T.S. Eliot's Aesthetics and Social Contradictions

Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of
Debrecen CAHS
T. S. ELIOT'S AESTHETICS
Author(s): Péter Egri
Source: Angol Filológiai Tanulmányok / Hungarian Studies in English, Vol. 8 (1974), pp. 5-
34
Published by: Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the
University of Debrecen CAHS
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Angol Filologiai Tanulinanyok VIII. Debrecen, 1974
Hungarian Studies in English VIII Hungary
Peter Egri
T. S. ELIOT'S AESTHETICS
Stephen Spender, one of the generation of poets who started to write u

influence says in his retrospective appreciation, The Struggle of the
Waste Land has a kind of finality which is about modern civilization itsel
of the whole seen through the European mind at the end of its tether."1 In
Poets of the 1950s Kingsley Amis gives voice to the new poetic aspiration
away radically from the Eliotic tradition, in the following words: ". . .No
any more poems about philosophers or paintings or novelists or art galler
ogy or foreign cities or other poems. At least I hope nobody wants t
Larkin, a member of the young generation of poets draws an even sharpe
himself and the Eliot school: "[I] have no belief in 'tradition' or a com
- kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets."3
The clashes sparking about Eliot's critical heritage are no less fierce,
representatives (John Crowe Ransom, Allan Tate, Robert Penn War
Brooks etc.) of "New Criticism" look upon Eliot as their predecessor, or at l
views that can be traced back to Eliot. On the other hand, Robert W
Marxist monograph on "The New Criticism " points out that the bas
Eliot's critical activity has not a reviving but an impoverishing effect on
cism.4 Eliot himself denies both being the predecessor and the contrary (
of Criticism , 1956).5
These opinions in diametrical opposition reveal not only the fundamental
of Eliot's critics, but also call attention to the contradictions of his poetic
activity. Eliot's world concept, both experienced and formed, is the
unresolved contradictions. They are rooted in his attitude towards contem
and historical issues, clearly reflected in his social criticism. Therefore the
of the principles of Eliot's aesthetic theory and his artistic practice, whic
of this paper, must be preceded by a delineation of his approach to some
social problems.
1 Stephen Spender, The Struggle of the Modern. London, 1963. p. 258.
2 Cf. Charles Tomlinson, Poetry Today. Boris Ford (ed.), The Pelican Guide to English L
The Modern Age. Harmondsworth, 1961. p. 458.
8 Ibid.
4 Robert Weimann, " New Criticism und die Entwicklurw bureerlicher Liter aturwissensch
1962. pp. 60-74.
5 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets . London, 1965. p. 106.
I
Eliot belongs undoubtedly to those poets of this century who are the most difficult
to understand. The difficulties of interpretation are not primarily of a linguistic nature :
his verse paragraphs are chiselled, according to his classicist ideals, in a linguistically
clear and distinct manner. The intellectual traps are set up by the artistic form resulting
from the unresolved contradictions of his world concept. Tracing out these contradic-
tions makes it easier to understand Eliot's specifically conservative avantgardism.
Eliot was a conscious artist; he tried to express his world outlook not only in a poetic
form but in critical essays and studies on society as well.6 We can find manifestations
of this kind already in his first period; after the ideological turn in 1927, however,
his views were laid down in longer and longer essays, in a more and more independent
form and in an increasingly dogmatic way; they are summarized in two works: The
Idea of a Christian Society, 1939 and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 1948.
An ever-recurring motive in Eliot's notion of society is the criticism of the modern
bourgeois order. He condemns bourgeois individualism, "whiggery", as he calls it
in his early essay The Function of Criticism . Later on, too, he writes with increasing
sarcasm and vigour of the financial oligarchy giving itself out to be pure democracy,
of the mass society of liberal democracy, set up for the sake of profit, which believes
only in banks and shares, compound interest, the maintenance of dividends, and the
cheap, anti-intellectual commercial values, advertised noisily by an industrialized world.
"Perhaps the dominant vice of our time", he writes, "from the point of view of the
Church, will be proved to be Avarice. Surely there is something wrong in our attitude
towards money. The acquisitive, rather than the creative and spiritual instincts, are
encouraged. The fact that money is always forthcoming for the purpose of making
more money, whilst it is so difficult to obtain for purposes of exchange, and for the
needs of the most needy, is disturbing to those who are not economists . . . And I
believe that modern war is chiefly caused by some immorality of competition which
is always with us in times of 'peace'."7
Eliot wants, however, to preserve the class-structure in which the censured economic
system exists. The class-distinctions are considered by him not only inevitable, but
necessary, they must be maintained, and with respect to culture they are even favourable.
The main repository of culture is, in his opinion, the "elite" coming for the most
part from the ruling, class. His ideal of education is also aristocratic.
The other contradiction within his world outlook is connected with fascism. He
realized the growing danger brought about by the totalitarian demagogy of national-
socialism and took a stand against fascist inhumanity.
At the same time, the criticism directed by Eliot against bourgeois democracy has,
as regards its social content, a right-wing character. This is manifest in his stressing
the necessity of an organic community, insisting upon the sustaining and saving power
6 A. G. George, T. S. Eliot. His Mind and Art. London, 1969. pp. 260-72.
7 T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society. London, 1939. pp. 97-8. Cf. pp. 15, 64.
of blood and soil, idealizing the purity of race, making anti-Semitic pronouncements
now and then, extolling primitivism, identifying the people with the mob, and rendering
the differences between fascism and democracy relative. Although he makes general
statements about his being for democracy, sometimes there is a dangerous transition
from the criticism of bourgeois democracy into the criticism of democracy in general.
In The Idea of a Christian Society Eliot states that totalitarian systems also can retain
the term "democracy" and give it their own meaning. In the Notes this thought is
illustrated by the following example: General Fuller, one of the visitors invited to
Hitler's birthday celebrations, gave an account of his experiences in The Times (April
24, 1939). Fuller sympathized with the Nazis; he thought Great Britain should join
fascism, and called himself a "British Fascist". "From my point of view, General
Fuller has as good a title to call himself a 'believer in democracy' as anyone else"8
Eliot adds, not that he approves of England's turning fascist; what he wants is a Chris-
tian society, and that, he thinks, cannot be reconciled with fascism. Nevertheless the
above relativization of the fundamental opposition between democracy and fascism
is a dangerous concession to Nazi demagogy.
Another unresolved contradiction of Eliot's idea of society is evident from his views
on socialism and communism. Although Eliot radically condemns the modern capitalist
way of life, he opposes the social system that is to abolish this way of life radically;
this comes from his very notion of the necessity of keeping up a class society. He is
only able to look at socialism in terms of the bourgeois caricature of its sectarian distor-
tions, and lumping together socialism and fascism by the term "totalitarianism", he
rejects it.
Eliot favours the social formations existing before the modern capitalist order or
in the early period of its development. His sympathy is turned to the organic social-
religious-artistic unity of the primitive or under-developed societies; the medieval
power of the Catholic Church; the life of the peasantry having a natural contact with
the soil; the relatively simple forms of producing and exchanging commodities;
the way of life preceding the industrial division of labour, not mechanized, divided
aristocratically but not grown in rigid castes. He has, however, sufficient sense of reality
to realize the impossibility of returning to the past and turns down every endeavour
of this kind as mushy sentimentalism that disregards contemporary circumstances.
However, if "liberal democracy" and the modern bourgeois order only embody,
in Eliot's view, the chaotic crisis of traditional human values, and fascism and communism
with their totalitarian systems can but increase the crisis, and only the disintegrating
remnants of the past survive into the present, what kind of solution can be given by
contemporary human society ? Eliot is consistent in his train of thought and draws
a negative conclusion : the whole of contemporary human civilization is decaying.
Taking the pessimistic consequences of the Eliotic line of argument is not identical,
8 Op. cit. pp. 19, 69.
however, with following the logic of reality; it results in another unresolved contradic-
tion, an illogicality from the point of view of historical reality: Eliot identifies the
crisis of modern liberalism with the hopeless condition of contemporary mankind
on earth.
With such presuppositions there can be but an unreal solution. Eliot thinks to find
it in the redemption of Christian faith. As regards the contents of this Christian idea
and ideal, it is partly a revival, in a way not described in detail by Eliot, of the social
and cultural cells preceding capitalism (parish, religious orders, Christian morality etc.),
and partly and mainly everything that is an abstract opposite of contemporary civilization
and morality (humility, charity, purity, virtue, prudence, organic collective life etc.).
"If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God) you should pay your respects
to Hitler or Stalin",9 Eliot writes rejecting the wordliness of liberal democracy. What
is deeper and more important than the difference between forms of government,
Eliot argues, is the difference between a Christian and a pagan society. The disarming
nature of this view becomes explicit especially if we consider that he condemned
bourgeois democracy, fascism and socialism, if not in the same manner, as "pagan
society" in an epoch when mankind could be defended only by the antifascist alliance
of bourgeois democratic and socialist forces. Eliot holds that the religious revival
may include certain social reforms as well, but he considers decisive not the systematic
economic, social and political changes, but the individual's becoming religiously
conscious. Every reform or revolution is but a "sordid travesty"10 of what human
society should be, he writes.
How can Eliot's Idea of a Christian Society be put into practice? Regarding this
matter, Eliot does not propose anything. On the contrary, he emphasizes many times
and decidedly that "I am not concerned with the means by which a Christian society
could be brought about."11 As a matter of fact, it is quite natural. If the Idea of a Christian
Society to be carried out is the projection of the past into the future, the present cannot
be the medium in which real measures can be taken on a social scale. If this idea is
the opposite of the whole of contemporary society, how could the positive forces,
rendering the future present, be explored? Ends and means come into antagonism
with each other, since the ends, set by Eliot, are on a social scale "unfeasible". Eliot
characterizes the Idea of a Christian Society as follows: "In using the term 'Idea' I
have of course had in mind the definition given by Coleridge, when he lays down
at the beginning of his Church and State that : 'By an idea I mean (in this instance) that
conception of a thing, which is not abstracted from any particular state, form or mode,
in which the thing may happen to exist at this or that time; nor yet generalised from
any number or succession of such forms or modes, but which is given by the knowledge
of its ultimate aim'."12
9 Op. cit. p. 63.

