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
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
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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. But we know that thgse highly-organized beings who are able to objectify their^assions, and as passive spectators to p|ntemplate their joys and torments, are also those who inffer and enjoy the most keenly." Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H, Bradley (London: Faber and Faber, 1964J7 p. 23.
5"Tradition and The Individual Talent," p. 19.
6"Hamlet" (1919), p._ 145. 5 by which he expresses, in an impersonal form, a complex state of mind—that of Prufrock, for example—aware of its experience. Indeed it could be said that Prufrock's awareness derives from the same sort of externalizing process that brings the poem into being. Eliot, by objectifying certain of his own feelings and thoughts, creates a unique character; Prufrock, through a like process, reveals parts of himself to us. Eliot, of course, is not Prufrock, any more than what is presented in this poem is a fully-rounded individual.
Since images are "external facts, which must ter• minate in [or derive from] sensory experience," perception pbviously plays a vital role in their origin. But Elipt does not simply use^his images to present perceptions, however original, as the poets of the Imagist Movement,
such as Ezra Pound?;and T. Er Hulrae, often do. Images in his poetry, as will be shown in later chapters, always serve a larger concern than themselves; Prufrock and
Gerontion, for example, present themselves through what they perceive. Hence Eliot's poetry is often more complex and subtle than much Imagist verse because Eliot recognizes that, as one critic has said, "the important part of the act of perceiving for poetry is not the unifying of sensory impressions on a sub-intellectual level but is rather the 6 act of being aware of the accompanying emotions."
Eliot's images begin in perception but move beyond it into awareness, by exploring the causes and effects surrounding the perceptive act. In the Imagist poetry of Pound and Hulme, however, the presentation of accurate perceptions through precise imagery is, generally speaking, the main goal. To put it another way, Eliot's poetry continually searches for the meaning which lies behind the experience presented; in the Imagist poem, the experience is itself the most important thing. It is necessary, however, to explore in detail Eliot's relationship with itihese two poets. Then it will be seen that Hulme, while npt directly influencing Eliot's poetry as some writers have claimed, did share certain similarities, a discussion of which helps clarify Eliot's image. Ezra Pound, on the other hand, did exert an important influence on Eliot's poetry, after their first meeting in 1914, which caused Eliot to shift his imagistic methods somewhat in Pound's direction. This shift led Eliot to a greater imperson• ality of approach, in which images served to express social and cultural levels ,of awareness.
7Sister Mary Costello, Between Fixity and Flux; A Study of the Concept of Poetry in the Criticism of T. S, Eliot ""^Washington, D, C. :-%he Catholic University of America Press |Jc., 1947), p. 62. Regardless of the ideas which are expressed in
Eliot's poetry, each poem demonstrates his conviction
that the image cannot he separated from the "meaning."
Thought must undergo artistic transformation "before it can
"be poetry; "the poet who 'thinks' is merely the poet who can express the emotional equivalent of thought.
The image is the emotional equivalent, the "objective
correlative", in Eliot's poetry. Hence he criticizes
Shelley, for example, for relegating his images to a
function which is largely one of decoration: "When Shelley
has some definite statement to make, he simply says it;
keeps hie images oh one side and his meanings on the other."
The poetry of Swinburne, Eliot argues, is defective because
"what he gives is not images and ideas and music. . . [but]
one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all
three.Here meaning is lost through a lack of unity;
the images do not occupy a distinctive place in the total
scheme to whose unity they should contribute, but lose
their identity and precision in the general confusion. On
.*8"Shakespeare anet the Stoicism of Seneca*' (1927), p. 135.r
9 v# "A Note on Richard Crashaw", Por Lancelot Andrewes (New fork: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1929), p. 136, as quoted in Sister Costello, p. 73.
10 "SWinburne as Poet" (1920), p. 324. 8 the other hand, Dante, who for Eliot is supreme among poets, is praised "because his ideas are expressed in
"clear visual images" which are "coherent, in that each 11 reinforces the last,"
Eliot, like Dante, uses his images, not merely as detailed pictures of the external world, hut as concrete embodiments of feelings and ideas. They serve, in many pf his poems, to objectify, in an intense, dramatic way, his total awareness of a fictional mind undergoing exper• ience; a mind which;is itself only partially aware of the complexities of ^ite environment, and its own feelings '.<: t' i?- • and thoughts. In the poems which are not revelations of one or several characters—the satirical poems, for example- images are also important, tending at times to act as symbols for large bodies of fact.
But Eliot's images achieve their intense poetic vitality not because they are shorthand equations, but because they are charged with emotion; they have, in this sense, a life of their own. Por many of the most intense images, the origins are buried in the poet's own memory ! and cannot be summoned at will. He can only try, when they dp appear, to perpetuate their mystery in his poetry: Why, for all of us, out of all that we have heard, seen, felt, in a lifetime, do certain images recur, charged with emotion, rather than others? The song of one bird, the leap
1:L,,Danten (1929), pp. 242,246. of one fish, at a particular place and time, the scent of one flower, an old woman on a German mountain path, six ruffians seen through an open window playing cards at night at a small French railway junction where there was a water mill: such memories may have symbolic value, but of what we cannot tell, for they come to represent the depths of feeling into which we .cannot peer,1*
The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faher and Faber, Ltd., 19337T"p. 147. CHAPTER TWO
SOME EARLY INFLUENCES ON ELIOT'S IMAGERY
At the heart of Eliot's approach to poetry, and in particular his use of the image, lies a reaction against nineteenth century English poetry. As an undergraduate at Harvard shortly after the turn of the century, Eliot read the poetry of writers such as Shelley, Swinburne and Tennyson, but was soon dissatisfied with what he found there. He disliked, in particular, the tendency of these '' poets to force their emotions and sentiments upon the reader, as if the very fact that they were poets made such emotions worthy subjects for poetry. He was repelled also by the moralizing and false eloquence of much of Victorian poetry, by which the often harsh realities of the physical world were minimized or ignored. As Eliot wrote later in an essay on Dante, "everything. . . was cheerfulness, optimism, and hopefulness; and these words stood for a great deal of what one hated in the nineteenth century." j
Eliot, of course, was not alone in his antipathy toward the state of English poetry at this time. One of the earliest and most important figures in the Imagist Movement in London, T. E. Hulme, was also beginning during this period t o write poems from a similar anti-romantic standpoint. It is therefore helpful in dealing with Eliot's early "imagism" to compare his theory and practice
lHDante" (1929), Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd.,1951),p. 262. 11 with that of Hulme. But since—as I hope to show later— Hulme did not directly influence Eliot's poetry, it is first necessary, before drawing the above comparison, to examine several writers to whom Eliot turned, and who seemed to influence both the subject matter and the imagistic method of his early poetry. Eliot was quick to adopt, from the poetry of Jules Laforgue, the pessimism and irony, which provided a very useful antidote against romantic sentimentality. Baudelaire showed Eliot how a poet, living in a modern, often sordid urban world, could express his awareness of this reality by using a variety of concrete images drawn from the urban scene. Eliot was deeply impressed as well by Jacobean drama and the poetry of the Metaphysical poets, especially John Donne, which achieved great intensity and vividness by -fusing together many apparently disparate images. Lastly, Eliot made good use of the theories of the philosopher Henri Bergson, which emphasized, among other things, the complex relationship between perception and memory, and suggested to Eliot the possibility of expressing this relationship through images. These are some of-the major figures, then, whose influence contributed to Eliot's first volume of poetry, Prufrock and Other Observations. Eliot discovered French poetry, and through it his own voice as a poet, in Arthur Symons' study, The Symbolist 12 2 Movement in Literature. Insisting later upon the impor• tance of this work upon his own poetic growth, Eliot wrote, "I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt; hut for having read his "book, I should not, in the year 1908, 3 have heard of Laforgue." Moreover, Symons' hook itself may have had some effect on Eliot's poetic method. Ellman writes that Eliot was probably impressed "by what Symons had to say, in the essays on Nerval and Laforgue, of the method of setting familiar and. apparently alien things together, of detecting the hidden links of distant and ,4& divergent things." „We find this principle at work in almost all of Eliot's subsequent poetry, but perhaps the best known example occurs in the remarkable opening image of
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock": £*] Let us go then, you and I, "1 When the evening is spread out against the sky . .Like a patient etherised upon a table...,5 . /•.).
2 First published in 1899 and revised in 1908, and again in 1914, The version cited here is the 1908 text, including the 1919 additions, published in New York by E. P. Dutton & Oo., Inc., 1958, with an introduction by Richard Ellman. ,
3 Book Review, Criterion , IX (Jan. 1930),357.
^ Symons, p. xv. 5 Collected Poems 1909-1962 (London: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1963), p. 13. Subsequent quotations from Eliot's poems will be from this edition, and will be indicated by page numbers in parentheses following quotation. 13
Here Eliot heralds his method; within one compressed image, the traditional moods of sunset, the day's last flare before the threat of night, are intensified and dis• torted by the image of paralysis and sinister manipulation.
The patient is "spread out" and defenseless, as Prufrock's own consciousness will soon be, both to him and to the reader. This is the first of a pattern of images running through Eliot's entire poetic creation: the images of paralysis, which often merge effectively with another pre• dominant pattern, images of decay and deterioration. Eliot repeats and develops the image in "Preludes", where the soul of the street becomes "stretched tight across the
Skies / That fade behind a city block"(p. 24). The poem ends with an image which expresses a paralysis of another kind: "The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots"(p. 25). This image evokes, like the
Image of the hollow men parading dumbly around the prickly pear (p. 91), the horror of a timeless, empty ritual.
i While searching for new methods to express his yision of the urban existence, it was natural that Eliot would be attracted to Jules Laforgue, a poet in whose work, as Eliot read in Symons, "the old cadences, the old elo• quence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished." The effect of this attraction was twofold. In
6Symons, p. 57. 14 general, Laforgue (and also Baudelaire) opened, up for Eliot a whole new world of images; ironically, it was the world around him: I learned that the sort of material that I \ had, the sort of experience that an adolescent ; had had, in an industrial city of America, could he the material for poetry; and that the source of new poetry might "be found in what had been regarded hitherto as the impossible, the sterile, the intractably unpoetic,7
| The example set by these two poets encouraged Eliot's own ability to find the most significant images in his urban environment for conveying its emptiness and futility; summing up his life, Prufrock concludes, "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" (p. 14). Living in a city means solitude and loneliness, but as Eliot read in Symons, it is "one of the terrors of human exis• tence that we may be led at once to seek and to shun solitude; unable to bear the mortal pressure of its em- brace, unable to endure the nostalgia of its absence," Prufrock senses this paradox in himself by seeing it in others: i Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?,.. (p. 15) Here the image of the lonely men leaning out from their windows as if attempting to escape from the self-imposed
7"Talk on Dante", Adelohi. XXVII (1951), 107,
8Symons, p. 11. 15 privation of their rooms dramatizes Prufrock's own situation, where a desire for vital experience is countered by a strong fear of it.
In "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", Eliot employs images of urban decay to represent the speaker's state of mind:
A broken spring in a factory yard, Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left Hard and curled and ready to snap, (p. 27)
Like the spring, the mind of the speaker has become hardened into certain near-hysterical modes; it has decayed and lost its resiliency. So the images of "twisted things" which form the back-bone of the poem are an expression of how the speaker sees his world, "A twisted branch upon the beach" (p. 26) transforms itself through association into the knife whose "last twist" (p, 28) spells the only life that he knows.
Among the images of urban life are several of which Eliot makes frequent use. One is the omnipresent smoke, j symbol of industrial contamination, which "*:.,:,slides along the street/ Rubbing its back upon the window-panes"(p. 14), Like the images of fog which often accompany it, it is usual• ly associated with a complex of various unpleasant feelings, and is present as a background to the action. In "The Love Song of J, Alfred Prufrock", it suggests foreboding, be• cause it is brought to life in a "beautiful yet sinister way. 16 And as George Williamson says,
with the image of the fog as cat we have another reflection of his Prufrock's mental state: desire which ends in inertia. If the cat image suggests sex, it also suggests the greater desire of inactivity. The speaker sees the evening in aspects of somnolence, or of action lapsing into in• action, both artificial and natural—sleep and etherization. The fog's settling down prompts the reflection that "indeed there will be time" for its more suggestive ac• tivity, and for his own,9
In "Portrait of a Lady", the attempted verbal se• duction of the young man begins and ends "Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon"(p, 18), The air clears only to permit the experience of the poem to occur; the speaker is left in the first agonies of self-doubt at the close, "... sitting pen in hand / With the smoke coming down above the housetops"(p,22). The smoke here seems to symbolize the falseness and obscurity of the shell or mask behind which the speaker hides in his efforts to avoid the entreaties of the lady. It also ;suggests the screen of politeness that she erects in front of.a desperate desire, which nevertheless breaks through in the poem. "Preludes" begins in a smoky atmosphere of despair and disgust:
yA Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysis (New York: The Noonday Press, 1953),""p.60. 17
The winter evening settles down With smell, of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days.(p. 23)
This poem can in fact be seen, with its "thousand sordid images"(p. 24) as the "butt-ends" of Prufrock's days, his past which he is unable to get rid of, or "spit out".
