Some Characteristics of Modernism in Literature

Modernist writers proclaimed a new "subject matter" for literature

and they felt that their new way of looking at life required a new
form, a new way of writing. Writers of this period tend to pursue
more experimental and usually more highly individualistic forms of
writing. The sense of a changing world was stimulated by radical
new developments, such as:
new insights from the emerging fields of psychology and
sociology
anthropological studies of comparative religion
new theories of electromagnetism and quantum physics
a growing critique of British imperialism and the ideology of
empire
the growing force of doctrines of racial superiority in Germany
the escalation of warfare to a global level
shifting power structures, particularly as women enter the work
force
the emergence of a new "city consciousness"
new information technologies such as radio and cinema
the advent of mass democracy and the rise of mass
communication
fin-de-sicle ["end-of-the-century"] consciousness
Some of the features of the new sense of reality:
the replacement of a belief in absolute, knowable truth with a sense
of relative, provisional truths (Einstein's first book on relativity
1905);an awareness of "reality" as a constructed fiction

a focus on the unconscious as an important source of motivation

(Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams 1900)
a turning away from teleological ways of thinking about time to a
sense of time as discontinuous, overlapping, non-chronological in
the way we experience it; a shift from linear time to "moment time"
less emphasis on art's reflection of external reality and a greater
emphasis on art's reflection of the perceiving mind; [compare
developments in painting: moving from "representational" Victorian
painting (painting that represents identifiable, often narrative,
scenes in external reality) through Impressionism (e.g. Whistler; the
attempt to paint the quality of the sensations stimulated by the
external scene) to Post-Impressionism (e.g. Matisse; painting the
"painterly" scene, the pure elements of colour and form--perhaps as
a way of painting the perceiving mind, the aesthetic consciousness]
a focus on epistemological concerns (how do we know what we
know?) and linguistic concerns (how is the way we think inseparable
from the forms in which we think?); a sense of the break-down of a
shared linguistic community; a reaction against the dominance of
rational, logical, "patriarchal" discourse and its monopoly of power
Some manifestations
writing:

of

new

approaches

in

modernist

character: a disappearance of character summary, of discrete welldemarcated characters as in Dickens; the representation of the self
as
diverse,
contradictory,
ambiguous,
multiple
plot: scepticism about linear plots with sudden climactic turning
points and clear resolutions; the use instead of discontinuous
fragments, "moment time," a-chronological leaps in time,
contrapuntal
multiple
plots,
open
unresolved
endings
style: "stream of consciousness"--tracing non-linear thought
processes, moving by the "logic of association" or the "logic of the
unconscious";
imagistic
rather
than
logical
connections
point of view (or focalization): a rejection of the single,
authoritative, omniscient point of view for a narrative focalized

instead through the consciousness of one character whose point of

view is limited--or through several characters who establish relative,
multiple points of view--or through several simultaneously-held
positions maintained by the one character

1.

Introduction

T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) has been called "by far the most important critic of the
twentieth century in the English-speaking world." He is above all a critic of poetry
and drama; he is not much interested in the novel. Eliot does not write any
systematic treatise explaining his theory of poetry; it is expounded in a number of
books and essays written through many years, interspersed with practical criticism
or other speculations on culture. Moreover, Eliot denies having an aesthetic theory,
he claims to suspect thinking abstractly about poetics. He seems to have a genuine
conviction that ultimate questions are beyond the reach of the intellect, and that
any attempt to define poetry is bound to failure. Eliot distrusts any criticism that
aspires to a scientific knowledge of its subject:
The true critic is a scrupulous avoider of formulae: he refrains from statements
which pretend to be literally true. He finds fact nowhere and approximations
always. His truths are the truths of experience rather than of calculation.
Criticism, it seems, does not fully escape the condition of literature. Eliot should be
read therefore with this assumptions: that he aims at most at an approximation to
his subject, the writer or the poetic experience. Being a poet, Eliot claims that in his
case theory is only "a by-product of my private poetic workshop", that his
theorizing is arbitrary, "epiphenomenal to [his] taste." According to Wellek, this is
not true: in fact, "Eliot's taste is often in little relation to his theory" (History
5:178). Eliot's theory is modelled on what he thinks he should like, not on what he
likes;
in
this
sense
it
fulfils
its
own
requirements.
Eliot's implied theory itself is coherent enough, although "some internal
contradictions persist" (Wellek, History 5:176). It develops many of the critical
concepts that will become current among critics during the greater part of the
century: poetry must be impersonal. Poetic creation requires aunified sensibility
which permits to find an objective correlative. But there is a historical dissociation
of sensibility which increases the difficulty of creation for modern poets. The
concepts of tradition and the status of belief in poetry are also central in Eliot's
criticism. "All these are crucial critical matters for which Eliot found formulas, if not
always
convincing
solutions"
(Wellek,
History
5:
176).

2.

Classicism

and

Tradition

In his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), T. S. Eliot opposes the
critical views then current in England. Apart from their disorganization, he
complains that there is no place left for tradition in them; only originality and
difference are recognized as a source of value. Therefore, the poets are considered
in isolation from one another, they are misleadingly presented as rootless
individuals.
Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not
only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the
dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. ("Tradition"
14).
Belonging to a poetic tradition should not be confused with repetition, with servile
imitation of the works of the past. What Eliot mistrusts is the show of personality,
novelty and originality. For Eliot, to be "original" is easy, and "the poem which is
absolutely original is absolutely bad." What is difficult is to belong to the great
poetic tradition. Eliot reverses the usual romantic view of tradition as a dead weight
which must be shaken off by the poet in search of his voice. Tradition is not a given,
but an end: "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great
labour" ("Tradition 14). In Eliot we find, therefore, an anti-Romantic doctrine of
artistic creativity, a classicist conception of poetics. In order to produce great art,
the poet must rely not on his subjectivity and the peculiarities of his personality, but
on a poetic tradition, on maturity and the discipline of the spirit. "True originality is
merely
a
development."
A poet needs a historical sense, a sense of the pastness and also of the
presentness of the past, of its present-day relevance. The poet must be introduced
to the dead poets' society. He must become aware
that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the
literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a
simultaneous order. The historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as
of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a
writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely
conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. No poet, no artist of any
art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the
appreciation of his relations to the dead poets and artists . . . . [W]hat happens
when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all
the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order
among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really

new)

work

of

art

among

them.

