T.S. Eliot The Eternal - Preface and Introduction

 

Anastasia  Marou
T.S. ELIOT THE ETERNAL
1991
TO MY HUSBAND ALKIS

 
© Anastasia  Marou 1990


All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmit-
ted, in any form or by any means, without written permission from the author.
Printed by: HADJIGEORGIOU PRINTlNGS, Tel. 25365345, Fax 25362873, Limassol, Cyprus


This study, reviewed and revised by the author, was initially prepared
under the guidance and direction of Professor John G. Blair at the Faculty
of Letters, University of Geneva. It was presented and supported in July
1982 as the author's Thesis for the licence ès lettres- - Master of Arts.




CONTENTS

PREFACE    
INTRODUCTION    
CHAPTER I PRUFROCK, PRELUDES and RHAPSODY ON A WINDY NIGHT 
CHAPTER II THE WASTE LAND
CHAPTER III ASH WEDNESDAY
CHAPTER IV FOUR QUARTETS    
CONCLUSION

  
NOTES

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED


PREFACE
This book is intended to provide a useful guide through T.S. Eliot's
major poems. More specifically its aim is twofold: First, with the help of the
Introduction and Bibliography, it aims to show how T.S. Eliot's work
appeared to some of the leading or representative critical minds of our
century; and secondly the main objective is to throw light on the poetry
itself as far as the element of time is concerned.

It is hoped that the book may reach a public of two kinds: on the one
hand general readers curious to know something more precise and exten-
sive about Eliot's greatest poems than what is generally available in man-
uals or literary histories; on the other hand it may be of interest to students
in universities and other higher educational establishments, and teachers
in the upper forms of schools which are studying Eliot's poems. In both
cases the aim is to help to save readers from forming too simple a picture
of the impact which the poet made on the critics of his time.
The poems have been discussed in relation to the element of Time
and the Eternal, in relation to their symbolism and mythology, and in rela-
tion to the man who wrote them.

I have incurred many debts in writing this book. I am aware that my
debts to Eliot's earlier critics are only inadequately acknowledged in the
notes, but I see no help for it. The most important debts one is conscious
of only generally. My understanding of the element of Time, of the Flux and
the Eternal has been largely shaped by Staffan's Bergsten's Time and
Eternity and by Henri Bergson's Duree et Simultaneile. I owe more per-
sonal debts to my revered instructor Professor John G. Blair of the Faculty
of Letters, University of Geneva, who, despite the difficulty of certain
issues, greatly encouranged me with his help and advice to humbly add
to the already considerable bulk of commentary on Eliot's poems.
Anastasia Marou
December, 1989
-

INTRODUCTION
Already there is a flourishing industry in Eliot criticism, much of which
floats as Hugh Kenner puts it, in a cloud of unknowing. Almost every con-
ceivable interpretation and every style of criticism, from the charmingly
dotty to the impenetrably profound, has somewhere found its way into
print. Although bewildering, this variety is a compliment to both author and
critics, for it represents a vigorous attempt to answer the challenge set by
Eliot's work. With the help of the introduction and bilbiography, I hope to
provide in the body of this study some guide through this sacred wood.
Although in retrospect most critics agree that Eliot's work can be seen
as an interrelated and organic growth, his apparent changes of direction
have always been disconcerting. Those early brave admirers whose voices
sounded through a hubbub of jeers (it is difficult now to imagine the out-
rage provoked by The Waste Land) were brought up sharply by Eliot's
announcement in 1928 that he considered himself a classicist, a royalist
and an anglo-catholic. A later generation of admirers was equally startled
by the apparent contrast between the Four Quartets and the West End
plays. Eliot did not help much, for he never cared for explanations. The
Notes to The Waste Land characterize this habit nicely; Were they merely,
as Eliot asserted, added at the request of his publisher to fill up a few
blank sheets? George Williamson makes illuminating use of them, but
there are other critics who regard them as less than helpful.

For good or ill, the influence of Eliot's poetry has been immeasurable.
After Prufrock in 1917, and certainly after The Waste Land in 1922, it was
no longer possible for a serious poet to write in the manner of the Geor-
gians. His poetry emerged, even then, assured and mature, exactly match-
ing the manner to the intention and from the beginning his touch was lethal
to the Georgian style. With Pound and Laforgue behind him, he helped
create a revolution.

