however retold by Eliot in a strange way, with questioning dissatisfaction. Eliot usually skips plots and characters, in order to prove his theories by analysis of an author's style. If he pays any attention to them, he does so in order to spot there actions that can be ridiculed, characters that can be unmasked. Byron is no exception. Eliot does not fail to find the weaknesses of his plot. The episodes of Byron's tale succeed one another in front of our bewildered eyes, like the carriages of a fast train:

‘A Christian, presumably Greek, has managed, by some means of which we are not told, to scrape acquaintance with a young woman who belonged to the harem, or was perhaps the favourite wife of a Moslem named Hassan. In the endeavour to escape with her Christian lover Leila is recaptured and killed; in due course the Christian with some of his friends ambushes and kills Hassan. We subsequently discover that the story of this vendetta – or part of it – is being told by the Giaour himself to an elderly priest, by way of making his confession. It is a singular kind of confession, because the Giaour seems anything but penitent, and makes quite clear that although he has sinned, it is not really by his own fault. (...) it is not altogether easy to discover what happened. (...) Not Joseph Conrad could be more roundabout. (...) Why a Greek of that period should have been so oppressed with remorse (although wholly impenitent) for killing a Moslem in what he would have considered a fair fight, or why Leila should have been guilty in leaving a husband or master to whom she was presumably united without her consent, are questions that we cannot answer’.

Eliot's tone is mocking. The narrative is found to be lacking in logic and clarity. Yet, Eliot turns the deficiency he has spotted into a merit. Byron's ‘ingenuity’ in story-telling troubles the reader by giving him less than he would like to know, by presenting unaccountable motives, confused feelings. Eliot thus praises Byron's use of ‘suspense’.

Last but not least, Eliot could not have failed to discuss Byron's use of words. His verdict is that Byron

‘added nothing to the language, that he discovered nothing in the sounds, and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words’.

It seems to Eliot that Byron's work might just as well have been written by a foreigner; Byron develops no peculiar style. He writes in a ‘dead or dying language’. His ‘imperceptiveness’ to the English word, which makes it necessary for him to use a great number of words ‘before we become aware of him’, accounts for his prolixity. His ‘schoolboy command of the language’ makes his lines sound commonplace and shallow.

The charges Eliot brings against Byron are not new to us, by now. Other writers were, in Eliot's eyes, guilty of the same things (see Milton I). The essay on Byron ends as it began, on a note of suspicion. We learn about Byron that

‘with all his bogus diabolism and his vanity of pretending to disreputability, he is genuinely superstitious and disreputable’.

In the essay Shelley and Keats (1933), Eliot attempts to define Shelley's poetry. It seems to him from the very beginning that Shelley expects too many things from poetry. Shelley takes his ideas more seriously than Eliot would like, and, what is worse, these seem to Eliot to be ideas of adolescence. They are ‘repellent’ to Eliot, the same as Shelley the man, who was ‘humourless, pedantic, self-centred’. When reading Shelley, Eliot has to make the effort of ‘abating’ his prejudices as best he can. He dislikes Shelley's enthusiasm for empty ideas, his ‘passionate apprehension’ of abstractions, because he finds them stored in a confused mind. Shelley's emotion, Eliot notices, was always and only stirred by such uninviting abstract thoughts.

Precision of images goes side by side with ‘bad jingling’. His ideas are ‘bolted’ in his poems, but never fully assimilated. Eliot's theory concerning borrowed ideas in poetry turns up once again. It is important for a poem to adopt (rather than create) a belief that should not operate as an obstacle to the reader's enjoyment. A belief which the reader may understand, even if he cannot share it. Shelley did borrow ideas, but he ‘muddled up’ the ideas he used, he

‘dabbled in both philosophy and poetry and made no great success of either’.

In Memoriam (1936) examines Tennyson's three qualities: ‘abundance, variety, and complete competence’. Eliot appreciates Tennyson's lyrical resourcefulness, his variety of metrical accomplishment, his fine ear and knowledge of words and sounds. Yet, it does not take Eliot too long to find out Tennyson's limitation: the latter's taste for the descriptive and the picturesque, his inability to use a narrative. His Ulysses, for instance, is a static poem. If Tennyson had been able to tell a story, to involve real people in it, like Dante, his beliefs would have mattered less, because, Eliot remarks,

‘We can swallow the most antipathetic doctrines if we are given an exciting narrative’.

When the narrative is absent, the poems are dull. It would be interesting to apply the idea to Eliot's own poems, The Waste Land in particular. We can infer from it that Eliot had a story in mind, that his poem has a narrative coherence, that it is not a collection of unrelated fragments, even if the narrative is hidden, under-stated. Tennyson's lack of a narrative is quite obvious in Maud. There, Eliot sees Tennyson trying to construct the ‘semblance’ of a dramatic situation. It lacks serenity, Eliot says. He reads in the poem evidence of emotional intensity, which attains no ‘purgation’, and therefore tends to become ‘black melancholia’. The quality of Tennyson's emotions does not seem to be quite to Eliot's liking. Maud's fury is ‘shrill rather than deep’. The violence of the poem is ‘feeble’. The cause of this impression, Eliot advances, may be an ‘error of form’. Tennyson's Idylls are all placed between lyricism and fiction. Maud is shipwrecked between lyricism and drama, without reaching any. In Memoriam is, to Eliot's mind, Tennyson's best achievement. He sees it as ‘great’ poetry, ‘economical of words’, displaying an emotional unity of confession. Eliot enjoys here Tennyson's tragic face, and talks with pleasure about religious despair in the poem. He finally calls Tennyson a ‘great master of metric as well as of melancholia’. The alliteration in this utterance is not easily ignored.

