T.S. Eliot: A Raid on the Inarticulate

This paper on T.S. Eliot was written for one of the Past and Present Series at StAnza 2008, (in which two participants each discuss a poet from the past), Janice Galloway’s choice being the poems of Edward Lear.

Sometimes it is possible to experience a very great work of art in all its immediacy. I mean the sense that it is speaking to you directly, and that you, in turn, let it do its work on you without being bothered by questions about its canonical supremacy. When I chose T.S. Eliot as my subject matter for a talk at the Stanza 2008 Poetry Festival, I hoped that I would find something to say about poems that have been part of my life for over 40 years.

In his Introduction to the Selected Prose of TS Eliot, Frank Kermode says that in 1935, ‘long after these seminal essays were written, Eliot wrote ‘a remarkable letter to Stephen Spender …’

‘You don’t really criticize any author to whom you have not surrendered yourself … Even just the bewildering minute counts; you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.’

’The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock’ was one of my first experiences of surrendering myself to a poem. I imagine that this may have occurred with countless readers. I could never deny its importance to me. When I repeat the lines:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

their panoramic melancholy always blows my head off. The poem feels incredibly profound, but as soon as I begin to inquire what about, or what the ‘overwhelming question’ might be, it collapses into meaninglessness. And yet I find myself drawn again and again to surrender to this great, strangely erotic and disturbing work of art as by an involuntary chemistry.

This extended conceit of a poetic ‘I’, and the notion of being accosted by a worldly, mysterious, even uncouth, yet familiar stranger, in a way that is impossible to resist, and whose effect is both profound and irrecoverable, occurs again and again in poetry and in all art. This encounter echoes what all important poetry does, irrespective of subject matter: where the reader becomes fused with its narrator, setting off on some quest and bearing witness to something both mundane and of a terrible importance that will change them forever. This strange other’s message has something to do with the getting of wisdom about man’s mortality, the attendant ills of ageing, the vanity of his enterprises, his enslavement to his passions, his suffering, his fear of failure, his lack of self-knowledge, but its mimetic meaning is you’ve just got to listen to this or you’ve just got to look at this, something about which Michael Donaghy (in ‘A Fine Excess’, his essay on John Keats) wrote most eloquently:

‘One way a poet creates the illusion of dramatic moment is to hold out his hand and show you something — an inanimate object, like Yorick’s skull, a magician’s prop towards which he directs our attention so that the magic can take place through sleight of hand. In Keats’ 1816 poem to Fanny Brawne there’s no object in his hand. It’s the hand itself he’s showing us, reaching out through the page and across a hundred and eighty-five years.’

Listen to this from Part II of ‘Little Gidding’:

In the uncertain hour before the morning
    Near the ending of interminable night
    At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
    Had passed below the horizon of his homing
    While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
    Between three districts whence the smoke arose
    I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As is if blown towards me like the metal leaves
    Before the urban dawn wind unresisting.
    And as I fixed upon the down-turned face
That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge
    The first-met stranger in the waning dusk
    I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
    Both one and many; in the brown baked features
    The eyes of a familiar compound ghost
Both intimate and unidentifiable.

It is comparable to Shelley’s ‘The Triumph of Life’, in Eliot’s opinion, Shelley’s finest poem:

Struck to the heart by this sad pageantry,
Half to myself I said- ‘And what is this?

Whose shape is that within the car? And why —’
I would have added- ‘is all here amiss? —’
But a voice answered —‘Life!’ ‚—

Both poems appear to be descendants of Dante’s encounter with Virgil in the ‘Inferno’. The ‘vade mecum’ here is a metaphor for the mentor or master, whose book the poet is never without. Immediately I thought of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, Wordsworth’s ‘The Leech Gatherer’, Keats’ ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, Hamlet’s meeting with the ghost of his father, and the repeated accounts of Oedipus’s meeting with his father in Sophocles’ ‘Oedipus Rex’.

As I was preparing this paper, I found I was having a sort of waking vision of all these poetic characters climbing out of their poems towards some other meaning, gibbering their own very particular, yet related, mad wisdom, when I remembered this from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’:

‘No poet, or artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone … You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them … and so the relations, proportions, values of each work of art towards the whole are readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new.’

And I thought: That’s it! He proposes that all poems form part of a living whole, simultaneously continuous and discontinuous, governed by laws beyond the reach of individual human will. This is a crucial point for all readers and writers of poetry.