("Tradition"

14-15)

The whole of European literature is therefore an organic whole, a structural system

which is changing constantly. But at the same time it is always complete; there
cannot be any missing parts before they are created. The usual assumption that
the past is unchangeable is done away with: the past is constantly being reworked
by the preset. Eliot would presumably agree with Borges's dictum that a a work
creates its own predecessors, that a work orders a series of disparate and
previously unrelated works into a teleological series that points to the newly created
work. Tradition, therefore, must not be conceived as a one-way street. It consists in
an interplay of present and past; the past guides the present and the present alters
the
past,
giving
it
a
new
significance.
"And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and
responsibilities" ("Tradition" 15). A writer must acquire a knowledge of the past. For
some this will mean erudition, for others it will be a matter of natural acquisition. In
any case, it is necessary. It is naive to dismiss the writers of the past and try to cut
ourselves away from tradition. But do we not know more than the writers of the
past? "Precisely", Eliot answers, "And they are that which we know" ("Tradition" 16).
It is the knowledge of the past which allows us to be moderns.
Eliot's influence in defining this tradition is also great: he helps to effect a shift of
taste away from romantic poetry, and revaluates the metaphysical poets, Dryden,
Jacobean and Caroline drama. Dante is the greatest poet of history, "the most
European, the least provincial." Eliot was not particularly interested in what are
usually called "the classics", the writers of Antiquity or those of the Neoclassical
age. "In spite of this ideological superstructure of classicism, Eliot's taste belongs to
a line which could be called medieval-baroque-symbolist" (Wellek, History 5:206).
It is easy to imagine the upheaval that this imaginative and evaluative historical
perspective would cause in the positivistic philology of the early twentieth century,
when scholars were busy with factual data instead of their interpretation, and
assumed quite naturally that the past comes before the present and quietly stays
there. However, Eliot is interested in this notion of the dead poets' society "as a
principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism" ("Tradition" 15). That is, he
intends to use it to explore the nature of poetry, of poetic creation, to apply it as a
guiding
principle
to
the
writing
of
new
poetry.
This conception of tradition is suggestive and has been widely influential.
However, it favours a view of poetry being written in a void, or more precisely, only
with respect to previous poetry. Eliot considers literature as being ultimately
beyond time. The theory is only superficially historic; it reduces literary history to
literary
tradition.

3.

Impersonality

The poet, then, must renounce the shortcut to originality and surrender his
individuality to tradition, to something more valuable than himself. Poetry is
divorced form his personality: "The progress of the artist is a continual self-sacrifice,
a continual extinction of personality" ("Tradition" 17). Only in this way can he find
his real self. Like Hulme and Pound, Eliot conceives of poetic creation as a process
of depersonalization. Far from being a confession, an exhibition of the artist's
intimacy, art enables the artist to escape from the obsession of his emotions and
from his personality. This is the opposite of the expressive, subjectivist theory of
poetry
which
we
found
in
many
Romantics.
The poet must limit himself to be a catalyst of emotions and feelings that are
played through him, while he himself remains impassible, without being consumed
in the reaction. He must be attentive to the quality of the poetic process, and not to
his own emotions, because "the poet has, not a 'personality' to express, but a
particular medium . . . in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar
and unexpected ways" ("Tradition" 20). What is crucial is the nature of this
combination, of the chemical reaction of poetry: the final compound, and not the
bare elements. It is the structure that counts, and not the origin or nature of the
materials. The emotions of the poet as such are uninteresting and irrelevant; they
will count only insomuch as they become poetry. The poetic emotions are not the
psychological emotions experienced by the author before, during or after the
process of composition. They are the emotions inherent in the poem itself. The two
need not coincide. The emotions which play on the individuality of the poet may be
alien to his poetry, and vice versa. Eliot plays down the quality of the emotion
experienced by the poet. It may be crude, simple or flat; the poet may still be an
excellent poet provided that the poem itself is not crude, simple, or flat. Eliot draws
here a difference between the emotions of the poet and those in the poem:
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones
and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as
well
as
those
familiar
to
him.
("Tradition"
21)
Poetical feelings are complex and general, concrete an precise; psychological
feelings are irrational, vague and indistinct. Of course, a poem deals with human