10 Op. cit. p. 59.
11 Op. cit. p. 48.
12 Op. cit. p. 67.
That is why Eliot's social criticism is remarkably abstract. It is noticeable in his
arguments that, when raising problems in an abstract, general way, his interest in
social matters and reforming endeavours endow his reasoning with a certain amount
of veracity. He perceives e.g. that "society is very deeply affected morally and spiritually
by material conditions." On trying to concretize his observations in some degree,
if only theoretically, and systematize them, he is immediately led astray by his con-
servative opinion and idealistic-religious point of view. He adds to the above-mentioned
remark that "this is not to accept any doctrine of determinism for it means no more
than that society, and the majority of individuals composing it, are only imperfectly
conscious of what they are doing, directed by impure motives and aiming at false
goods." The real solution can be brought about only by a religious order (Catholicism
and the International Order, 1934).13
All these unbalanced contradictions in Eliot's notion of society had the intellectual
and emotional consequence that he came to reject the whole of the given world, and
was not able to take a firm stand in reality. His avantgardism, having a specific colour
given by his explicitly religious conservatism, originates in this abstractly generalizing
negation. Though it is characteristic of avantgardism in general, too, that it does not
give a concrete critical representation of a concrete society, and the general revolt
of its followers may change over into a general resignation that can be confirmed
officially as well, still, it seems to be a specific feautre of English avantgardism that its
most characteristic manifestations (Joyce's prose and Eliot's poetry) are socially and
politically much less polarized than similar artistic endeavours in other European
countries. The aspirations of one of the leading poets of the American imagists, Ezra
Pound, who had a great artistic influence on Eliot, resulted finally in the affirmation
of fascism. From German expressionism there were ways leading both towards the
left (Brecht, Becher, Toller, Frank) and to the right (Benn, Kaiser, Johst). Italian futurism,
glorifying, from the outset, violence and war, and combining political proclamations
with artistic manifestos, became a trend officially supported during the fascist regime
(Marinetti). Russian futurism, on the other hand, in which there were from the begin-
ning strong ant i- war efforts, included a poet who later saw the future in carrying out
the aims of the socialist revolution (Mayakovsky). From French surrealism there was
a way leading to socialist poetry (Aragon, Eluard); the Hungarian 'isms' also had an
active anti-war trend which approached socialism, or was even socialist (L. Kassak,
A. Komjat, A. Jozsef, Gy. Derkovits etc.).
The expressionism, surrealism and constructivism of Joyce, however, were connected
with an unconcern for every kind of political activity; those of Eliot were accompanied
by an openly conservative attitude;14 neither of them were backed up by real social,
13 T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose. Harmondsworth, 1963. p. 197.

14 Cf. E. M. Browne, From The Rock to The Confidential Clerk . Neville Braybrooke (ed.), T. S. Eliot. A
Symposium for his Seventieth Birthday. New York, 1958. p. 68. L. P. Hartley, A Garland from the Young .
Ibid. p. 102. - F. Kermode, A Babylonish Dialect . Allan Tate (ed.), T. S. Eliot. The Man and his Work.
A Critical Evaluation by Twenty-six Distinguished Writers. New York, 1966. p. 237.
political radicalism. This common feature of Joyce's and Eliot's artistic world concept
can partly be explained by the conservative tendency of 20th century English history.
But Shaw's dramaturgy, Auden's, Spender's and MacNeice's poetry in the 30s proved
that this history also offered artistic possibilities, different from those perceived by
Joyce and Eliot.
II
Eliot's literary criticism links up his social criticism and literary practice.15 In its prin-
ciples the views of his social criticism are prevailing; its matter, direction and emphases
are determined by the demands of his poetic and dramatic oeuvre. In its intellectual
system aspects of many kinds are arguing with one another.
One of the most conspicuous contradictions within his literary criticism can be
found between the exceptional artistic sensibility of the poet-critic and the conception
of literary history of the critic-poet. Whatever theme he may have treated, his refined
and keen aesthetic hearing offered previously unnoticed observations to his passion
for systematization, challenging intellect and critical austerity. Especially those of his
essays are of lasting value in which he analysed the models and inspirations of his own
poetic and dramatic work (Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry, 1917; Dante, 1920,
1929; What Dante Means to me, 1950; Baudelaire, 1930; The Metaphysical Poets, 1921;
John Dryden, 1921), dealt with the historical relation between poetry and criticism,
(The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 1932), or treated prosody and problems
in the history of versification (Reflections on ' Vers Libre * , 1917; Seneca in Elizabethan
Translation, 1927; The Three Voices of Poetry, 1953).
However, Eliot's poetic-critical sensibility produces lasting conclusions only if he
does not run against the prohibitory signs of his theory of literary history. This theory
attacks and inverts the traditional notion of the principal direction in the development
of English poetry. According to the traditional view, the backbone of development
was formed by the works of Shakespeare, Milton, the so-called romantic poets, Brown-
ing, Swinburne and Tennyson. The young Eliot rises up against all of them, contrasting
Shakespeare, there being no English poet who would come up to Eliot's ideal, with
Dante; Milton with the metaphysical poets, Donne, Marvell, Crashaw, Herbert,
Vaughan; the romantics with the classicists, mainly with Dryden and Pope; the poets
of the middle and later nineteenth century with the Imagists, especially with Ezra
Pound and, spoken or unspoken, himself. The defence of his own poetic ideal is the
fundamental principle of his critical activity, as is suggested by his self-analytical essay
15 Cf.M. C. Bradbrook, Eliot's Critical Method . B. Rajan (ed.), T. S. Eliot. A Study of his Writings by Several
Hands. London, 1947. pp. 119-28. - G.Williamson, A Reader's Guide to T. S. Eliot London, 1955. pp.
27-49. - M. Praz, T. 5. Eliot as a Critic . Allan Tate (ed.), op. cit. pp. 262-77. - A. Warren, Continuity in
T. S. Eliot's Literary Criticism . Allan Tate (ed.), op. cit. pp. 278-98.
10
To Criticize the Critic (1961). Eliot rarely states his opinion about prose- writers, but
generally these views coincide with his opinion of the contemporary poets; he considers
Hardy as disagreeable as Shaw.
The ideological background of Eliot's theory is provided by the reactionary criticism
of bourgeois individualism, the literary development of bourgeois self-consciousness.
In Four Elizabethan Dramatists (1924) Eliot designates development as deterioration,
and pointing out its Elizabethan beginnings and the final stage indicated by Pinero,
he condemns it as a whole.16 In his essay on Thomas Middleton (1927) he speaks of the
sixteenth century as the initiation of the "plutocratic modern world".17 In Shakespeare
and the Stoicism of Seneca he writes : "What influence the work of Seneca and Machiavelli
and Montaigne seems to me to exert in common on that time, and most conspicuously
through Shakespeare, is an influence toward a kind of self-consciousness that is new;
the self-consciousness and self-dramatization of the Shakespearean hero, of whom
Hamlet is only one. It seems to mark a stage, even if not a very agreeable one, in human
history or progress, or deterioration, or change."18 Eliot's conservative world outlook
is manifest in his condemning Milton, the greatest poet of the English bourgeois revolu-
tion, who was able to express its ideology in the purest form, both from religious
and poetic points of view, and in his attacking Shelley's revolutionary idea of society.
His aversion for the modern liberal bourgeoisie made Eliot oppose the notion of bour-
geois development and its reflection in literary forms.
This conception gave rise to a number of errors in his literary criticism which were
corrected by Eliot's artistic tact only in the later phase of his development, modified
from ideological and artistic points of view. Following the development in literary
history, the first group of Eliot's critical misunderstandings and "mishearings" centres
around the work of Shakespeare. When esteeming Shakespeare's philosophy inferior
to that of Dante he does not yet undervalue Shakespeare's art. But when censuring
Othello that in his last speech before his suicide he is deceiving himself and the public,
and instead of thinking of Desdemona, murdered a moment before, he is concerned
about himself and does not display the virtue of humility, the narrowness of his
conception makes Eliot see a fault of character where Shakespeare's character-drawing
culminates. It is the ideal of humility that prevents the critic from understanding the
renaissance consummation and realization of individual consciousness and personality.19
Later his severity towards Shakespeare was mitigated. His crystallized world outlook
made him patient with the opponents of his youth, the more and more vigorous urge
of his own poetic and dramatic calling directed his attention to the organic evolution
and artistic values of the Shakespearean poetic drama. In 1932, in the Preface to Essays
on Elizabethan Drama he regrets his former unqualified assertions and self-conceit.20
16 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays. London, 1963. pp. 116-7.

17 Op. cit. p. 168.
18 Op. cit. pp. 139-40.
19 Op. cit. pp. 130-31.
20 T. S. Eliot, Preface to Essays on Elizabethan Drama. New York, 1932, 1956. p. VII.
11
Another issue of Eliot's theory of the history of literature and poetic sensibility
is Milton. Censures had been showered upon Milton since the beginning of Eliot's
critical activity; they were systematized in an essay in 1936 (Milton I). According
to this essay Milton's imagery is pale (only his auditory imagination is strong); his
language is artificial and conventional; he writes English like a dead language; his
style is tortuous and rhetorical. Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets approached
the world with a unified sensibility,21 capturing impressions through all of their senses
and thoughts. With them image, music and idea, object, emotion and thought, the
representation of phenomena of everyday life and poetic solemnity fused together.
Later on, however, this unified artistic sensibility became dissociated. Out of it the
music and rhetoric of language were extracted and exploited one-sidedly by Milton,
the play of fluctuating emotions by Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.
Eliot observes a real process, but does not differentiate properly between the organic
unity of Shakespeare's poetic world concept and the tormented, sometimes artificial
lyric unity of the really important and undeservedly neglected metaphysical poets,
tossed about in the historical and ideological storm of the seventeenth century. Meta-
physical poetry is transformed by Eliot somewhat in the likeness of his own Imagist
lyric; he makes Milton and the romantics prejudicially responsible for the dissociation
of sensibility; admonishing Dryden and Pope patiently, he pardons them; and fails
to give a proper analysis of historical conditions. In fact, however, it was exactly the
power and drive of the English bourgeois revolution that were expressed by Milton's
poetic sublimity; it is Milton's Puritan pathos that is doubted ironically by Eliot's con-
servative scepticism. The bathos of the everyday life of the bourgeoisie in the advanced
state of its development, as a poetic subject-matter and critical "fact" is contrasted
in Eliot's Milton criticism with the pathos, the elevated poetry of the bourgeoisie
being born in a revolutionary way. This is why it is understandable that Eliot comes
to recant a part of his former Milton criticism ( Milton II, 1947), when', partially and
religiously, having risen above the deliberate prosaism of the Imagist lyric matter,
he dismisses the poetic ideal according to which poetic idiom must approach spoken
language, prose. Thus Milton is called, again an error in his criticism, "the greatest
master of free verse" in the English language.22 What is the reason that the most charac-
teristically religious poet of 20rh century English poetry could never understand com-
pletely the greatest representative of 17th century Puritan religious lyric? The explana-
tion, I think, can be found, all things considered, not in dogmatic differences but in the
substantial difference, historically determined, between Milton's and Eliot's religious
world concepts. Milton's religiosity summarized the most important progressive
bourgeois aspirations of the Puritan revolution; that of Eliot, on the other hand, ex-
pressed the illusory counter-world of the crisis of modern liberalism stylized to
the universal crisis of all mankind.
21 Cf. D. E. S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot. London, 1960. pp. 48-79.