Matthew Arnold (1933) wrote academic poetry that had little technical interest for Eliot. Yet, Arnold seems to him to be a poet to whom ‘one readily returns’ because, besides being a ‘Professor of Poetry’, he also has the gift of being intimate with his readers. His is a poetry of ‘unrest, loneliness and dissatisfaction’. Eliot explains that Arnold lived during a period of false stability, which causes his tone to betray regret, loss of faith, instability, nostalgia. His poetry conveys a certain feeling of boredom, in connection with which Eliot formulates a well-known remark:

‘... the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory’.

Swinburne as Poet (1920) writes a ‘diffuse’ poetry. Swinburne is no master of concentration, but here this turns out to be to his advantage. As Eliot puts it,

‘His diffuseness is one of his glories’.

He has a genius for employing an amazing number of words in order to convey very few things. Yet, his poetry cannot be ‘condensed’ without being ruined. Although no stanza seems to be essential, none can be left out. For Swinburne’s sake, Eliot builds a theory of verbal totality. He considers that, for Swinburne, ‘the meaning and the sound are one thing’. Eliot means to say that Swinburne has a peculiar way of using, of ‘working’ the meaning of a word. He rejects concrete words. His emotion is general, and his lines convey it by ‘expansion’. Swinburne's emotion is so close to the word that it seems to spring from words rather than the other way round. Eliot states, therefore, that the words are the object of Swinburne's poetry. Swinburne’s poetic idiom does not depend on any outside reality. It is a self-sufficient world. This independence of words brings a morbidity of language into Swinburne's poetry. It seems to Eliot that language in a ‘healthy’ state should not be self-referential. It should rely upon an object, refer to something real outside itself. If, in Swinburne's lines, there is no supporting object for the word, the meaning becomes merely the ‘hallucination’ of a meaning, and language looks uprooted, under-nourished.

In writing about Yeats (1940), Eliot remarks the former's ability ‘after becoming unquestionably the master, to remain always a contemporary’. When a poet reaches middle age, Eliot decides, he has three choices left: to give up writing, to repeat himself with virtuosity, or to ‘adapt’ himself to middle age, and think out a new manner of writing. The poetry of young Yeats, Eliot feels, hardly bears any obvious trace of emotional intensity. In looking for emotional involvement, Eliot realizes that he is contradicting his earlier theory of impersonal poetry, and feels bound to revise that too:

‘I have, in early essays, extolled what I called impersonality, in art, and it may seem that, in giving as a reason for 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 reread my own prose writings, I am willing to leave the point unsettled ...’

A new theory on impersonality follows. Yeats had, while young, the impersonality of the ‘mere skilful craftsman’. Later, he developed it into a ‘maturing’ impersonality, which turned intense personal experience into a ‘general symbol’. In other words, Eliot concludes, Yeats started as a craftsman, and ended as a poet.

Yeats' later, intensely personal poetry is now to Eliot's mind a triumph of the ‘freedom of speech’. Yeats' early poems, those of the ‘Celtic twilight’, are poems of ‘confusion’. They give out too little, they lack ‘complete emotional expression’. Paradoxically, in becoming more personal, Yeats appears to Eliot to become more ‘universal’, more maturely ‘impersonal’. There is one interesting remark in Eliot's theory, namely that Yeats is the poet of middle age, who had the ‘honesty and courage’ to face old age and adapt to it. Yeats' later poetry did not lose its vigour. Eliot even sees it growing younger with every year added to its author's age. Eliot is impressed by Yeats' insight into the psychology of old age, by Yeats' fearless revelations. He quotes with awe:

‘You think it horrible that lust and rage

Should dance attendance upon my old age;

They were not such a plague when I was young:

What else have I to spur me into song?’

Freedom of speech, honesty towards oneself, adaptation to one's advancing age are topics Eliot himself touched in his poems. He again resorts to workshop criticism to explain Yeats. The ‘clarity, honesty and vigour’ he praises in Yeats' later poetry are equally looked for by Eliot in his Quartets. The remark that Yeats ‘was always lyric, even when dramatic’ also holds good for Eliot himself. It appears to Eliot that Yeats the old man ‘integrated’, preserved Yeats the young man. In describing Yeats' poetry of old age, Eliot is in fact trying to come to terms with his own age, to relieve his painful feeling of loss, to re-discover poetry by adapting to passing years, to devise a new mood for his own work.

                                                        *

The same as Yeats, Eliot was obsessed with the feeling that years and words flow by. In his essays, he devised delaying theories, which were supposed to help him overcome his basic rush-into-despair mood. Despite this bravery, despite his oracular tone of self-assurance, his memorable phrases convey a generous indecision. T.S. Eliot may be remembered rather as a critic of losses, than of battles won. He may have lived in a critical age for criticism. He was a critic of visions and revisions. He devised a mixed critical and creative literary genre entitled workshop criticism. The words which he uses in this genre, that speaks out of two heads, are fit to make up poems rather than essays. In his literary criticism, Eliot's words of no speech teach us to avoid taking for granted a term, a doctrine, a style. Every word is questionable and uncertain. So is every method, every fashion, every mind. All opinions are worth being uttered in a private style. Yet their author treats and teaches us to treat all styles with a broad sense of tolerant humour.