To Hayward, 14 July 1941: “I have pushed on with Little Gidding, and enclose provisional results · · · My suspicions about the poem are partly due to the fact that as it is written to complete a series, and not solely for itself, it may be too much from the head and may show signs of flagging. That is a dilemma. Anyway, however doubtful of it I have been, I had to finish it somehow or it would have stuck in my crop and prevented me from turning to other tasks. The question is not so much whether it is as good as the others (I am pretty sure it is not) but whether it is good enough to keep company with them to complete the shape. If the problem is more than one of improving details, it will have to go into storage for some time to come.” To Theodore Spencer, 21 July: “I was very pleased by your expression of enjoyment of The Dry Salvages. I think myself that it is the best of the poems that I have done in this form: a thought which at the moment does not give me unqualified pleasure, because I have just written a fourth, I hope final, quartet to go with the three you know. I am awaiting John Hayward’s impressions: I am in that uncomfortable state when I am dissatisfied without knowing quite what is wrong.”
Hayward to Morley, July 1941: “Tom has completed the first rough draft of the final poem of the Quadrologue—Little Gidding · · · Tom is exercised to know whether to print the poem separately and postpone the publication of the quartet until the autumn of 1942, or to publish the poems as a collection this autumn with Little Gidding as the novelty to attract purchasers who already possess the earlier pieces. My own view is that in these times the less delay the better in bringing into the world the kind of work that consolidates one’s faith in the continuity of thought and sensibility when heaven is falling and earth’s foundations fail.” (Housman: “These, in the day when heaven was falling, | The hour when earth’s foundations fled”, Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries.)
Hayward to TSE, 22 July 1941: “As yet I have done no more than read through the draft of the pome · · · I await your order to comment · · · your last most entertaining newsletter with which additional fragments of the pome were included.”
Hayward to Montgomery Belgion (then a prisoner-of-war), 29 July: “A fourth and final poem in the group is in preparation I have a draft in front of me. It is to be called Little Gidding.”
TSE to George Every, 30 July: “I have actually written a fourth poem (Little Gidding) but at present I am deeply dissatisfied with it.”
Hayward to Morley, Aug 1941: “I have not yet had an acknowledgement of my observations on the poem Little Gidding. He fears that it is uninspired and mechanically repetitive of the earlier poems in the group, but says that he must get it off his mind before he can turn to other work.”
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
TSE to Hayward, 17 Oct 1941: “Two points have constantly slipped out of my letters. One is my curious lapse in failing to thank you for your careful notes on Spittle-Skidding. which WILL be most useful to me in revision. I have probably forgotten to mention them before simply because I had determined to put the whole thing out of my mind until December. Your notes are carefully preserved against my resumption of that toil.”
Hayward to Morley, July 1942: “My tactful feelers about the poem’s progress have been without effect and, as from past experience I know that he finds the summer an unfruitful time for composition, I fear that he may not get down to it before the autumn. He was, as I think I told you in an earlier letter, dissatisfied with the first draft, considering it to be generally inferior to the first three poems which, by the way, have been as highly praised over here as anything he has written and have more than rehabilitated his current poetic reputation which was in some danger of becoming temporarily dimmed by the vapourings of the young. I think myself that he underrates the fundamental strength and beauty of the poem in its first crystallization, though I believe he is at any rate half persuaded now that it is better material to work on than he had at first supposed · · · His chief fear was that he was simply repeating himself and so running into the risk of producing an elegant parody of the earlier poems in the group.” (Levy 106 recalls showing TSE two pages in Dylan Thomas’s handwriting, including Chard Whitlow, Henry Reed’s parody of Burnt Norton. At the foot of the second, TSE wrote: “Not bad. But I think I could write a better parody myself! T. S. Eliot, 27.iv.58”.)
TSE to Hayward, 21 July 1942: “I have put Part II of Little Gidding into the melting pot, but nothing has solidified yet.” 17 Aug: “obstinately my mind refuses to do its best at the rechauffé of Murder, until it has eased itself of Little Gidding. So here is a rescension of Part II, which seemed to me the centre of weakness. Even if this is better than the first version (which I assume you still have by you) it may not be good enough; and if it is not good enough (minor improvements, of course, apart) then I fear that the poem must simply be allowed to disintegrate. If this is fundamentally all right, then an improvement of the other sections does not seem to be beyond the bounds of possibility. I submit it (together with another edition of Part III) with some trepidation.”
Hayward to Morley, 7 Sept 1942: “Little Gidding is almost completed. After almost exactly a year’s delay, Tom took it in hand about three weeks ago and since then I have received three revisions and expect to receive the final text this week.”
TSE to Herbert Read, 18 Sept 1942: “I think that Little Gidding is now about as good as I can make it: at any rate I have sent a copy to Mairet—though I have already made two more improvements since posting it.” (The following day he wrote to Hayward with some final changes and dissatisfactions: see headnote to Little Gidding, 2. COMPOSITION.) In a copy of NEW inscribed for Valerie Eliot, TSE wrote: “The poem was given to help a weekly which, alas, was dying from lack of support. Mairet had been, I maintain, a great editor, and not bound to the social-credit chariot wheels.” In a letter to W. Travers Symons, 1 Oct 1958, TSE paid tribute to Mairet’s contribution to Neville Braybrooke’s symposium for TSE’s 70th birthday, and recalled their “work together on the New English Weekly · · · But with the disappearance of the New English Weekly, which was, while it lasted, the best weekly published in this country, something of great value went out of my life.”