situations, emotions, attitudes. And inevitably a personality emerges behind the

poem. But these emotions, this personality, need not be those of the author. Since
poetry is an escape from personality, the best poems tell us nothing about their
author. At times he speaks as if the personality of the poet did not intervene in the
composition of the poem. The poetic experience is described as a chemical reaction
in which the poet is only a "catalyst": he favours the reaction of the poetic elements
but is not emotionally involved, he remains apart from the poem. But in his
practical criticism Eliot has to recognize that authors are not that impersonal. Other
critics will speak in this respect of the "implied author" or the "lyrical subject." Eliot
does not use the terms himself, but he shares the views: "Eliot's criticism uses often
a standard of personality which is not, of course, the anecdotal, empirical
personality but the personality pattern emerging from the work itself"
(Wellek, History 5:183). He even uses this personality which unifies the different
works of the same author as a criterion of value. He accepts that the emotions
used in poetry may be the emotions actually experienced by the author, as long as
they have been transformed: "out of intense personal experience," the poet "is able
to express a general truth; retaining all the particularity of the experience, to make
of
it
a
general
symbol."
Eliot recognizes that the right poetic concentration is not achieved by simple
deliberation and is not completely conscious. But he is more interested in rejecting
the Romantic account of the process of composition, Wordsworth's "spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings." Eliot stresses instead the conscious aspect of
writing, the importance of consciousness, of awareness, which is at the same time a
flight from subjectivism:
In fact the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious and
conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him
"personal." Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it
is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality. But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want
to
escape
from
these
things.
("Tradition"
21).
The emotion of art is therefore impersonal: it is a matter of the poem, not of the
writer's life. It is not an outpouring, but a construction, an achievement. And poetic
tradition offers the poet a guidance in this escape from personality. The poet "is not
likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present,
but the present moment [= importance] of the past, unless he is conscious not of
what
is
dead
but
of
what
is
already
living"
("Tradition"
22).
Writing is a compromise between the personal, creative and chaotic side of the
writer on the one hand and his critical instinct, his awareness of tradition on the
other. "Probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his

work is critical labour."

The Romantics ignore this aspect of the process of
composition; they do not want to accept the need of a regulative principle inside the
human spirit. They rely on the individual instead of tradition. But for Eliot the
individual as such has no principlesa belief that underpins his ethics as well as his
poetics.

4. Autonomy of the Poem

4.1.
The
Meaning
4.2.
Organic
4.3. The Objective Correlative

of

Poem
Structure

4.1.

of

Poem

The

Meaning

The rejection of the authorial meaning is part and parcel of Eliot's theory of
impersonality. If the poet has retreated himself from the poem once it is finished,
the poem becomes an independent object, autonomous and public, available to
judgement. The literary work of art lies then "somewhere between the writer and
the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality the writer is trying to
'express', or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or the
writer as reader." It is easy to see that unless some limits are set or assumed, there
is no difference between this theory and complete freedom of interpretation. Eliot,
however, does not seem to worry about this problem. He assumes that the
objectivity of the poem is evidence enough of its core of meaning. The poem "in
some sense, has its own life . . . the feeling or emotion or vision resulting from the
poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the
poet." That is, the poet is one thing and the intention, the idea of the author is
another thing. They must not be confused. Only the first is relevant for the reader
and the critic; the poem must not be interpreted or evaluated in relation to the
writer's subjective experience. The origin of the poem "has no relation to the poem
and throws no light upon it."
Biographical criticism is therefore irrelevant: no
amount of data about the author will explain the existence of the poem. As we shall
see later, the critical consequence of this view of the poem as an autonomous
whole is that criticism must concentrate on the work itself, not on its causes or
effects.

This separation of the poet and the poem has further anti-Romantic
consequences. The issue of the sincerity of the emotion becomes irrelevant. If the
emotion represented in the poem need not be the poet's own, the question of
sincerity does not arise. In fact, it does not arise for the reader if he faces the poem
itself, without any prior knowledge of the author. Eliot recognizes at first that our
knowledge of the poet's insincerity of feeling affects our enjoyment of the poem.
But he soon becomes more concerned with what he calls "genuineness": he
separates the sincerity of the man from that of the poet, the sincerity which is built
into the poem and is the only relevant one. The subjective, psychological belief of
the author is finally irrelevant. "Strength of belief has no relation to successful art"
(Wellek, History
5:192).

4.2.

Organic

structure

According to T. S. Eliot, a poem is an autonomous verbal structure, a dynamic

organism with a life of its own. It is a describable object, a symbolic world which is
amenable to analysis and judgment. The relevant objects of study are its meaning,
the organization of the materials which constitute it, the relations between each of
the parts and the other parts, as well as the relations with the overall structure of
the work. The object of study is the work itself, its immanent values, not the poet or
the process of composition. No amount of external criticism, of biography, of
history, source studies, influences, psychological or sociological studies will be
sufficient for the critic. His proper job is to study the work itself. Of course, the
relevant emotions, the meaning of the work is a part of the work: Eliot is no
formalist in this sense. But "once we have dissociated the speaker of the lyric from
the personality of the poet, even the tiniest lyric reveals itself as drama" (Wimsatt
and Brooks 675). Lyric poetry, the subjective genre, is objectivised by Eliot's ideal
of impersonality; all art aspires to the classical ideal of the objective drama. The
feelings in lyric are not the feelings of the poet: in poetry there is simply the
expression of an emotion through an object, not the expression of the author.
An instance of organicism is Eliot's discussion of the role of verse. Eliot is vague
when speaking of metrics, but nevertheless he insists that its relation to meaning is
organic. The beauty of verse is not the beauty of pure sound: sound and metre
become one with the meaning of the words they organize. Eliot sees the poem as a
"musical pattern of sounds and a musical pattern of secondary meanings of the
words which compose it, and these two patterns are indissoluble and one." The
music of the word "is at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the
words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of the
context; and from another relation, that of the immediate meaning to that context
to all the other meanings which it has in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth

of associations." Poetry aspires to the condition of music (here Eliot agrees with
the Romantics) but it is a music of meaning, not of sound. Actually, what Eliot is
referring to is not music but the peculiar semantics of the poem, in which the value
of the words is fully present and is moreover contextually overdetermined.
A work may fail to achieve an organic structure, a unified meaning of its own.
According to Eliot, Hamlet is an artistic failure because Shakespeare has not
succeeded in integrating all the materials of his sources and his own vision in a
successful way. The work shows that it is a product of various hands instead of
being guided by one unifying principle. It drags along a number of superfluous
scenes and irrelevant motifs. According to Eliot, Hamlet's melancholy is left
unexplained; there is not sufficient motivation for it in the play, given Gertrude's
insignificance. Emotion is not adequately conveyed, it is in excess of the facts, it is
not embodied in the play, but remains outside. Most people would not agree with
Eliot, but here we are interested mainly in the critical principles he applies. The
relation between character and plot in drama should also be organic: "in great
drama character is always felt to benot more important than plotbut somehow
integral
with
plot."