A second and more complex influence on Eliot1s imagery occurred as the result of the temporary adoption of the Laforguian attitude. Hence the various protagonists— Prufrock, the young man in "Portrait", and especially the speakers in "conversation Gallante" and "La Piglia Che Piange"—adopt an ironic mask behind which to hide their real feelings. And they will not, as Symons says of La• forgue himself, permit themselves at any moment the luxury 10 of dropping this mask. The irony is often self-parody^and is reflected in the deliberate choice of what may be termed images of frivolity. Prufrock, unable even to flee from;the lady at •^Symons, p. 61.
11Hugh Kenner, in The Invisible Poet: T. S. Ellot(New York: Citadel Press, 1964), p. 16, has observed that it was because "Laforgue discovered the potentialities of self-parody not in poetry at large but in poetry of a circumscribed era, in a lyric mode closely allied with that of Dowson and Symons, one alone among the possible derivations from Baudelaire: this fact helps explain his sudden power-to engulf a man who had been shaping slender lyrics at Harvard In the first decade after the nineties," 18 the top of the stairs, asks in acute self-mockery: "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?"(p. 14), a line borrowed from 12 Laforgue. In the "Portrait", the speaker shrugs off a: moment of genuine doubt with the forced callousness of "This music is successful with a 'dying fall'/ Now that we talk of dying—"(p. 22). But the image from Twelfth Night, where music is the "food of love", suggests by ironic contrast the complete absence of love behind the forced politeness of the protagonists. "Conversation Gallante", heavily influenced by 13 Laforgue's "Autre Complainte de Lord Pierrot", is a com• plex pyramid of ironic reversals, a poem, as Grover Smith rightly says, whose "excessive difficulty does not hide ..14 its indignificance." It is marred by excessive posturing and dandyism of tone; yet Eliot's unfailing ability to choose the correct image is present even here. The image of the moon as '. . '. Prester John's balloon Or an old battered lantern hung aloft To light poor travellers to their distress.'(p. 35)
12Prom a letter to Jules' sister Marie in 1881, as quoted in Warren Ramsey, Jules Laforgue and The Ironic Inheritance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953),p. 38. 13 Appears complete in Symons, Symbolist Movement, p. 61. 14 T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), p. 27. 19 underlines by irony the speaker's failure to respond with emotion to life, a failure only partially concealed by his attempts at wit. Both he and the girl are in a sense "poor travellers" in a world in which the romantic life, as sym• bolized by the fabulous Prester John, can never be realized. The young man's expansive wit and imagery only serve to make him in the end a rather pathetic figure. Here is imagery adapted to the purpose of self-irony.
The poignancy of failure is especially present in "La Piglia Che Piange", where Eliot, employing the Laforguian device of "doubling himself15becomes both the observer of and the participator in the action, a heavily Romantic parting of lovers. Surprisingly, however, the parting has not actually occurred; it is only an act in the poetic imagination of the poet-observer or director. Yet it is more than that, since the poet, as a participator, is forced to hide his true feelings of grief through an ironic pose. Hence a contrast is established between the event-as-real and the event-as-imagined in the mind of the poet. The poet-participator suffers, as the repetition of the lovely
image of longing testifies: But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair,(p.36) and the girl from whom he has parted compels his imagination
15Smith, p. 28. 20
many days, Many days and many hours: Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.(p. 36)
But the poet-director, adopting the ironic mask, will find
Some way incomparahly light and deft, Some way we should "both understand, Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.(p. 36)
"La Piglia" can he viewed as a poem whose subject is in fact, the creation of a poem, in the Laforguian manner, by depriving a situation of its traditional Romantic aurathrough the use of irony. In the present case, both treatments, the Romantic and the ironic, are given together. The poem demonstrates in miniature Eliot's own position as a poet during this early period, rejecting one mode and adopting another.
Turning to Baudelaire, we may note that it is largely in the matter of imagery that an indebtedness is evident.
Several items composing Baudelaire's stock of images are used by Eliot, especially in his early poems. ' In "Rhapsody", for example, the cat which '
'. . .flattens itself in the gutter, Slips out its tongue And devours a morsel of rancid butter,'(p. 27), and the cat in "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", convey
the same feeling of mystery and slight disgust-1 as do the 21
cats in Baudelaire's "Les Chats" who ". . . cherchent le silence et l'horreur des tenebres." Eliot's "Preludes" seems to draw a good deal of its inspiration and its imagery from "Le Crepuscule du Matin". Both poems deal with the hour "ou l'ame, sous le poids du corps reveche 17 et lourd,/lraite les combats de la lampe et du jour."
Each poem relies to a large extent on shockingly sordid urban imagery: the woman in "The Preludes" clasps "... the yellow soles of feet / In the palms of both soiled hands"(p. 24), whereas in Baudelaire's poem, "Les femmes de plaisir, la paupiere livide,/ Bouche ouverte, dormaient 18 leurs sorameil stupide." . Eliot, in fact, translates Baudelaire's nineteenth century Paris— L'aurore grelottante en robe rose et verte S'avancait lentement sur la Seine deserte,
Et le sombre Paris, en se frottant les yeux,ig Empoignait ses outils, vieillard laborieux —into twentieth century London:
The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer Prom the sawdust-trampled street With all its muddy feet that press To early coffee stands, (p. 23)
Charles Baudelaire, Le Fleurs du Mal et Oeuvres Choisles, ed. Wallace Fowlie (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), p. 66. 17 19
Baudelaire, p. 82. A Baudelaire, p. 82.
18Baudelaire, p. 82. 22
Baudelaire's poetry was not merely a source-book for imagery. Like Laforgue, Baudelaire exerted a more profound influence on Eliot through his method of using images. "I think that from Baudelaire I learned first," wrote Eliot, "a precedent for . . , the possibility of fusion between the sordidly realistic and the phantasma• goric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-
of-fact and the fantastic."20 This quotation describes, in fact, the basic method of Eliot's poetry: the fusion of apparently disparate images together to form a whole. In this way, Eliot found it possible to convey not only the sharp details of his urban environment, but also, by jux• taposing these details with elements drawn from elsewhere, convey his awareness of their significance. Baudelaire's greatness, according to Eliot, lay in his ability to achieve this suggestiveness in his imagery:
It is not merely in the imagery of common life, not merely in the use of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis, but in the elevation of such imagery to the first intensity—presenting It as it is, yet making it represent something much more than itself—that Baudelaire has created a mode of release and expression for other men,21 Baudelaire's "Spleen"~provides several good examples
of such imagery of first intensity. Proceeding by a process
20"Talk on Dante", p. 107.
21"Baudelaire" (1930), p. 426. 23 of objectification, Baudelaire creates images here to represent his feelings of "boredom, in a way which combines both "the sordidly realistic" and "the phantasmagoric":
Pluvius, irritated with the entire city, Pours from his urn in great waves a dismal cold Over the pale inhabitants of the neighboring cemetery And mortality over the foggy outskirts. My cat on the stones looking for a litter Ceaselessly moves its thin mangy body; The soul of an old poet wanders along the rain spout With the sad voice of a chilblained phantom.
The bell mourns, and the smoky log Accompanies in falsetto the wheezing clock, While in a pack of cards full of filthy odors, The fatal bequest of an old dropsical woman, The handsome knave of hearts and the queen of spades Talk darkly about their dead love,22
The last stanza of Eliot's "Preludes" gains its effect of horror through a similarly bizarre combination of images:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh; The worlds revolve like ancient women Gathering fuel in vacant lots. (p. 25) These lines—along with those which open "The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"—are only unusual instances of Eliot's general image technique, acquired in part from a study of Baudelaire's poetry. But Eliot also found the method of image juxtaposition operating in the plays of the
Jacobean dramatists, and the poems of the Metaphysical poets
Baudelaire, p. 68, translated by Wallace Powlie. 24
he was to claim later that the "telescoping of images and
multiple associations ... is one of the sources of the
vitality of their language."23By means of a verse which is anchored in the concrete, dramatists like John Webster were often able to create through their imagery an intense dramatic effect: Dost thou imagine, thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a shameful fall? Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think to root thyself in dead men's graves, And yet to prosper?24
In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Eliot uses simi• lar extravagant images for dramatic purposes;, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas "(p. 15). Such dramatic posturing, pathetic in Prufrock's case, is the frequent rhetorical position of many of the characters in Jacobean drama. At crucial moments, they step out of themselves, as it were, and become conscious of themselves as acting. As Eliot says, "the really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare occurs in situations where a 25 character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light','
23"The Metaphysical Poets"(1921), p. 283,
24 The White Devil. IV,iii,120-4, in Three Jacobean Tragedies, ed. with an introduction by Gamini SalgSdo (London: Penguin Books, 1965)., p. 217, 25" 'Rhetoric' and Poetic Drama" (1919), p. 39. __ 25 and he cites as examples the final, and remarkably simi• lar, speeches of Othello, Corialanus and Timon. In the case of Prufrock there is the flamboyant and slightly ridiculous, "I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach" (p. 17), Eliot continually uses in this poem extravagant images for Prufrock's feelings about him• self, as, for example;
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet—and here's no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat and snicker, And in short, I was afraid, (p, 16)
all of which ring unmistakably of the Jacobean drama. Yet it was the intensity of fusion in the imagery of this drama which interested Eliot the most, and this in• tensity is achieved to an even greater degree in the verse of the Metaphysical poets. In his essay on these poets, Eliot makes several remarks which reveal that he was, in his own way, attempting to achieve similar effects through images in his own poems. In particular, he felt that the Metaphysical poets expressed their thoughts in concrete images; they could "feel their thought as immediately as
the odour of a rose."26 John Donne's poems are especially remarkable for their sensuous vitality. This is often
26"Metaphysical Poets", p. 287. 26 achieved "by the piling of image upon image or the develop• ing and expanding of one image, much a3 Eliot does in the following: And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wiggling on the wall, Then how should I "begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?(p. 15)
But Donne's originality was not, in Eliot's opinion, so much a matter of technique as it was a way of expressing reality from the point of view of a remarkably aware mind. It is obvious, moreover, that Eliot was anxious to develop such an awareness, which he considered to be a special characteristic of a poet: an ability to amalgamate exper• iences and express the process of doing so in his poetry. Or, in Eliot's words; When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its *;;;:••.. work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes,27
We have examined various causes which combined t o produce two main effects in Eliot's imagery: the shock of recognition in images of the sordid modern metropolis, and
the peculiar power produced by combining paradoxical oh
The Metaphysical Poets", p. 287 27 elements to produce an image "rich and strange". Images have been called here the product of Eliot's "awareness" rather than of his perception, because the latter term tends to imply an activity in the present, isolated from the past. In reality this is impossible, since what we perceive is determined in part by past experience;
Prufrock's "For I have known them all already, known them all... . " (p. 14) provides a motive for all his perceptions and actions in the present of the poem. This principle— the merging of past and present—is a prevalent concern in Eliot's poetry, and the name qf_HenriBergson figures .prominently here. Eliot had the opportunity of attending Bergson's immensely popular lectures when he was in Prance from
1910 until the fall of 1911.28 It was during this period that Bergson expounded many of the ideas which had already 29 appeared in publication, at least in French; and while it is true that Eliot's later and more profound interest in P. H. Bradley caused him to mistrust much of Bergson's 30 philosophy, at this early stage in his development he
28Smith, p. 4. Bergson was a professor at the College de Prance from 1900 to 1914. See Harold A. Larrabee's introduction to Selections from Bergson (New York: Appleton- Century-Crofts, Inc., 1949), p.xiv.
29That is: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), Time and Free Will (1889). Matter and Memory (1896). Creative Evolution (1907). See introduction to Selections from Bergson 30 Kenner, p. 46. Por Eliot's debt to Bradley, Kennerls whole chapter here is very helpful. 28 evidently found it very useful to his poetry. According to Bergson, the process of perception is not unique "but is linked inseparably to memory. This is due to the fact that all our past experiences are stored in the recesses of our minds; that is, they become memories. We are only conscious of them when they be• come, as Bergson says,11 detached ... from the depth of our personality, drawn to the surface by perceptions which resemble them. "31 Bergson refers to both the thing perceived and the memory which collaborates with the present as an image: '"While external perception provokes on our part movements which retrace its main lines, our memory directs upon the perception received the memory- images which resemble it and which are already sketched out by the movements themselves."32 Thus our personal memories govern our understanding of what we perceive even when, according to Bergson, the perceived object is unfamiliar to us:
If the retained or remembered Image will not cover all the details of the image that is being perceived , an appeal is made to the deeper and more distant regions of the memory, until other details that are already known come to project themselves upon these details that remain unperceived.33
31lntroductlon to Metaphysics, trans, by T. E. Hulme., :(New York: Q. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912), p. 10.
32From Matter and Memory, in Selections from Bergson, p. 52. All future references to Selections will be to. Matter and Memory.
33iI^p0avac-felon to Metaphysics, p. 12. - 29
Perception is controlled by our past; yet paradoxically,
"there are no two identical moments in the life of the same conscious being • . • because the second moment always contains, over and above the first, the memory that the first has bequeathed to it."34 The above process is, in a sense, reversible. Bergson distinguishes between "pure memory" that has not emerged through perceptions which resemble it, but remains hidden from the consciousness, and the memory-image. In fact, without the process of perception memory cannot be said to exist, since we are unaware of it: Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and inversely, a memory ... only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other ... .35
The image is vital in Bergson1s philosophy, since it is through the image that the ultimate goal—the intuition of duration or flux which is the only reality- comes nearest to being achieved: j
It is true that no image can reproduce exactly the original feeling ... but the image has at least this advantage, that it keeps us in the concrete. No image can replace the intu• ition of duration; but many diverse images,
^Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 12.