And, of course, allusiveness was for Eliot the main motivation for the enjoyment and for the composition of poetry. While erudition is there in spades, practically in every line, it is not at all the point (even if it sometimes feels showy and overdone). In fact, the way he so often undermines his erudition by rephrasing familiar texts, by his incongruous juxtapositions and patches of nonsense, suggests that it is to be experienced as not much more than a seething scrap heap, a ‘tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing’. I think that the point is this: in his collages of blighted landscapes, snippets of Shakespeare, epigrams from ancient texts, scraps of mysticism, lost civilisations, surrealist flashes, pub gossip, anxious thoughts, incompetent worryings, stops on journeys, bursts of dramatic monologue, he constantly reminds us of things we forgot we knew, places we’ve been, songs we’ve sung. We experience the deep pleasures of recognition as if the mind is free to shoot through time and space, into every possible experience, every possible shade of thought and feeling. For example, in these lines from ‘Portrait of a Lady’,

And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression … Dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.

he imbues the account of a duplicitous and embarrassing relationship with the kind of terrible thrill one experiences in the company of the Shakespeare’s fools and clowns, and the sense of abandon one feels watching a dancer execute a tap-dance to perfection. He said:

‘There is no doubt that a poet wishes to give pleasure, to entertain and divert people; and he should be glad to be able to feel that the entertainment or diversion is enjoyed by as large and various a number of people as possible. From one point of view the poet aspires to the condition of the music hall comedian.’

It is instructive to remember that the author of The Waste Land was an admirer of Edward Lear, thought highly of Marie Lloyd and became the friend of Groucho Marx.

While I was thinking about this, I was reminded of a passage in Catherine Lampert’s brilliant essay from the catalogue of a retrospective show of Lucian Freud’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery, in which she refers to an article he wrote for Cambridge Opinion. She writes:

‘the suggestion was that the spirit of the times, however pessimistic was stimulating. When man finally sealed his destiny by inventing his own inevitable destruction he also gave art absolute gravity by adding a new dimension: this new dimension, having the end in sight, can give the artist supreme control, that he will (in Nietzsche’s words) exert retroactive force and create conditions under which ‘a thousands secrets of the past crawl out of their hideouts into his sunshine’.

It is well-known that Eliot studied Nietzsche, and we find this in ‘Preludes’:

You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which you souls was constituted;

Eliot’s poems teem with exuberant images of abjection: like the self compared to "a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas", his "head borne in upon a platter", the disembodied ‘arms braceleted and bare’, a ‘lustreless protrusive eye stares from the protozoic slime’, ‘ midnight shakes the memory as a madman shakes a dead geranium’, a cat which devours ‘a morsel of rancid butter’ echo not only the robotic worlds of such contemporaries as Dali, Magritte, Max Ernst, De Chirico, De Nerval and Sigmund Freud’s vocabulary of the dream and the uncanny, but also the gargoyles of Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ and the verminous infestations of King Lear and Macbeth. The discomfitingly eroticised person of Sweeney and the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land recall Sickert’s images of fetid domestic horror. But it is the street, which makes innumerable appearances in Eliot’s poems — and is a descendant of Blake in its representation of both conscience about and indifference to human suffering, being both damned and innocent at the same time — which was Eliot’s innovation as the place where henceforth poetry would happen, for example, from ‘Preludes’ (parts II and IV):

You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands

The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

The street has become a metaphor for the universe and has stolen the qualities of fecundity, sublimation, spirituality, poignancy, transience and passivity which once belonged to nature. And it is interesting, but not surprising, to note that Eliot’s urban imagery seems more closely observed than his somewhat second-hand, Pre-Raphaelite-like gardens, children, pipes, birds and roses which appear in the pastoral sequences of his poems. I think perhaps this was a deliberate ploy on his part.

To appreciate Eliot’s innovation, it is worth delving into the relationship between his poems and those of the French Symbolists, most notably of Baudelaire. Eliot wrote: ‘Without Baudelaire, Corbière, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, I should not have been able to write poetry at all.’ The discovery of Baudelaire and Laforgue helped him become to the person that he became in manners, dress and outlook. He would probably have liked to have been Baudelaire, but by temperament he was too fastidious and cautious.

Baudelaire, Eliot wrote, ‘gave new possibilities to poetry in a new stock of imagery of contemporary life.’ He quotes from ‘Le Vin Des Chiffonniers’:

‘… Au Coeur d’un vieux faubourg, labyrinthe fangeux
Où l’humanite grouille en ferments orageux,
On voit un vieux chiffonnier qui vient, hochant la tête,
Buttant, et se cognant aux murs comme un poète.’

At the heart of some old suburb, muddy labyrinth,
Where humanity crawls in a seething ferment,
One sees a rag-picker go by, shaking his head
Stumbling, bumping against walls like a poet.

and comments:

‘This introduces something new, and something universal in modern life. It is not merely in the use of imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the great metropolis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first intensity — presenting it as it is, and yet making it represent something much more than itself — that Baudelaire has created a mode of release and expression for other men.’

