The Poems of T. S. Eliot Volume I

by Thomas Stearns Eliot, Christopher Ricks

  To Anne Ridler 30 Oct 1942: “I feel every year that I am becoming a little less confident of my own opinion of the first volumes of young poets.”

  To Diana Reeve, 29 Sept 1946:

  You have shown me a considerable mass of manuscript, which, if it consisted of finished poems, would be more than enough to constitute a life’s work. Ordinarily, one would expect to find, in such a quantity, certain poems which one could say were worth preserving, some which could certainly be destroyed, and a great number in between of doubtful promise, some of which might be developed into finished verse.

  That is not what I find here. The later poems are, on the whole, firmer and clearer than the earlier ones; but all have something about them that strikes the reader, and none of them can be called a finished poem. You have, I should say, been writing hitherto, in order to set down certain experiences, and extrude certain obsessive images. These things are the material, or among the valid materials, of poetry: but to make poetry of them is another, and still more difficult task, requiring infinite patience. You are perhaps striving to communicate a message: but poetry does not work in quite that way. So far, you have been content to half-express what you have to say, and then pass on to say it again, or to say something a little different, in another poem. The effect is as if we overheard you talking to yourself, and could only catch a fragmentary phrase here and there. Now, to write poetry, one has to be interested in the form as well as the content, to be so much concerned with the form that, finally, the form itself represents the content, takes the content into itself. One has, first, to be interested in the surface, the immediate appearance; that is to be interested in words, for their own sake, until one finds a particular combination of words which, by being just right, conveys to the reader some immediate impression of the deeps of solitude out of which the poem emerges. For the poem, to be a poem, must emerge.

  It may surprise you to hear that what you need to exercise is a more superficial interest, so that you may give the pleasure of poetry to the reader before he quite understands the poem, and indeed to many readers who never will quite understand. The choice of words, both for their sound and for their precise sense and for their associations; the creation of a musical pattern, an effective metric: the sense for these qualities can only be exercised by a constant reading of poetry—and primarily for the immediate excitement of great verse, and by the concern with how the poet does it, more than with what he has to say to you. Also, one can try re-writing poems in different forms, and attending to all the different kinds of verse, so that, when the need comes, something like what you need for your own poem will come to your mind. Think for a time in terms of poetic technique; and for a time—if what you want is really to make a poem, read a good deal of poetry of all ages, and the best prose in subjects in which you may not be particularly interested, rather than the mystics. It is only, indeed, at a very advanced stage of the spiritual life—which few reach—that one can afford to concentrate on the mystics. We should all have some acquaintance with them (and I have suggested that you might, having gone so far, profitably study one or two mystics of a different type than those you have been attracted to); but in that direction, what we need most is just the apparently more humble exercise of learning how to pray.

  To Pound, 4 Apr 1935, on Michael Roberts’s Faber Book of Modern Verse: “It is a contemporary anthology in this sense that you and I & Yeats are there to show what good or harm we have done if either which I am inclined to doubt when I read what is turned out now a days. Furthermore it is to illustrate the development of English ENGLISH poetry such as it is for there is a point at which English and American divaricates. So far as I can make out American poetry consists of YOUR imitators from Macleith leish to Zukovsky etc. Robt. Fitzgerald and what not and Ame [Amy Lowell] I mean English poetry consists of the neo-pastoral and pylon-pastoral and practical joker schools. We leave the reader to judge for himself at what point gangrene sets in and draw his own moral · · · I dont like poetry much I mean what people write with now and then a canto from you or a canto from Binyan a canto here and a canto there and a occasional Beast from Marianne’s menagerie a pangolin this time but I have to give the lads their chance I dont suppose Barker will appeal to you but there is something in that nevertheless I am more doubtful about Thomas (Dylan).”

  To Christopher Hassall, 3 Jan 1936, of a long poem Hassall had submitted: “there is too much poetry in it, and not enough attention paid to the structure. One cannot afford to be so poetic as this in a poem of this length. One must begin by finding something which it might be misleading to call a plot. What I mean is a framework which will have its points of interest and excitement on a rather lower level than the poetic. I maintain that a long poem ought to be as interesting as a detective story, and this just isn’t · · · If I pick it up and read a page by itself here or there I can get some enjoyment · · · But when one reads several pages continuously, the effect is of a diction very heavily clotted. It seems to me that you need to practise a more pedestrian style and the use of sparer and bonier language for the places where nothing more is required. Otherwise you lose intensity by aiming at intensity everywhere.” To John Hayward, 25 Nov 1940, advising how to begin writing his novel of manners, “the RECHERCHE”: “I think the thing is to start in a sort of middle style, the kind one can go on with indefinitely, and let it develop (as it will) into the Personal Idiom in the course of becoming a habit.” 6 Dec 1940: “When I say Middle Style (or did I?) I mean such a fusion and confusion of Sodome et Gomorrhe, Cranford, My Life and Hard Times and the Duke of Portland’s Fifty Years at the Stage Door as only you · · · can compound” (Proust; E. C. Gaskell; James Thurber; the Duke of Portland, Fifty Years and More of Sport in Scotland, Faber, 1933).