Selections, p. 48, " 30 borrowed from very different orders of things, may, "by the convergence of their action, direct consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to be seized.36
Now since many of Eliot's dramatic poems begin in medias res, they are preceded in our imagination by a past filled with certain experiences. We can guess, for example, from Prufrock's present state that his past has been largely one of tedium and frustration. But Eliot is not concerned with this sort of hypothetical past; he is concerned with memory, and the details of this concern strongly suggest a Bergsonian influence.
At least one of the early poems—"Rhapsody on a
Windy Night"—depends for its effect very largely on Berg- 3"7 son's theories. The speaker begins by hearing "Whispering lunar incantations. . ."(p. 26) which dissolve "the floors of memory", permitting a whole series of memory-images to come into being. Furthermore, Eliot employs the Bergson• ian view that because of the growing wave of the past,each moment in an individual life is different from' its prede• cessor. The presentation of this view is accomplished by striving to eliminate any suggestion of conscious or de• liberate association. As Smith says, "the dissolution of orderly thought into an irrational, almost surrealistic 36
Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 15-6. ^"Preludes" may also draw its inspiration from Bergson. In this poem, the process by which perception draws from a 31 collage of discontinuous mental impressions obeys the laws
of instinctive consciousness according to Bergson,1,38 In
the case of the speaker in this poem, memory is perhaps better left below consciousness, since the images which do present themselves are distorted and full of horror.
But perception draws them out regardless, as it must. It
is interesting to notice too that the moon has lost her memory, which in Bergsonian terms is to be totally cut off
from one's past. Pictured here as an old prostitute (the memory-image from the actual prostitute of stanza two) ,
she has indeed lost the tradition of beauty and love which
is her past:.
"Regard the moon La lune ne garde aucune rancune, She winks a feeble eye, She smiles into corners. She smooths the hair of the grass. The moon has lost her memory, • , , (p. 27)
store of memory-images is suggested by the lines:
You dozed, and watched the night revealing The thousand sordid images Of which your soul was constituted, , . . (p, 24)
Moreover, the fancies curled around "these images" (those in the poem) suggest memory-images of possible hope and transcendence which do not "appear" but of which the poet is half-aware. They are borderline images.
Page 24, 32
But it is the lines just "before the close of the poem— "Memory' / You have the key. . ."(p. 27)—which do most to justify a Bergsonian reading. Not only does the speaker have the "key" to his memory—his present experiences— which, tragically, he cannot use, "but his memory is the key to the ordering and relating of the fragments of the same present experiences. Eliot seems to "be treating the past here as a trap from which present experience cannot release us; this is the horror, in other words, in the Bergsonian world in which there is no present; in which "when we think this present as going to "be, it exists not 39 yet; and when we think it^as existing, it is already past." If our past endures and the self is a succession of states, or, more accurately, a continuous flux, then the reality is mobility, what Bergson calls "things in the making;"40 Analysis or conceptualization cannot grasp this flux, since they can only substitute theoretical discontinuities for 41 an actual process. Only intuition--"Intellectual sympathy"— is capable of sensing this reality, Bergson's account of this intuitive process is very interesting, since it is much like the artistic process in 39Selections, p. 56,
40Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 65,
41Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 9. Bergson later defines it as "the metaphysical investigation of what i8 essential and unique in the object." 33
Eliot's poetry. After gathering the sum of his observations and experiences, accumulating them and fusing them together, the individual must make "an often very painful effort" to place himself at the heart of his experience, "to seek as deeply as possible an impulse"; after which he need only let himself go.42In a like manner, Eliot depicts the poet as fusing together in his poem the feelings, images, etcetera, which form the contents of the "receptacle" that is his mind. Both writers seem to emphasize the accumulation of experience and the need to fuse this experience together; and both Berg• son and Eliot would agree that one's "intellectual sympathy" is the only valid clue to the reality of experience.
We may go farther, in fact, and regard Eliot's image as an attempt to capture the flux, to fuse past, present and future together. Now,- since the image is concrete and is really anchored in time, it cannot "stop" time; it does the next best thing, however, by capturing an instantaneous 43 . sense-impression as exactly as possible. And according to Bergson, as we have already mentioned, the convergence of the action of a series of diverse images can lead us to an intuition. The image can approximate- the flux because it AO Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 90. *°T. E, Hulme, much closer to Bergson than Eliot, demands that the poet seek to render the "exact curve" of what he perceives through images, "the very essence of an intuitive language,"See "Romanticism and Classicism", Speculations (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd*, 1924), pp, 132,. 135, 34 contains the past (it is influenced "by memory),the present, (since it is an act of perception), and the future (it affects all future action.) Briefly, then, Bergson's philosophy seems to have been present in Eliot's thoughts when he composed poems such as "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", "Preludes", and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night", which use images to convey, among other things, the passing of time, and the duration of time in the individual. In other words, the theories of Bergson helped Eliot enlarge the scope of awareness in his poetry by permitting both memory and perception to function together. It is true also that Bergson seems to have remained a part of Eliot's experience until "Tradition and the Indi• vidual Talent", in which the former's notion of personal duration is extended to the concept of a literary past whose nature is altered by the addition of every new work. In short, Bergson seems to have provided a system of thought upon which a theory of poetry could rest, a theory which could also incorporate similar techniques of composition by such widely different poets as the Symbolists and the later J 44 . ' Elizabethan dramatists.
44It is important to mention here that Eliot, while using Bergsonian theories of memory and perception, did not share Bergson's belief as to the nature of reality: We have no right, except in the most provisional way, to speak of my. experience, since the I is a construction out of experience, an abstraction, from it; and the thats, the browns and hards and flats, are equally ideal constructions from experience, 35
Having discussed some of the elements which found their place in Eliot's imagistic methods in his early poetry, we may further clarify this poetry through a comparison with the Imagist T. E. Hulme. The fact that several writers have commented upon the similarities ex• isting between these two poets, who began composing poetry at about the same time, leads to a question of influence: did Hulme's poetry and aesthetic have any bearing upon Eliot's early "imagism"? Hulme is often honoured as the founder of the Imagist Movement in England, although his contribution as a poet was slight. However, he wrote an important body of prose before his death in 1917, including many remarks on the role of the image in modern poetry, and this work has been viewed subsequently as a contributing factor in Eliot's early practice.
There is no doubt, first of all, that Eliot read some of Hulme's essays—including his best-known work, "Romanti• cism and Classicism"—shortly after they appeared in a volume entitled Speculations, published in 1924, and was
as ideal as atoms. An elan vital, a flux, is equally abstracted from experience, for it is only in departing from immediate experience that we are aware of such a process. In short, we can only discuss experience from one side and then from the other, correcting these.
See Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley(London; Faber & Faber, 1964), p. 19. 36 45 impressed by them. He also admired the six poems which appeared in an appendix as "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme." These include "Autumn", "Mana Aboda", "Above the Dock", "The Embankment", and "Conversion", But, since these poems appeared as early as 1912 in an appendix to Ezra Pound's Ripostes, and since many of Hulme's lectures and essays were published during his lifetime as articles in A, R. Orage's New Age, we must ask if Eliot was exposed to, and influenced by, Hulme's poetry and criticism when they first appeared. On the extent to which Hulme's theories may have affected Eliot's practice, critical opinion varies. One claim at least may be disposed of: that of Genesius Jones, 46 who states that EliotIhew Hulme personally, Eliot has
since denied that he ever met Hulme,47 But while recog•
nizing this fact, Grover Smith remarks that "through Pound ^Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy pf Art, ed. Herbert Read (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1960).According to J. R. Daniells, in "T. S, Eliot and his Relation to T. E. Hulme", University of Toronto Quarterly. II (April, 1933), 381, Eliot included it among a list of books, along with his Criterion, which illustrated a tendency toward Classicism. The rest of Hulme's essays and poetic fragments appear in Further Speculations, ed. by Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955). 46 . Approach to the Purpose: A Study of the Poetry of T. S. Eliot (London: Hodder-and Stoughton, 1964), p,157n. 47Letter to the Editor, Times Literary Supplement. August 9, 1957^p. 483b. ~~~ ~~ — ~" • 37 some of Eliot's early verse had been influenced by Hulme's 48 theories." Both of Hulme's biographers to some extent support this view. According to Michael Roberts, Eliot's 49 poetry "is full of the sort of imagism that Hulme wanted" and Alun Jones claims that Hulme's theory of poetry "finds its most coherent expression neither in the poems of the Imagists, nor in his own poems, but in the early poetry of 50 T. S. Eliot." Kristian Smidt adds, more cautiously, Eliot never met Hulme. ... But he had long been the center of a group of philosophers, writers and artists, and his spirit and ideas lived on in the literary circles of London when Eliot came to the capital.51 Such biographical information as is available makes any definite conclusion on this matter impossible. We know that "Hulme published no articles exclusively concerned with poetics. ... but in 1914 he was one of a series of lec• turers in Kensington Town Hall on new developments in art 52 and literature, reading a paper on modern poetry." Eliot was in London in the spring of 1914, but only to pass through l ' *°Page 318. ,
49 T. Ef Hulme (London: Paber & Faber, 1938), p.225.
50The Life and Opinions of Tj_ E^ Hulme (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), p. 53.
51Poetrv and Belief in the Work of T^ S^ Eliot (New York: The Humanities Press, 1961), p. 23.
52Stanley K. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951, p. 48. This was, no doubt, "A Lecture on Modern Poetry" which, as Hynes says, was probably given as a lecture in 1908 or 1909, and revised in 1914, when it was again delivered. See Further Speculations ,Exii. 38 53 on his way to a fellowship in Germany. He returned to London in September or very shortly "before:
At the outbreak of the war I was in Germany and only succeeded in making my way to Eng• land three weeks later. It is therefore probable that I presented myself at Mr. Pound's door early in September, 1914.54
According to Pound, Hulme may have already enlisted 55 and gone off to the war by October. There is some doubt about this, however: Herbert Read, for example, is of the opinion that Hulme may have remained in England until shortly after Christmas of this year.56 It is therefore just pos• sible that Eliot may have heard "A Lecture on Modern Poetry,", if it was delivered during the last four months of 1914. But Eliot, who is always so scrupulous about acknowledging any indebtedness to outside influences, makes no mention of it at all. He may, of course, have read the New Age articles which Hulme was writing during that year and, indeed, had 57 been writing since 1909. They are indispensable records of — I 53Smith, p. 4. ^TLS letter, 1957, p. 507b.
55From an unpublished letter by Pound, now in the Yale University collection, Quoted by Herbert Newton Schneidau, Ezra Pound's Criticism and the Influence of his Literary Relationships in London, 1908-1920 (.Ann Arbor. Michigan: University Microfilms, Inc.,1963), p. 238,
E£ Speculations, p. x. 57See "Appendix C: A Bibliography of Hulme's WritingsJ', Further Speculations, pp. 221-3. The "Notebook of T. E. H.}' which appears in Speculations as "Humanism and the Religious 39
Hulme's thought and they form, as we have seen, a large part of the two published books. But since none of these essays is devoted to his poetic—they deal insteai with Bergson, theories of modern art, and philosophical spe• culation—they could not have been much use to Eliot's poetry. In short, it is reasonable to conclude that Hulme's theory of the image had no direct influence on Eliot's poetry prior to 1924.58 However, even if Eliot was indeed exposed to Hulme's theories by Pound, or through Pound's criticism, Eliot's later praise of Hulme as "a man who wrote several remarkable poems himself, and who also had an aptitude for theology',' 59 denies by implication that Hulme's role in his own poetry was an important one.
Attitude" ran, for example, in seven installments between December 1915 and February 1916. 58 Eliot has made a comment that verifies this conclusion, while rather mysteriously advancing support for the view that he may have influenced Hulme, in the TLS letter cited above. Hulme's essay "Romanticism and Classicism" opens with the pre• diction that "after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for a classical revival," Eliot admits: "if he made the prophecy in question during the last foUr months of 1914, and if Mr, Pound was in close enough touch with him to have shown him the typescript of my poems, then it is just possible though highly improbable, that he was aware of my existence a and had me in mind," And when Hulme remarked in "A Lecture on Modern Poetry": "What has found expression in painting as Impressionism will soon find expression in poetry as free verse. The vision of a London street at midnight, with its long rows of light, has produced several attempts at repro• duction in verse."(Further Speculations, p, 72;, he may have been thinking of Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" which was composed in 1911 and may have been part of the above typescript, 59The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), p. 149, 40
It must be pointed out, however, that when Eliot composed his little-known poem "The Death of St. Narcissus" in 1912, at least one of Hulme's poems—"Conversion"—may 60 have been in his mind: CONVERSION
Light-hearted I walked into the valley wood In the time of hyacinths, Till beauty like a scented cloth Cast over, stifled me. I was bound Motionless and faint of breath By loveliness that is her own eunuch. Now pass I to the final river Ignominiously, in a sack, without sound, As any peeping Turk to the Bosphorus.61
This poem may have appealed to Eliot because of its sophis- icated manner and sensitive, Prufrockian tone; the final defeat in the last three lines seems to be faintly echoed by the subtle combination of fear and self-pity in
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown, (p. 17).
