Poetry and Belief in the Work of T. S. Eliot

Kristian Smidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317303213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This title, first published in 1961, explores the general background of attitudes, beliefs and ideas from which Eliot's works have originated. This study examines the influences of Eliot's work, and includes Eliot's personal views as told to the author. The book also looks at technique, structure and imagery of his poetry. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

VII
REALITY (Part One)

AS early as in the Prufrock poems Eliot reaches out, as we have seen, for an experience of totality. He often seems to be making deliberate efforts to fuse disparate impressions, the noise of the typewriter and the smell of cooking, and force them to reveal their occult relationships. Distinctions between objects are suppressed, and impressions are made to represent wholes of feeling:

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

The poet often imparts to us a sense of completeness which almost convinces us that he must have discovered it in the outside world. But there is a feeling of unfulfilment besides. For the wholeness is not really discovered in outer things and recorded as a perception. There is no essential unity between a suburban evening and the smell of steaks in passageways, but only one of habitual togetherness. The unity which we feel is one of mood, which the perceptions only serve to express. There are unifying moods but no unifying ideas to support them. In the Quartets it is different. The smell of wild thyme and the sight of winter lightning have no spatial or temporal connection, but an ideal unity nevertheless. And in the beginning of East Coker the objects mentioned have no unity of mood, but an essential oneness of substance and significance:

Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,

Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth

Which is already flesh, fur, faeces,

Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.

The ‘deep lane’ does not exist in its own right, but ‘insists on the direction / Into the village’, and ‘the sultry light / Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone’, making itself one with it.

Eliot declared in ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’ that the general and universal was superficial and without interest; it was the particular that counted. But he obviously found it difficult to content himself with the particular or even to remain assured of its prime reality. There were strong influences, Plato’s perhaps most pervasive among them, urging that reality was not in the particular, as Bergson and other modern philosophers asserted, but in the universal. His own longing for metaphysical certitude, we may assume, made it impossible for him to ignore these voices. And his interest in Symbolism made him all the more attentive to them. This interest was no doubt mainly concerned with the formal aspects of Symbolism at first. But it drew him on to try to express the ineffable. It pointed to final causes, to hidden meanings, to correspondences between phenomena, in fact to just those things which he wished to find and communicate, but long failed to discover. His view of this life as unreal and of a transcendent existence as real owes a great deal to the Symbolists as well as to more purely philosophical sources. For Symbolism, though to a large extent a matter of form and technique, was essentially a search for the mystic reality behind physical manifestations. So it was understood by Symons, who hardly interested himself in the technical aspects of French Symbolism at all. In his Introduction to The Symbolist Movement, Symons wrote that ‘the literature of which I write in this volume [is] a literature in which the visible world is no longer a reality, and the unseen world no longer a dream’. And it was this literature that he held up as the only hopeful model to his times. Symons’s conception of Symbolism was no doubt passed on to Eliot, whose dependence on Symons right up to recent years appears clearly enough in his work.

There is something in what Middleton Murry says, that it is the highest function of imagery ‘to define indefinable spiritual qualities. All metaphor and simile can be described as the analogy by which the human mind explores the universe of quality and charts the non-measurable world.’ In these things, he says, ‘however much we struggle, we cannot avoid transcendentalism’.¹ In fact, imagery is a means of approaching religious understanding, and it is used deliberately in this way in Eliot’s later poetry. In the words of Cecil Day Lewis: ‘The image cannot, of course, reproduce the soul of things: what it can do is to persuade us, by the force of its own vitality, and our own answering sense of revelation, that soul there must be—or, if you dislike the word “soul”, to persuade us that there is beneath the appearance of things a life whose quality may not be apprehended in our everyday intercourse nor be gauged by the instruments of science.’ ‘The poetic image,’ he says, ‘is the human mind claiming kinship with everything that lives or has lived, and making good its claim.’¹ We have here a representative modern poet and critic speaking with the voice of the Symbolists.