  To Kenneth Allott, 18 Feb 1936: “Now I have been meditating the poems you sent me. They none of them seem quite so good as I think you might have made them with more time and trouble, and I wonder whether you always stopped to reflect on the meaning of each sentence when completed. I recognise a force and acidity that I like; all of the poems seem to me worth taking more trouble over than you seem to have taken. I return most with a few pencillings, and am keeping the first poem (four pages) to type out and see how it looks. It seems to me the best, and to need about 10 hours more work.”

  To Tom Burns, 9 Feb 1937, of verse by a friend (unidentified): “she ought to go on writing, although at the end of a lifetime’s work her whole volume might not be very much bigger than it is now. But by that time she would have refined it as far as possible, and have developed her own critical faculty, which is so very important, to a degree at which she could distinguish very slight differences of quality which would enable her to select and reject with precision. Her themes are well worth dealing with again and again; in the end a great deal should be destroyed. I think that in a book such as hers would be it is almost more important to leave out what is not quite so good than it is to keep in the high spots.”

  To Ian Cox, 13 Oct 1937: “I have read your poem several times, and am very much interested in it, and as with your other work, I find it extremely difficult to put into words just what I feel about it. My feelings are however, very similar to those on reading your prose book. It is exciting and queerly disturbing, just as your prose is. It seems to me that you have the right material for poetry, but have not yet succeeded in making a poem out of it. To say that much is already to say a good deal, because people whose experience fabricates the right material inside them are by no means common. With most of the poetry that I see, not only is the workmanship bad, but the material itself is bogus. Your material and experience is quite real to me. Where I find the poem fails is both in rhythm and in the control of imagery. There is still a lack of musical pattern in the poem, and one does not feel inevitability in the line arrangement. This is one reason why my attention tends to wander from time to time. A poem, like anything else, must be constructed in such a way as to keep the reader’s attention: I don’t mean to keep i
t taut the whole time, because that itself is fatiguing and leads to inattention, but, in a poem of any length, by a right alternation of tension and relaxation. And when I say that a poem must keep the attention, I do not necessarily mean that it should be very simple and easy to understand. A poem can be very obscure and yet be extremely exciting to read.”

  To Mervyn Peake, 26 Jan 1940: “You speak in several poems of singing, but I think the first thing a poet needs to learn is how to talk. If you could absorb as influence a few poems by direct statement in the simplest and most austere language, I think that might be good for you. It is not necessary, in order to make a good poem, to have a very vast or sublime emotion to inspire it. It is not possible to make a good poem if the expression adopted is out of scale to the emotion felt, and a very commonplace feeling or insight, if honestly worked out, is as much as one needs or can expect to have.”

  The Writer as Artist (1940), a radio discussion with Desmond Hawkins:

  I believe that the writer as artist has a very vital social function, a social usefulness which goes far beyond the number of readers who consciously appreciate his artistry, which goes beyond the circle of those who read his work at all, which extends even, in time, to those people for whom he becomes merely a name on a public monument. He is useful, in the degree of his greatness, to all those who speak the same language, even if they never hear of him. As an artist, his job has been to use the right words in the right order: that is, he helps to prevent the language from deteriorating or from getting ossified; and I should like to make clear, if I can, why this is a matter of vital importance for everybody.

  A great language · · · is a marvellous social creation, dependent upon innumerable factors: history has not produced more than a very small number of great languages. A living language, one that people are using in all their daily affairs, is constantly changing: for every generation lives in a rather different world from its predecessor; it has new things and new situations to deal with, and it thinks and feels about them in a new way. But what people do not always remember is that a living language, being alive, can die · · · It will happen if the general level of culture, intelligence and energy declines, and if the nation ceases to produce individuals having just that preoccupation with words which marks the writer as artist—a preoccupation with words which is at the same time a concern with the exploration of subtleties of thought and feeling. So if a nation to be great must have a great language, it is the business of the writer as artist to help to preserve and extend the resources of that language · · ·

  When the language degenerates, the capacity of the people for thinking, feeling, and adapting itself to new conditions also degenerates; it is the ability of a people to produce the writer as artist that prevents it from sinking to a condition in which a short scale of farmyard noises will provide all the vehicle it needs for expression and communication.

