“Some of my strongest impulse to original development, in early years, has come from thinking: ‘here is a man who has said something, long ago or in another language, which somehow corresponds to what I want to say now; let me see if I can’t do what he has done, in my own language—in the language of my own place and time’”, American Literature and the American Language (1953) 19. In his copy of William Henry Schofield’s English Literature from the Norman Conquest to Chaucer ch. I, TSE underlined the sentence “Originality of matter was deplored as a fault.” (To Anne Ridler, 15 Dec 1956: “The difference between saying something new, and saying something old in a new way, in poetry, seems to me often negligible, if it exists at all.”)
TSE to Egon Vietta, 23 Feb 1947: “I do not know about other writers of verse, but I find myself that my interest in poetry is very much directed by the question: has this man discovered or invented anything that I could make use of in my own work? So I have learned nothing from Rilke, and know only a little of his poetry; I have I think got something from Hofmannsthal, and perhaps something from Morgenstern! I have always inclined to the belief that while poets are the most authoritative critics of poetry, within their limits, we must always weigh what any poet says about poetry or about the work of other poets, in relation to what he writes or wants to write in the way of poetry himself.” (TSE’s misspellings of Hugo von Hofmannsthal here and elsewhere are corrected. The German poet Christian Morgenstern, 1871–1914, drew inspiration from English nonsense verse.)
To Mrs. Branford, 1 June 1934: “I cannot but feel that it is impossible to do much to forward the recognition of another man’s poetry unless one is in sympathy with theform, as well as the content and message. I have a different, and partly un-English, tradition behind me, and my habits in metric and vocabulary are different. I do not pretend to understand, still less to judge, any of my contemporaries: I can only really understand what I try to do myself.”
Modern Tendencies in Poetry (1920):
The one Victorian poet whom our contemporary can study with much profit is Browning · · · When I discovered Jules Laforgue, ten years ago, he gave me the same revelation which I imagine he has given to other people before and since: that is, he showed how much more use poetry could make of contemporary ideas and feelings, of the emotional quality of contemporary ideas, than one had supposed. Browning, at his best, for example in Bishop Blougram’s Apology, had done as much; and Browning’s poetry is much greater poetry. But the development of Browning had been such as to conceal from us some of the implications of his work. He had begun as a disciple of Shelley, and emerged from this into a developed mature impersonal stage: his adolescence had not been so important as Laforgue’s. It is easier for a young poet to understand and to profit by the work of another young poet, when it is good, than from the work of a mature poet. I am no longer of the opinion that Laforgue, at the stage which he had reached at his death, was a great poet; I can see sentimentalism, absorption in himself, lack of balance. But in Laforgue there was a young man who was generally intelligent, critical, interested in art, science and philosophy, and always himself: that is, every mental occupation had its own precise emotional state, which Laforgue was quick to discover and curious to analyse. So Laforgue has been more important, as a laboratory study for the young poet, than either Rimbaud or Corbière. For their work, though always personal in the right sense, is either indifferent or mature. At their best, they present much more solid achievement than Laforgue.
Virginia Woolf: “on or about December 1910 human character changed” and “the men and women who began writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this great difficulty to face—that there was no English novelist living from whom they could learn their business”, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, a talk printed as Character in Fiction in Criterion, July 1924, and reviewed there in Jan 1925 by “F. M.” (for whom, see headnote to Index of Identifying Titles). TSE to Woolf, 22 May 1924: “It also expresses for me what I have always been very sensible of, the absence of any masters in the previous generation whose work one could carry on, and the amount of waste that goes on in one’s own work in the necessity, so to speak, of building one’s own house before one can start the business of living. I feel myself that everything I have done consists simply of tentative sketches and rough experiments. Will the next generation profit by our labours?” For Woolf on TSE’s “inclination—to develop in the manner of Henry James”, see headnote to “Poems (1920)”, 6. PUBLICATION OF POEMS (1919).
“At different periods, of course, there may be greater or less sympathy between the older writers and the younger. What the help and encouragement of men of an older generation may be like, what it feels like, what useful stimulus or perhaps misdirection it may give, I do not know. At a time which may be symbolised by the figures 1910, there was literally no one to whom one would have dreamt of applying. One learnt something, no doubt, from Henry James, and might have learnt more. But Henry James was a novelist, and one who gave the most formidable appearance of exclusive concentration on his own kind of work”, Views and Reviews, 12 Sept 1935.
To Herbert Read, 18 Jan 1927: “I only feel that H. J. is especially difficult because to me he seems not wholly conscious. There is something bigger there, of which he is hardly aware, than ‘civilisation’ its ‘complexities’. In some ways he seems to me, as a conscious person, a child: which is perhaps why I like some of his poorer stuff better than his best; in his poorer stuff something bigger appears without his knowing it—e.g. I like specially The Altar of the Dead The Friends of the Friends.”
2. SYMONS AND LAFORGUE
I have written about Baudelaire, but nothing about Jules Laforgue, to whom I owe more than to any one poet in any language. (To Criticize the Critic 22)
“But if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of the French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in Literature [1899, 2nd ed. 1908], we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a revelation. After we have read Verlaine and Laforgue and Rimbaud and return to Mr. Symons’ book, we may find that our own impressions dissent from his. The book has not, perhaps, a permanent value for the one reader, but it has led to results of permanent importance for him”, The Perfect Critic (1920).