4.3.

The

Objective

Correlative

The theory of the objective correlative is inspired in the doctrines of evocation put
forward by the French symbolists, as well as in Colerige and in Johnson's description
of the Metaphysical conceit. A passage in Santayana has been pointed at as the
immediate predecessor: "The glorious emotions with which [the poet] bubbles up
must, however, at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects." Actually, the
term "objective correlative" itself is unimportant. Eliot seems to have used it
literally only in the essay on Hamlet, which provides also the clearest definition of
the concept.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective
correlative"; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,
which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately
evoked. ("Hamlet" 145)
An "objective correlative" is then a kind of metaphor for an emotion, a metaphor
where the tenor is an emotion (or rather, a "feeling") and the vehicle is any literary
device: a metaphor proper, a motif, a plot structure, a character. . . For Wimsatt

and Brooks it is "the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling" (668). For
Wellek, the objective correlative is the poem considered as "a symbolic world which
[Eliot] thought of as continuous with the feelings of the poet, objectifying and
patterning them" ; it is
the right kind of devices, situations, plots, and objects which motivate the emotion
of a character in a play or a novel, or even, as Eliot used it more broadly, simply as
the "equivalent" of the author's emotion, the successful objectivation of emotion in
art. (History 5:192).
The notion of the objective correlative is the logical result of the conception of the
literary work as an autonomous structure and of the impersonality of poetic
feeling. The work provides the formula for a feeling particular to itself.
Eliot's own formulation is couched in terms which are surprisingly psychological
and not so distant from the empiricist doctrines of the association of ideas. Eliseo
Vivas has criticised Eliot's conception of the objective correlative as not being
sufficiently objective: Eliot assumes that the poet is in possession of an emotion
that he tries to express, or that he intends an effect which is fully formed before he
composes the work. For Vivas, "the poet only discovers his emotion through trying
to formulate it in words." The poet and the reader need not feel alike; poetry is not
to be conceived as the transaction of an emotion from the writer to the reader. In
general, however, Eliot is not guilty of conceiving poetry as a communication of
emotions. The doctrine of the objective correlative is concerned with an emotion
which is objective, that is, contained in the work: the emphasis is put on the
structure of the poem, and not in the emotion of the poet. The emphasis is on an
emotion which is not spontaneous, but mathematically calculated: we may usefully
remember here the mathematical analogy in Poe's "Philosophy of Composition."
The stress on craftmanship is anti-Romantic. Eliot favours bold images with the
power to amalgamate disparate experiences (witness the opening of his "Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock"). He sees imagination where Colerige saw only fancy: "in the
verses of Marvell . . . there is the making of the familiar strange, and the strange
familiar,
which
Coleridge
attributed
to
good
poetry."

5.

The

Dissociation

of

Sensibility

Eliot's version of organicism is part and parcel of a whole theory of history. The idea

of a dissociation of sensibility has a venerable Romantic ancestry: witness for

instance Schiller's opposition between the material drive and the formal drive, and
their unification in the play-drive. It seems to derive more directly from Rmy de
Gourmont's analysis of Laforgue's mind in Promenades littraires. Eliot transforms
this individual description into a universal narrative. Originally, the sensibility of the
human being was unified: his emotions, his ideas, his sensations, were all
channelled in the same direction, instead of running against each other. Then, at a
given moment in history, there occurred a dissociation of this unified sensibility.
Eliot usually locates the change in England and in the seventeenth century. The
metaphysical poets were able to think and feel in an orderly way: in them, there is
an identity of thought and sensation. In them Eliot finds "a direct apprehension of
thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling." "A thought for Donne was an
experience: it modified his sensibility." Eliot praises what he calls Cowley's "wit", a
near-equivalent to the New Critical "irony."
"Wit" means range and
comprehensiveness, a refusal to be one-sided, a suggestion of multiple perspectives
on experience. Wit is a "constant inspection and criticism of experience. It
involves, probably, a recognition implicit in the expression of every experience, of
other kinds of experience which are possible. But after the metaphysicals the
dissociation of sensibility occurs. The eighteenth century consecrates itself to
abstract thought, and becomes unable to feel. This leads to the opposite reaction in
the nineteenth century, which is submerged by a wave of disorderly feelings. In the
poets of the Victorian and the Georgian age, we find a confusion of thought and
feeling, instead of a harmonic fusion. Eliot's ideal is the restoration of this unified
sensibility by means of poetry. The artist "should have the unified sensibility which
reaches from the most elementary response to the highest intellectual abstraction"
(Wellek, History 5:198). The poet of unified sensibility should be aware not only of
truth and beauty, but also of good and evil. Dissociation involves forgetting the
problem of good and evil in poetry. Some of the French Symbolists (Baudelaire,
Laforgue) attempted the reconstitution of a unified sensibility, and they did that
partly by reintroducing the problem of good and evil in poetry; only by dealing with
moral problems and establishing a moral order is it possible to reunite the whole of
man's
personality.
Eliot presumably aspires to write a poetry of unified sensibility, which in his case
means also religious poetry. However, "In the defense against Paul Elmer More's
accusation that there is a cleavage between Eliot's correctly classical criticism and
his perverse modernist poetry, Eliot endorses the strange view that in a chaotic age
poetry must be chaotic." His poetry would therefore be flawed as the whole age is
flawed. Indeed, Eliot seems to believe that the poet cannot help expressing in some
way the time he lives in. There is an uneasy relationship between this awareness
and the timeless version of literature that he puts forward in "Tradition and the
Individual
Talent."
The idea of the objective correlative is also related to the theory of the unified