It is interesting to study the development of Eliot’s imagery and to see how it reflects the development of his thought. For whatever images and symbols he uses—personal and traditional—his use of them is marked at all stages by his individual needs and adaptations.

The sexual urge can be traced through many stages of sublimation—‘the transition from Beatrice living to Beatrice dead, rising to the Cult of the Virgin’.² ‘The moment in the arbour where the rain beat’, which is remembered in Burnt Norton, is transformed into a symbol of religious illumination. The little girl of Dans le Restaurant rings the changes through ‘la figlia che piange’, Marie and the hyacinth girl of The Waste Land, and Marina, to the Lady of Ash-Wednesday and Four Quartets. Eliot is aware of this development and of its Freudian significance. In the same way the murder theme with its accompanying sense of guilt travels through many stages (e.g. the philanthropically stabbed Juliet in the early Nocturne, the ‘pained surprise’ of la figlia, the Philomela myth in The Waste Land, the actual murder reported in Sweeney Agonistes, the contemplated murders in The Family Reunion and the vicarious murder in The Cocktail Party) to acquire a deep spiritual significance. To grasp the essential of this significance it is not necessary to ‘dissect / The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors’, for the image is not private but general in its poetic contexts.

The wind throughout Eliot’s poetry is a symbol of emptiness and nothingness. At the end of Gerontion a gull fights vainly against the wind, to disappear completely—‘White feathers in the snow’. The dialogue of ‘A Game of Chess’, which partly echoes a poem by Thomas Hardy, uses the wind symbol very significantly:

‘What is that noise?’

The wind under the door.

‘What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?’

Nothing again nothing.

‘Do

‘You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do vou remember

‘Nothing?’

In Marina, the various categories of the vain and wicked ‘are become unsubstantial, reduced by a wind’. And the wind retains the same significance in Burnt Norton, where it sweeps the gloomy hills of a London which knows only

Tumid apathy with no concentration

Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind

That blows before and after time,

In Burnt Norton, however, the wind is not the only effective power in human lives.

The image of the sea is somewhat ambiguous in the Prufrock and 1920 poems. But mainly it suggests all the phenomena and events of life, which, like Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’, impinge upon the individual without his being able to order or relate them in his mind, or utilise them in any way. He is choked, and the sensation is one of drowning. His individuality is dissolved, his bones are picked, as in the case of ‘Phlébas, le Phénicien’ or his counterpart, ‘le garçon délabré’, who is unable to cope with his reality. A precarious existence can be led among all the uncoordinated phenomena by means of dreams, and thus the sea itself can come to represent dreaming and unreality, as in The Love Song (‘should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas’; ‘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’).

Because the phenomena of life have their existence within our consciousness, the sea, too, is within us. And the idea of the sea as a confusion of unrelated matter contained in the mind is seen clearly in Rhapsody on a Windy Night:

The memory throws up high and dry

A crowd of twisted things;

A twisted branch upon the beach

Eaten smooth, and polished

As if the world gave up

The secret of its skeleton,

Stiff and white.

Connected with the sea and drowning are the symbols of fog and smoke. Morning at the Window joins the two sets of symbols in ‘the brown waves of fog’. More directly than the sea, the fog suggests ignorance and bewilderment, the sense of being lost and of not knowing where to go.

In The Waste Land, the sea is ‘Oed’ und leer’. We again meet Phlebas the Phoenician. ‘The king my brother’s wreck’—death at the bottom of the sea—means no more than death in the earth: ‘White bodies naked on the low damp ground / And bones cast in a little low dry garret.’ And yet it is not for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• I. Background and Influences
• II. The Views of the Critic
• III. Poetic Belief
• IV. Point of View in Eliot’s Poetry
• V. Technique and Thought
• VI. Appearance
• VII. Reality (Part One)
• VIII. Reality (Part Two)
• IX. Eliot’s Synthesis
• General Index
• Index of Works by T. S. Eliot