THE DEVELOPMENT AND FUNCTION OF THE IMAGE IN THE POETRY OF T. S. ELIOT,1909-1922 by JOHN FREDERICK PRESTON B.A.j The University of British Columbia, 1964 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF Master of Arts in the Department of English We accept this thesis as conforming to the required standard THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA July, 1967 In presenting this thesis in partial fulfilment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of British Columbia, I agree that the Library shall make it freely available for reference and Study. I further agree that permission for extensive copying of this thesis for scholarly purposes may be granted by the Head of my Department or by h.i>s representatives. It is understood that copying or publication of this thesis for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. Department of £M4>tLr'7*/ The University of British Columbia Vancouver 8, Canada Da t e 5E?T£~/7y9&2. ^ /ft 7 ii ABSTRACT One of the most unique and striking features of T. S. Eliot's poetry up to and including The Waste Land is its imagery. Par from being mere decoration, the images in these poems play a vital role in the process of poetic communication. This paper attempts to examine in some detail Eliot's image, the important influences which con• tributed to its development, and its function in these poems. The poems of Prufrock and Other Observations show that Eliot had perfected his own "imagisra" before coming into contact with Imagist theories through Ezra Pound in 1914, These poems reveal Eliot's characteristic method of using images—which are mainly precise renderings of an urban scene—as "objective correlatives" for a wide range of thoughts and feelings, in order to dramatize the plight of the poem's speaker. It was through a close study of such figures as Charles Baudelaire, Jules Laforgue, the Jacobean dramatists, the Metaphysical poets and the philos• opher Henri Bergson, that Eliot discovered his own poetic voice. Although he knew little before 1914 of the Imagists— notably T. E. Hulme, who was to influence him much later— Eliqt's "imagism" shows certain similarities, in theory and practice, with the work of this important poet and theo• retician. These similarities are examined in this paper to help define Eliot's own "Imagism". iii After 1914, Ezra Pound played an important part in the development of Eliot's imagery. In general, Pound showed Eliot methods for extending to the limit the impersonality which was already a feature of Eliot's poetry. This led, through a mutual interest in the poems of Theophile Gautier, to Eliot's satirical poems in the Poems 1920 volume. These poems juxtapose concepts in the.form of concrete images, many of which are drawn from a wide variety of literary sources. But Eliot was restricted by Gautier's rhyming quatrain: in the satires, dramatic intensity is sacrificed for excessive superficiality and undue complexity. "Gerontion," however, marks a return to the energy of the Prufrock poems by using images to present an awareness of individual and cultural neurosis. Finally, The Waste Land marks a climax in Eliot's development by fusing and harmonizing methods previously acquired, and achieves unity through a complex pattern of images, many of which grow out of. the preceding poems. At their best, these images are not only precise sensual experiences but powerful expressions of feelings and thoughts. As such, they give ample proof that the image in Eliot's poetry is the primary means of poetic expression. iv TABLE OP CONTENTS Chapter ' Page I. INTRODUCTION . „ . .• . 1 II. SOME EARLY INFLUENCES ON ELIOT'S IMAGERY . .:10 III. • ELIOT AND EZRA POUND . ......... 50 IV. CONCLUSION . .. 88 ANNOTATED LIST OF WORKS USED ... 93 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Poetry, . • may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world, —The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism The poetry of T, S. Eliot is a poetry which is committed to penetrating the substratum of our being, and to removing the vejjLl which covers the visible and sensible world. It is a poetry which seeks at all times to clarify what we are and examine the nature of the universe in which we find ourselves. In short, it is a poetry of awareness. The term "awareness" is used here to refer to that process by which an individual is not only conscious of his surroundings, but conscious of the effect that they have upon him. This kind of consciousness, which Kristian Smidt calls a "mode of perception, related to intuition, and distinct from sharp consciousness or plain knowledge",1is a major characteristic, • in fact a dominant theme, of Eliot's IJoetry. His poems/contain characters whose awareness Is 1Poetr.v and Belief In the Work of T. S. Eliot (New York: The Humanities Press, 1961), p. 117. the central experience of the poem. These characters, who are neither fully developed individuals nor mere disembodied voices, are caught in moments of self- examination, as they struggle to achieve some sort of.; harmony "between themselves and their environment. The reader is presented with the total experience, including the perceptions, the beings who perceive them, and their limited awareness of how these perceptions affect them and their actions. It is mainly because their awareness is limited that none of the characters in Eliot's poems achieve total harmony; they tend, in other words, to evade themselves and the world as well. In order to present a wide range of awareness in his poetry, Eliot employs the image as the major means of expression. Although this is trud of all his poems, the discussion in the following chapters of Eliot's images and the various factors influencing them limits itself to the poems up to and including The Waste Land. This is done not only for convenience, but also because the experiences presented in these poems generally occur with• in an accurately depicted urban setting, whose realization demands precise imagery. In the later poems, the focus turns gradually inward to what may be called highly per• sonal religious meditation; the outside world, losing some of its former intrinsic importance, seems to operate 3 in the main as • symbols . for inner experiences. But in Prufrock and Other Observations, the Poems 1920 volume, and The Waste Land., images are used in order to convey 2 different degrees of awareness in an impersonal way. The remarks in Eliot's prose which together form his Theory of Impersonality help clarify his idea of the image, although the,word itself is never defined. The theory grew out of actual poetic practice, and hence \yas not articulated until well into his career as a poet. Even his earliest poems, however, anticipate his later insistence that there must be a separation in the poet's sensibility between;"the man who suffers and the mind which creates" in order that his mind may more perfectly "digest and transmute the passions which are its material"; that is, in order that emotions may be worked "up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all." The distinction between emotions and feelings is not made clear in Eliot's criticism. It seems apparent, Leonard Unger; writes, "throughout Eliot's works, the experience of awareness is itself often a vividly realized image . -''i'v ." See "T, S. Eliot's Images of Awareness," T^ 3^ Eliot: The Man and His Work, ed. "by Allen Tate (New Yoi*£: Dell Publishing Co., Inc. ,1966),p.213. 3"Tradition and the Individual Talent? (1919).Selected Assays (London: Faber and Faber Ltd.,1951), pp.18,21, Subsequent quotations from Eliot's prose will be from this edition, unless otherwise noted. 4 however, that emotions are associated v/ith "the man who suffers," and feelings with "the mind which creates."4 Since, as Eliot also says, "the poet's mind is in fact a receptable for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite together to form a new compound are present 5 together," we may assume that images are among those ele• ments that the poet..>externalizes at the moment of creation: The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an 'objective correlative'; in other words, a|set of - objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall he the formula of that parti• cular emotion;«Ssuch that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.6 The image thus acts as an "objective correlative" in Eliot's poetry. It is the means in many of the poems ^It is important to note that such a separation does not inhibit the poet's ability to feel; rather, it increases his awareness of his feelings. As Eliot says in his doctoral dissertation, completed in 1916, "the majority of feelings have never succeeded in invading our minds to such an extent as completely to fill it; they have from first to last some objectivity, I do not mean that they are any the less in• tense for this, or :^that they disappear under attention. To say that one part of the mind suffers and another part i reflects upon the suffering is perhaps to talk in fictions.