sensibility. "The poet becomes the man who returns to this original immediate
experience, to a unified sensibility by objectifying his feeling" (Wellek, History
5:186). Ideas must become feelingeven sensory experience:
actually Eliot . . . exploits the ambiguity of the term 'sensibility' and conceives this
fusion of thought and feeling as equivalent to a fusion of thought and sensation.
The metaphysical poets represent this fusion to perfection . . . . The poet must both
feel and sense his thought. (Wellek, History 5:187).
The poetry of unified sensibility satisfies Eliot's and man's yearning for wholeness
and
integrity.
At times Eliot gives different accounts of the dissociation of sensibility. He often
seems to see the dissociation as a gradual process, or to locate it at other points in
history. It has, too, practical consequences for the historian of literature, such as
the fragmentation of literary genres. In order to read the novels of Wilkie Collins we
must be able to reunite the elemnents that have become dissociated in the modern
novel. The Victorian novel reunited the thriller, the sentimental novel, the
philosophical novel. Now these elements have split into as many genres. The
subgenre of the "thriller" did not exist in the Victorian age because the best novels
were
thrilling.

6. The Language and Technique of Poetry

6.1.

Diction

"Eliot in approaching a work of poetry thinks of it, first of all, as language"

(Wellek, History 5:193). An important mission of the poet is to restore and to
develop language. In order to do this, the poetry must stand in some relation with
common language. The language of poetry must not "stray too far from the
ordinary everyday language which we use and hear." Eliot favours "some standard
of poetic diction, neither identical with, nor too remote from current speech." The
language of Dryden or that of Dante are examples of this balanced poetic diction.
Milton, on the other hand, is the example of the way the poet should not use
language, tearing it apart from the common language. "Milton", Eliot holds, "writes
English like a dead language."
Eliot liked Joyce'sUlysses, but not the
baroque Finnegans Wake. He rejects those styles in which language itself becomes

the center of attention, instead of pointing towards its object; he warns against
"language dissociated from things, assuming an independent existence."
The difference between prose and poetry bothers Eliot. He wants to write prosaic
poetry, which nevertheless is the contrary of Pater's poetic prose: a poetry which
exploits the resources of colloquial language without ceasing to be poetry. He does
not identify poetry and verse; for him poetry is an honorific term. He complains
somewhere that we lack the the word to qualify good prose as "poetry" qualifies
good verse. However, Eliot justifies the use of verse, even in drama: "if we want to
get at the permanent and universal we tend to express ourselves in verse."
Eliot defends two very different kinds of poetry. The first is the poetry of images,
the kind of poetry written by St. John Perse: "The work of poetry is performed by the
use of images: by a cumulative succession of images each fusing with the next; and
by a rapid and unexpected combination of images apparently unrelated."
The
other is the poetry of statement, the poetry which preserves the coherence of a
prose argument, with few images and a solid logical constructionthe kind of
poetry that Dryden writes. And when speaking of long poems or of drama, he holds
that there must be a difference in degrees of poetic intensity between the parts.
The
less
"intense"
fulfil
the
role
of
prose
inside
the
poem.
In any case, whether we write a poetry of images or a poetry of ideas, Eliot
demands that poetry in our present-day civilization
must be difficult. The poet must become more comprehensive, more allusive, more
indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. It is
not sufficient to 'look into our hearts and write'. One must look into the cerebral
cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts. (Selected Essays 275-76)
As an example of this comprehensive and difficult poetry, he puts forward the
model of the metaphysical poets; but in order to understand his meaning we must
think
of
his
own
poetry
instead.
The reference to allusion is important . Eliot became known in the early 1920s
because his poetry was "so full of quotations." Eliot uses fragments of older poetry,
lines or passages from Spenser, Shakespeare, Dante, as an ironic device, in order to
emphasize the difference between the ideal world of the past and the decayed
world of the present. His poetry, therefore, invokes a large number of world-views
and implied contexts which are brought to bear on the poem. Eliot's disgust with
contemporary reality may be "a traditional literary device" (Sampson 853) but his
technique to convey this disgust is new enough: it is only possible because Eliot
exploits
his
position
at
the
end
of
a
poetic
tradition.

6.2.

Myth

and

Symbol

Eliot sees the connection between poetry, myth, and ritual, but he does not favour
the primitivistic interpretations of Jung or Herbert Read, or the latter's notion of
"unconscious symbols." Consciousness and unconsciousness are not the
parameters in which symbolism functions: "If we are unconscious that a symbol is a
symbol, then is it a symbol at all? And the moment we become conscious that it is a
symbol, is it any longer a symbol?" Eliot provides an unmystical description of the
use of symbolism a a deliberate device to control the meaning of words. Symbolism
is for Eliot one of the main resources of the poet. The poet turns the word into a
symbol; that is, he makes it work as much as possible, uniting the disparate in the
concrete, meaning more than it would in other kind of writing. In Eliot, "Symbol is
simply the rightly charged word and not a pointing to the supernatural"
(Wellek, History 5:198).
Likewise, Eliot recommends myth as a method, a technique. The role of myth in
his poetry can be compared to that of literary allusion. A myth can provide the
framework of a contemporary work. In this respect, Eliot praises the use Joyce
makes of the Odyssey as a reference basis for Ulysses: myth can be "a way of
controlling, of ordering, of giving shape and significance to the immense panorama
of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." The artist is a user of myths,
but he is not a mythmaker. "The artist is more primitive, as well as more civilized
than his contemporaries." The artist is not bound to the remnants of the past: he
encompasses
the
whole
of
history.