John Crowe Ransom, Conrad Aitken, Edwin Muir, F.R. Leavis and a
few others recognized in the twenties that a new master had appeared,
but even when the aged eagle spread his wings in Ash Wednesday in 1930
there were still many who would not acknowledge his majesty. He was a
bird of prey only, they said, who snatched what he required from other
men's acres and produced nothing readable of his own. Nevertheless,
about 1930 was the turning point. From then on, slowly but inexorably,
Eliot's reputation grew, the clamour subsided to respectful murmur, and
when he died in 1965, he was regarded by the public as the most eminent
and respectable man of letters in the English-speaking world.

But among critics the debate is by no means over. It will be the aim
of this study to examine thoroughly one of the most dominant themes in
Eliot's poetry which, by the unique way it is treated, establishes Eliot's
reputation as the most brilliant poet of the 20th century. It is the theme of time,
memory and eternity as it is developed in his major poetic works. In his
early poems, The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday and finally the Four Quar-
tets. Time and the timeless or the Eternal, time and relativity, memory and
memories closely related with time - these elements skillfully developed by
Eliot compose one of the most complex poetic structures which is the
means by which the emotional and intellectual elements are incorporated
into a whole.

It is difficult to tell so soon after a poet's death what will become of
his reputation. Eliot's still stands very high but there are signs of doubt and
disaffection creeping in. It may be that the next ten ·years will see a revalu-
ation, and probably the customary period of neglect will follow later still.
But it is hard to see at the moment how Eliot could ever be relegated from
his position as one of the two or three most creative and influential figures
in twentieth-century literature.

The man and the poet
Reared at St. Louis, with periodic holidays on the Massachusetts
coast, Thomas Stearns Eliot grew up a member of a transplanted New
England family of puritan origin and unitarian faith. He has said little about
his childhood reading. At the age of fourteen he discovered the Rubaiyat
and was at once enchanted; about the same time he first read with admi-
ration Rousseau's The Blessed Damozel. At sixteen having attempted Byron,
he composed a piece of comic narrative verse in ottava rima, A Fable for
Feasters which hints perhaps at a prior reading of The Ghost, in Barham's
The Ingoldsby Legends. Byron's influence persisted for twenty years or
more. Characters in Eliot's own poems are seldom heroic, but they share
with the heroes of Byron's Eastern romances a characteristic burden of
blight and guilt, which can be attributed to a common Adam's curse of
Calvinism.
 
That the romantic heritage in Eliot's poetry should have been pes-
simistic was owing to several causes, in part personal and in part educa-
tional. As a Harvard undergraduate, he had come under the sway of the
anti-romantic Irving Babbitt. One cause, at least after 1912, was
philosophical. From 1910 to 1915, Eliot concentrated his studies upon
philosophy and logic. Upon being graduated after three years at Harvard,
he went to Paris, where during 1910-11, he was tutored by Alain Fournier
and attended Bergson's lectures. In the autum of 1911 he resumed work
at Harvard, investigating under the guidance of Josiah Royce the epis-
temological systems of Meinong and Bradley and trying to read Sanscrit.
In the spring of 1914, while an assistant in philosophy, he met Bertrand
Russel, temporarily in residence as a lecturer. The following summer he
spent some weeks on a fellowship in Germany, chiefly at Marburg, and
from there he went to Oxford, where at Merton College he finished his for-
mal studies. In 1916, he completed the doctoral dissertation he had
started at Harvard. He called it «Experience and the Objects of Knowledge
in the Philosophy of F.H. Bradley». From Bradley Eliot derived certain
assumptions about the nature of experience and carried their mark perma-
nently. Far from extolling the self as had the romantics, Bradley, while
affirming its importance, diminished its dignity. Reflected in Eliot's work is
Bradley's view of the personality as a mere cluster of imperfections and
delusions: even though perceptions can occur solely in the personality's
timeless «finite center- of feeling, that is in the conscious soul itself, that
center has no unity and is but a vehicle of appearences. Still every soul
is insulated from every other; this idea, reinforcing the romantic theme of
isolation in guilt, seems to have deeply impressed Eliot. The one citation
of Bradley in the poetry appears as a note to The Waste Land on the hor-
ror of solitude.