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
TSE to the Master of Magdalene, A. B. Ramsay, 31 Oct 1942: “It would be a pleasure to me to be allowed to add to the manuscripts and other papers connected with my poem The Dry Salvages which you kindly accepted on behalf of the College, the manuscripts and papers of my latest poem, Little Gidding, a poem of about the same length which completes the series to which the other belongs. These papers are of the same description and of about the same bulk.”
The drafts of Four Quartets were almost all published, along with a selection of the correspondence with Hayward, in Helen Gardner’s The Composition of “Four Quartets”. The appendix on The Writing of “Little Gidding” in Smart is, as he writes, based upon her scholarship.
4. “NOT MERELY MORE OF THE SAME”
TSE’s letter of advice to George Barker of 24 Jan 1938 turns repeatedly upon words and phrases that had figured in Burnt Norton or were to do so in the three further Quartets:
I do not think that these poems make a volume which it is advisable to print as it stands. To you, no doubt, these poems appear new, and a development of your previous work: but they will not so appear to the reader. I do not say that they are not, take them all round, just as good as your first volume: the point is, that after two volumes they are not the right stuff for a third. There comes a point, and it comes very quickly, where the reader of poetry—and I mean the most intelligent and sensitive reader—demands not merely more of the same, but something new. The ordinary novel reader is quite happy to have “another Edgar Wallace” or “another Ethel Mannin” as the case may be; and would be annoyed if he got anything very different from the last. He is not going to re‑read the author’s previous novels, and he wants the same thing made to look just different enough. But in publishing poetr
y you are publishing primarily for the hundred or so best readers—if you get a larger public, that is all to the good, but it can’t be aimed at. And the best poetry readers don’t want more of the same: until you do something quite new they prefer to re‑read what you have done already.
Whether you stop writing poetry for a time, or merely stop printing it, is a point upon which no one can advise you; but I do feel that for the present you should stop publishing: except, of course, for “trying things out” in periodicals. Poetry is either a matter of a brief outburst, or it is a matter of a lifetime’s work: in either case it is a nuisance to be a poet. When it is a life work, you are sure to find from time to time that your inspiration is exhausted, and that you either repeat yourself, or stop writing. These are painful, but necessary periods. I do not say that this has happened to everybody who has been accounted a great poet. A few men, like Shakespeare, have gone on growing so fast that they simply could not repeat themselves; you could almost say that Shakespeare was a new man every time he started a new play. But more often a poet has gone on writing without knowing that he has not developed sufficiently to justify it. Swinburne wrote many good poems in later life—poems that nobody else could have written. But at the same time it is not necessary to read them, in a world crammed with reading‑matter. In the long run, it is only necessary poems that count, and only the necessary poems that will be read.
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
I think, as I say, that it is a right part of the labour of going on writing poetry, to have these periods of sterility and bafflement of which I speak. They should recur throughout one’s active life. There have been several periods of considerable extent in my own life, when I have felt almost convinced that I should never be able to write again; or when I have produced something with great labour and found it still‑born. In fact, these periods seem to make up the greater part of my life. My published work might be much larger than it is, if I had not kept in mind that nothing is worth doing twice. It is quite possible that my later work is not so good as my earlier—I must prepare myself not to be too depressed if I ever see that to be so; but at any rate I can make sure that it shall be different. Whether we develop or not is a mysterious business, not directly under our control. But one must try to be clear about this: in what way do I feel things differently from last year? and let one’s work be faithful to the change. One’s emotional life is in constant change; one wakes up astonished to find that one does not feel the same about something as one did yesterday; feelings disappear from which we part with regret; but there is always the fascination of the new, or perpetually adapting oneself as an artist to the change in oneself as a man, and as one grows older restating the problems of life from the older point of view.
Now in these periods of sterility one has to have recourse partly to patience and waiting: that is the passive side. But one can also do much by filling up one’s mind—partly from books, from interesting oneself in new subjects in the outside world, and partly from one’s experience and study of human beings. Also, one can do much by widening one’s taste in poetry, and saturating oneself in authors who are not immediately congenial; and by technical experiments in verse of various kinds. All these activities will help to preserve you from the common danger—which I see in your own verse—of diffuseness; and help you to gain concentration.
Ever yours,
T. S. Eliot
P.S. There is a common error nowadays of making a distinction between poetry for “the few” and poetry for “the many”. This is introducing an irrelevance based on political premises. Poetry should be written, not for the “few” in the sense of a small group of highly refined, or socially superior, triflers who are trained to enjoy the obscure and the eccentric and the perverse: but for the “few” in the sense that there are never more than a very small number of people who are competent to judge poetry at all. One must aim to satisfy the best readers of poetry—whoever they may be, because one only knows a very few oneself; the rest are scattered and often obscure; and not more than a very small percentage of newspaper critics—sometimes none—is included among them. And the larger public, or “the people”, is only the shadow of this unknown or only partly known élite. To aim directly at “the people” is to aim to write the ephemeral, because that is what the people wants.
