T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth

Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth

G. Atkins

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781349453498
  9781137301314
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137301321
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By reading T.S. Eliot literally and laterally, and attending to his intra-textuality, G. Douglas Atkins challenges the familiar notion of Eliot as bent on escaping this world for the spiritual. This study culminates in the necessary, but seemingly impossible, union of reading and writing, literature and commentary.

1

Reading Literally, Reading Laterally

Abstract: Much of T.S. Eliot’s undeniable difficulty stems, not from inherent obscurity, but from the way we have been taught to read the poetry. He himself famously said that modern poetry must be difficult, and his is demanding: allusive, indirect, often following what he called the “logic of the imagination.” Rather than continue to read him “in depth,” with special attention to symbols and allusions, it is time to follow the lead of the poetry itself, and read it literally and laterally. Eliot practiced a comparative style of reading, and his own poetry calls for reading that juxtaposes passages within a given poem and between and among his poems. The words themselves are the means by which the Word is approached.

Atkins, G. Douglas. T.S. Eliot Materialized: Literal Meaning and Embodied Truth. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137301321.

The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life.

—T.S. Eliot, “Baudelaire in Our Time,” Essays Ancient and Modern

The welcome News is in the Letter found.

—John Dryden, Religio Laici or A Laymans Faith

The two tools of criticism are analysis and comparison.

—T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

Today, nearly 100 years after the publication of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Sacred Wood, and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot still suffers from the perception of being difficult. It is, of course, a judgment that he himself invited when, in 1923, he boldly declared that the modern poet must become “more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.” The result is, he said, in his magisterial critical voice, that “poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.”¹ It is a predictive statement with creative force and capacity.

As my freshman students confirm semester after semester, Eliot is not as difficult as alleged. There are complexities and problems, to be sure: allusions to older texts, often in foreign and even recondite languages, references to a wide variety of historical and cultural figures, philosophical ideas transmuted into complex sensations, arcane words (e.g., “Polyphiloprogenitive”), “metaphysical,” “quaint,” “obscure” language and diction. Nevertheless, many students, and other readers as well, do better than muddle their way through; re-reading helps, particularly when done aloud, and there exists a plethora of cribs and companions to assist the befuddled reader. The real difficulty in reading Eliot, I have come to understand, lies not in some supposed depth at which his meaning lies, accessible, if at all, only to the most knowledgeable and persistent digging and mining. Rather than vertical, the issue is horizontal, and lateral: how parts relate to parts and to whole, one section, verse, word to the next. We are accustomed, however—Romantic even in our theoretical rebellion against Romanticism, in love still with personality and spirit and soul—to look deep within for the true meaning, for the essence that is spirit, which, we all supposedly know, lies far below the surface. If, though, Eliot does not subscribe to these Romantic and modern notions, we may look for his meaning in all the wrong places. I am suggesting, indeed, that he asks to be read laterally, comparatively, even literally. In addition to listing “comparison” as one of the two available tools of the critic, he himself practiced a thoroughly comparative way of reading texts, as the essays included in his first collection, The Sacred Wood (1920), illustrate.²

Let us return to that early essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” from which I quoted above. After delivering his partly defensive assertion that contemporary poets will have to be difficult, Eliot proceeds to link the “school of Donne” with “classical poets” for the way they share the “essential quality of transmuting ideas into sensations, of transforming an observation into a state of mind.”³ Immediately recognizable as absent from this formulation, however obscure the definition may appear, is that “inward” turn that he reprobates in the Romantics in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and develops in “The Metaphysical Poets”: there is simply no hint of (Romantic and modern) reflection. Eliot then goes on in the latter essay to the critical, and no doubt surprising, remarks on surface and depth, soul and diction, engaging, as always, in comparison:

It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, Milton and Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. If we continued to produce Miltons and Drydens it might not so much matter, but as things are it is a pity that English poetry has remained so incomplete. Those who object to the “artificiality” of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to “look into our hearts and write”. But that is not looking deep enough; Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.⁴

Here, I suspect, Old Possum is at pranks with the literal and the figurative, as he dethrones the heart and soul as the object, end, and test of art.

Eliot’s difficulty lies, I think, where he says that St.-J. Perse’s lies in his Modernist poem Anabasis, which Eliot translated and published, along with an important preface, in 1930. In that preface, Eliot begins with expressed doubt about the need for such a piece while acknowledging the work’s difficulty:

I am by no means convinced that a poem like Anabasis requires a preface at all. It is better to read such a poem six times, and dispense with a preface. But when a poem is presented in the form of a translation, people who have never heard of it are naturally inclined to demand some testimonial. So I give mine hereunder.