Eliot's undergraduate period holds a more generally recognized clue
to his depreciatory handling of romantic optimism. In 1908, when he was
twenty, he encountered The Symbolist Movement in Literature, by Arthur
Symons, and there first heard of Jules Laforgue, whom with other French
poets he then read. Laforgue's own temperament was romantic but his
manner was cynical. He had a disposition to jibe at sentiment. This habit,
though it shaded his poems with a pathos, brightened them with a tinsel
novelty all the more bizarre because of their slang. Splitting or doubling
himself into languid sufferer and satiric commentator, he wrote poems
deriding in one passage the tenderness of another. Eliot accommodated
 this idiosyncracy to his own needs; it helped him to veil personal agonies
with impersonal ironies. «One is prepared for art when one has ceased to
be interested in one's own emotions except as material .... Personal emo-
tion, personal experience is extended in something impersonal - not in the
sense of something divorced from our feelings, but the pattern we make
of our feelings is the center of value». (1) This was written in 1924, but Eliot's
theory and practice of poetry in this respect were consistent throughout
his life. The things he was actively engaged in battling for, when he started
writing, are the things he continued to battle for, but the feelings and the
patterns made of the feelings have steadily changed and deepened.

He has always been master of what, in a rare lapse into the hideous
language of modern abstraction, he has called the «objective correlative».
In Prufrock, that creation of thinking into feeling, of projecting the inner life
in terms of weather and scenery and rooms and gestures and disease and
sounds and textures, seemed already complete. With age he has lost none
of that richness of sensibility, but it has expanded to cover wider areas of
experience. In addition, he has developped a new method of direct
philosophical analysis in poetic form and has infolded the two into a poetry
of contemplation which is as sensous as it is intellectual. One of the most
dominant philosophical themes he touches upon from his early poems to
his most mature ones, is the theme of time. Without losing for one moment
its profound intellectual and philosophical dimensions, it is loaded with a
new, almost mystical and unexploring meaning.

NOTES
(1) T.S. Eliot, Introduction to Le Serpent by Paul Valery
(2) The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot, ed. Faber and Faber, 1969, «East
Coker», Ill, p. 180.
(3) Foster, Steven. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, VII, 1965, «Relativity
and The Waste Land: A Postulate»
(4) Fjelde, Rolf. Western Review, «Time, Space and Wyndham l.ewis», 1951, pp.
60-67.
(5) Russell, Bertrand: The ABC of Relativity, p. 55, London 1925
(6) Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. Four Quartets, Casebook Series, The Macmillan Press,
London 1969, pp. 138-152.
(7) Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, ed. A.V.Bever, Paris, 1917, p. 242.
(8) T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, «Tradition and Individual Talent», ed. Faber and
Faber, 1976, p. 15.

LIST OF WORKS CONSULTED
1. Bergson, Henri, Duree et Simultsneite, Paris 1922
2. Bergonzi, Bernard, ed. Four Quartets, Casebook Series, The Macmillan Press,
London 1969
3. Bergsten, Staffan, Time and Eternity
4. Eliot, T.S., The Complete Poems and Plays of TS. Eliot, ed. by Faber and
Faber, London 1969
5. Eliot, T.S., Selected Essays, ed. by Faber and Faber, London 1976
6. Gardner, Helen, The Art of TS. Eliot, The Crescent Press, London 1949
7. Kenner, Hugh, The Invisible Poet, ed. by W.H. Alien, London 1960
8. Martin, Jay, ed. The Waste Land: A Col/ection of Critical Essays, Prentice-
Hall, lnc., 1972.
9. Smith, Graver, Jr., TS. Eliot's Poetry and Plays, The University of Chigago
Press, Illinois 1956
10. Southam, B.C., ed. Prufrock, Geroniion, Ash Wednesday and other shorter
poems, Casebook Series, The Macmillan Press, London 1978
11. Unger, Leonard, TS. Eliot: Moments and Patterns, University of Minnesota
Press, Minneapolis, 1966.

Comments

[Stefania]

I had the pleasure to read your book, Anastasia, when it was first published and was thrilled to discover T.S.Eliot's major poems. I've read the Four Quartets in English and the Waste Land in Greek - translated by our great poet George Seferis who was, I think, one of Eliot's greatest friends.

[Laura]

Congratulations, Anastasia! I didn't know you were a published author. Can't wait to read more!

[Anastasia]

That's right. George Seferis was one of Eliot's closest friends. I believe that the Greek translation of The Waste Land is one of the best.
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