What I think Eliot did for future generations of poets was to open up a very much greater range of feeling, albeit within a restricted spectrum, than had been available before. But if I was to say that he combined the liturgical with the derisive, the tender with the malicious, the urbane with the nostalgic, the thoughtful with the vacuous, the incantatory with the gossipy, the lyrical with the matter-of-fact, that would convey nothing of his finesse and I’d still be nowhere even near naming his achievement. About that he wrote:

‘I have hinted that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely by any evaluation of personality, not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say’ but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.’

For me, the supreme example of this is to be found in these lines from ‘Preludes’:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

These remarkable lines appear like a momentary admission of tenderness, a suggestion of the curves of a girl’s body, and infuse the evocation of the city’s bleakness and decrepitude with a mind-blowing empathy. I believe that what he did was to evoke very precisely nuanced states of feeling in a very much less classified manner than we are used to thinking of them — feelings that occur between feelings and that don’t have names — like the photographs one throws away because they show people in transition between one expression and another. I can’t think of any modern poet who did this to a greater extent.

I also think that he, more than any other, most profoundly destabilised the idea of meaning and subject matter, both into the future but also retrospectively, for poetry and for all art. He cast a sort of postlapsarian spell over everything. I do not only mean this in the accepted Modernist sense that the purpose of art is to disturb, but in the sense that what any poem might mean is a very mysterious thing — viz this, from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism:

‘The poem’s existence is somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to express, or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or of the writer as reader. Consequently the problem of what a poem means is a good deal more difficult than it first appears.’

And in a lighter vein:

‘The chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a poem, in the ordinary sense, may be (for here 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 nice bit of meat for the house-dog.’

In the same essay, he wrote:

‘If a poem of mine entitled Ash Wednesday ever goes into a second edition, I have thought of prefixing to it the lines of Byron from Don Juan:

Some have accused me of a strange design
    Against the creed and morals of this land,
And trace it in this poem, every line.
    I don’t pretend that I quite understand
My own meaning when I would be very fine;
    But the fact is that I have nothing planned
Except to be a moment merry …’

And as a postscript, he adds ‘There is some sound critical admonition in these lines.’ I wonder whether his point was this: ‘Ash Wednesday’ is a poem that appears to be tremendously solemn, almost biblical in its scope, perhaps a kind of death march for the loss of what he called (in his essay on Dante) ‘The High Dream’; but perhaps it does not really have a meaning at all, and that possibly the point of composing poetry is no more than the pleasure to be had from the act of composing poetry; hence there is cause for rejoicing (if not exactly Byron’s merriment!):

I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice.

And if you read his essays on Dante, you will find a very different Eliot, basking in the benign influence of his master. I believe that it was probably from Dante that Eliot learned about love, beatitude and the education of the senses. Here he is quoting a passage from the Paradiso (which provided the inspiration for ‘Ash Wednesday’):

‘Within its depths I saw ingathered, bound by love in one mass, the scattered leaves of the universe: substance and accidents and their relations, as though together fused, so that what I speak of is one simple flame. The universal form of this complex I think I saw, because as I say this, more largely I feel myself rejoice. One single moment to me is more lethargy than twenty-five centuries upon the enterprise which made Neptune wonder at the shadow of the Argo passing over him.’

Under Eliot’s influence, I think that the maturation of any poet is also their conscious arrival at a state of inevitable and prolonged, but also necessary crisis (experienced as a hunger for something grand coupled with the knowledge that there is nothing to say), which mirrors feelings of loss of control on a personal and on a universal scale and becomes itself intrinsic to the practise of composing poetry. I’m not trying to say that he meant that this state did not exist for earlier poets, but rather that the emphasis he placed on it, and the assurance with which he said it, fixed it permanently in the landscape of any serious reader or writer of poetry. Listen to this from ‘East Coker’:

    … and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each new venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate — but there is no competition —
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

There is a very entertaining interview with Eliot, published in The Bed Post in which the interviewer asks: what do you feel to be function of poetry? Eliot replies:

‘The function of poetry is to give pleasure and if you ask what kind of pleasure I can only say the kind of pleasure that poetry gives. But I think good poetry is doing something for the reader that is beyond pleasure. It isn’t merely pleasure; it is an enhancement of life, an enlargement of our sensibility and is doing something which to those who enjoy it makes life more worth living.’

That must be as good an answer as any.

When I began this, I understood the phrase from ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ which reads: ‘you cannot value him alone; you must set him for contrast and comparison among the dead’ to be an injunction on the reader to see that all poems form part of a whole … Now I understand it as a description of the involuntary response to the force that great poems exert on us. And I see this again and again in the conversations that we have when we chatter about the poems we admire, in which the act of admiration of one great poem is the comparison of it with another. So I think Eliot was right; he was describing something which we believe without knowing we believe it, something we do without knowing that we do it.