6.3.

The

Use

of

Convention

There are other conventions, apart from myth, available to the poet. "Rhetoric",
used by the critics of the Romantic tradition as a term of abuse, is revaluated by
Eliot. The conscious artificiality of a genre, its "rhetoric", is not a shortcoming, but
a precondition for a required effect. Eliot reacts against the naturalistic tradition in
drama, and wants to recover the right for a character to speak in monologue or
being aware of his own dramatic role, the kind of play inside the play that we often
find in Shakespeare. The rhetoric of the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic
speeches is the result of a conscious delight in speech. This is pernicious if it is
done for its own sake, "if it is not done for a particular effect but for a general
impressiveness" ("Rhetoric" 42). Generic conventions must be used as elements of
poetic construction. They must become a channel through which to articulate the
emotion in drama. Inarticulate emotion is, as always, Eliot's bte noire.

Eliot reacts against the dramatic tradition of Shaw or Ibsen, and calls for a more
concentrated, more stylized, more intense drama, closer to the religious ritual which
was at the origin of drama. To the naturalistic drama of the late nineteenth century
Eliot opposes the poetic drama he was to exemplify himself in Murder in the
Cathedral and The Cocktail Party. Poetic drama he defines as "a design of human
action and of words, such as to present at once the two aspects of dramatic and
musical order." An extreme example of the use of conventions with a view to
reaching a particular effect can be seen in melodrama. Melodrama does not arise
naturally, in the way drama does: "we are asked to accept an improbability, simply
for the sake of seeing the thrilling situation which arises in consequence" (Eliot,
"Wilkie Collins" 467). Eliot speaks of exploring the devices of melodrama,
presumably
to
turn
them
to
worthier
uses.

7.

The

Function

of

Criticism

Just like literature, the body of criticism forms an organic whole, a society of dead
critics. There is an unconscious community between critics as there is one between
artists. But criticism is not autotelic, like art. Its end is "the elucidation of the works
of
art
and
the
correction
of
taste"
("Function").
Eliot insists on the need to adopt critical standards, to choose the principles of
criticism. He draws here a significant analogy between criticism, literature, religion
and politics. The English tendency is to Protestantism, to Romanticism, to
individualistic, liberal Whiggery and to critical anarchy. The French tendency is to
classicism and Catholicism, to the establishment of a central authority and the
regulation of taste: the Frenchman seeks external standards in the tradition, and
does not rely on his inner voice alone ("Function"). All of Eliot's thought is pervaded
by this classicist ideal: that we should refer our subjective principles to general
laws, to avoid impressionism and vague moralism in criticism. Eliot seems to have
derived much inspiration for this from the French critic Remy de Gourmont.
In "Tradition and the Individual Talent", T. S. Eliot has sown the seeds of both his
poetics and his critical theory. Criticism must concentrate itself on properly literary
matters, not extraliterary considerations. Eliot calls critics such as the "New
Humanists" Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More "imperfect critics" because their
concern is primarily moral, not artistic. He also reacts against impressionistic
criticics, who are unable to establish critical principles, to formulate the general
laws underlying their impressions, in a word, to objectify what is subjective. Eliot's
poetics based on tradition and impersonality has a direct bearing on his critical

ideas. It is the poem and not the poet who will become the center of critical
attention. Biographical criticism, or any kind of data concerning the circumstances
of the work instead of the work itself are useless as an explication of the work. The
only
relevant
tools
of
the
critic
are
comparison
and
analysis.
We have already seen that every poet has a critic inside him which is his
connection with tradition and guides him during the composition of his work. "The
critical activity finds its highest, its true fulfilment in a kind of union with creation in
the labour of the artist" ("Function" 31). This is Eliot's backhanded way of showing
criticism out of the literary scene. If every poet has a critic inside himself, there is
no
need
for
other
critics
to
show
him
his
job.
There are more kinds of criticism apart from the one built-in in the poet. Most of
them are not legitimate. The first is creative criticism, the impressionistic criticism
of Sympson or Paterwhich is not criticism, in fact: "It does not count" for Eliot;
these critics are actually frustrated, "incomplete artists."
Criticism must be
subordinated to creation: autotelic, creative criticism is not to be accepted. The
second kind is historical criticsm, scholarship, which again is not criticism proper; it
is a legitimate activity in its own right, but should not be confused with criticism.
Eliot is fond of drawing a distinction between scholarship and practical criticism.
Scholarship is ideally concerned with facts; its aim is to interpret the meaning of the
work in its original historical context. Criticism is concerned with value judgments:
its aim is to determine the meaning of the work for us, now; the use we can make of
it; its significance to the modern poet. This confrontation will be replayed again and
again during the following decades. According to Wellek, "making criticism serve
only temporary ends while scholarship serves the permanent seems a specious
conclusion based on a false dichotomy. It pervades Eliot's criticism" (History 5:
178). At one time Eliot claims that "the only genuine criticism is that of the poetcritic who is criticizing poetry in order to create poetry." "The important critic is the
person who is absorbed in the present problem of art, and who wishes to bring the
forces of the past to bear on these problems." There is only one exception for Eliot:
Aristotle, who seems to have been good at everything. Predictably, Eliot was
strongly criticized for these views. They are unduly restrictive, both of the authors
and the scope of criticism. "Later he merely asked the critic to have some
experience in composing poetry" (Wellek, History 5:179). But still Eliot rejects
interpretation
and
judicial
criticism.
A further imperfect kind of criticism is interpretation. When applied to criticism,
Eliot's theory of impersonality makes him warn us against the dangers of critical
interpretation:
it is fairly certain that "interpretation" . . . is only legitimate when it is not
interpretation at all, but merely putting the reader in possession of facts which he
would otherwise have missed. ("Function" 32).

Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to
interpret, we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to other
works of art; and for "interpretation" the chief task is the presentation of relevant
historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. ("Hamlet" 142)
Even irrelevant historical facts are to be preferred to allegorizing the work. Even the
critics who investigate Shakespeare's laundry bills are better than those who try to
"interpret" the work and succeed only in interpreting themselves. Eliot has a
respect for factual scholarship that he does not manifest when facing journalistic
criticism. Facts cannot corrupt taste, but random opinons and fanciful
interpretations can. Just as the critic has no business giving advice to the poet on
how to write, he has no business giving advice to the reader on how to read. The
critic, like the author, must be impersonal; his role is to attract the attention of the
reader to the work, not to himself. Criticism which draws attention to himself is
vicious, and must be avoided. Interpretation is not true criticism because it falsifies
the work. You lose contact with the work itself, and "instead of insight, you get a
fiction." Interpretation is deceiving because it limits the meaning of the work even
as it claims to explain it. Eliot does not believe in the possibility of a single or
permanent interpretation: "every interpretation, along perhaps with some utterly
contradictory interpretation, has to be taken up and reinterpreted by any thinking
mind and by every civilization." He looks on interpretation as "a necessary evil, a
makeshift, a compensation for our imperfections" (Wellek, History 5:180). We have
already mentioned Eliot's conception of the autonomy of the poem, his rejection of
the continued authorial control on the finished work. The meaning of the poem is
left for the reader to decide; it does not seem to be completely fixed in Eliot's
conception. "A poem may appear to mean different things to different readers, and
all of these meanings may be different from what the author thought he meant."
"The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally validit
may even be better." According to Wellek, "Eliot is right in not wanting to lose this
accrual of meaning", but this does not solve the problem of correctness, which was
not
really
faced
by
Eliot
(History
5:181).
Judgments of value are also forbidden in criticism. "The critic must not coerce,
and he must not make judgments of worse and better." He "must simply elucidate;
the reader will form the correct judgment for himself." These are, presumably,
among the statements that we are not supposed to take literally. Eliot "seems
rather to protest against subjective and arbitrary interpretation and against the
dogmatic ranking of authors." Moreover, "the interdiction of judgment and ranking
is completely belied by Eliot's practice. Ranking, judging, was the secret of his
success and appeal as a critic" (Wellek, History 5:180). Actually, his idea of the
poetic tradition, of the "absolute poetic hierarchy" that we must assume
presupposes
the
activities
of
judgement
and
ranking.

It is to be noted that in rejecting interpretation and judgment as tasks proper to

the critic, Eliot is not dismissing them completely: instead, he is displacing them into
the area of the reader. What Eliot does is to suppress the mediation of the critic in
areas where his judgment or his interpretation will be in conflict with those of the
reader, who in any case would have to judge and interpret again the critic's
interpretation.
What is left, then, for the critic to do? The aim of criticism is "the return to the
work of art with improved perception and intensified, because more conscious,
enjoyment." This enjoyment comes from an awareness of how poetry achieves its
effect. The critic can explain the technique of the poet, the way he says things,
instead of the things he says. But Eliot's own criticism oversteps the limits he sets
hereas
all
criticism
should.
8.

Literature,

Morality,

Religion

The early Eliot defended the autonomy of art. The later Eliot subordinated it to
religion. Poetry is not actual religion nor an adequate substitute (Eliot always
defended this) but in the later years it is seen as a preparation for religion. The
need of critical regulation we have been commenting on exceeds the purely literary
judgment. Literary criticism must be supplemented by moral and religious
criticism. Because of this Eliot has been accused of upholding a double standard
of value.
Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and
theological standpoint . . . . The 'greatness' of literature cannot be determined
solely by literary standards; though we must remember that whether it is literature
or not can be determined only by literary standards.
The New Critics will reproach Eliot that he has accepted the division in the first
place and will keep trying to fit together the fragments of the work. According to
Wellek, Eliot speaks here "as if morality and theology were ingredients merely
added to minimal aesthetic value . . . . To accept Eliot's dichotomy of 'greatness'
and 'artness' means giving up an organic point of view, establishing a new divorce
of form and content" (History 5:190). But Eliot refuses to subordinate the religious
standard to a wholesale moral aesthetics, and insists on opposing two regulative
principles. He gave a name to this regulative principle when he declared himself to
be a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.
Morality is a constituent part of literature, and good literature must be moral. We
separate irrationally (and incompletely) our literary from our religious judgments.
Aesthetic and moral pleasure must not be divorced: a purely "aesthetic" judgment is

an aberration. Reading literature, Eliot argues, affects not only our taste but the
whole of our being. Therefore, Eliot reacts against purely aesthetic approaches to
literature, and differentiates taste and morality: "For literary judgement we need to
be acutely aware of two things at once: of 'what we like', and of 'what we ought to
like'. Few people are honest enough to know either." We must learn to know what
we feel and to understand our shortcomings, in taste as in everything else.
It is here that we meet the problem of belief. The early Eliot had defended that
belief in the ideas used by the poet is irrelevant to the enjoyment of poetry: "You are
not called to believe in Dante's philosophical and theological views"; he draws "a
difference between philosophical belief and poetic assent" . Later he will hold,
perhaps more sensibly, that this complete separation is not possible: "One probably
has more pleasure in the poetry when one shares the beliefs of the poet."
According to Wellek, "we are not always able to reach the state of disinterested
contemplation that poetry demands" (History 5:190). The truest philosophy
becomes then the best poetic material. The problem is that Eliot uses the Catholic
dogma as the rule to measure the degree of truth or falsensess of ideas or
philosophical systems. Still, his theory allows a measure of distance in belief which
is still acceptable and does not preclude the enjoyment of poetry:
When the doctrine, theory, belief, or 'view of life' presented in the poem is one
which the reader can accept as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of
experience, it interposes no obstacle to the reader's enjoyment, whether it be one
that he can accept or deny approve or deprecate.
Eliot separates here logical criteria from aesthetic ones, and once more he will meet
the rebuke of Wellek, who thinks that
coherence is an aesthetic as well as a logical criterion. . . The maturity of a work of
art is its inclusiveness, its awareness of complexity, and . . . the correspondence to
reality is registered in the work itself. An incoherent, immature, 'unreal' poem is a
bad poem aesthetically. (History 5:191).
Eliot warns against the effects of bad art. Literature affects our personality; it
contributes to shape it when we are young. The literature read for amusement may
have the greatest influence, since it is read without effort and uncritically. To read
critically is to realize that literature is not a presentation, but an interpretation of
life: another's interpretation of life. Literature only becomes knowledge when we
consider it as another person's perspective on reality. Unless we realize this we are
in danger of letting our personality be invaded by the personality of the writer. For
instance, when the author in a novel condones the behaviour of some characters
and condemns others, our judgment of those characters is affected by that alien
viewpoint. And the novel has become gradually secularized, alien to a religious