22 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 158.
12
Eliot's notion of the development of English lyric also comes into conflict with
the values of 19th century English poetry, branded as romantic.23 Wordsworth, Cole-
ridge, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Morris, Swinburne and Tennyson caught Eliot's
fancy before his mature manhood; these poets, concludes Eliot, are consequently
immature. Above all, it is Shelley, whose ideas and emotions are declared by Eliot
immature; his poetic method extravagant and incoherent, his attributes ineffective
metre paddings, his rhymes empty jingles. But Eliot finds fault with the others, too.
Wordsworth is inexpressibly boring; he lacks plenitude and variety. Coleridge's
feelings are impure; his abstract theories sentimental. Byron is empty; he mixes
disillusion and cynicism unpleasantly; he wrote too much of which too little is good;
his poetic attempts are sonorous affirmations of the commonplace with no depth
of significance; his feelings are often confused; his ear is imperfect; his vision is not
strong enough; he is not properly objective and expressive; he devotes gigantic energy
end persistence to such a useless and petty purpose as self-analysis.
The poets, coming after the romantic movement but in some cases having a stylistic
similarity with it, are not more fortunate, either. Robert Browning, who was a master
of the dramatic monologue, had not created a single character whom the reader has
a vivid recollection of; his poetry is obscure, and, at least as compared with Marvell,
again "immature". William Morris's composition is loose; his uncertain objects are
enveloped by dreamily suggestive, nebulous emotions. Swinburne r> diffuse; his attributes
are emptier than those of Shelley; his style is rhetorically musical; he prefers veiled and
sonorous abstractions to sharp images. Tennyson's blank verse has a coarser effect than
that of Shakespeare's contemporaries, because it is less suitable for arousing complicated,
refined and surprising sentiments; his style is poetically artificial; his way of represen-
tation is one-sided; in contrast to Herbert and Donne, he is not an intellectual poet; he
has no epic gift, being attracted to elegiac moods. Eliot's antiromantic standpoint was
formulated theoretically, as well: "The only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it. . .
Romanticism is a short cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disci-
ples only back upon themselves, . . . there is no place for it in letters."24
However pertinent Eliot's criticism over some excesses of romanticism occasionally
is, his overall anti-romantic criticism, as shown by the above citations, is conspicuously
one-sided. Not having analysed the relation of the poets, ranged with romanticism,
to reality, his norms of classification are often unfounded. He has a sharp eye for the
artistic features different from his own ideal of style, but he looks upon the differences
in poetic quality as differences in value, affirming his own ideal, disclaiming those of the
poets criticized and often sacrificing truth. Under the term "romanticism" he rejects
practically the best part of nineteenth century English poetry, and considering tradition
impersonal, in the very act of referring to it, he approaches dangerously the conservative-
23 Cf. F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry. Harmonds worth, (1932), 1963. pp. 13-28, 66-8. - D. E.
Jones, The Plays of T. S. Eliot. London, 1960. p. 82. - D. E. S. Maxwell, op. cit. p. 67.- G. Jones, Approach
to the Purpose . A Study of the Poetry of T . 5. Eliot. London, 1964. p. 302. - N. Frye, T. S. Eliot. Edinburgh
and London, 1968. p. 17.
24 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood. London, 1964. pp. 31-2.
13
avantgarde negation of poetic tradition and the general formal charecteristics of poetry.
"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personal-
ity .. . Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion ; it is not
the expression of personality, but an escape from personality."25
It is the ideal of classicism that Eliot sets against romanticism. His opinion was
strongly influenced by the views of I. Babbitt, and later T. E. Hulme and Ch. Maurras.
The difference between classicism and romanticism, he writes, is 4 4 the difference between
the complete and the fragmentary, the adult and the immature, the orderly and the
chaotic" (The Function of Criticism, 1923). 26 In Eliot's early critical writings it is order
that is of primary importance among these essential components of the classic ideal;
order is considered by him an outward system forced upon the hustling and seething
chaos of the world. He praises Dante's theology, the intellectuality of the metaphysical
poets, Blake's and Joyce's mythology for their creating order. It is not difficult to
recognize in the person of this critic the poet of The Waste Land , who, not unlike Joyce,
Schonberg, Berg andWebern, tried to counterbalance the surrealist and expressionist
disorder with constructivism.
In Eliot's later critical works classicism is characterized more and more by maturity
of mind, manners and language and perfection of the common style, and the claim for
universality ( What is a Classic ?, 1944).27 But even this conception is hard to illustrate
with acceptable examples. Opposing the progressive ideas of the nineteenth century,
Eliot thinks for a long time that Goethe is under the mark since "he dabbled in both
philosophy and poetry and made no great success of either ( The Use of Poetry and the
Use of Criticism, 1933, )28 and moreover, he is a little provincial(I). So we cannot call
him a universal classic," Eliot writes in What is a Classic? (This opinion was recanted a^
late as 1955 in his lecture Goethe as the Sage.)
Who is, then, a classic poet ? Eliot thinks that English literature has no real classic poet
and classic age. It is the poetry and the age of Dryden and Pope that seem to embody
this ideal, but in their age, too, the power and universality of Christian faith had been
already disintegrated. Actually Eliot looks upon classicism as an ideal to be realized
hereafter on the example, but not on the imitation of, the best old traditions (Virgil,
Dante, Shakespeare, Racine, Corneille, Dryden, Pope). Eliot considers this task his
innermost aspiration ; the ideal of maturity, wise and disciplined equilibrium and poetic
universality (religiously coloured) radiated from the internal ideal of his later works
into his critical activity and intensified his endeavours, which had been previously, too,
on these lines.
These intentions, however, yearning for the past and the future, homeless in the
present and longing for a redeeming order of the next world, did not lack certain
romantic features; consequently they could not reject definitely that which under the
25 T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent , 1919. Selected Essays, pp. 17, 21.
26 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 26.
28 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism. London, 1933, 1964. p. 99.
14
term "romanticism" had been objected to for such a long time and in many different
ways. Eliot's notion of romanticism was gradually modified, becoming more adaptable.
It was Coleridge the poet and critic in whom Eliot first recognized the kindred spirit ;
later Wordsworth, who tried to render poetic language more natural and opposed the
world of the English Industrial Revolution, roused his sympathy. By and by Shelley,
who had been damned for a long time, came to be mentioned as a positive example.29
If in his program-setting essay Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) Eliot had
characterized poetry as an escape from emotions, in The Social Function of Poetry in 1943
he declared that 4 'poetry has primarily to do with the expression of feeling and emotion. . .
poetry is the vehicle of feeling", )30 and in the later stage of his career he more and more
often made remarks suggesting that he no longer considered classicism and romanticism
opposites excluding each other (After Strange Gods , 1934 ;31 To Criticize the Critic , 196132).
Besides the clash between poetic sensibility and the theory on the history of poetry,
a number of contradictions characterize Eliot's critical conception. Among them the
contrast between aesthetics and criticism is very typical. The whole of Eliot's critical
activity can be characterized by the claim for a theoretical generalization in prosody,
poetics and even in aesthetics. What he writes about free and regular verse, the function
of rhyme and metre, the music of poetry, the relationship of poetry and drama, the
characteristics of poetic drama, the role of tradition and innovation, the frontiers of
criticism, the nature of poetic generalization, contains many aesthetically pertinent
remarks that must be recorded by the theory of literature and especially by poetics.
He states of Coleridge approvingly that he established the significance of philosophy
and aesthetics for literary criticism ( The Frontiers of Criticism, 1956)33. He thinks, it is very
hazardous for modern literary criticism to disregard aesthetics. At the same time,
however, the fine curve of his generalizations in poetics, the theory of literature and
aesthetics is continually broken by the lack of a comprehensive, objectively systematiz-
ing, scholarly world outlook. That is why in his volume of essays The Use of Poetry
and the Use of Criticism in which he buckles down to theoretical generalizations many
times and in many ways, he cannot help remarking that "a perfectly satisfactory
theory which applied to all poetry would do so only at the cost of being voided of all
content", and "I have no general theory of my own".34
It is the concrete method of making generalizations in the theory of literature that
is problematic for him and in his opinion. That is manifest not only in his failing to
systematize, in spite of his constant efforts to do so, his various particular observations,
whether true or false, but also in another contradiction between his abstractly proper
partial statements and their improper or unsatisfactory concretization. In his essay
29 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 15. Cf. Selected Prose, p. 30.