  Royal Academy Speech (1960):

  I hold that a young poet, before taking liberties with versification, should aim at some proficiency in more formal and traditional kinds of verse. Let him try his hand at blank verse, the rhyming couplet, the sonnet and the villanelle. Let him find out in this way how difficult they are, and find out whether what he has to say can be said in one of the stricter forms or not. In so doing, the young poet may acquire some insight into the work of dead masters. And, in discovering that a traditional form does not fit what he has to say, he may learn also why it does not suit; and if he really has something to say, this may help him to find the way in which he can say it. To put it briefly, learn the rules before you start breaking them.

  My second piece of advice is this: never aim at novelty. Novelty of form or idiom is not something that we should seek; it is something that should force itself upon us. It should force itself upon the poet simply because he has something to say which cannot be said in any other way—though of course no poet knows exactly what he has to say until he has said it. The startlingly new may come with a maximal or a minimal departure from an accepted convention of poetic speech: in either case it must appear inevitable so that the reader will understand that the poet has said something new and said it in the only way in which it could be said. The author who deliberately aims at originality of language is very often attempting to conceal, behind the eccentricity of his diction, the conventionality, the commonplaceness of his vision.

  My third general piece of advice to the young poet is this: never attempt to do something that has been done, in your own language, as well as it can be done. In so doing, you are not only adopting a form, but mimicking the content. No imitation of Alexander Pope’s couplets, or of Byron’s ottava rima, can be more than a clever pastiche: for either the author had nothing original to say, or had something to say which he has not succeeded in saying—because it has not altered the form to the degree necessary for his individual communication. The path of poetry through the ages is strewn with the wreckage of attempts to emulate great masters by imitating them. When we are young, it is right that we should be carried away for a time by the work of some poet of another age or another language; but if the young writer has the real gift of nature, this enthusiasm will lead him away from imitation and make him more aware of what he has to say and the way in which he can say it. There is all the difference in the world between imitation and influence. Imitation is servitude; influence can mean liberation.

  It may seem that I have indicated a very difficult road for the poet to follow, a road from which any deviation can lead to disaster. He must practise the accepted forms of verse, if he is to escape from them. He must avoid imitation, but not strive for originality. He must have something to say which will impose the proper way of saying it; but what he has to say cannot be abstracted from his way of saying it. It is this “something to say” which justifies the poem, giving it a “something to say” which may, in great poetry, touch the depths of human ecstasy or anguish. In other words, pure poetry—la poésie pure—is a goal which, if reached, would annihilate poetry.

  Bibliography

  Publishers are not noted, except when TSE’s relation to them is important. Place of publication is not given when in Britain or America, or for French books published in Paris. Reference has often been made to editions used by TSE himself, and information about his own copies is included here, as are comments about his relation to some of the books about him.

  Academic editions are listed by authors’ names, not those of the editors:

  Boswell, James, Life of Johnson ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (6 vols., 1934–50)

  Anthologies and collections of essays are listed by the names of the editors:

  Olney, James (ed.), T. S. Eliot: Essays from the Southern Review (1988)

  TSE read many of the classics in Greek and Latin, but also knew great translations such as Golding’s Ovid, Pope’s Homer and Dryden’s Virgil. Where more recent English translations are needed, original Loeb editions are mostly used, some of which are listed below.

  In the editorial matter, references to collections of essays are given in the form “Olney ed.” References to books and articles are generally abbreviated to the author’s name (Greene). If more than one title by an author is listed, the italicised name without date signifies the most important in this context, which is given first; references to other titles are then given with name and date. So Gallup signifies his T. S. Eliot: A Bibliography (1952, rev. ed. 1969), while Gallup 1970 signifies his T. S. Eliot & Ezra Pound: Collaborators in Letters (1970). If more than one title from a single year is listed, then a letter is added, as for instance Harmon 1976a, Harmon 1976b.

  Abel, Richard, The Influence of St.-John Perse on T. S. Eliot in Contemporary Literature Spring 1973

  Ackerley, C. J., “Who are These Hooded Hordes …”: Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Hesse’s “Blick ins Chaos” in Journal of the Australasian Universities Modern Language Association Nov 1994

  Ackroyd, Peter, T. S. Eliot (1984)

  Adams, Henr
y, The Education of Henry Adams (1918); TSE’s copy, Valerie Eliot collection.

  Aiken, Conrad, The Jig of Forslin (1916)

  —— Ushant: An Essay (1963)

  —— Selected Letters ed. Joseph Killorin (1978)

  Alexander, Michael, The Dedication of “The Waste Land” in Scripsi July 1986