view of life. Indeed, contemporary literature as a whole tends to be degrading,

since it has forgotten the supernatural side of man and concentrates on the inferior
natural life. Eliot complains that our age is the most parochial of ages: we read
only contemporary authors, and forget the classics. Today it is more difficult than
ever to become an individual, since most people are simply caught in the main drift
of modern culture which leads them to worldly values. The Christian reader must be
aware that most authors today are unbelievers. Still more: they are unbelievers
who do not realize that there are still believers near them. The Christian reader
may enjoy modern literature and profit from it, but he must know the place of
others
and
his
own.
Eliot deplores Arnold's conception of the end of religion and his attempts to
substitute "culture" or literature for religion. "The effect of Arnold's religious
campaign is to divorce Religion from thought."
In this, Arnold was after all a
Puritan. He surrenders to a blind moral feeling and sees in Christianism only a
source of emotions which do not need any belief to uphold them. Eliot will likewise
reject Arnold's double offspring, I. A. Richards conception of poetry as psychological
balance, and the "new humanism" of Irving Babbitt. Humanism is an offshoot of
religion, it is dependent on Christianity, its values need the values of religion to
uphold them. Without its religious basis, humanism will lose its sense of direction:
"You cannot make humanism itself into a religion" ("Babbitt" 475); "the humanist
makes use, in his separation of the 'human' from the 'natural', of that 'supernatural'
which he denies." If the supernatural is denied, the opposition betwen man and
nature collapses. The logical outcome is Pater's doctrine of "art for art's sake"
which actually means "feeling for feeling's sake", and can only lead to an
irresponsible hedonism. These attempts to turn literature or art into a kind of
substitute for religion are the symptoms of the dissolution of thought which is in
progress in the 19th century: "the isolation of art, philosophy, religion, ethics and
literature, is interrupted by various chimerical attempts to effect imperfect
syntheses" ("Arnold"). Arnold's religion of poetry is therefore a consequence of the
dissociation of sensibility, a further symptom of decay. Literature is not a source of
ethical principles. The humanist solution is a historical accident, which may serve
for certain individuals, but which cannot provide the basis for society at large. The
life of a culture must stand on a basis which is firm and true, not derivative or
nostalgic.
There is no getting round the real issues. We must face the problem of religion,
of the meaning of existence, because all our actions depend on the answer we give
to that question. "There are two and only two finally tenable hypotheses about life:
the Catholic and the materialist." This is Eliot's diagnosis of contemporary society:
it is confused, lost; it lacks orientation. It is unable to educate young people.
Education must be related to the social system. Our education deteriorates
because our society is unsettled, and we have no clear notion of what we want. The
problem of education turns out to be a religious problem. Education is dominated

by the idea of getting on in the world, no longer by the wish to acquire wisdom.
Only technical efficiency and social promotion count. Modern education focusses on
scientific knowledge of the world and of manwhich does not mean understanding
of life or self-knowledge. Eliot opposes the idea of "education for a society of
leisure" and of raising up the school age as a remedy against unemployment. He is
also against the notion that everyone should reach higher education, that the
university should be expanded to the whole of the population. These notions merely
show that modern education has no clear aim: it neglects the questions of who
should be educated, and why. The modern tendency, according to Eliot, is to let
students develop their own interests, instead of being guided. Studying things for
which we have no taste or aptitude, he argues, is essential: in this way we learn to
take an interest in them. This is one of his arguments to defend the continued
study of the classics at university. Ultimately, Eliot argues, education must rest
upon a religious conception. "As only the Catholic and the Communist know, all
education must be ultimately religious education" ("Modern Education" 515). Eliot
concludes his critique of modern society with an appeal to the revival of the
monastic
ideal
of
the
Middle
Ages.
Eliot "looked complacently upon those who refuse to choose between Rome and
Canterbury on the one hand and Moscow on the other (Communism is for him a
religion) and who refuse to appplaud his glorification of an earlier state of British
culture" (Wellek, History 5:220). He did not decline as a critic after his conversion,
but he did not solve the problematic relationship between his theory, his practical
criticism, and his own poetry. Instead, he refused to concentrate on literature and
embraced extrinsic standards of criticism:
his interests shifted away from literary criticism and thus he was apt to use
literature as documents for his Jeremiads on the modern world. He embraced a
double standard which dissolved the unity of the work of art as well as the
sensibility that goes into its making and the critical act itself. he thus weakened (on
behalf of what he felt to be higher interests) the impact of his achievement as a
literary critic. Taken in its early purity his literary criticism seems to be very great
indeed" (Wellek, History 5:220)