Moreover, Hulme's line, "In the time of hyacinths*,' may have helped suggest to Eliot the various hyacinth images in his poetry, culminating in the hyacinth girl episode in The Waste Land (p. 64).
60Smith, p. 34.
61Speculatlons. p. 267. 41
But such "borrowing says very little, since Eliot incorporates many words and phrases from other sources into his own poetry, often without being much concerned with the ideas and techniques which created them; or he sees in these words a feeling which has been captured successfully and which he can contrast for effect against a new poetic environment.
The kind of influence which is more important—the kind ex• erted, for example, by Jules Laforgue—affects not only the poetry itself but the way in which it is created. Hulme's poetry did not influence Eliot in this way, and in fact could not have done so, because Eliot and Hulme were separated by a difference in their whole approach to poetry. But by con• sidering Hulme's poetic, and in particular his ideas on the function of the image, we can clarify Eliot's approach to the image.
T, E. Hulme began with certain critical impressions which he wanted to express or "fix" a fairly explicit theory which it was the purpose of his poetry to demonstrate. The governing principle behind Hulme's poetry—in fact, behind his entire thought—was, as mentioned earlier, a distinct aversion to romanticism, and a desire to reinstate classical standards in art. "I object even to the best of the romantics," wrote
Hulme,"I object to the sloppiness which doesn't consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about some- thing or other."
62"Romanticism and Classicism". Speculations, p. 126. All subsequent references to Speculations are to this essay unless othewise noted. 42
He especially disliked the egotism of many of the Romantics, who felt that their poetry was capable of including, or even taking the place of, all other areas of experience: You don!t believe in God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. ... Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion, (p, us)
Hulme shared with Eliot the"classical,,view, stemming from a belief in Original Sin, that man was essentially a limited being and that therefore perfection was not of this world. But Hulme's greater pessimism led him to believe "the cosmos is organised in parts; the rest is cinders"(p. 220). Such a belief could only lead to the view that language is largely an arbitrary and unsatisfactory system imposed on the flowing, cindery chaos of reality. And since language could never remain stable, poetry could not hope to ever express profound and permanent emotions or truths. There• fore, modern poetry "has become definitely and finally \.\ introspective and deals with expression and communication of momentary phases in the poet's mind." Its goal is, at best, to express through images, the exact nature of the cinders, the concrete world of reality, preferring the light of ordinary day to~the light "that never was on land
or seaVCp. 127).
"A Lecture on Modern Poetry", Further Speculations,p. 72. 43
For Hulme, poetry is an intensely visual art, in that "each word must "be an image seen, not a counter."0^
Ideas are not to "be tolerated unless they are expressed through concrete images, Hulme seemed to possess, in this regard, a sincere, almost mystical "belief in the power of the object. He writes that "one might even say that the actual physical objects observed by men have altered the course of thought. For example, the mirror in the theory of perception, and the wheel in Eastern thought," The poet's task, according to Hulme, is to deal with these objects and the emotions that they invoke in him. In other words, if he is "moved by a certain landscape, he selects from that certain images which, put into juxtaposition in separate lines, serve to suggest and evoke the state he 66 feels," Hulme discusses this process further, using an interesting analogy: .v To this piling-up and juxtaposition of distinct images in different lines, one can find a fanci• ful analogy in music, A great revolution in music when, for the melody that is one-dimensional music, was substituted harmony which moves in two. Two visual images form what one may call a visual chord. They unite to suggest ari image which is different to both.67
Hulme is also, like Pound, fond of seeing poetry in sculp• tural terms. He speaks of the new poetry moulding images
65"Searches after Heality II: Haldane," Further Speculations, p. 12. 66 "A Lect.u.^ Further Speculations, p. 73.
67"A Lecture on Modern Poetry,", Further Speculations, p. 73. 44 into definite shapes, as well as chords; of building up a "plastic" image rather than hypnotizing the reader with the effect of a repeated rhythm. But while allowing for a certain degree of fluidity in his image structures, the poet must at the same time seek the "exact curve" of his feelings and thoughts, constantly carving away all un• necessary material, since
language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing hut a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts.. . .{The artist] will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an
idea in the mind; (p. 132).
It is easy to see certain similarities between Hulme's approach to poetry and Eliot's. Both insist, for example, upon the need for clear and exact images; both are aware of the effect to be obtained by juxtaposing images, startling the reader into new ways of regarding his world, and also binding the poem into an organic rather than an artificial unity. Eliot's view on this matter of unity could serve for Hulme also:
The work of poetry is often said to be performed by the use of images; by a cumulative succession of images each fusing with the next;„_or by the rapid and unexpected combination of images apparently unrelated, which have their - - 45
relationship enforced upon them by the mind of the author,68 But anti-Romanticism, which in Eliot's poetry finds its expression in the general theory of impersonality, is carried to a greater extreme in the poems of Hulme, In his efforts to prove "that beauty may he in small, dry things" (p. 131), Hulme deliberately sets out to reverse the Romantic mode of all-inclusiveness and its tendency to optimism by reducing the scope of poetry. Such a reduction is a direct result of Hulme's "classical" view of the limi• tations of man. He distinguishes between two views of man's nature: One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well,- a re• servoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical(p. 117).
His poetry attempts to reflect man's limitation. A good example is the following poem: ABOVE THE DOCK
Above the quiet dock in midnight, Tangled in the tall mast's corded height,
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away &g Is but a child's balloon, forgotten after play.
68"Prose and VerseJ' The Chapbook, XXII (1921), 9..
69St>eculations. p. 266, 46
Hulme, refusing to idealize the moon in the traditional manner as a symbol of man's aspirations, reduces it to a toy, tangled and caught in the mast of a ship. He em• ploys his characteristic method here: images create an analogy by which great objects are compared to small and commonplace ones, resulting simultaneously in the ironic and often humourous reduction in importance of the former, and the elevation in magnitude of the latter.
Now it is true that many of Eliot's images are of common, mundane realities such as cigarette-butts and the smells of steaks in passageways. Generally, however, the purpose of such imagery is to contribute to the presenta• tion of the perceiver's complex state of mind and his awareness of it. Eliot occasionally employs images by which the important is rendered trivial; in the "Preludes",1, for example, the following lines provide an ironic commen• tary on the outworn poetic image of dawn as "rosy-fingered" or "in russet mantle clad": j
The morning comes to consciousness Of faint stale smells of beer Prom the sawdust-trampled street.(p. 23).
But whereas Hulme asks the reader to regard with pleasure and amusement his inversions, Eliot's images, in the context of the poems in which they appear, prevent us from regarding them lightly. The commonplace, especially in the Prufrock 47 collection, is decidedly tragic, even—perhaps more so-— when the tone is ironic: "Shall I part my hair "behind? Do
I dare to eat a peach?"(p. 17) Eliot, in short, uses his images to achieve an intensity, a depth of feeling, which
is foreign to Hulme's poetry and his theory as well. Eliot's "classicism" does not forbid the expression of deep emotion.
On the contrary, the emotion becomes the more poignant for the ironic mode of expression which controls and understates it. Hulme allows a "cheerful, dry and sophisticated" tone to mask and even replace the deeper emotional response. Hulme's "Autumn" employs the same procedure as "Above
the Dock": A touch of cold in the Autumn night;-- I walked abroad, And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge Like a red-faced farmer, I did not stop to speak, but nodded, And round about were the wistful stars With white faces like town children,70
This poem suffers, however, because Hulme feels obliged to resort to traditional poetic devices, rather than images. Since, to use his own words, "the poet must ".• : continually be creating new images, and his sincerity may be measured by •' the number of his imagee|'<: Hulme's poem fails by his own standards, too. However we may question his criteria for "sincerity',' the fact remains that "Autumn" is imprecise and
70Sx>eculations. p. 265, 48 sentimental "by the Imagist'Standards which Hulme contributed.
It loses intensity and directness through the use of two similes, the banal "touch of cold", and two rather shopworn adjectives, "ruddy" and "wistful". By contrast, Eliot's
"Preludes",, his most "Imagistic" poem, is vivid and power• ful because it relies on concrete presentation and not analogy:
The winter evening settles down With smell of steaks in passageways. Six o'clock. The burnt-out ends of smoky days. And now a gusty shower wraps The grimy scraps Of withered leaves about your feet And newspapers from vacant lots; The showers beat On broken blinds and chimney-pots, And at the corner of the street A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps(p. 23).
It may be argued that the images in the above poem have as their basis a structure of implied analogy, as, for example, between the day's end and an extinguishing cigar• ette. But Eliot compresses his images together with such force and directness that we are seldom detained by the arrangement itself. The images are the experience. Unless' the comparison is so extreme and unusual that it demands an explicit statement—the first three lines of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", for example—Eliot rarely uses similes or other more obvious links. Since his poetry seeks 49 to reveal the totality of a complex and immediate exper• ience, he chooses rather to juxtapose, to submerge or altogether remove the connecting tissue, in order to convey with accuracy the operation of the experiencing mind. Hulme, on the other hand, draws attention to the analogy itself as a revelation of the poet's own sophisti• cation and wit. Coffman is-right in pointing out that Eliot's use of the image " looks toward his later definition of the objective correlative, which aims at fullness of expression and communication rather than merely virtuosity and owes more to Pound's 'equations' for the emotions than to Hulme's image."fl 1
I
Coffman, p. 220. CHAPTER III
ELIOT AND EZRA POUND
In the previous chapters, the concern has been mainly with Eliot's poems in Prufrock and Other Observations in order to demonstrate that Eliot was developing a method of imagism independent of the Imagist Movement. Little evidence exists to show that Eliot at this time was at all influenced by the writers of this movement. Even T. E. Hulme did not apparently influence Eliot's poetry, either through his theories of the image or his actual poetic practice. In spite of certain similarities between the two, Eliot reveals a greater complexity and a wider range of awareness in his approach to poetry. Eliot's early "imagism" easily satisfies the theore• tical requirements of the Movement. His images are, in the main, precise evocations of concrete objects existing in the physical world. They reveal the presence of a keen and discerning perceiver, who can select and arrange his images in a manner that is thoroughly appropriate to the experience presented. But what sets Eliot apart from the Imagists— specifically, T. E. Hulme—is the intensity of his awareness. Eliot is able to combine thought and feeling in his images, and compress together past, present and future glimpses into the nersonae whose voices speak out in the poems. Such a complex presentation not only enhances our appreciation of the speaker's mental anxiety, but gives the poem as a whole 51 a greater significance than a poem which relies merely on one or two isolated images. Poems like Pound's "Oread" or
"In a Station of the Metro", for example, employ the single image and assume that, once established effectively, it can stand upon its beauty, or its specially perceived characteris• tics, or upon its intrinsic interest; Eliot employed a series of images, each interesting but finding its full meaning only as a part of the effect of the poem as a whole—and the poem !•?. is not just delicately coloured pictures or a series of sensations, but pictures and sensations which become a commentary on the society and experience which produced it.-*-
But Eliot's poetry which appears after 1914 shows a pronounced change in method and purpose. This resulted mainly from his exposure to Pound's poetry and his theories of imagism, which affected Eliot's poetry and his handling of the image. A brief,discussion of these theories is there fore valuable-—first as a basis of comparison, and, second, as an approach to the Poems 1920 collection. Initially, how• ever, it is necessary to outline the nature of Eliot's previous contact with Pound's-poetry and the Imagist Move• ment in general,
Eliot first met Pound—and Imagism—on September 22, 2 1914, shortly after his arrival in London from Germany,
Stanley P. Coffman, Imagism: A Chapter for the History, of Modern Poetry (Norman, Olclahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), p. 221. 2 See Ezra Pound's letter of this date to Harriet Monroe, quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: The Citadel Press, 1964;, p. 73. 52
Before this, however, Eliot had read some of Pound's poetry,
"but was not at the time too impressed: I was introduced to Personae and Exultations in 1910, while still an undergraduate at Harvard. The poems did not then excite me, any more than did the poetry of Yeats: I was much too engrossed in working out the implications of Laforgue. I considered them, however, the only interesting poems by a contemporary that I had found.3
It must be noted also that Eliot makes no mention of having read, at this early stage, the three famous principles of the Imagist Movement, formulated by Pound and Richard Alding• ton, or Pound's own essay, "A Pew Don'ts by an Imagistejf < 4 both of which appeared in 1913 in Poetry magazine. We may assume then that since six of the poems contained in Prufrock and Other Observations were written a good deal before this 3"0n a Recent Piece of Criticism'*, Purpose. X (June 1938),91-2. Pound himself has since added support to the assumption that his influence on Eliot dated only from their first meeting. In a letter to the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, July 26, 1957, p. 457b, Pound wrote: "Mr. Eliot had already written Prufrock and other works of considerable interest before arriving at the shadowed portals of 5, Holland Place Chambers. He either disapproved of some of my practices or was puzzled as to why I committed them. We found certain points of agreement." A These principles were: 1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contri• bute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome. 53 time.^including "Preludes";: which is virtually an. image- study, it is obvious that Eliot did not need the theories of Pound and Aldington to teach him how to compose accurate images. Of more crucial importance here is the fact that while Eliot was composing the earliest of these poems, Imagism as a movement did exist, in a form which is called by William Pratt "The School of Images, 1908-1909."6 The schoolmaster was T. E. Hulme, and the movement began as a Poet's Club, later re-forming itself into a group which 7 first met at a Soho restaurant in the spring of 1909. The various members shared a desire to experiment which grew out of a dissatisfaction with the state of English poetry at that time. In this respect, they were linked in sympathy with Eliot; it is highly unlikely, however, that he was aware of this school, since its output was practically non-existent. Pound's "Pew Don'ts" were published in Poetry, I (March 1913), 200-1, and are here quoted from "A Retrospect", in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. with an introduction by T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1954),p. 3, Subsequent quota• tions from Pound's criticism will be from this volume unless otherwise noted,
5These include: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"(1910-11), "Portrait of a Lady" (1909-10), "Preludes" (1909,-10,-11), Rhapsody on a Windy Night"(l91l). "Conversation Gallante"(l909), and "La Figlia Che Piange" (1911). These dates of composition are those determined by Grover Smith in T. S_, Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning.(Chicago: the Uni• versity of Chicago Press, 1956).