To Symons, 14 Nov 1923: “I hope you will not mind if I take this opportunity—as it is the first occasion on which I have written to you—of expressing my warm admiration both for your prose and for your verse. I have a peculiar debt of gratitude to your Symbolist Movement for that was my introduction, for [which] I have never ceased to be grateful to you, to a poetry which has been one of the strongest influences on my life.” To Desmond MacCarthy, 23 Dec 1924: “The book was my first introduction to modern French verse and in this way had the most immeasurable influence on my own poetical evolution.”
Reviewing a later study of the Symbolists: “Mr. Quennell has done for his generation what Arthur Symons did many years ago with his Symbolist Movement in Literature. I am not disposed to disparage Mr. Symons’s book; it was a very good book for its time; it did make the reader want to read the poets Mr. Symons wrote about. I myself owe Mr. Symons a great debt: but for having read his book, I should not, in the year 1908, have heard of Laforgue or Rimbaud: I should probably not have begun to read Verlaine; and but for reading Verlaine, I should not have heard of Corbière. So the Symons book is one of those which have affected the course of my life · · · I look back to the dead year 1908; and I observe with satisfaction that it is now taken for granted that the current of French poetry which sprang from Baudelaire is one which has, in these twenty-one years, affected all English poetry that matters”, Baudelaire and the Symbolists (1930).
Again, in 1933: “when I first came across these French poets, some twenty-three years ago, it was a personal enlightenment such as I can hardly communicate. I felt for the first time in contact with a tradition, for the first time, that I had, so to speak, some backing by the dead, and at the same time that I had something to say that mi
ght be new and relevant. I doubt whether, without the men I have mentioned—Baudelaire, Corbière, Verlaine, Laforgue, Mallarmé, Rimbaud; I should have been able to write poetry at all”, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry 287 (Turnbull Lecture III).
Three years later:
I cannot help wondering how my own verse would have developed, or whether it would have been written at all, supposing that the poets of the generation of the ’nineties had survived to my own time and had gone on developing and increasing in power · · · I certainly had much more in common with them than with the English poets who survived to my own day—there were no American poets at all. Had they survived, they might have spoken in an idiom sufficiently like my own to have made anything I had to say superfluous. They were in contact with France, and they might have exhausted the possibilities of cross-fertilisation from Symbolist Poetry (as they called it) before I had a chance. What happened was that they made it possible for me to discover these poets: Arthur Symons’ book on the French Symbolists was of more importance for my development than any other book. I must be grateful to him for putting me in touch with the work of the French poets, and for not having got out of them, for his own poetry, what I was to find there myself. When one reviews one’s own writing, as when one reviews one’s own life, how much there is that bears the appearance of mere chance! One has been dependent upon one’s predecessors for what they did not do, as much as for what they did! The one poet of that period, the youngest and the greatest, who survived, was of course Yeats; and it happened that in my own formative period Yeats was in his most superficially local phase, in which I failed to appreciate him.
Tradition and the Practice of Poetry (1936)
“Symons did perform the function of bringing important poets to the attention of English readers; and for that reason his book will remain a landmark. As criticism I cannot say that Symons’s book stands the test of time. He omitted one or two poets of the first importance—notably Tristan Corbière; he included one or two writers—Maeterlinck and Villiers de l’Isle Adam—whose reputation is now somewhat diminished; and even when he admired the right authors, one cannot say that it was always for the right reason · · · Symons could treat certain poets as forming, between them, the outline of a period, so that he had no need to refer to a number of admirable poets much of whose work has permanent value (I mention in passing only the names of Verhaeren, Jammes, Samain, Tailhade, Kahn, Regnier, Vielé-Griffin)”, Contemporary French Poetry (1952).
Interviewed by Donald Hall in Paris Review (1959), TSE referred to “Arthur Symons’s book on French poetry, which I came across in the Harvard Union”. In his own copy, in the chapter on Laforgue, he marked the sentence, “The old cadences, the old eloquence, the ingenuous seriousness of poetry, are all banished, on a theory as self-denying as that which permitted Degas to dispense with recognisable beauty in his figures.”