“For myself,” Eliot goes on, “there was no need for a preface”; he knew that the poem carries no reference to Xenophon or the Journey of the Ten Thousand, that it has “no particular reference to Asia Minor, and that no map of the migrations could be drawn up.”⁵ Perse means by his title that “the poem is a series of images of migration, of conquest of vast spaces in Asiatic wastes, of destruction and foundation of cities and civilizations of any races or epochs of the ancient East.”⁶

Borrowing from a French commentator on Perse’s poem (Lucien Fabre), Eliot proceeds to “two notions which may be of use to the English reader.” The first of these notions is that

any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the suppression of “links in the chain”, 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 concentrates into one intense impression of barbaric civilization. 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.⁷

Eliot proceeds to another finely analytical paragraph, his second sentence below becoming a virtual staple of subsequent commentary on poetry, one in which the critic is very much present and plainly visible, as well as patently engaged in “Gen’rous Converse” (Alexander Pope):⁸

Such selection of a sequence of images and ideas has nothing chaotic about it. There is a logic of the imagination as well as a logic of concepts. People who do not appreciate poetry always find it difficult to distinguish between order and chaos in the arrangement of images; and even those who are capable of appreciating poetry cannot depend upon first impressions. I was not convinced of Mr Perse’s imaginative order until I had read the poem five or six times. And if, as I suggest, such an arrangement of imagery requires just as much “fundamental brain-work” as the arrangement of an argument, it is to be expected that the reader of a poem should take at least as much trouble as a barrister reading an important decision on a complicated case.⁹

Eliot’s translation of Perse’s poem appears as prose, but Eliot insists it is poetry: “Its sequences, its logic of imagery, are those of poetry and not of prose; and in consequence—at least the two matters are very closely allied—the declamation, the system of stresses and pauses, which is partially exhibited by the punctuation and spacing, is that of poetry and not of prose.”¹⁰

Eliot moves then to the second “notion” he has borrowed from Lucien Fabre, “a tentative synopsis of the movement of the poem,” offering guidance for a first reading, which can be forgotten when the reader no longer needs it.¹¹ It amounts to a putting-in-other-words that “movement,” which is not thematic, of the poem’s ten divisions (e.g., IV. “Foundation of the city,” VII. “Decision to fare forth,” X. “Acclamation, festivities, repose. Yet the urge towards another departure, this time with the mariner”). Eliot immediately adds: “And I believe that this is as much as I need to say about Perse’s Anabasis.” He does say more, however: “I believe this is a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of Mr James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia Plurabelle [later incorporated into Finnegans Wake]. And this is a high estimate indeed.”¹²

The “logic of the imagination” that Eliot defends in his discussion of Anabasis bears a certain relationship to that “mythical method” that he identifies with Joyce in Ulysses: the juxtaposition, without commentary or reflection, of different time periods and cultures, this via the context created by allusions to The Odyssey. Such allusion as appears in the opening verses of The Waste Land functions in similar fashion, although the situation is medieval rather than mythical: there, the comparison and contrast with Chaucer’s pilgrims on the way to Canterbury in April render tellingly the wastelanders’ incapacity for feeling and meaning. Fecundity and fertility comment on, and offer a critique of, modern barrenness and infertility—all without direct authorial intrusion or editorial statement. A burden thus rests on the reader to know, to perceive, the unstated. It is by no means, though, a matter of reading deeply; instead, it is a matter of placing side by side, of comparing two contrasting situations.

In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933), the Norton Lectures at Harvard, Eliot returned at the end to the matter of difficult poetry (a section reprinted in his Points of View, 1951). Here, he considers several reasons a reader may find a poem difficult, including “the reader’s having been told, or having suggested to himself, that the poem is going to prove difficult.” Such a reader, reasons Eliot, “obfuscates his senses by the desire to be clever and to look very hard for something he doesn’t know what—or else by the desire not to be taken in”; instead, the reader should begin “in a state of sensitivity.”¹³ Citing himself as instance, Eliot says that the “seasoned reader” “does not bother about understanding; not, at least, at first.” “Finally,” Eliot says, “there is the difficulty caused by the author’s having left out something which the reader is used to finding; so that the reader, bewildered, gropes about for what is absent, and puzzles his head for a kind of ‘meaning’ which is not there, and is not meant to be there.”¹⁴ Such a “meaning,” Eliot adds, may serve “to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the poem does its work upon him.” Some poets, though, “become impatient ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1  Reading Literally, Reading Laterally
• 2  Turning and Acceptance in Ash-Wednesday : Affirming Life’s Newness and Joy
• 3  Falling in Love and Reading Spinoza: Some Forms of Approach to “Amalgamating Disparate Experience”
• 4  The Gift Half Understood: Incarnation as “Impossible Union,” Way, and Intersection
• 5  The Word, Words, and the World: Redeeming the Word, or Some Implications of Incarnation for Reading and Writing about Literature
• Bibliography
• Index