5. THE WAR
A week after Britain declared war on Germany, and shortly before publication of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, TSE wrote to John Hayward, 11 Sept 1939: “My financial future* [* or shd. I say foutse?] seems to depend upon Cats.” (Fr. foutre = fuck-up; fou = mad, + tse = TSE.) 21 Nov: “The two small books are still selling very well, the X. Society [The Idea of a Christian Society] now more rapidly than the Cats; But I can’t think of anything more serious (in the way of poetry and drama) to write next.”
Stephen Spender: “Although some painters were reserved to paint war pictures, no poet was reserved for the purpose of writing war poetry or any other kind of poetry. It would be impossible, of course, for a poet to enter into an undertaking to write poetry about war in the same way that a painter can paint scenes of war. It would also have been impossible for a government in conducting total war to give poets complete freedom without any obligation to write propaganda or, indeed, to write anything”, in Poetry Since 1939 (1946), “II. Conditions in which Poets have Worked”.
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
The magazine Time reported, 7 June 1943, TSE’s comment on writing in wartime: “Of these quartets their author has said, ‘each represents the maximum length of a poem which I have been able to get continuous time to do under these conditions.’”
To Frederick Tomlin, 15 May 1957: “it was war-time conditions which produced three of my Four Quartets. The Family Reunion was produced in the spring of 1939; when I saw it on the stage and realised all the errors and defects of technique, I was determined to start another play which should be free of the same faults. The war prevented this owing to the impossibility of sitting down morning after morning to a task which would occupy me for a couple of years. The quartet form was the solution because I could concentrate on the five sections of each poem separately” (Tomlin 200). By comparison with play-writing, “The form of the Quartets fitted in very nicely to the conditions under which I was writing, or could write at all. I could write them in sections and I didn’t have to have quite the same continuity. It didn’t matter if a day or two elapsed when I did not write, as they frequently did, while I did war jobs”, Paris Review (1959). Each Quartet is longer than that which precedes it.
“The last three of my quartets are primarily patriotic poems”, draft of The Three Voices of Poetry (1959) (Moody 203). “All the last three Quartets are in a sense war poems—increasingly. East Coker belongs to the period of what we called the ‘phony war’”, T. S. Eliot Talks about His Poetry (1958). After Janet Adam Smith reviewed the 1952 edition of Gallup in New Statesman 24 Jan 1953, TSE sent her a postcard, 8 Feb, “to complain of your finding nothing Toppicle in the 4 4tets. If L. G. isn’t Toppicle: well, it was meant to be the best Patriotic Poem in the language.”
To Anne Ridler, 9 Nov 1940: “I now sleep in comfort in the Fabers’ basement shelter, instead of sitting up in uniform in the wardens’ room · · · the rest of the time, in Surrey, I live in absolute luxury. Unless I can produce some work of value this winter, I shall not feel justified in this life.”
To Henry Eliot, 1 June 1942, describing a lecture tour in Sweden: “What is accomplished by this sort of cultural warfare is impossible to say: but it [is] a part of total warfare which one must, as an individual, accept one’s part in.” In this spirit, during 1943, TSE agreed to act as temporary president of “Books Across the Sea” (slogan: “All readers of books in English are freemen of one common realm”), and was using its notepaper for letters (perhaps to conserve Faber’s ration). To Mary Trevelyan, 30 Oct 1944: “I have just recorded a wee broadcast of 1½ minutes on the Respo
nsibility of Men of Letters for the European Service, and am trying to repeat it in French and German.”
To E. Martin Browne, 20 Oct 1942: “It is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel confident that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is a justified activity—especially as there is never any certainty that the whole thing won’t have to be scrapped” (Browne 158). (TSE included Marianne Moore’s Poetry, beginning “I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle”, in her Selected Poems, 1935.) “Of what use is this experimenting with rhythms and words, this effort to find the precise metric and the exact image to set down feelings which, if communicable at all, can be communicated to so few that the result seems insignificant compared to the labour?” Christianity and Communism (1932). “the intolerable wrestle | With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter”, East Coker II 20–21.
[Poems I 177–209 · Textual History II 483–545]
To Neville Braybrooke, 25 Nov 1958: “At the time when I wrote East Coker I had been living for some years in South Kensington and travelled daily on the Underground between Gloucester Road and Russell Square, and East Coker itself was composed before the Blitzkrieg began. There is some reference to the Blitz, of course, in Little Gidding.”
6. TITLE
To E. M. Stephenson, 12 Mar 1941: “you are on the right line when you speak of the musical phrase because I tend to think of my own work in building it up more in terms of an analogy of musical form than in any other. I say analogy because I think it is dangerous to press the resemblance between poetry and music too far.”
The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I Page 127