Edward J. H. Greene: “Il m’a dit aussi qu’il croit être le premier en Amérique à avoir possédé les oeuvres complètes de Laforgue” [TSE has also told me that he believes he was the first person in America to own the complete works of Laforgue], Greene 20. It was with Laforgue in mind that TSE wrote Reflections on Contemporary Poetry IV (1919):
It is not true that the development of a writer is a function of his development as a man, but it is possible to say that there is a close analogy between the sort of experience which develops a man and the sort of experience which develops a writer. Experience in living may leave the literary embryo still dormant, and the progress of literary development may to a considerable extent take place in a soul left immature in living. But similar types of experience form the nourishment of both. There is a kind of stimulus for a writer which is more important than the stimulus of admiring another writer. Admiration leads most often to imitation; we can seldom remain long unconscious of our imitating another, and the awareness of our debt naturally leads us to hatred of the object imitated. If we stand toward a writer in this other relation of which I speak we do not imitate him, and though we are quite as likely to be accused of it, we are quite unperturbed by the charge. This relation is a feeling of profound kinship, or rather of a peculiar personal intimacy, with another, probably a dead author. It may overcome us suddenly, on first or after long acquaintance; it is certainly a crisis; and when a young writer is seized with his first passion of this sort he may be changed, metamorphosed almost, within a few weeks even, from a bundle of second-hand sentiments into a person. The imperative intimacy arouses for the first time a real, an unshakeable confidence. That you possess this secret knowledge, this intimacy, with the dead man, that after few or many years or centuries you should have appeared, with this indubitable claim to distinction; who can penetrate at once the thick and dusty circumlocutions about his reputation, can call yourself alone his friend: it is something more than encouragement to you. It is a cause of development, like personal relations in life. Like personal intimacies in life, it may and probably will pass, but it will be ineffaceable.
The usefulness of such a passion is various. For one thing it secures us against forced admiration, from attending to writers simply because they are great. We are never at ease with people who, to us, are merely great. We are not ourselves great enough for that: probably not one man in each generation is great enough to be intimate with Shakespeare. Admiration for the great is only a sort of discipline to keep us in order, a necessary snobbism to make us mind our places. We may not be great lovers; but if we had a genuine affair with a real poet of any degree we have acquired a monitor to avert us when we are not in love. Indirectly, there are other acquisitions: our friendship gives us an introduction to the society in which our friend moved; we learn its origins and its endings; we are broadened. We do not imitate, we are changed; and our work is the work of the changed man; we have not borrowed, we have been quickened, and we become bearers of a tradition.
I feel that the traces of this sort of experience are conspicuously lacking from contemporary poetry, and that contemporary poetry is deficient in tradition. We can raise no objection to “experiments” if the experimenters are qualified; but we can object that almost none of the experimenters hold fast to anything permanent under the varied phenomena of experiment. Shakespeare was one of the slowest, if one of the most persistent, of experimenters; even Rimbaud shows process. And one never has the tremendous satisfaction of meeting a writer who is more original, more independent, than he himself knows. No dead voices speak through the living voice; no reincarnation, no re-creation. Not even the saturation which sometimes combusts spontaneously into originality.
TSE told Greene that he first read Baudelaire in 1907 or 1908, “with great impact” (Greene 18). “I had discovered the French poets in question in 1909 when I was an undergraduate. Baudelaire was not a symboliste, but the fore-runner of the symbolistes. My Prufrock was written in 1911 and there was no ‘stream of new American poetry’ at the time when it was written. I was not aware of any in 1915 either. I met Ezra Pound in 1914”, Northrop Frye corrigenda (1963). To Greene, 30 June 1947:
My present impression is that I read a good deal of Rimbaud within the same year in which I made the acquaintance of Laforgue. At that time, however, from perhaps 1908 until 1912 I was so much under the influence of Laforgue that Rimbaud could have made only a slighter impression. In subsequent years however I have certainly reread Rimbaud as well as Mallarmé a number of times. Whereas Laforgue is a poet to whom I have felt no need to return. Apart from that period when I was first reading these poets, that is to say before I went to Paris in 1910 I also possessed myself of the two volumes edition of Van Bever et Léautaud [Poètes d’aujourd’hui] and was struck by the poems included of Tailhade. It was not for many years after that that I acquired a volume of Tailhade’s poems. His work still gives me much pleasure. Before I went to France in 1910 I was acquainted with Corbière only in the Van Bever anthology, but I bought a copy of his poems in Paris during that year. I should say that it was Corbière rather than Ri
mbaud who succeeded Laforgue in my affections.
The anthology, which was frequently reprinted, also contained work by Remy de Gourmont, Francis Jammes, Jean Lorrain, Maeterlinck, Stuart Merrill, Valéry and Verlaine.
To Robert Nichols, 8 Aug 1917: “I remember getting hold of Laforgue years ago at Harvard, purely through reading Symons, and then sending to Paris for the texts. I puzzled it out as best I could, not finding half the words in my dictionary, and it was several years later before I came across anyone who had read him or could be persuaded to read him. I do feel more grateful to him than to anyone else, and I do not think that I have come across any other writer since who has meant so much to me as he did at that particular moment, or that particular year.”
To René Taupin, 12 Apr 1928: “I came across the work of Jules Laforgue in 1908, and from that time on for several years was very much under the influence of that poet. I was already familiar with the work of Baudelaire. I did not think that my friend Pound became aware of Laforgue until some years later · · · I cannot say to what causes was due the influence of this type of French poetry in America · · · As for Rimbaud · · · I cannot say that that poet ever has very much more influence on myself. I have indeed been much more affected by Tristan Corbière · · · I can only speak for myself · · · I am ignorant of the influences on contemporary American poetry.”
3. VERS LIBRE
Charlotte C. Eliot to Bertrand Russell, 23 May 1916, on her son’s prospects: “I have absolute faith in his Philosophy but not in the vers libres.” (TSE, Letters 1)
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 29