William Pratt* The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Mini• ature- (New York: E, P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1963), p. 14, ''Pratt, p. 15. F. S. Flint was also present at the first meeting, with Pound appearing in April (p. 17). 54
As Pratt says, "The 'School of Images' was important more for its theorizing than for its practical poetic achievement; neither the Imagist name nor anything definite in Imagist form was to emerge until a few years later." And Eliot's own comment on this formative stage of the Imagist Movement suggests also its lack of influence on him: "Whether the name and principles of imagism were Pound's invention or Hulme's,
I do not know, and am not very much interested."9 It may in fact he said that this remark is charac• teristic of Eliot's general attitude toward the Movement. Apart from the special cases of T. E. Hulme and Pound, Eliot showed slight interest in the Movement per se. Pre• sumably, he found little in the poetry of the other Imagists— like "H. D.", Flint or Aldington—that he could put to use. Eliot had already achieved, on his own, the same concision and metrical variety which the Imagists were to demand several years later. But by acknowledging later that the Movement was responsible for the birth of modern English poetry, Eliot did show that he was aware of its contribution, while denying that he had had any part in the renaissance:
The point de repere usually and conveniently taken, as :; the starting point of modern poetry, is the group de• nominated "imagists" in London about 1910. I was not there. • • . The poets in the group seem to have been
8Page 16.
9"Ezra Pound?, Poetry., LXVI 11 (September 1946),: 329. 55 drawn together by a common attraction towards modern poetry in French, and a common interest in exploring the possibilities of development through study of the poetry of other ages and languages.10 Turning back to Pound, we see that, as a theorizer, he is remarkably consistent in his emphasis on the importance of the image in poetry. Pounds essays are invaluable in this respect because they are deliberate attempts to offer a pro• gram of instruction for the young poet which is both forthright and unambiguous.
It seems appropriate to begin with Pound's definition of the image: An "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, I use the term "complex" rather in the technical sense employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart. • . .It is the presentation of such a "complex" instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation;' that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.H
Such a concise definition calls for expansion. It is vital to note, first of all, that the image presents a complex; it does not convey, or suggest, or try like the artist to paint a picture. "When Shakespeare talks of the1 Dawn in russet
10"The Aims of Education" (1950), To Criticize the Critic and other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965), pp. 58-9.
1:L"A Retrospect" (1918), p. 4. First appeared in the Poetry issue previously cited. 56 mantle clad/" writes Pound, " he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his „12 nothing that one can call description; he presents." The principle of presentation links together the first two principles of Imagism, the insistence on "direct treatment" and the warning to eliminate all unnecessary material. Only by presentation can the distance between the experience and the poem which re-enacts it be, as far as possible, reduced. Metaphors and similes, Pound would argue, are at onee remove from the image, since they operate through a distinct analogy, stated or implied. Images which are presentations create a work of first intensity, in which the poem and the experience which gives it its being are practically inseparable. Of equal importance is precision, which becomes in Pound's view not merely a technical necessity but a criterion for artistic morality. To be precise is to be honest, to see the object exactly as it is: This brings us to the immorality of bad art. Bad art is inaccurate art. It is art that makes false reports.13 Pound's obsession with precision in art cannot be over-estimated.
12"A Retrospect", p. 6, Pound does, it"is true, call the image "the poet's pigment"- in Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New York: New Direction Books, I960), p. 90, first published in 1916. In doing so, however, he is stressing its importance as the essential medium of poetry,
13"The Serious Artist" (1913), p. 43. 57
His repeated— and generally -unsuccessful—attempt to credit Ford Madox Ford rather than T. E. Hulme for "ham- 14 mering this point of view" indicates a concern stretching hack as far as 1908, when Pound first met Ford. And it was this same concern which directed Pound towards certain early poetic influences: "In the art of Daniel and Caval- canti, I have seen that precision which I miss in the Victorians, that explicit rendering, be it of external nature or of emotion. Their testimony is of the eyewitness, their symptoms are first hand."^ This quotation leads to an important distinction, which the definition also supports. Pound, like Eliot and unlike Hulme and the Imagists, does not attempt to restrict the image, whether in theory or in practice, to concrete objects drawn from the physical world. Such images are certainly valid. But Pound recognizes that the image functions or should function, as a complex of intellect and emotion, and in this its main importance lies. It is true that the natural object, properly chosen and presented, is always i 16 "the adequate symbol" and can therefore achieve additional' dimensions of meaning. But Pound's definition intentionally / 14The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. ed. by D. D. Paige/?)' (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1950), p.49n. rr
15"A Retrospect'/, p. 11. ISGaudier-Brzeska, p. 90. 58 permits images chosen from such diverse areas as history, politics, literature or Confucianism, when presented as if perceived at "first hand." The image demands a highly de• veloped intellectual sense of fact—all fact—and facts, in : Pound's poetry, become through the process of poetic creation, no less "real" or physical than natural objects. His poetry sets out, in other words, to animate ideas, to breathe life and emotion into them. The image is thus the artistic meta• morphosis of these facts; it functions, like Eliot's image,' as an equation for the emotion, and is not based upon theories of analogy or metaphor.
Pound's use of the terra "complex" also reveals the comprehensiveness of his definition, and should therefore be discussed. He does not elaborate upon this term; but Scheidau, referring to the psychologist Bernard Hart, defines "complexes" as systems of "emotionally toned ideas" which operate unobserved in the mind to cause seemingly random associations and progressions of thought to turn toward one recurrent object. He [Hart} gave the example of a man in love whose thoughts keep re• turning to his beloved even when they start out ! on utterly unrelated topics. The "complex" was an overpowering yet subtle obsession that kept bringing up, by non-rational associations, the ceaselessly recurring fixations; whatever most „ deeply disturbed or gripped that particular mind,1'
In other words, the seemingly random details of perception
1'''Herbert Newton Schneidau, Ezra Pound's Criticism and the Influence of his Literary Relationships in London, 1908-1920 T~Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966), p. 28. 59 which are presented as images act as clues to a vital association of feeling and thought. The image is a coalescence in the form of a particular scene, vision or insight, of the "system of emotionally toned ideas." It is clear also that the ordering form of Pound's poetry relies heavily on this term and the implications contained within it to justify the use of a "balanced juxtaposition of images without connecting matter, acting like a series of apparently unrelated clues. In a poem like Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," for example—
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, "black bough.18
—the mind is forced to solve the clues, as it were, and make an immediate connection between statement and image. Then the poem begins to open out and reveal a pattern of widening associations. The effect of the image is nearly instantaneous; it is, to borrow a term from James Joyce, a visual "epiphany," an intense moment of experience presented in a concentrated form. At the heart of the Imagist poem lies the real subject—not the perceiver, <' or the "object," but the act of perception itself.
At the outset, this factor supports the basic dis• tinction (already hinted at) between Pound's Imagism and Eliot's early verse. The Poundian image utilizes perception
18 i Selected Poems, ed. with an introduction by T, S.lEliot (London: Paber & Paber, 1959), p. 113. 11 60 the perception and subsequent revelation of "objects',*, whether in the physical world or as objectified or impersonal "felt thoughts'!" In this process of continuous perception, Pound's personae are experiments in different ways of per• ceiving reality. The various and unique%eyes" of de Born, Villon, Propertius, Rihaku or Pound himself, posing as the ironic and satiric commentator on society, are all carefully constructed masks which conceal that part of Pound which creates and organizes his objective material.
As we have already seen, Eliot's poetry presents images which reveal not only the perceived phenomena, but also the complex mental activity of the perceiver. That is, the poetry in the Prufrock volume begins in perception hut 19 seems "to expand at once into mental images." Often as a consequence the images are bizarre and surreal, to suggest in a dramatic fashion the anxieties and torments which motivate them. The situation which emerges in Eliot's poems is therefore more inclusive,_and conveys more about the nature of individual experience, because in contrast to the poetry of Pound, it is 1 a poetry of exploration at another level altogether. Its basis is tirelessly psy• chological; hence the unanswerable authority with \Vhich line after line rings into the consciousness of even the half-alert reader
19Kristian Smidt, Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S., Eliot (New York: The Humanities Press, 1961), p. 117. 61
y . , .Pound's early work with personae nowhere reaches Prufrock levels of intensity because it is a preliminary purification of the artist qua artist for an impersonal handling.20
The "characters" in Eliot's poems are' more than new eyes,
"but less than living "beings. They are instead complex states of mind and feeling, the patterns of which it is the purpose of the image to reveal. Part of the complexity so revealed derives from the character's awareness of him•
self interacting, or failing to interact, with his world.
But his awareness is always less than the reader's; Eliot's pervading ironical tone in these poems originates in this distinction. In short, Pound moves from the objective to
the subjective by recording the process of perception, "the precise instant when a thing outward or objective transfers 21
itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective." Eliot, by seeking to objectify an inner state, works in reverse of
Ti A 22 Pound. ^Kenner, p. 126. ^Gaudler-Brzeska, p. 81.
Donald Davie, in Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 74, has defined this dis• tinction very well. If it can be assumed, as we have done, that Eliot's image acts as an "objective correlative", then, "according to Eliot, the artist, in constructing his objective correlative out of phenomena offered to his senses, is not at all interested in these phenomena for themselves, in their objectivity, but only to the extent that they may stand.in for the subjective phenomena. . .which can be objectified through them. . • .Eliot's theories, like those of such sym- bolistes as Mallarme and Valery, have the merit of acknowledging the discoveries made by romanticism about the complexities of perception. Gourmont and Pound appear, by comparison, naive." 62
Turning now to the poems of Eliot's second volume, we note that, with the exception of "Gerontion," the dram• atic monologue is absent. This may suggest that Eliot is not here concerned with involving the reader in dramatic situations in order to expose the complex psychological state, or states, within the poem. The poems are, instead, the words of voices without any special identity, voices which present concepts or facts through various images. Even Sweeney, who is seen more frequently than Prufrock, remains less tangible than the latter "because his identity seems to undergo a significant change with each poem in which he appears. Eliot carries impersonality to its highest level in these poems; he is willing to sacrifice any emotional involvement on the reader's part for the sake of dealing with broader areas of experience than are found in the Prufrock collection. The awareness here is primarily of social and cultural orders of thought, and the treatment of these is predominantly satirical in tone.
An early and rather trivial example of this new approach for Eliot is "The Boston Evening Transcript," written in 1915. In this poem, Eliot employs images to show lifeless conformity on a social rather than on an individual level. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" may imply a criticism of certain self-defeating tendencies common to many individuals, but it is mainly a study of character. 63
But the "Transcript" satirizes that sub-culture in any- urban society which seeks to perpetuate dreary "respec• tability" and outworn moral conventions. Since it is the 28 speaker who, wearily mounting the steps, brings the very instrument of these attitudes to "Cousin Harriet", he ironically includes himself in the general satiric con- . demnation. Perhaps the most evident "Poundian" touch in this and the other poems of 1915—"Morning at the Window"-
"Aunt Helen!*. "Cousin Nancy" and "Mr. Appolinax"—is the dominant tone of levity, also prevalent in Pound's Lustra, published in 1916. The second section of "The Social OrderJ', one of many satiric sketches in Lustra, is a good example of this special tone: II (Pompes Punebres) \
This old lady, " - Who was 'so old that she was an atheist', Is now surrounded By six candles and a crucifix, While the second wife of a nephew ! Makes hay with the things in her house, / Her two cats Go before her into Avernus; A sort of chloroformed suttee, And it is to be hoped that their spirits will walk With their tails up,
23The familiar image of upward movement on a staircase, so frequent in the Prufrock series, is invariably used by Eliot, until its final development in "Ash Wednesday," to anticipate a defeat or failure of some kind. As will be shown later, Eliot's characteristic method of developing a certain image progress• ively throughout the poetry is one of the important ways by which his entire work achieves unity. 64
And with a gentle, plaintive mewing, For it is certain that she has left on this earth No sound Save the squabble of female connections.24
"Mr. Apollinax". composed in 1915, can be viewed as a transition between Eliot's first and second collec• tions. As Grover Smith says, Eliot's main technique here
is one of "exaggerative contrast"?5and this enables him to convey the sort of ironic contrasts that he discovered in Pound's Lustra. In "Transcript" there is the bathetic image of evening "Wakening the appetites of life in some / And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript"tp. 30 ), which has the^ same ironic effect as the images, much more extreme and even surrealistic, that operate in "Mr. Apol«* linax":
In the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus, at Professor Channing- Cheetah's He laughed like an irresponsible foetus, (p. 33)
The bizarre images which the speaker uses here in his attempt to criticize Mr. Apollinax 's child-like savagery« indicate a mind which can harbour many extremes at once, a mind like Prufrock's or the speaker in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night". But in this case, the main concern is not with the speaker but with Mr. Apollinax, and the contrast
24Selected Poems, pp. 118-9.