30 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets , p. 19.
81 T. S. Eliot. Selected Prose, p. 31.
34 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, pp. 141, 143. Cf. pp. 149-50; Milton II. On Poetry
and Poets, p. 151 ; The Social Function of Poetry, On Poetry and Poets, p. 18; To Criticize the Critic . p. 18.
15
on Hamlet (1919) Eliot sets forth his famous and often quoted theory of the "objective
correlative", according to which "the only way of expressing emotion in the form
of art is by finding ... a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the
formula of that particular emotion.' 35 When applying this figurative conception to
Shakespeare's Hamlet, he draws the absurd conclusion that the play is an artistic failure
because in it the emotion to be expressed, the effect of the mother's vice on her son, does
not and cannot find its objective equivalent. In the artistic world of Hamlet the problem
of "the time out of joint" is left out of consideration by Eliot. The message of the play is
restricted arbitrarily to a psychological motive, and having found that the form of the
Shakespearean drama does not express the Eliotic content, the tragedy is condemned.
Similarly, when in the essay on Milton written in 1947 he raises the issue that the
dissociation of sensibility, observed in Milton's poetry, should be examined as symp-
tomatic effects of the Civil War and the contemporary English and European situation,
he makes an abstractly true statement. On trying to concretize his correct theoretical
perception, reality escapes his grasp : "for what these causes were, we may dig and dig
until we get to a depth at which words and concepts fail us."36 In abstract generality
Eliot admits that changes in poetic form are the symptoms of changes in society.37
When, however, he ought to apply this thesis to the connection of the revolutionary
changes in society and the revival of poetry, as professed by Shelley, he seems to be
sceptical (The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism J.38
The difficulties of concrete generalization are shown by a contradiction of the arguing
method of Eliot, the critic, especially in his first period; some facts in his train of
thought are established in an unusually explicit way; these, however, invalidate each
other to such an extent that the conclusion appears to be extremely vague. In his essay
Reflections on Vers Libre written in 1917 he attempts to prove that vers libre can be inter-
preted prosodically, too. First in strictly formulated sentences he lays down that "any
line can be divided into feet and accents. The simpler metres are a repetition of one
combination, perhaps a long and a short, or a short and a long syllable, five times
repeated." To this he adds in the next sentence, and no less definitely: "There is, how-
ever, no reason why, within the single line, there should be any repetition . . . "39 In other
words, free verse is traditionally metrical if traditional metres are interpreted freely.
In the final inference of the essay the differences between metrical and free verse get
thoroughly blurred. In this vein of thinking, which is paradoxical to the point of
self-contradiction, the prosodic reflection of Eliot's conservative avantgardism and the
poet of the period of The Waste Land can be perceived. In The Function of Criticism Eliot
35 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 145. Cf. F. O. Matthiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot . New York and
London, 1958. pp. 56-80. - A. Mizcner, To Meet Mr. Eliot . Hugh Kenner (ed.), T. S. Eliot. A Collection
of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962. p. 20. - R. Blackmur, In the Hope of Staightcning
Things Out. Ibid. pp. 144-5. - G. George, op. cit. p. 122.
36 T. S. Eliot, Milton II. On Poetry and Poets, p. 153.
37 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 75.
38 Op. cit. p. 94.
39 T. S. Eliot, Reflections on 4 Vers Libre ' To Criticize the Critic, p. 158.
16
expounds in pregnantly formulated sentences the nature of the relation of literary criticism
to truth, fact and outer reality. The conclusion of his train of thought is, however, this:
"But if anyone complains that I have not defined truth, or fact, or reality, I can only
say apologetically that it was no part of my purpose to do so, but only to find a scheme
into which, whatever they are, they will fit, if they exist."40 Sometimes Eliot's
contradictory views on a certain object are divided among several persons; partly that
accounts for the interlocutory form of his essay entitled A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry
(1928), dramatizing the contradictions of his theory on this genre before the evolvement
of his own dramatic poetry. Eliot aims at characterizing his object by self-contradictory,
witty paradoxes as well, when, for example, he writes of Goethe and Shelley that
"they would not have been as great as they were but for the limitations which perevent-
ed them form being greater than they were" ( The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism J.41
Eliot's attitude towards realism, too, contains inner contradictions. His poetic
aspiration to get hold of contemporary reality, his anti-romantic criticism, castigating
the turning away from the sight, however abhorrent it may have been, of the modern
industrial world, his Imagist ideal, claiming the necessity of sharp and graphic imagery,
the somewhat traditionalist nature of his avantgardism inclined Eliot as a critic to support
realism. He pointed out e.g. Middleton's realism with praise and agreement ( Thomas
Middleton , 1927) j42 he underlined in a positive sense that Dante "became the voice of
the thirteenth century... Shakespeare became the representative of the end of the
sixteenth century, of a turning point in history" ( Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca)*3
Eliot, the poet, however, tried to associate the claim to a complete expression of
contemporary reality with the requirement of a total negation of this reality. This
association, brought about by force, could not, of course, produce viable realism either
in criticism or in the arts. Thus Eliot's notion of realism is often questionable even when
he defends realism; e.g. behind Middleton's realism Eliot perceives a detached observa-
tion and a photographic social documentation and considers the Shakespearean represen-
tation of the age and artistic generalization impersonal. At the same time he takes a stand
outright against the realistic attempts both of Elizabethan and twentieth century drama
(Four Elizabethan Dramatists): 44
In Eliot's concept of tradition an opposition of historical and unhistorical approaches
can be observed. On the one hand he points out pertinently how far tradition in literature
even determines the creation of a new work of art, and analyses profoundly the way in
which the new work of art widens and modifies tradition itself. Meanwhile, he lays
a special emphasis, and with reason, on the historical aspect whose representative is
aware "not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence." On the other hand, it
is just the conception of the historical aspect that Eliot introduces the notion of the unhis-
40 T. S. Eliot. Selected Essays, p. 34.

41 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 100.
** T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, pp. 166-9.
48 Op. cit. p. 137.
44 Op. cit. pp. 114^7.
2 Angol Filologia ^
torical aspect into, declaring that the historical sense is manifest in the perception of the
timeless and of the temporal together and it is this that makes a writer traditional
(Tradition and the Individual Talent).*5
Again, the paradoxical situation of Eliot, the poet seems to be articulated here theo-
retically. As a poet, attempting to get hold of a new era, he could not deny the historical
difference between the present and the past. But as an advocate of a myth of cultural
history, seeing only a social and cultural deterioration in the history of the bourgeoisie,
and refusing to recognize any other, upward historical movement, he could only
conceive the dynamic continuity of cultural and artistic values, preserved exactly by
development, to be unhistorical and timeless. As he considered the whole of the present
worthless, he could not understand the real temporal and historic relation of the present
and the past, either. Moreover, the antiliberal tradition or the tradition considered
antiliberal should, in Eliot's view, replace the invalid contemporary scale of values
which he believed to have collapsed completely, and from the aspect of human and
cultural value only the non-temporal pieces of a non-continuous past are real. That is
how the artistic tradition fitting in with Eliot's poetic and critical conception is combined
with the notion of timelessness; that is how and why his poetic images of the present
are accompanied by so many citations, allusions, artistic and philological reminiscences
of poets and scholars, and the exuberant tradition apparatus in the explanatory notes
is appended to the poem. And that is why the historical discussions of his critical works,
often containing valuable partial observations, become one-sided, fragmentary, written
in the spirit of the history of ideas, and mythically constructed.
The philological and critical vegetetion luxuriating in Eliot's poetry calls attention to
the conflict between his poetry and critical activity, The poet, rejecting the whole of
the contemporary present as worthless, criticizes this present by using scholarly quota-
tions standing for past cultural values, often stylized and mythicized into the timeless.
The theory of the impersonal tradition and the extinction of personality has the conse-
quence that poetry, and art generally, approach science, a process undermining form
and genre. "It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition
of science", Eliot writes in Tradition and the Individual Talent,** whereas in The Function
of Criticism he explains that the poet atones for the lack of inspiration by a strict
composition.47 In The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he proceeds one step further
by saying that "the important moment for the appearance of criticism seems to be the
time when poetry ceases to be the expression of the mind of a whole people. . . when
the poet finds himself in an age in which there is no intellectual aristocracy, when
power is in the hands of a class so. democratised that whilst still a class it represents
itself to be the whole nation; when the only alternatives seem to be talk to a coterie
or to soliloquise, the difficulties of the poet and the necessity of criticism become
45 Op. cit. pp. 14, 15.

46 Op. cit. p. 17.
47 Op. at. p. 30.
18
greater."48 Eliot himself must have felt that scholarly-critical endeavours might come
into conflict with poetic development; that is suggested by the poetically moving and
tearfully subjective end of his essay on the historic relation of poetry and criticism:
"if, as James Thomson observed, 'lips only sing when they cannot kiss', it may also be
that poets only talk when they cannot sing. I am content to leave my theorising about
poetry at this point."49 How long he was worried by this problem is shown by the fine
essay of his later period From Poe to VaUry (1948), in which he writes that if the introspec-
tive critical activity is carried to the limit as it was by Valery, that begins to destroy
poetry.50
Of course, poetic-artistic practice and scholarly-critical theory do not, in principle,
exclude each other. There is a danger only if the former is not only accompanied, but
partly substituted for by the latter; when concrete, artistic representation and criticism
are replaced by abstract, scholarly-critical, lifeless material. (This process in poetry is
similar to that in thejoycean type of novel occasionally growing into a critical, analytical,
philological essay.) It is not the quantity but the quality of criticism that is concerned
here. As regards the depth and the objective essence of his criticism, Eliot, rejecting the
whole of his age, was not more, but less critical than Bertolt Brecht or Attila Jozsef,
who identified themselves with the better part of their age as passionately as implacably
they attacked its worse part. It is only the abstractly general negation of Eliot that is a
danger for the arts. Eliot's lyric was endangered not only by becoming saturated with
critical-scholarly inert material, but by his writing less and less poetry and more and
more criticism; his critical output surpasses considerably his poetic activity.
If in poetry Eliot tends to adopt the impersonal objective method of science (this is one
source of his Imagism), in criticism, on the other hand, he often makes use of the personal
methods of poetry. Although in his critical analyses he seldom uses poetic similes and
his train of thoughts is argumentative, nevertheless in his reasoning it is not always the
objective connections of his theme that prevail but rather the subjective aspects of his
own poetry, indeed, the subjective standpoints of a given period in his poetry. Thus,
in his criticism the subjective and objective elements become confronted with each other,
and in this way an additional kind of contradiction develops. There is no piece of literary
criticism by Eliot in which we could not find a previously undiscovered and artistically
important objective connection. On the other hand, however, in Eliot's criticism of
Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Shelley there are numerous instances of his projecting the
image of his own poetry into the object of his criticism, praising or condemning the
poet by his own poetic demands, even at the expense of subjectivizing and distorting
the immanent laws of the analysed work.
In some cases, when analysing himself, Eliot contradicts himself. In Thoughts After
Lambeth (1939), looking back upon the earlier reception of The Waste Land, he remarks
ironically of the critics who saw the disillusionment of a generation in the 'poem, that
48 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism . p. 22.

49 Op. cit. p. 156.
50 T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic . p. 41.
2* 19
perhaps he expressed for the critics their own illusion of being disillusioned. In reality,
however, The Waste Land does suggest a total earthly disillusionment, and it is only the
hope and confirmed religious belief of his second period that are in Thoughts After
Lambeth flashed back illegitimately upon the world of The Waste Land , "Disillusion
can become itself an illusion / If we rest in it" Eliot writes in his play The Cocktail Party
(1949) 51 and, though involuntarily, he indicates the luminous source that threw a new
light upon The Waste Land .
If Eliot's literary criticism contains so many contradictions, it is no wonder that the
very notion of literary criticism is contradictory with him. In the whole of his critical
work he tried to arrive at lasting critical judgements, and by the evidence of many of his
essays, not without success; yet he was often tempted by the thought that it was not the
critic's task to "make judgements of worse and better" ( The Perfect Critic, 1920) 52 k
He interpreted poetic works passionately and often convincingly; with good reason
he was proud of being a critic and at the same time a poet as well; nevertheless he
claimed that, just as a poet, he was "sceptical of all 'interpretations' of poetry" ( Intro -
duction to The Wheel of Fire by G. Wilson Knight, 1930).53 Heknewthat poetry was a form
of communication but he held, "that which is to be communicated is the poem itself"
(The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism).5* He realized more and more clearly that
a work of art could not be understood isolated from outer reality, but the central feature
of the aesthetic quality, namely that a work of art is the specific form of the concentrated
expression of reality, remained concealed from him.55 He did his best to overcome the
superficiality of impressionistic critique and practice a scholarly and valid criticism, but
exactly because he could not elucidate the aesthetic connection between art and reality,
he professed that literary criticism was not a scholarly discipline (The Use of Poetry and
the Use of Criticism).
This final conclusion is, however, a mistake to be disproved by the better part of
Eliot's critical work itself. If many of the New Critics tend to carry on just the problem-
atic elements of Eliot's critical conception, it is all the more necessary to turn our
attention to the lasting part of Eliot's critiques, which can be revealed only by exploring
and examining its contradictions. This is the way which leads us to understand his
poetry as well.
Ill
Turning over the leaves of Eliot's first two volumes Prufrock and Other Observations
(1917) and Poems (1920) the reader's attention is caught, besides the inspirations of
Lafbrgue, Corbiere, Baudelaire,56 Dante, Donne, Webster, Ezra Pound and Robert
x 61 T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party . London, 1965. p. 138.