25page 32. 65 between his vitality, however amusing, and its absence in the spectators. Although the speaker feels inclined to laugh, somewhat defensively, at Mr. Apollinax, whom he tries to ridicule in images of contradictory mythology, the real satiric target is ". . . dowager Mrs. Phlaccus, and Professor and Mrs. Cheetah" (p. 33). These figures are perfectly summed up, in all their vacuity, in the speaker's only memory-image of them: " I remember a slice of lemon, and a bitter macaroon" (p. 33).
Like Eliot's early poetry, "Mr. Apollinax" establishes a dramatic scene which functions in part as a revelation of the speaker's mental state through a series of widely varied images. But the impersonal manipulation of objects and names, and the suggestion of a contrast between vitality and sterility, place the poem in technique and theme close to the Poems 1920 volume.
Por these poems, it was Ezra Pound who provided the impetus by introducing Eliot to the work of the French poet Theophile Gautier when, as Pound puts it, at a particular date in a particular room, two authors, neither engaged in picking the other's pocket, decided that the dilutation of vers libre, Amygism, Lee Masterism, general floppiness had gone too far and that some countercurrent must be set going. Parallel situation centuries ago in China. Remedy prescribed 'Emaux et Camees' ( or the Bay State Hymn Book). Rhyme and regular strophes. Results: Poems in Mr. Eliot's second volume, not contained in his first 'Prufrock' ( Egoist, 1917), also 'H. S. Mauberley'. 26
26«Harold Munro!,'? The Criterion. £I(April-3uly 1932),590 66 Pound was quick to notice in Gautier the "hard" in French poetry, the continuous effort to "cut in hard substance," always intent on " the quality of the emotion to he conveyed."27 In other words, he found the • precise rendering of emotion and the clarity of thought which he was always after in his own work. A good part of Gautier's success in Emaux et Camees is no doubt due to his choice of form; the tight rhyming quatrains permit no laxity or sloppiness, and demand the concision which Pound felt was lacking in much of, the vers libre of the day. It is true that the quatrain, with its pronounced, unvarying rhythm, cannot handle deep emotion. It is, however, the ideal poetic vehicle for satire, since the rhythm can be made to understate, and there• by increase the effectiveness of, the irony, as it does in Eliot's "Hippopotamus":
The hippopotamus's day Is passed in sleep; at night he hunts; God works in a mysterious way— j The Church can sleep and feed at once. (pp. 51-2) and in Pound's Hugh Selwvn Mauberle.v (Life and Contacts):
• \ All things are a flowing Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness Shall outlast our days. 8
S^'The Hard and Soft in French Poetry" (1918), p. 285.
28Selected Poems, p. 174. 67
Eliot especially likes to play, in "Burbank with a Baedecker:
Bleistein with a Cigar"*, for example, on the rhythmic expec• tations .of the reader, by making full use of the resources of the quatrain to increase the ironic impact:
Princess Volupine extends A meagre, blue-nailed, phthisic hand To climb the waterstair. Lights, lights, She entertains Sir Ferdinand Klein. Who clipped the lion's wings And flea'd his rump and pared his claws? Thought Burbank, meditating on Time's ruins, and the seven laws. (p. 43)
Eliot's images in these poems reflect a Gautier-like hardness. They are usually created out of elements not
"present" as part of a natural environment, and often their very compactness and impenetrability lead to obscurity. They
share with Pound's images in Mauberle.v a high degree of im• personality. Eliot, however, carries this further by employing
speakers whose identity does not really seem to matter—only
their dominant points of view. Since there is (except for
Gerontion) no central figure whose mind the images reveal,
the reader tends to remain at a considerable emotional dis- i
tance from the poem. Images which seem to pertain to persons
are discovered, on closer examination, to simply present
actions: an extreme example of this sort of. impersonality occurs in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales"., where
The silent man in mocha brown Sprawls at the window-sill and gapes; The waiter brings in oranges Bananas, figs and hothouse grapes; 68
The silent vertebrate in brown Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Rachel nee Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes with murderous paws. . . • Cp. 59)
Here it is remarkable how an atmosphere of sinister mystery is evoked ina scene which is itself impossible to exactly delineate.
The above poem is a significant example of a general shift in the function of Eliot's images. In adopting the greater impersonality of Pound's method, Eliot employs jux• taposed images to a greater extent than before. Even the names which appear—Sweeney, Bleistein, Doris—aire..linages,not people; more accurately, they are "not actors in a realistic drama, but. • .symbolic embodiments in a conflict of values." The images are made to bear -a great weight of meaning in this conflict, for they must "bring together the past and the present, not of a single mind, but of a society, a religion, or a culture. Mirroring in this respect the Cantos, these poems concentrate on the factual, on the intellectual, rather than the emotional component of the image. As Hugh Kenner says:
Plainly, the quatrain, like Pope's couplets, is, in Eliot's usage, primarily a vehicle for sudden juxtapositions. • • .These poems consti• tute an attempt to create a satiric medium for
29Elizabeth Drew, Tj, Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949), p. 40. 69
twentieth-century usage, nurtured by the perception that satire in verse works by assembling a crazy-quilt of detail, each detail an unchallengeable fact (everything in Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service, from the sable presbyters to the bees' hairy bellies, exists on the plane of fact).30
Whereas the Prufrock poems tend to show the effect of an individual's past upon his perceptions and awareness of the present, these poems examine the complex relationship existing between the cultural past and the present state of society. Eliot does not, however, naively contrast a glorious past with a corrupt present. Instead, he probes beneath the surface appearances of life, now and in the past, to reveal the ever-present moral sham and hypocrisy. The modern age, Eliot seems to be saying, may appear, through its lack of religious faith, to be worse than most. But if the beautiful song of the nightingales in "Sweeney Among the Nightingales" seems at first to supply an ironic comment upon the sordid intrigue of the contemporary scene in the poem, we must remember that these same birds . i . . .sang within the bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud And let their liquid siftings fall To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud, (p. 60) The nightingales, as eternal observers, bear witness to the history of man's imperfection,
Eliot avoids any sort of direct, hence over-simple,
Page 88. 70 contrast in these poems. In "Whispers of Immortality", he portrays the complex sensibility of John Donne who, "expert
"beyond experience", . . .knew the anguish of the marrow The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh Allayed the fever of the bone. (p. 55)
Beside his torment, Grishkin's sensual soul and her "friendly bust" seem comparatively insignificant; "but the animal intensity of her "feline smell" is at least more admirable than "our lot" who crawl "between dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm" (p. 56). In Eliot's "The Hippopotamus," the simple, unthink• ing believer—an absurd hippopotamus who is "merely flesh and blood" (p. 51)—is, after all, saved; while the True Church, apparently secure in its own power and perfection, "remains below / Wrapt in the old miasmal mist"Cp» 52). As achievements in their own right, these poems—with the notahle exception of "Gerontion"—are a disappointment. No one can question their humour and cleverness, but these virtues are gained at considerable cost; the impact of the satire is spoiled by excessive complexity, especially in the irritating and repellant "Sunday Morning Service". Here and elsewhere, the complexity is partly due to an increasing number of mythological images whose effect depends not only
upon our identification of the source but also our placement of them in the modern, ironic perspective of the poem. It seems apparent that Eliot was unable to fit his images into 71 the self-imposed restrictions of his chosen form—the quatrain at its most rigorous—and yet was unwilling to
•Sri relax these restrictions as Pound did in Mauberley . The subtlety of the Eliot image should have been allowed to dictate the form in which it appears, rather than vice versa. Moreover, Eliot is at his best when presenting images which originate in the complexities of an active, aware mind, de• livering its ov/n monologue. His approach is largely psycho• logical and needs the focus of one or several central figures. The "Poundian" solution—"the impersonal handling of things"—
is not Eliot's .method, as these poems show.32 "Gerontion", on the other hand, is unique among these poems in that it fuses the earlier dramatic monologue. •./.••,„*:•••.;:•
K. L. Goodwin complains, in The Influence of Ezra Pound (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 117, that Eliot was forced to resort to "line-filling and flabby rhyming". This judgment is, however, unduly severe; part of the ironic effect of the following stanza, for example, is due to the intentional and bathetic "forced" rhyme of "Sidney" and "kidney^1 a stanza which Goodwin singles out for biame:
I shall not want Honour in Heaven Por I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney And have talk with Coriolanus And other heroes of that kidney.
° It is interesting to find Eliot himself indirectly pro• viding the best criticism, in advance, of his satires. Writing in 1917 on the limits of the American tendency in modern verse, Eliot criticises it in limiting its forces to
an arrest at the object in view; the American poet is fearful of betraying any reaction beyond that revealed in the choice and arrangement; the effect 72 with the social and cultural insights of the satires. Grover
Smith notes that it "combines with a kind of stream of con•
sciousness the techniques of allusion, already used in "Burbank1,' which fulfills Eliot's idea of the historical sense in poetry."33
In effect, it applies the ideas of "Tradition and the Indivi•
dual Talent", published in 1917, by making the past seem present by conveying it as memory-images which exist in the
"now" of Gerontion's thoughts, not as descriptive images placed in a past setting. Gerontion's meditations are complex
and incorporate many separate experiences. So many, in fact,
that we must view him as a mental traveller rather than a
sentient being. His awareness approaches in scope that of
Tiresias in The Waste Land, whose perceptions are not limited by time, place, or sex. Eliot originally intended that these
two figures should nierge together, and it was only Pound's
insistence which prevented Eliot from using "Gerontion" as a 34 preface to the longer work.
is of an ingenious if sometimes perverse visual imagination in complete detachment from any other faculty.
See "T. S. E.: Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," The Egoist, IV, (September, 1917), 138.
33Page 57. ^Pound wrote Eliot,"I do not advise printing 'Gerontion'' as preface. One don't miss it at all as the thing now stands. To be more lucid still, let me say that I advise you NOT to print 'Gerontion' as prelude." See The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, ed. by D. D. Paige.(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1950), p.171. 73 The Waste Land is a complex unity of images con•
tributing to a dominant emotional impression; "Gerontion1,".,. however, is a poem of paradox and ambiguity. The image in the epigraph from Measure for Measure sets the appropriate stage: Gerontion's "Thoughts of- a~dry~brain in a dry season" (p. 41.) are his after dinner sleep. He is cut I. off now in his mind from either the certainty of youth or that of comr- placent old age. Many of the images themselves are deliberately constructed around paradoxes; "depraved May" (p. 39), "flower• ing judas" (p. 39), "chilled delirium" (p. 4l). Unable to reach conclusions, Gerontion's mind can only ". . .multiply variety /In a wilderness of mirrors. . ." (p. 41). The image of history as a deceptive mistress whose "supple con• fusions" (p. 40) only betray man, deeply disturbs him:
Think Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes. (p. 40) It is interesting to note in the above passage the perfect
fusion that Eliot achieves in this poem between mood and
rhythm. Gerontion's intense uncertainty is expressed in the J
abrupt caesuras of Eliot's variation on Jacobean dramatic
verse, and his compulsion to try and work things out reveals
itself in the command "Think!/ which he later repeats several
times.
But Gerontion cannot unify his own visions or place
himself in any secure position through such pondering. It 74 is not, as he says, because he has lost his passion that he is doomed. On the contrary, he has never experienced real passion:
I was neither at the hot gates, Nor fought in the warm rain. • . .(p. 39) That is, he has never felt either the excitement of struggle or (as the images also suggest), that of sexual love. Real emotion has instead "been supplanted by sterility. The goat, a symbol of lust, is as static as the rest of Gerontion's surroundings; The goat coughs at night in the field overhead; Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds. The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea, Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.(p. 39) Gerontion waits for the rain which never comes; the gutter of his "draughty house" (p. 40) remains plugged. Aware of his impotent state, Gerontion must include himself among the victims of "Christ the tiger" (p. 39), while failing to accept this same force as a means to salvation. "Gerontion" derives much of its dramatic effect from such imagery as that cited above. Gerontion, in fact, is i • • i less a character than he is an image of decay. His great inclusiveness makes him a symbol: What are contrasted in this poem are the secular history of Europe, which the life of Gerontion parallels, and the unregarded promise of salvation through Christ. Gerontion symbolizes civilization gone rotten. ... The overt statements about history weave a fabric of general meaning, a cri• tique of civilization. Though one is never allowed 75
to forget the presence of Gerontion, one never really knows what kind of man he is, Prufrock lives as a personality; Gerontion as a recording memory,35
Civilization has gone rotten partly because of the complete breakdown of traditional cultures; Eliot's Jew, "Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp, / Blistered In Brussels, patched and peeled in London" (p, 39), provides an image of this cul• tural confusion. Significantly, he is the owner of Gerontion's "decayed house',', an image which suggests both Gerontion's isolation and lack of roots, and the state of his own mind as he perceives it.
In short, the intensity and beauty of this poem is due to Eliot's ability here to create images which continually expand into a larger context than that of a sterile, yet still- questioning, consciousness. These_images—with the exception of those referring to Gerontion's meager physical surroundings- do not arise from Gerontion's perception of concrete reality. This is appropriate, since his blindness or failing vision (he has to be "read to by a boy") means that his world must exist as a mental world. Many of the images, as a result, have a strange, dream-like quality and duplicate the feverish work• ings of his mind by refusing to linger on the specific and the definable. In the following passage, for example, the fleeting memory-images seem to suggest the contamination of
35Smith, pp. 60,63, 76 the Word "by modern occult practices, "but it is difficult to say exactly why they do:
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas, To "be eaten, to "be divided, to be drunk Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero With caressing hands, at Limoges Who walked all night in the next room; By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians; By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room Shifting the candles; Praulein von Kulp Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob, (pp.-39-40)
Such images, coloured by the chaotic nature of Geron•
tion's revery, do not act in isolation, but rely for their
effect upon the general metaphor they create in conjunction with other images. In this respect, "Gerontion" anticipates
in its method The Waste Land. "Gerontion" also relies on
the repetition of certain images—such as that of the house,
as in the passage just quoted, to which Gerontion's mind
habitually returns—to give the poem a pronounced ritualistic
tone. It is as if Gerontion were engaged in a process of self-
exorcism, a vain attempt to justify himself and so obtain
deliverance. In a sense, he is both a scapegoat symbol for
the errors of history, and a victim, like the dying Grail
king, "waiting for rain."36
It was Pound, as we have already seen, whose influence prevented Eliot from using "Gerontion" as a preface to The Waste Landi; In this case, however, Eliot was probably right to follow 77 Turning now to The Waste Land and its imagery, we notice at the outset that Eliot is able, once again, to enlarge the focus of his imagery by causing his images to "refer", in various ways, to the enormously significant world of vegetation myth, Grail legend, and Christian mythol• ogy, Eliot's main technical method for achieving this enlargement is the use of allusion to many other sources. But the process by which, in his work, an image, originally a simple presentation, tends to assume metaphoric or even symbolic weight is, as-Wellek and Warren point out in Theory of Literature, a characteristic in the development of many writers?
Is there any important sense in which 'symbol' differs from 'image* and 'metaphor'? Primarily, we think, in the recurrence and persistence of the 'symbol*. An 'image' may be invoked once as a metaphor, but if it persistently recurs, both as presentation and representation, it becomes a ; symbol, may even become part of a symbolic (or mythic) system, • • ,What happens with impressive frequency is the turning of what, in a writer's early work, Is 'property',into 'symbol' in his later work. Thus in his early novels, Henry James painstakingly visualizes persons and places, while, in the later novels, all the images have become metaphoric or symbolic,37
This continuity of imagery is perhaps the main reason
Pound's advice, since the resulting gain in The Waste Land's dramatic effect and concision more than compensates for the loss in absolute clarity.
37Rene Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature
(New York: Harcourt, Brace &Co#, 1942), pp. 178-9, 78 for reading Eliot's poems in chronological order, as in
fact he urges us to do,38 Each poem, in effect, "builds upon the imagery of its predecessor. The image, for example, of the circular staircase, upon which the speaker in Ash Wednesday makes his purgative ascent, achieves an impressive symbolic significance when we see it in the light of several earlier 'stair-images^, Prufrock wonders if there will be time "to turn back and descend the stair, , ."(p. 14), but his fear of being ridiculed from the upper landing forces him to go on. In the "Portrait"; the image of climbing stairs is also used to express the speaker's dread and reluctance: "I mount the stairs and turn the handle of the door / And feel as if I had mounted on my hands and knees'.' (p. 21), Movement up the staircase is here positive, but only in the sense that it signifies an acceptance of, or approach to, some kind of experience. The experience itself may be un• rewarding, as it is in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night"—
'You have the- key, The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair. Mount, i The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall, . Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life,'
The last twist of the knife, (p. 28)
—but it is the direction of the movement that is most
38"I'd like to explain in the first place that when I read my poems, I read them in chronological order. They fall into certain definite periods, between which there are gaps indica• ting a sort of state of mental drought when I didn't expect to write anything ever again." "T.S. E. Talks about his Poetry", Columbia University Forum, IE (Winter 195*5), 12. 79
important. To meet Princess Volupine Cp. 42), Burbank must
descend, a movement which foreshadows his later "fall". So
in The Waste Land. Eliot can effectively underline the
complete araorality of "the young man carbuncular" (p. 72)
"by having him find, upon leaving his typist, "the stairs unlit " (p. 72).
The symbol of the drowned Phoenician sailor in Part
IV of The Waste Land> is perhaps the most compelling instance
of the image-symbol development in Eliot's poetry. It depicts
the theme of metamorphosis, the basis of which is the concept
of "dying into" a new and greater life. Eliot went to Ariel's
song in The Tempest, which profoundly affected him and appears
in much of his poetry:
'Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change , Into something rich and strange. (I,iii397-402)
The emergence begins in the moving conclusion to "Prufrock", where the "chambers of the sea" (p. 17) seem to represent a world of innocent beauty and love, perhaps the youth that
Prufrock realizes has passed him by:
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. Cp» 17)
The tragedy here is that Prufrock envisions a possible "sea change" only in his dreams, which are rudely shattered by 80 the human voices of the "real" world about him.
In "Mr. Apollinax"5 the image is used to metaphori• cally suggest the importance of the poem's subject. Mr.
Apollinax is compared to the old man of the sea, whose laughter mocks the "worried bodies" (p. 33) of the drowned men who "drift down in the green silence," and whose only change is decay. The sea, a metaphor for wider areas of experience than the other party guests are aware of, is
Mr. Apollinax's element. 39 "Dans le Restaurant"* written in 1916-17, amplifies the image much further, and because the form in which it appears here is virtually translated in The Waste Land, it can stand on its own in the later poem without obvious connecting links or explanatory notes. In the French poem, the emphasis is on metamorphosis as a cleansing and purifying process; Phlebas, the drowned Phoenician sailor, is drawn by the current ". • .aux etapes de sa vie anterieure" (p. 54).
He acts as the symbolic embodiment of the old, lustful waiter, to whom the speaker in "Dans le Restaurant?; involved by his own similar memories, gives money for the bath. His fate
is offered as a warning to renounce desires of the flesh: Figurez-vous done, c'etait un sort penible; Cependant, ce fut jadis un bei homme, de haute taille, (p. 54)
Smith, p. 35. 8i-
But in The Waste Land the fate of Phlebas has even more, complex overtones:
His drowning, against which Madame Sosostris has warned him, re-enacts the rise and fall in the flower garden and the rise and decline through which, headed for death, he has passed his life, ... ,And yet, on an ironic level, he . is like Christ; he is the sacrificial god de• scending into the waters, . . .But for Phlebas the baptism is followed by no emergence; his seven days have lengthened into a fortnight; he is no Lycidas, 'sunk low but mounted high', and his eyes like those of Tiresias have not 1 :e been turned to pearls.40
The early image of the ses chambers is now a complex symbol, by which drowning implies both a death to be feared and a possible means to redemption.
Complex and impersonal symbols, like Phlebas, growing from earlier images, contribute to the complexity of The Waste
Land* Eliot also employs other means to enlarge the poem's comprehensiveness. By alluding to a wide.range of sources— and, what is more, incorporating often the subtleties of their rhythms—Eliot makes it possible for the image to present a variety of perspectives while retaining its artistic inten• sity.
The opening of "The Pire Sermon" is a brilliant example of this fusion. The dominant mood is one of nostalgia and a sense of irreparable loss:
The river's tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed, Cp- 70)
40Smith, p. 92, 82
The Quest-figure is standing "by the hank, about to recall the scenes of empty lust which follow these lines. The sexual motif, however, is anticipated in the image of the river's broken tent, which, "not broken would have been composed of the overarching trees that transformed a reach of the river into a tunnel of love; the phrase beckons to the mind the broken maidenhead."41 The archaism "tent" even introduces, to some degree, the prevailing allusion to Spenser's poeto "Prothalamion." Summer is past, the land is brown and desolate, and "the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink. . .
(p»70). Eliot invokes the drowning motif again here, in order to connect this section to the previous one by reminding us of Ophelia's death by water. We are also reminded of an earlier question: "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?"(p. 63).. „ Since the nymphs have departed the speaker is alone; but the beauty
of the ideal love immortalized in Spenser's poem has also gone. The river Thames, while empty of debris, is by no means pure;
'! The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, ;' Silk hankerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights.
The modern nymphs, who appear later, were merely engaged in casual sexual encounters with their equally amoral friends,
41Kenner, p. 165. 83
"the loitering heirs of City directors",, who, in fear of the
repercussions that might result from unwanted pregnancies, have departed, leaving no addresses. The feeling of loneli• ness and exile is then once more suggested:
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept. . » Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my hack in a cold "blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. (p.70)
The image of the waters of Leman fuses the misery of the AO Babylonian captivity with that of Byron's prisoner of Chillon but there is no release from this prison. The wind the speaker hears is not the wind of the Spirit but a "cold blast" bring•
ing a death divorced from the grandeur of Marvell's "winged
chariot" of Time. The final line gives a dramatic emphasis upon the horror of death and decay without rebirth and perhaps anticipates physical lust by suggesting Eliot's "Whispers of
Immortality", where "breastless creatures under ground /
Leaned backward with a lipless grin," (p. 55).
Imagery built upon earlier poems (and upon earlier
sections of this poem), and images drawn from other sources are the two main elements by which Eliot achieves intensity and comprehensiveness In The Waste Land. It is by means of
its imagery that the poem also expresses itself as a unified whole, and not merely as a "heap of broken images". 42 Elizabeth Drew, p. 79. 84
As a key to the means "by which the poem is bound together, Eliot's note on Tiresias is usually cited:
Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. (p. 82)
At best, this note explains why Eliot chose the figure of
Tiresias; it does not suggest, however, how the poem gives an impression, though tenuous, of unity and emotional one• ness. Moreover, the desired "melting" of the various characters is not, in the experience of most readers, a feature intrinsic to the poem. It is a mechanical, and somewhat over-simplified system which is part of the poem's complex structure rather than part of the poem as a poetic creation. Similarly, a complete grasp of the notes tells only of the knowledge of which the poem partakes. Eliot once insisted, in fact, that the notes came about because book publication of the poem forced the enlargement—for reasons of size~of the original sources of quotations used, which themselves aimed at "spiking the guns" of critics of his earlier_poems, who had accused 43 him of plagiarism.
43The Frontiers of Criticism: A Lecture by. T^ C Eliot, Delivered at the University of Minnesota Arena on April 30,
1956t(University of Minnesota, 1956), p. 10. 85
Perhaps more relevant to The Waste Land is Eliot's comment in the preface to Perse*s Anabasis: Any obscurity of the poem, on first reading, is due to the suppression of 'links in the chain1 of explanatory and connecting matter, and not to . , . incoherence, or to the love of cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method is that the sequence of images coincides and concen• trates into one intense impression , . . .The reader has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively without questioning the reasonableness of each at the moment; so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.44
This method, what Eliot calls the "logic of poetry,"4makes it possible for the long poem, when it is not based on a definite plot-3tructure like Paradise Lost or restricted at all by barriers of time and place, to cohere in some way without losing its poetic vitality. Eliot shares with Pound— who was of course responsible for the final, greatly condensed form of The Waste Land—the belief that the poem must be a process and not ^ static thing. Hence it is natural th* images, in Eliot's poetry units in themselves, should form the basis for The Waste Land's total effect of meaning and emotion, an effect which need not be the same for every reader, or remain constant. The Cantos carry this method to extremes, but the impact is deadened-because many of the images in the poem are themselves insignificant and cannot stand alone. In an organism, the part—vital in itself—must contribute to the
44Eliot's 1930 PrefaceC p. 10) to St.-John Perse's Anabasis, trans, by Eliot(New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1949).
45Anabasis. p. 11. 86 whole; this unity is what makes Eliot's poem so dynamic. The Waste Land achieves unity in a larger sense, too, since it marks the conclusion in a series of lesser poetic explorations into aspects of what might "be termed the "waste land" of twentieth-century experience. At the same time, it embraces within its awareness many of these same aspects in modified forms: the modern city, with its cigarette butts, newspaper scraps, smoke and fog; the sophisticated boredom of those who, attempting to ignore these and other grim reali• ties, pass their time in empty conversation and sterile love affairs; and the misery, frustration and loneliness of the individuals, like Prufrock, who are caught between these two worlds but sense some meaning, some glory lying somewhere beyond the horror and boredom of their existence. The poem is a comprehensive expression of Eliot's sense of his own age, in relation to past ages; just as the underlying Grail legend gives the poem coherence, so the poem acts as a way of giving shape to the disorder of contemporary history. That the poem should achieve so much is due in part to the extreme impersonality of its approach, as expressed through highly compressed and suggestive images. Thus in its method also, The Waste Land is a conclusion, since it carries earlier tendencies in self-effacement to an extreme:
In The Waste Land, the development of impersonality that Gerontion shows in comparison with Prufrock reaches an extreme limit; it would be difficult to imagine a completer transcendence of the individual self, a completer projection of awareness.46
Leavis, p.80. 87
It may be said, then, that from Poems 1920 to
The Waste Land, Eliot was absorbing some of the imagistic methods of Ezra Pound, This led him to extend to the limit certain tendencies in impersonality which he had already demonstrated in his imagery of the Prufrock collection.