62 T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood . p. 11.
« T. S. Eliot, Preface to G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire. London, 1930, 1949. p. XVI.
64 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, p. 30. Cf. p. 64.
w Cf. Gy. Lukics, A kuloitosseg mint esztetikai kategSria (The Specific as an Aesthetic Category). Budapest,
1957 ;Az esztetikum sajatossdga (The Peculiarity of the Aesthetic Quality). Budapest, 1965. II. pp. 177-245.
M G.Jones, op. cit. pp. 30-79.
20
Browning, by the sharp poetic images of Eliot. These images carve out the counterpart
and counter- world of the industrial civilization and the way of life of contemporary
America and Western Europe. The evening "is spread out against the sky / Like a patient
etherised upon a table", "The yellow fog. . . rubs its back upon the window-panes";
the eyes looking at you "fix you in a formulated phrase" ( The Love Song of J . Alfred
Prufrock); "Midnight shakes the memory /As a madman shakes a dead geranium";
you see a woman in a torn dress "in the light of the door / Which opens on her like
a grin"; "And you see the corner of her eye / Twists like a crooked pin"; the memory
throws up dry "a twisted branch" eaten smooth and skeleton-like, and a rusty "broken
spring. . .hard and curled and ready to snap" (Rhapsody on a Windy Night). It is espe-
cially the last lines of the poems that bring out images of high tension : "Wipe your hand
across your mouth, and laugh; j The worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering
fuel in vacant lots" (Preludes) ; "The last twist of the knife" (Rhapsody on a Windy
Night).
Still, such and similar images are not always brought into a direct poetic and organic
connection. It is certainly true that in contrast to the epic and dramatic genres, the reflec-
tion of the coherent objective surface of reality is not a determinant of the lyric genre ; in
poetry the individual relationship of the ego and a human situation is framed, imagery
serves only to make this relationship graphic. But in Eliot's poetic world concept it is
this relationship that becomes problematic. The increasingly abstract negation of his
environment makes it more and more difficult for him to experience and render the real
connections of the world. That is why his images often become fragmentary (Portrait
of a Lady ; The Boston Evening Transcript; Mr. Apollinax; Gerontion; Sweeney Among the
Nightingales). The intensity of the particular pictures is the Imagistic consequence of
their being remote from one another.
The uncertainty of Eliot's world concept also renders the poetic generalization of the
images contradictory. With the intuition of a highly gifted and exacting poet Eliot tries
to organize his world into an artistic unity of wider scope ; in some of his early poems he
succeeds in doing so. The impossibility of the self-realization of the personality was an
individual and at the same time a social question of general validity, its artistic generali-
zation of permanent value can be found in Prufrock; the disintegration of the world,
the dissolution "of memory / And all its clear relations" was also a problem of the age,
experienced personally (Rhapsody on a Windy Night) ; the social and religious crisis of the
genteel way of life was, a typical experience seen through individual eyes (Aunt Helen;
Cousin Nancy ; The Hippopotamus).
But gradually Eliot is compelled to substitute scholary-philological correspondences
for poetic generalizations. In Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar, even in the
short epigraph Eliot proposes to suggest the contrast between the past traditional values
of Venetian culture and the contemporary paltriness of bourgeois civilization, here with
an anti-Semitic bias, by citations from Gautier, the motto in a St. Sebastian by Mantegna,
Henry James, Shakespeare, Robert Browning and Marston; and the poem itself is full
of allusions. Just because he seeks universal values outside of the whole of contemporary
21
reality, from the representation of scenes of this reality we cannot reach artistic genera-
lization in a natural way. That the great number of philological allusions overburden
and explode the poem is shown by the fact that several of his poems cannot be complete-
ly understood without a philological-scholarly explanation of the learned reminiscences
( Mr. Apollinax ; Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service ; Sweeney Among the Nightingales,
etc.). The philological apparatus often expresses the impersonalization of the poetic ego,
or its being hard-armoured, isolated and alienated from reality, as well.
The attitude of Eliot, as a poet, is also characterized by irreconcilable contradictions.
He considers the world he lives in ridiculously petty and attacks it, but his irony ( Cousin
Nancy; Mr. Appollinax ; Conversation Galante; Sweeney Erect; The Hippopotamus;
Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service) is combined with self-irony57 (Prufrock; The Por-
trait of a Lady ; A Cooking Egg) ; the cynical and emotional tones complement each other
( The Portrait of a Lady ; La Figlia Che Piange ; A Cooking Egg) ; the sceptical perplexity
of Prufrock assumes already the form of spilt personality : the young poet can enter
into the inert and lonely meditating spirit of an aged man with a frightening authen-
ticity.
The contradictions of Eliot's poetic attitude are expressed by his almost universally
hopeless paradoxes. At the end of Prufrock the absolute opposition of the world of desires
and the human world appears with a paradoxical force: "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." In Gerontion May is "depraved", just like in The Waste
Land where April is "the cruellest month", and history, perhaps by way of an Eliotic
generalization of the World War's experiences, is cunning: "what she gives, gives
with such supple confusions / That the giving famishes the craving . . . Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues / Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes."
Ideal and reality, the hyper-intellectual and the animal-instinctive are confronted with
each other: "Sweeney shifts from ham to ham / Stirring the water in his bath. / The
masters of the subtle schools / Are controversial, polymath" (Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning
Service). Of Grishkin, promising pneumatic bliss, like a jaguar with subtle effluence of
cat, who in her vulgarity seems to be the counterpart of Sweeney, Eliot writes: "And
even the Abstract Entities / Circumambulate her charm; / But our lot crawls between
dry ribs / To keep our metaphysics warm" (Whispers of Immortality).
Versification also implies the contradictions of Eliot's poetic attitude alienated from
life. The harmoniously sonorous, regular, traditionally rhyming, metrical forms are
used in ironic, parody-like, grotesque poems ( The Hippopotamus ; Sweeney Erect, etc.).
When, however, Eliot speaks from his own soul, with tragic solemnity, complaining of
the dissonant contrasts of reality with gloomy despair, he applies vers libre, making use
of rhyme and metre less (Prufrock) or little ( Gerontion). Like Thomas Mann's protagonist,
the composer Adrian Leverkiihn, like SchSnberg, Berg and Webern, and like so many
representatives of avantgarde music and poetry, he feels harmony banal, and considers
37 Cf. F. R. Leavis, op. cit. pp. 87, 100. - D. W. Harding, T. S. Eliot , 1925-1935. Hugh Kenner (ed.), op. cit.
p. 105.
22
only the dissonant, freely expressive, even expressionist form, deriving from the partial
or total decomposition of harmonious order, serious and becoming art. Eliot is ready
to come out against the surrounding prosiness, but when, in vers libre, he approaches
his poetic style to prose, he has to take into consideration, as a creative principle, what
he hates.
Eliot's early aspirations are synthetized in The Waste Land (1922), the summit of his
poetry. The poem consists of 433 lines to which explanatory philological notes of 191
lines arc added. The Waste Land marks an era in the development of English and Ameri-
can poetry in the same way as Joyce's Ulysses , published in the same year, does in English
and European prose ; in both of them the crisis of bourgeois values, revealed by the bloody
welter of the first imperialistic World War, manifests itself in a form mixing expres-
sionism, surrealism and constructivism.68
On a first perusal of the poem it is anarchy that the reader is impressed by. The barren
symbol of the title, the Latin epigraph, taken from Petronius' Satyricon, interspersed
with Greek words, the dedication for Ezra Pound, begun in English, ended in Italian
and referring to Dante, and the main text, in Pound's manner, alluding to thirty-five
writers, quoting foreign authors in six original languages, introducing even Sanscrit
words, seem to be rather confused. The five structural units also contribute to the
impression of incoherence. The great number of characters, introduced and concealed,
merging into one another, makes the poem even more difficult to understand. With the
blurred characters the indistinct background and the poetic style are continually altering.
The method of the cycle in creating images is characterized by a fragmentary and
discontinuous application of extraordinarily suggestive mosaic flags. April, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, and stirring dull roots with spring rain; the summer, coming
over the Starnbergersee with a shower of rain; the winter sleigh-ride; the full-armed,
wet-haired girl; the crowd flowing over London Bridge, under the brown fog of a
winter dawn; the chair like a burnished throne glowing on the marble; the red sails,
wide to leeward, swinging on the heavy spar; the woman raising her knees supine on
the floor of a narrow canoe; the two sweltering wanderers among the mountains of
rock without water, seeing a third gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded; the image
of the stony rubbish : all these awake a powerful atmosphere, but they resist persistently
every question by the reader and son of man, concerning the meaning : "What are the
roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, / You
cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images, where the sun beats."
The form of The Waste Land also suggests a chaotic world concept. Its vers libre
tends to break down the wall between prose and verse, but the lines of demarcation
between lyric, epic and drama are also blurred. Behind the characters and situations of the
basically lyric poem the outlines of an epic story appear faintly. The excited dialogues
of Part II, the dynamically alternating soliloquies of Part III, and the desperate exclamation
58 Cf. F. R. Leavis, op. cit. pp. 70, 77-^6. - C. Aiken, An Anatomy of Melancholy. Allan Tate (ed.), op. cit.
p. 201. - E.Wilson, Axel's Castle. London and Glasgow, 1971. p. 90. - R. Kirk, Eliot and his Age . T. S.
Eliot's Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century. New York, 1971. 73-91.
23
closing this part, the questions and answers breaking up Part V, the dramatic represen-
tation of the poetic matter, the tension of long verse paragraphs winding through the
lines, the terse concision of the language following the tradition of Jacobean poetic
drama : all these anticipate the later dramatist.59 The philological overcharge of the poem
often eliminates the boundary between art and science.
A detailed analysis, however, can discover the work of a brain constructing with
mathematical exactness. Eliot himself points out in the notes attached to the poem that
the key to understanding The Waste Land is Jessie Weston's book on the Grail legend,
From Ritual to Romance (1920).60In the ancient story there is a wasteland whose barrenness
is caused by its sovereign, the Fisher King's sterility. The curse of the drought will be
removed by the happy union of the Liberator and the mythical Woman. Eliot treats
the Grail legend with disillusioned pessimism. The various scenes of the poem: the stony
rubbish, the Unreal City, the luxurious boudoir, the dreary pub, the autumn Thames,
the typist's dirty flat, and the rocky desert are the spatial versions of the very same
spiritual desolation; the alternating characters are the ironically-gloomily unworthy
variants of the same figures, the Fisher King, the Liberator and the Woman. The unity
of the cycle is promoted, though not carried out with an immediate artistic suggestive-
ness, by the constant opposition of the magnificent past and the miserable present61,
thrown into relief by citations, too, recurring leitmotifs (philomel, water, barrenness),
terse, identical metrical structures and philological parallels. This poetic construction,
which is both whirlingly dissonant and at the same time extremely systematic, is akin to
the principles of composition in Schonberg's dodecaphonic music, combining expres-
sionism with constructivism.
The epoch of The Waste Land was concluded by the notable poem The Hollow Men
(1925), which, contrasting the symbol of the "cactus land" with the allegory of the
"multifoliate rose",62 is the religious herald of Eliot's new poetic period.
The stabilization of Eliot's religious world concept at the end of the 20s formed a new
period in his poetry as well. What is most conspicuous is the religious theme and spirit
of his most important poems. Among Ariel Poems, Journey of the Magi (1927) and A Song
59 For the essentially dramatic character of T. S. Eliot's poetry see G. Smith, Jr., T. S. Eliot's Poetry and Plays.
A Study in Sources and Meaning . Chicago, 1956. p. 26. - H. Gardner, The Art of T. S. Eliot. London, 1958.
pp. 105-6. - R. Speaight, Interpreting Becket and Other Parts. Neville Braybrook (ed.), op. cit. p. 77. - L. P.
Hartley, A Garland from the Young. Ibid. p. 103. - D. E. Jones, The Plays of T. S. Eliot. London, 1960.
pp. 26-7. - A. Mizener, To Meet Mr. Eliot. Hugh Kenner (ed.), op. cit. p. 22. - F. R. Leavis, op. cit. pp.
69-74. - C. H. Smith, T. S. Eliot's Dramatic Theory and Practice. From Sweeney Agonistes to The Elder
Statesman. Princeton, 1963. p. 3. - Ph. R. Headings, T. S. Eliot. New Haven, 1964. p. 100. - Bonamy
Dobree, T. S. Eliot. A Personal Reminiscence . Allan Tate (ed.), op. cit. p. 67. - J. C. Ransom, Gerontion.
Ibid. p. 135. - L. Unger, T. S. Eliot. Moments and Patterns. Minneapolis, 1967. p. 27. - A. G. George,
op. cit. p. 178. - E. Wilson, op. cit. pp. 95-6.
60 Cf. F. R. Leavis, op. cit. p. 80. - G. Williamson, op. at. pp. 118-30. - A.J. Wilks, A Critical Commentary
on T. S. Eliot's *The Waste Land'. London, 1971. pp. 13-6.
61 Cf. F. R. Leavis, op. cit. p. 75. - D. E. S.Maxwell, op. cit. pp. 42,64, 80-91. - E. Wilson, op. cit. p. 86.
- In the opinion of some critics Eliot has condemned both the past and the present :G. Smith, Jr., op. cit.
pp. 46-7, 50, 60, 83. - H. Gardner, op. cit. pp. 88-9. - A. Mizener, op. cit. p. 21. - G.Jones, op. cit. pp. 103.
149-50.
62 L. Unger, op. cit. pp. 69-91.
24
for Simeon (1928) denote biblical themes by their very titles, and Animula (1929), calling
up Dante, and Marina (1930), referring to Shakespeare also suggest the necessity of a
religious revival. Ash Wednesday, in the words of G. Williamson's concise summary,
describes stages of despair, self-abnegation, moral recovery, resurgent faith, need of gra-
ce and renewal of will toward both world and God.63 The parts of Four Quartets , (1943),
each consisting of five movements, organized during seven years into a comprehensive
cycle, Burnt Norton (1935), named after a Gloucestershire manor. East Coker (1940),
bearing the name of the Eliot forefathers' birthplace in England, Dry Salvages (1941),
a group of rocks near the northeastern coasts of America and Little Gidding (1942),
immortalizing the seat and home of a seventeenth century Anglican religious community,
analyse the relation of time and timelessness from a religious point of view, flashing up
some moments of the history of the Eliot family, leading from England to America
and from there back again to England.64
In Eliot's late poetry a new element is the redoubling of the aspects of representation.
The images and symbols of the Waste Land or their poetic synonyms continue to
characterize the human world; this world is rocky, arid, barren, where white bones lie
scattered, and people live a sham-life, "Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
I Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops, / The bitter
apple and the bite in the apple" (Dry Salvages). These images prove the extraordinary
talent of the poet, but their frequency decreases, their remoteness is increased by the
abundance of ethico-religious and philosophical contemplations.65
Above the unreality, affliction and hopelessness of the human world the aspect of
the divine world of religious salvation is introduced, and beauty that up to that time
has seldom occured in Eliot's poetry, also appears. It is beauty that "made cool the
dry rock and made firm the sand / In blue of larkspur, blue of Mary's colour" (Ash
Wednesday) ; it is beauty that unfolds the peaceful splendour of the "garden", a recurrent
symbol with Eliot (Ash Wednesday, Four Quartets); it is beauty again that creates
harmoniously rhyming lines and stanzas which now, in contrast to his first period,
express primarily not irony but moments of elevation (Ash Wednesday IV; East
Coker IV).
The moral uplift of the tension between the heavenly and earthly aspects rouses yearn-
ing and bright feelings in the poet, once so proud of his impersonality: "Midwinter
spring is its own season / Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown, / Suspended in
time, between pole and tropic. / When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire, / The
brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches, / In windless cold that is the heart's heat, /
Reflecting in a watery mirror / A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. / And
glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier, / Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind,
63 G. Williamson, op. cit. p. 184.

M S. Bergsten, Time and Eternity. A Study in the Structure and Symbolism of T. S. Eliot* s Four Quartets. Ltind.
1960. pp. 76-119. - H. Kenner, The Invisible Poet. T. S. Eliot. London, 1966. pp. 247-76.
w Cf. F. R. Leavis, op. cit. p. 104. - E. Wilson, op. cit. p. 109.
25
but pentecostal fire / In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing /
The soul's sap quivers." (Little Gidding I, cf. Dry Salvages V).
A far reflection of the seething lava stream of the contemporary crisis and the social
and historical commotions also appears now and then for a moment in Eliot's later
poetry, though here, too, as a subordinated part of his apocalyptical religious vision,
as in his social and literary criticism. "Wavering between the profit and the loss" he
writes in Ash Wednesday in 1930 at the nadir of the depression; in Difficulties of a States-
man (1932) the makers of arms protest against the reduction of orders and demand the
abdication of Coriolan; the "dark dove with the flickering tongue" combines the
symbol of the pentecostal purifying flame with the image of a Nazi bombardment
setting on fire and destroying parts of London (Little Gidding II), a combination not
unlike that of Henry Moore who in his picture-cycle on an air-raid shelter in 1940-41
now and then also flashes up a frightened real human figure among his sculpture-visions,
sunk into nature and deprived of both body and soul. A human face; an animal seen
with the eyes of a human being, or indeed of a child, or an anthropomorphic landscape
also flicker through Eliot's smaller, song-like, closed poems, Five Finger-Exercises (1933)
and Landscapes (1934-5); and in 1939 as a relaxation Eliot brought out a volume of
animal fables in verse with charming and witty rhymes ( Old Possum's Book of Practical
Cats).
But it would be a mistake to believe that in Eliot's later poetry there is a simplification
and modern synthesis of the same character as in the mature lyric of A. Jozsef, P. Eluard
or L. Aragon. Then, too, the more natural, organic and closed poetic aspirations germi-
nate within an avantgarde world concept. Eliot's most important and ambitious later
works, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets evince that the religious turn in his world
outlook, the religious retouch of his poetic world concept have left exactly his principal
aspects unchanged. The contradictions of earthly human life remain unresolved: the
religious redemption of the next world, divined intuitively in moments of a mystical
revelation, ensues only after the damnation, suffering, self-destruction, hollo wness of
this world, and, as pointed out in his essay Thoughts After Lambeth, he continues to feel
isolated.66 It is this lonely estrangement from the world that maintains the avantgarde
principles of Eliot's poetry, the most important contradictions of his first period, the
cosmic paradoxes, the incoherent view and the speculatively constructed rather than
lyrically organic manner of generalizations of expressive poetic images. The basic
structure is not altered by the fact that the inert matter charging the poem is now
primarily of theological, philosophical nature.
Thus Eliot in his late period, too, remained the poet of unresolved contradictions.
In the subjective contradictions of his predicament, the essential, objective contra-
dictions of the world could only be reflected in a very indirect, fragmentary and
distorted way. The loosening of the relation between ego and world results as a matter
of course in disintegration in a genre whose nature is determined by the plastic expression
26
of this relation: "Between the idea / And reality / Between the motion / And the
act I Falls the Shadow. . . / Between the conception / And the creation / Between the
emotion / And the response / Falls the Shadow" ( The Hollow Men). The work becomes
similar to the composition of Adrian Leverkiihn, the composer-relative of Eliot and
Joyce, whose achievement was pertinently called by Thomas Mann a "gliihende
Konstruktion' ' 6 7 Its weakness lies in the instability and inaccuracy of the creator's
world concept; its strength is the most exact expression of this world concept inspired
by an extraordinary talent.
Because it goes without saying that there are so many tokens of Eliot's extraordinary
poetic gift and artistic sensibility sparkling through every period of his poetry. The fact
that his poetic inspirations, taken over with a change of direction, ripened an artistic
relief and consummation in Auden and Spender, his younger contemporaries and left-
wing followers in the 30s; that today, too, he arouses emotions and thoughts, creates
moral tension, and in the most unexpected moments touches hidden and previously not
even suspected chords in the reader; that his words even reverberate in the souls of
readers or rather listeners not sharing his views: all this manifests that Eliot has found
a transparent and effective form of expressing human messages of general validity.
The creative force of image and symbol (Preludes) ; the great number of associations,
shimmering softly, like a halo, around the solid and compact images (Prufrock, Rhapsody
on a Windy Night); the daring comparisons, amalgamating remote phenomena by a
surprising metaphor (The Waste Land I) ; the characteristic and nostalgic portrayal of
the dreary metropolitan way of life, both locally tied and wishful of the distant ( The
Waste Land III) ; the wit of paradoxical rhymes and thoughts (East Coker III, Ash
Wednesday V, Coriolan I) ; the arrhythmic intermissions of his metre, the regular heart-
beat of the elevated moments (Ash Wednesday II) ; the harmony of rhymes, which
make the barren rhymeless lines burst into flowers in the moments of spiritual home-
coming (Ash Wednesday VI): all these together have created a new poetic language,
a treasure that can also be used by posterity.
IV
Paradoxically it was in his dramas that Eliot's poetry became transparent and settled.
Dramatic poetry and poetic drama became the leading genre of his last period, but in his
early poetry as well, following the examples of Robert Browning's dramatic mono-
logues and Ezra Pound's "Personae", and hiding his vulnerable personality, sometimes
he had spoken to the reader from behind a masque of a figure ( Prufrock , Gerontion, The
Waste Land). Although his critical activity shows that from the beginning of his career
he had had the object of a modern, up-to-date revival of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
poetic drama in view, it was not until the ideological turn in 1927 that the preconditions
" Th. Mann, Doktor Faustus. Berlin, 1961. p. 242.
27
became ripe for the change of genre. The stabilization of ideological principles made it
possible for the poet to detach in some degree his own endeavours from himself and
represent them in the world of figures created by himself. The ideological crystallization
brought about a more objective analysis of the contradictions of "the waste land"
and created the Archimedean firm point, shining like a fixed star, to which moral values
could be related and towards which a dramatic movement could be directed. The eco-
nomic depression of 1929-32 and the premonitory signs, and then the tempest of another
war with the collective crisis together aroused in Eliot the demand of a more objective
social and moral scrutiny and the wide propagation of religious redemption. The essays
in social criticism and his dramas have a common origin : the dramatist can address more
people and more intelligibly than the poet.
The change in genre took place gradually as a result of Eliot's becoming conscious
of the new circumstances of the new age. In 1926 and 1927 Eliot brought out two pieces
of his Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama, published in 1932 under the title
Sweeney Agonistes. Here the Sweeney-myth, created by Eliot with so much hatred in
Sweeney Erect and Sweeney Among the Nightingales, persists. In the drama-fragment, too,
Sweeney is the vulgar figure of the condemned modern civilization, whose coarseness
is brought out by wittily syncopated, jazz-like, expressive, indeed, sometimes expres-
sionist music-hall verses. Here, too, there is a great abundance of learned allusions to
Greek mythology, just as to Milton or to St. John the Baptist, but the work can be
followed without unriddling them.
If Sweeney Agonistes shows us the banal side of life, The Rock ( 1934) presents its religious
aspect. The play was written upon request for charitable purpose; today it is kept alive
only by its choruses. The invitation came at a moment, Eliot confesses in The Three
Voices of Poetry, when he seemed to himself to have exhausted his poetic gift, and to have
nothing more to say.68 Even if The Rock is much inferior to his later lyric (and dramatic)
poetry, this confession indicates that Eliot was aware of the necessity to change genre.
In the choruses of the play, as the echo of the depression, the complaint of the unem-
ployed construction workers breaks out, this is however, completed by making the
whole of industrial civilization and progress the scapegoat, and the solution given by
the poet is to build on the justice of the Church and to care not for the human rela-
tions but for the connection between man and God. Time and history can be given a
sense only by the incarnation of the timeless Word in a moment creating time, thus Eliot
foreshadows the mystic philosophy of history of Four Quartets. The ideological
direction of Eliot's notion of the world is nowhere so explicit as in the choruses of
The Rock.
The banal and religious aspects of life were united in Murder in the Cathedral (1935).
It was here that Eliot made attempts at a monumental, modern revival of poetic drama.19
68 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 91.