The result was a greater reliance than before upon the presentation, without comment, of a complex pyramid of images within a single poem, images drawn from a variety of mostly literary sources, Eliot tried, in other words, to achieve intensity through extreme compression. He also acquired through Pound—by way of Theophile Gautier—the satirical technique of manipulating facts in the form of concrete images within the strict formal measure of the quatrain. Fortunately, in Gerontion and later in The Waste
Land, Eliot realized the hampering effect of this style and returned to his own unique rhythmical vers libre, allowing his images to express their full dramatic power. CHAPTER POUR CONCLUSION
It is appropriate in a discussion of Eliot's imagery to concentrate on the poems up to and including The Waste Land, for it is in these poems that Eliot relies most heavily on the image to objectify a complex range of exper• ience, to render certain thoughts and feelings in an impersonal way. Beginning with the world of the senses—most often the urban scene—his images quickly expand into a complex inner world, so as to present a conscious mind at work. This con• sciousness may belong to an individual, like Prufrock, at odds with his own surroundings; or it may belong to "characters like Gerontion or Tiresias who, with their broader fields of awareness, probe cultures and societies to question the nature of moral decay and the disappearance of love and faith.
In the poems we have discussed, the major tendency in the development of the image is an increase in impersonality. Eliot, deliberately setting out to free his poetry from the restrictions of personality, creates images which act as
"objective correlatives". They are the concrete Mfacts!J. the artistic rendering of thoughts and feelings. So success- fui has Eliot been, in fact, in objectifying emotions— "working them up into poetry"^"—that his poems are often accused of lacking emotion, usually by readers who, nurtured
^'Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), p. 21. 89 on the Romantic poets, identify emotion with the appearance of words like "happy" or "sad". But Eliot's poems prove, on the contrary, that it is only through images that the most delicate shades of feeling can he expressed. They also show that the image is capable of moving "beyond the ornamental to express a wide range of meaning.
Imagery continues to play an important part in the poems written after The Waste Land. But whereas the image formerly exists in a "pure" state—that is, it is inseparable from the experience-of awareness it seeks to present—in the later poems it tends to act at times symbolically, to "stand for" other areas of experience, areas which are primarily religious in nature. This change is coincident with Eliot's own struggles to harmonize the life of the artist with that of the Christian; after his decision to become an Anglo-Catholic in 1927, the poems reflect, with an increasingly personal fla• vour, this new interest. Even The Hollow Men, although written in 1925, presents (through images and symbols derived in part from The Waste Land) an emptiness which is essentially personal and spiritual. In effect, this poem is Eliot's "dark night ,'' of the soul",- and thus it anticipates the reconciliation finally achieved in the complex and powerful Four Quartets.
Perhaps the most obvious way that Eliot's later poetry mirrors the change in his life is through its imagery. Formerly images were used to present the often sordid reality of the modern world; in the later poems, the images,are used to 90 transcend reality, to provide, as Smidt remarks, Ma means 2 of approaching religious understanding.*1 Consequently we find, in Ash Wednesday, for example, many images which are like spiritual manifestations or miracles: Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart -my liver and that which had "been contained In the hollow round of my skull, (p. 97)
Other images convey a feeling of mystery not through their
esoteric quality "but because of their deliberate suggestive-
ness: Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown, Lilac and brown hair; Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind, over the third stair. • • .(p. 99) Often precise and suggestive images are combined, as in the following example from Burnt Norton, to present the wonder of a sudden vision: Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged, And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight, And the lotus rose, quietly, quietly, The surface glittered out of heart of light, And they were behind us, reflected in the pool. i Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. Cp. 190) Even in poems which appear to be more concerned with depicting a natural scene rather than conveying a mystical experience, Eliot does not try to capture and fix the unusual detail, as in his early poetry, but emphasizes, in his images, the general fleeting impression. Intensity is often sacrificed—in
Page 154. 91 Landscapes, for example—for an effect of casual lyricism:
Children's voices in the orchard Between the blossom and the fruit-time: Golden head, crimson head, Between the green tip and the root. Black wing, brown wing, hover over; Twenty years and the spring is over;
To-day grieves, to-morrow grieves, Cover me over, light-in-leaves; Golden head, black wing, Cling, swing, Spring, sing, Swing up into the apple tree. (p. 152)
In short, although many of the images of the earlier poems recur, they undergo a change in value and emphasis, to become virtually a new kind of imagery. While lacking the
sharp precision and realism of the earlier images, the new
images, as Helen Gardner notes, are mostly beautiful and poetically suggestive in themselves, whereas the earlier imagery was more often grotesque. They are often drawn from nature, where the most characteristic of the earlier imagery came from human life lived in cities or, if from nature, from nature in its more sinister aspects. Many of the images are traditional, common symbols, which have an age-old meaning: the rose, the garden, the fountain, the desert, the yew. The poet accepts this traditional imagery, and mingles it with images , of natural beauty, and with more esoteric images • • ,; from the world of private myth-making.3
In the later poems, then, the role of the image becomes diffuse as it enters into the symbolic world of personal and Christian myth. But the poems that have been
2The Art of T. S. Eliot (New York: E. P, Dutton & Co., Inc., 1959), p."100. 92 focused upon in this paper—from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to The Waste Land—•triumphantly demon• strate that the image is the supreme means "by which poetry can convey the conscious mind in the act of being aware of its own existence. His images achieve vitality through their sensual qualities, but go far beyond the sensual in revealing the selectivity of perception and the elements of experience which influence it. Eliot realizes that the nature of a consciousness—what Prufrock, for example, "is"—cannot be separated from what it perceives.
At the same time, Eliot's poetry does more than simply validate the existence of mechanisms which operate when an individual encounters his world. His images are often suggestive of feelings lying beneath the limits of consciousness, and behind the masks we construct to avoid "the awful daring of a moment's surrender" (p. 78). By seeking to explore the "substratum of our being?. Eliot's poetry—and the complex of images which gives it life—makes us aware- of these feelings, and creates in us the capacity to be aware of them in others. ANNOTATED LIST OP WORKS USED
I. PRIMARY WORKS
Baudelaire, Charles. Les Fleurs du Mai et Oeuvres Choisies, ed. with an intro. by,Wallace Fowlie. New York: Bantam Books, 1964, Bergson, Henri. Introduction to Metaphysics, trans, "by T. E. Hulme. New York: G*. P. Putnam's Sons, 1912.
. Selections from Bergson, ed. with an intro. by Harold A. Larrabee. New York: Appleton-Century- Crofts, Inc., 1949. Eliot, T. S. Book Review. The Criterion. IX ( Jan. 1930), 333-6.
. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Paber & ' Paber, 1962. . "Ezra Pound1 ." Poetry. LXVII (Sept. 1946), 326-38. . The Frontiers of Criticism: A Lecture by T. S. Eliot. . . April 30. 1956.Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1956.
. Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy 23L EJL SA. Bradley. London: Paber & Paber Ltd., 1964. • Letter to the Editor. Times Literary Supplement. August 9, 1957, p. 483b. • "On a Recent Piece of Criticism". Purpose, X (June 1938), 90-94. . "Prose and Verse". The Chflpbook.. XXII (April 1921), 3-10.
• Selected Essays. London: Paber & Paber Ltd., 1951.
. " Talk on Dante". Adelohl. XXVII (First Quarter 1951), 106-14. 94 . To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965. . "T. S. E.: Reflections on Contemporary Poetry*1. The Egoist. IV (Sept. 1917), 133-4. "T. S. B. Talks about his Poetry." Columbia University Forum. II (Fall, 1958), 11-4. Hulme, Thomas Ernest. Further Speculations, ed. by Sam Hynes. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955. . Speculations: Essays on Human!sm and the Philosophy, of Art, ed. by Herbert Read. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1960. Perse, St.-John. Anabasis, trans, and with an intro. by T* S. Eliot. New York: Harcout, Brace and Co., 1949. Pound, Ezra. G-audier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Direction Books, 1960. "" . " Harold Monro". The Criterion. XI (April-July 1932), 4. . Letter to the Editor. Times Literary Supplement. July 26, 1957, p. 457b. . The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. ed. by D, D, Paige. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., 1950. . Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed, with an intro. by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber Ltd.,'1954. . Selected Poems, ed. with an intro. by T. S. Eliot. London: Faber & Faber Ltd., 1959. Three Jacobean Tragedies, ed. by Salgado Gamini. London: Penguin Books, 1965. 95 2. SECONDARY WORKS
Coffman, Stanley K. Imagism: A Chapter for the, History of Modern Poetry. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951. The best study of Imagism to date, since it provides both the available historical data and a detailed discussion of the works of the poets involved. Coffman credits T. E. Hulme with laying down the foundations of the movement,
Costello, Sister Mary. Between Fixity and Flux: A Study of the Concept of Poetry in t.hft fir11.1 n1 RTTI o-E S.. S. Eliot. Washington, D. C: The Catholic University of America Press, Inc., 1947. Examines Eliot's criticism in detail in order to derive from it his theory of poetry. Not enough attention paid to the poems themselves, however.
Daniells, J. R. "T. S. Eliot and his Relation to T. E. Hulme". University of, Toronto Quarterly. II ( April 1933), 380-96. Shows how Eliot's poetry, like Hulme's, is char• acterized by concrete language and vividly presented sensations. Both poets avoid the conventional in their search for new images and metaphors. Daniells tends, however, to exaggerate their similarities.
Davie, Donald. Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. A very perceptive study of Pound's writings, care• fully defined against the background of poets such as Eliot.
Drew, Elizabeth. T. S, Eliot: The Dealgn his Eaejkcy.. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949. A Jungian approach to Eliot's poetry, which analyses the poems in terms of certain basic archtypal symbols giving them continuity. Its implications for poetry in general are often ••. more valuaole than the aotual discussion of the poems.
Gardner, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Ltd., 1950. A very intelligent study of Eliot's poetry, using the Four Quartets as the focus and culmination of his efforts. 96 Goodwin, K. L. The Influence o.f. E^na Pound. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. A scholarly, unimaginative treatment of Pound's influence on his contemporaries and later writers, such as Yeats, Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Archibald Macleish, John Cournos, John Rodker and Basil Bunting. The Pound-Eliot chapter is the most interesting discussion of this relationship so far. Jones, Alun. The Life and Opinions of £. J£. Hulme. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. The "best and most comprehensive full-length study of Hulme, It is valuable also for its appendix containing many of Hulme*s unpublished poetic fragments and short poems.
Jones, Genesius. Approach to the Purpose: A Study of the Poetry. of". T. S. Eliot. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1964. Approaches Eliot's poetry from a predominantly Christian bias, but fails to provide any new insights into the poems, especially those written before The Hollow Men. Kenner, Hugh. The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot. New York: Citadel Press, 1964, While certainly the most brilliant and perceptive of all the books on Eliot, The Invisible Poet puts too much weight on its main thesis: that Eliot deliberately-sets out to "hide" behind his poetry.
Pratt, William. The Imagist Poem: Modern Poetry in Miniature. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1963. A collection of the best verse by poets of the Imagist Movement, and others such as Williams, D. H. Lawrence and Wallace Stevens. The introduction provides a very compact and useful history, defines the image, and makes some important distinctions between Imagism and Symbolism. Also includes a bibliography of Imagism.
Ramsey, Warren. Jules Laforgue and the Ironic Inheritance. New York: Oxford University Press, 1953, The most important and exhaustive treatment of this fundamental aspect of modern poetry. Includes major and minor twentieth-century poets. 97 Roberts, Michael. T. E. Hulme. London; Paber & Paber, 1938. The pioneer study of Hulme, now largely superseded by the work of Alun Jones.
Schneidau, Herbert Newton. Ezra Pound1 s Criticism and, the Influence of his Literary Relationships in London. 1908-1920. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms, Inc., 1966. Examines in detail Pound's aesthetic and its influence on those who came into contact with it. In his chapter on Eliot, Schneidau shows how both Pound and Eliot profited from their mutual contact.
Smidt, Kristlan. Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot. New York: The Humanities Press, 1961. ~" ~" A comprehensive examination of the central beliefs underlying Eliot's poetry. The discussion of Eliot's images and the role of perception in his poetry is especially useful. Also contains the most detailed! • biography to date of Eliot's early life.
Smith, Grover. T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays: A Study in Sources and Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956. Apart from being an indispensable study of the many sources upon which Eliot's poetry relies, this book is full of sound critical judgements.. Sometimes, however, Smith overstresses Eliot's reliance on the work of others.
Symons, Arthur. The Symbolist Movement in Literature. New York: E, P. Dutton&Co., Inc., 1958. This pioneer nineteenth-century study of the French Symbolists contains many acute observations and much fascinating biography. It is weak, how• ever, when lt attempts to draw general conclusions.
T. S, Eliot: The Man and his Work, ed. Allen Tate. New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. A commorative collection of twenty-nine essays, Including reminiscences, analyses, and general comment. Some of the contributors include I. A. Richards, Herbert Read, Stephen Spender, Bonamy Dobree, Pound, C. Day Lewis and Conrad Aiken, 98 Wellek, Rene and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942, pp. 175-200. This chapter, entitled " Image, Metaphor, Symbol, Myth,11 makes many important and far-reaching distinctions between these terms, and suggests how artists progress between them in their work. Williamson, George. A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-by-Poem Analysi s .""New Yofek: The Noonday Press, 1953. A detailed analysis of the poems which manages to strike a balance between pure intuition and exhaustive source-hunting.