89 G. Smith, Jr., op. cit. pp. 180-95. - D. E. Jones, op. cit. pp. 50-81. - C* H. Smith, op. cit. pp. 76-111.
- E. M. Browne, The Making of T. S . Eliot*s Plays. Cambridge, 1970. pp. 34-79. - J. Chiari, T. S. Eliot ,
Poet and Dramatist. London, 1972. pp. 115-43.
28
Though he knew that he was not to imitate Shakespeare's blank verse or the tone of the
Shakespearean drama, still Shakespeare's method offered an unsurpassed example, as
regards historical authenticity, the dramatic realism of colloquial speech, the plastic
unity of poetry and drama. The contradictions of Eliot's world outlook did not make
it possible for him to follow the Shakespearean way. The author of Murder in the Cathe-
dral is at variance with the Shakespearean type of drama exactly in the basic principles of
artistic modelling, and instead of emphasizing the objective antagonism of the given
epoch, he transferred the subjective, unresolved contradictions of his own situation on
his matter.
What is most conspicuous is the discrepancy between a historical and unhistorical
approach. Murder in the Cathedral takes us back to England of the twelfth century and
tells of the martyrdom of Archbishop Thomas Becket who was murdered in 1170
at King Henry II's instigation. It recalls a number of aspects of that age: the central-
izing efforts of the king; the conditions and relations of king, nobility and people;
the antagonism of state and church interests; Henry II's campaign in France. It presents
the peripeties of Becket's life which was full of dramatic turns; it introduces the chan-
cellor who was the king's right-hand man, and the archbishop who excommunicated
the bishops that had crowned the heir to the throne.
Yet Eliot's work is not a real historical play. Becket considers every form of represent-
ing and serving secular interests as a misleading temptation. He turns down the First
Tempter proposing to display to him the once experienced pleasures of life at court,
and the Second Tempter, persuading him, as chancellor, to constrain the barons to
obedience and to defend the poor. He keeps off the Third Tempter, bringing the alliance
of the barons against the king, just as be does the fourth one, offering Becket his most
secret desire, martyrdom, out of wordly vanity, with one eye on glory after death.
Thomas Becket precludes the possibility of historical action: "The fool, fixed in his
folly, may think / He can turn the wheel on which he turns."70 The Fourth Tempter
speaks from the depth of Thomas's soul, when mocking at history and historical ap-
proach in the name of mysticism. He says of posterity that it "Will only try to find the
historical fact. / When men shall declare that there was no mystery / About this man
who played a certain part in history."71 When seeking for the motives of martyrdom,
Thomas lays special stress on the fact that martyrdom is always the design of God, it is
never the design of man,72 and foreshadowing the religiously antihistorical mysticism
of Four Quartets, he declares: "It is not in time that my death shall be known".73
Eliot's antihistorical bias manifests itself most clearly in the prose epilogue of the play.
Here the four Knights, addressing posterity, plead their cases. It is especially the Third
Knight who proves with reasonable arguments that the king, in the given historical
situation, could not put up with the changed policy of Becket. And even if he cannot
"* T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral. London, 1968. p. 25.

71 Op. cit. p. 41.
w Op. cit. p. 53.
78 Op. cit. p. 79.
29
represent the murder as morally justifiable, he reveals the inner logic of historical
necessity very convincingly. In Eliot's eyes, however, all this is a mean contrivance in
which historical truth turns out to be a base lie in relation to divine truth. That is why,
though according to Eliot this epilogue was slightly influenced by Shaw's St. Joan, 74
the manner in which Eliot addresses posterity is just the opposite of Shaw's method,
as regards content and historical conclusion. At the end of Eliot's play the historical
truth of the subject-matter dissolves into thin air, whereas with Shaw it gets thrown
satirically into relief.
Besides the antagonism of historical and unhistorical aspects, there is another opposi-
tion to be observed in Eliot's drama : it springs from the twofold and antithetical methods
of artistic generalization. On the one hand, while representing the historical events
typical of the period, depicting the fate of the Canterbury women, portraying Becket's
inflexible character and moral firmness, characterizing the Knights who dash at Becket
in the king's name, the way of the graphic artistic logic from the individual to the
general is followed. But this tendency is suppressed by another, stronger direction of
generalization. Becket, the four Tempters and the four Knights give the impression
of allegorical figures in a medieval mystery or morality play;75 they seem to illustrate
general, abstract moral maxims. Eliot rightly considers the well-known medieval
morality play Everyman, whose very title is abstract, as the model of Murder in the
Cathedral' 76
This duality is the formal reflection of Eliot's contradictory view on history. The
abstract, static emotional generalization is also served by the frequent appearance of the
chorus. What in the historically clearer and simpler medium and world of the Greek
drama is a rightful dramatic and poetic device revealing the essential tendencies of
reality, in Eliot's work assumes the function of the abstract stylization of emotional
homogenization, and has the consequence of simplifying the manifold objective contra-
dictions of reality.
In Eliot's play, drama and poetry also come into antagonism with each other. The
objective conflict of the depicted epoch breaks out between the state and the church,
the king and the archbishop, the murderer and the victim. In Eliot's interpetation this
historical conflict gets lost. Since the archbishop, the antagonist of the murderers, is
himself ready for death and has prepared for martyrdom since his homecoming, no
historical conflict develops, drama is replaced by lyric of high tension. Murder in the
Cathedral is perhaps the most powerful poem of Eliot. The chorus of the Canterbury
women, anxious about their own fate and Becket's life, misgiving, foreboding and
complaining of the affliction, speaks, dreads and whines, implores, yearns and prays
with a poetic overflow of bewildering intensity that is peerless in Eliot's earlier lyric.
The torrent of images is directed by the logic of the situation put on the stage, if not
74 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets , p. 81.

75 Cf. D. E. S. Maxwell, op. cit. p. 182. G. Smith, Jr., op. cit. p. 188. - D. E. Jones, op. at. p. 50. - C. H.
Smith, op. cit. p. 103. - M. C. Bradbrook, The Drama of T. S . Eliot. Notes on Literature, No. 27. London,
Oct. 1963.
30
to the dramatic, then to the poetic consummation. Their current is strengthened by the
circumstance that, in contrast with Eliot's non-dramatic poetry, here their flow is not
stemmed every now and then by visually unimpressive philological, scholarly obstacles;
and in the moments of poetic concentration, their intensity is increased by more regular,
sometimes magically suggestive rhythm and rhyme.
In Eliot's art, however, the condition for finding his voice in the lyric genre is the
formal disintegration of drama and its passing over to lyric. In his exellent essay Poetry
and Drama he writes that the chorus was introduced to express the emotional significance
of the action, and that a poet, writing for the first time for the stage, is much more at
home in choral verse than in dramatic dialogue. He hoped that "the dramatic weak-
nesses would be somewhat covered up by the cries of the women. The use of chorus . . .
concealed the defects of my theatrical technique.77
Eliot's having rendered the figures of this play subjective is proved by the inconsistent
characterization of the four Tempters, too. At first they stand for worldliness, the rights
of the ego, the pleasures and the command of life, later on, however, all of a sudden and
without dramatic reason, they turn the guise and make complaints: "Man's life is a
cheat and a disappointment; / All things are unreal, / . . .man passes / From unreality
to unreality."78 The subjectivity of this change in character becomes especially clear if we
notice that the Tempters speak according to Becket's mentality: "Human kind cannot
bear very much reality"79 says Becket later. These words are exactly those of Eliot, the
poet, repeated word for word in Four Quartets.80 All this proves that in this play Eliot
could not realize the Shakespearean demand of the unity of poetry and drama, set by
himself. Whereas in Shakespeare's mature works poetry is the lyrical froth of the
historical surge of the drama, in Eliot's writings poetry is a substitute for real dramatic
characterization and conflict.
These contradictions, though with different stresses and different subject-matters,
survive in Eliot's later plays, too. In The Family Reunion (1939) we witness the clash of
two dramatic conceptions. The first one; in spite ofits Aeschylean reminiscences, reminds
one of Ibsen's world of social criticism, interspersed with symbols. Amy, an old dowager
wants to have the members of her family around herself on her birthday. Instead of the
intimate family reunion, however, we witness the disintegration of the family, and
through this, of a way of life. Instead of functioning as the cementing force of the family,
Amy turns out to be a collapsing, apathetic old woman, carried off by a heart attack at
the end of the play. Ivy and Violet, Amy's sisters and Gerald and Charles, Amy's broth-
ers-in-law would willingly stay away from this conventionally formal gathering. Mary,
the daughter of a deceased cousin of Amy, does her best to get out of the oppressive
atmosphere of the family residence. One of Amy's sons, John has a car-accident; the
77 Op. cit. 81. Cf. G. Smith, Jr., op. cit. p. 184. - H. Gardner, op. cit. p. 133. - R. Speaight, op. cit. p. 71.
-J. Peter, Murder in the Cathedral. Hugh Kenner (ed.), op. cit. p. 155.
78 T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 44.
79 Op, cit. p. 75.
80 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets . London, 1968. p. 14.
31
other, Arthur, in a state of drunkenness, runs his car into a roundsman's cart and reverses
into a shop- window; the third, Harry, on a voyage from New York to Europe, had
tossed his wife over the rail, and since then has been tormented by remorse ; he is haunted
by the Furies in his mother's house, too. When Agatha, the headmistress of a college,
Amy's most inflexible and sharp-witted sister informs her nephew that even his father
intended to kill his wife, but for Agatha's arguing him out of his plan, as at that time Amy
was already carrying Harry in her womb, Harry resolves to leave the paternal home,
whose name Wishwood has become in his eyes the symbol of life-lie.
The tragi-comical tension between appearance and reality, the shattering of the ideal
of bourgeois-aristocratic respectability, the disintegration of the family, the destructive
effect of the past on the present, the analytical structure of the drama, its symbols, Harry's
eccentricity inherited from his father, recall Ibsen's Ghosts .
This drama-conception is contrasted by a medieval morality-play touched up by
irrationalism. When Harry learns from Agatha that even his father wanted to kill his
wife, he does not despair but feels relieved. It is a proof for him that it is not he who is
abnormal and guilty in a normal and guiltless world, but it is the world whose natural
condition is abnormality and guilt, concentrated and realized by individuals of extraor-
dinarily sensitive nerves and vulnerable soul. Guilt makes one see the world as horrible,
boring and digusting and this experience overwhelms one with such sufferings as,
through the purgatory of expiation, can bring salvation.
The characters of the play are not able to bear this dual and contradictory conception.
Harry, the murderer is glorified at the end of the drama, as the expiator chosen by fate
for suffering. As Eliot identifies the bourgeois manner of living with the human way of
life, the social criticism, revealed by Harry's figure, is at the same time of antihuman
character. Harry's reaction to the news about his brother's car-accident is indifference,
the sovereign contempt of a superman. Eliot later realized himself that he had been left
in a divided frame of mind, not knowing whether to consider the play the tragedy of
the mother or the salvation of the son, and in the course of time he withdrew his sym-
pathy from Harry, the "insufferable prig" and took the side of the mother.81 The style,
too, is hit hard by the instability of the conception: some characters speak now in their
own name, in a language standing near prose, then, forming a chorus, they express the
afflatus of an irrational power in highly poetic style. A change in style like this is rather
disturbing, and so is the fact that one or another character, as pointed out by Eliot, falls
out of the action and recites lyric duets, and as it were, sings operatic arias.82
The different dramatic conceptions clash in Eliot's best play, The Cocktail Party (1950),
too. In the background and the first part of the drama a satirical comedy is unravelled.
Its elegantly gliding verse paragraphs, assimilated very much to colloquial speech, remind
one of Dryden, whereas its witty variety, fast and fluent dialogues sparkling in paradoxes,
the unexpected and exposing situations, the satirically sharp social criticism, the ironic
portrayal of morality, the intellectual superiority concentrated in some characters
81 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets . p. 84.

M Op. cit. pp. 82-3.
32
representing the author, are conceived in the spirit of Shaw, the oft-rebuked great
rival dramatist.
At the beginning of the play we are shown a cocktail party, given by Lavinia Cham-
berlayne, the wife of a London lawyer. But the hostess is absent ; we learn soon that she
has run away from her husband. In the course of funny misunderstandings and lively
turns it comes to light that Sir Henry Harcourt-Reilly, the psychiatrist, has advised
Lavinia to leave her husband for a few days in order to test the moral endurance of the
members of the party, with their intertwined private lives. Edward Chamberlayne, the
abandoned husband desperately desires the return of Lavinia, with whom he did not get
on well, and whom he has not loved for a long time. Celia Coplestone, the gifted po-
etess, who was Edward's friend, now thinks that nothing stands between them and their
marriage any more, and she is disappointed because Edward is not willing to marry her.
Peter Quilpe, the novelist and scenarist, is in love with Celia but as Celia does not pay
attention to him, he leaves for California. Lavinia is in love with Peter and she has a
nervous breakdown on learning that Peter does not love her any more, but feels attracted
to Celia. In the end Reilly reconciles Edward and Lavinia : he considers both of them
average and mediocre enough to find each other finally.
It is at this moment that the other drama, for whose sake the first one has been written,
begins. Celia complains to the psychiatrist that since her disappointment in Edward
the world has become meaningless for her and her own personality nightmarishly empty.
Reilly promises to cure her of her troubles and sends her to a "sanatorium", a symbol
of expiation through torture. Celia goes to the Island of Kinkanja to be a nurse among
the savages. Monkeys, venerated by the heathen savages, but killed and eaten by the
christianized natives, are devastating the island. Celia looks after the dying diseased of
a Christian settlement, and stands by them when the heathen natives, blaming the
Christians who have killed the monkeys for their misfortune, assault the settlement and
massacre its inhabitants. Celia dies a martyr: she is crucified over a swarming ant-hill.
The guests of the cocktail party, meeting one another a couple of years later, receive
the news with horrified astonishment, but Reilly confirms the news coolly : Celia has been
chosen for death by torture; her moral superiority has led her to salvation through
suffering.
This strange contrast of an accomplished classical comedy and an extreme romantic
tragedy has brought with it two significant innovations in Eliot's dramaturgy. The one
is that the figures of the comedy act according to their own characters and have a voice
of their own. The other innovation lies in Eliot's introducing a third, intermediate hu-
man level between the two poles of earthly damnation and heavenly salvation. It is on
this level that in everyday human happiness Edward and Lavinia live, taught by the
crisis of the cocktail party to respect each other. This humanization of a certain degree
explains that in Poetry and Drama Eliot could have a critical survey of his first dramatic
efforts.
The Cocktail Party was followed by a rather weak poetic comedy with a dignified
humor and ending on a religious tone, The Confidential Clerk (1953).
3 Angol Filologia 33
Then came Eliot's last poetic drama The Elder Statesman (1959). As in his previous
plays, here, too, two contrasting dramas are merged into one work. The first one
strikes Ibsen's tragi-comic, introspecting note. Its central figure is Lord Claverton, whom
a career as a statesman has left callous and apathetic in his old age. After the visit of
a former friend of his, Federico Gomez whom he betrayed, and his former lover
Mrs. Carghill whom he deserted, his conscience is awakened, and the reservedly proud
"great" man confesses his sins to his daughter Monica, whom he wanted to keep
selfishly for himself before, but now gives to her fiance Charles Heminton with pleasure.
That is how the Ibsenian tragi-comedy is intervowen with the Christian morality play
of religious redemption. The humane voice is, however, not to be reduced to silence
any more by the relentless severity of this morality play. In Eliot's life work it is the
first time that two young people find each other in happy love. Lavinia and Edward
could reunite only at the cost of having proved morally inferior. The love of Monica
and Charles is not clouded any more by moral reproach of the pettiness of human
existence.
What sounded this humane voice in Eliot ? Was it the collective suffering of the second
World War ? The well-balanced wisdom of old age ? The fulfilment of a new love
consoling his old age with the nest warmth of a real personal connection, remembered
by the intimate and beautiful verse dedication at the head of his last drama ? Probably all
these together. In Eliot's later critical writings, too, the demand of a more humane art
appears which, after the extremes of avantgardism, crystallizes the picture of modern
reality in a clearer, more transparent and balanced form.83 It was the consequence of the
unresolved contradictions of Eliot's artistic world concept that he himself was not able
to achieve this new synthesis; his career, social and literary criticism, lyric and dramatic
poetry were torn up by the contradictions of his approach to, and presentation of,
reality to such an extent that his student can only find his way in Eliot's seemingly cha-
otic life work if he treats these unresolved contradictions as a guiding principle. This
is the source of the ultimate unity of his aesthetic theory and artistic practice. Eliot's
greatness lies in the intellectually and artistically absolutely undisguised and extraordi-
narily talented formulation of contradictions that were unresolvable for him. That is
why he was able to carve out the scattered and fragmentary, but sharply sparkling
pieces of a potential modern poetic synthesis, and that is why he could have a pre-
sentiment of the historical necessity of creating a new artistic form to integrate tradi-
tion and innovation in an organic way.
83 T. S. Eliot, Yeats, 1940. On Poetry and Poets, pp. 255, 256; The Music of Poetry , 1942. On Poetry and
Poets, pp. 35, 36, 38; From Poe to Valery, 1948. To Criticize the Critic, pp. 38, 41, 42.
34

T.S. Eliot's Aesthetics and Social Contradictions

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Centre for Arts, Humanities and Sciences (CAHS), acting on behalf of the University of

Stephen Spender, one of the generation of poets who started to write u

8 Op. cit. pp. 19, 69.

9 Op. cit. p. 63.

13 T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose. Harmondsworth, 1963. p. 197.

16 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays. London, 1963. pp. 116-7.

21 Cf. D. E. S. Maxwell, The Poetry of T. S. Eliot. London, 1960. pp. 48-79.

29 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 15. Cf. Selected Prose, p. 30.

40 T. S. Eliot. Selected Essays, p. 34.

45 Op. cit. pp. 14, 15.

48 T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism . p. 22.

x 61 T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party . London, 1965. p. 138.

63 G. Williamson, op. cit. p. 184.

66 T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays, p. 369.

" Th. Mann, Doktor Faustus. Berlin, 1961. p. 242.

68 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, p. 91.

"* T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral. London, 1968. p. 25.

74 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets , p. 81.

81 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets . p. 84.

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