LIDIA VIANU

T.S. Eliot - An Author for All Seasons

THE QUICKSANDS OF CRITICISM: ISSUES AND APROACHES

Eliot's critical strategy is one of tentative opposition. His disposition is ironical. His essays seem to be haunted by a mocking bird. Writing about Eliot's criticism (consisting mostly of reviews and lectures), Hugh Kenner (The Invisible Poet, 1959) noticed that Eliot's tone was related to what the Atheneum or Egoist readers expected a review to sound like. He called it a tone of ‘deft buffoonery’, a ‘knowing mimicry of British weekly reviewing’, a ‘close and knowing mimicry of the respectable’. Eliot's arguments are ‘steadily subversive’, he said. They secretly cooperate with the reader's expectations. Eliot's cultivated ‘blandness’ yields a ‘complex comic satisfaction’. Eliot's critical procedure, Kenner stated, was to force his subject to expose himself. Eliot's essays have a ‘rhetorical layout’, which Kenner described as a

‘parody of official British literary discussion: its asperities, its pontification, its distinctions that do not distinguish, its vacuous ritual and familiar quotations and bathetic solemnities’.

Indeed, Eliot usually starts by slyly turning the opinion he attacks into a piece of bad rhetoric. He relates it in laughable, superficial, hardly logical sentences. He thus throws a weakening light on the view which stirs him into formulating his own. His criticism is in constant search of such critical incentives. When he deplores the lack of an intellectual atmosphere (of a ‘current of ideas’, in Arnold's words), Eliot means, in fact, that his vitality as a critic depends upon the existence of ideas which can be ironically questioned and finally destroyed. He sets out, in his early criticism moreover, shouting ‘delenda est’.

Eliot's favourite stylistic trick is the anticlimax. He loves to surprise the reader. His irony relies heavily on unexpected twists and turns of the mind. His critical progress is a picturesque succession of peaks, precipices and cunning springs that turn into waterfalls. This love for shock and surprise proves Eliot's wish to handle the reader's mind tyrannically. More often than not, he speaks with his tongue in his cheek. There is always something lurking unexpressed behind words, some menace laughingly hinted at. A fatal weapon in fact, which he wants us to guess and fear, and which at times he actually makes use of. He has devised a consummate rhetoric of denial, which tiptoes from the innocent surprise to the furtive stab. He looks like a Mona Lisa of criticism. From wherever you look at him, you see him smile back. Only, you never can tell what at. His mind is at its best when pinching other minds. Affectionately, maybe, but pretty hard, nevertheless. It is impossible not to feel Eliot's smiling anger in his essays. His dramatic strategy in his literary criticism covers three acts: suspense, surprise, shock.

Eliot cultivates his enemies because he feeds on them. Like a bird of prey, he pounces on the right sentence to confute. His critical powers need to be stirred by a reason for contradiction. There are hundreds of denying formulas in his essays. He is an expert at variations in the negative: from negative conjunctions to negative adverbs, verbs in the negative, improbable moods and tenses, negative prefixes or suffixes, and words with negative meaning. No negative resource of the language is ignored. Of special interest, in this respect, is Eliot's eye for the ‘might have been’, which evinces in fact his joy at scolding what actually is, and praising what is not.

Thus armed with negatives, Eliot calls to attention every author he happens to be reading. He has a passion for critical rebuking. He often claims to have been ‘struck’ by, to be regretfully dissatisfied with an option. This is an euphuism for having spotted an error. The more sins he spies, the more lively and energetic he feels. He reprimands, he shakes his forefinger reproachingly. If a painter were to draw him in his favourite pose, the painting ought to be entitled Eliot forbidding. Eliot has a gift for controversy, rather than exposition in criticism. We might say that, for him, in the beginning was the NO. Even his affirmations turn out to be the denial of a negative statement. His liking for warnings, for prophetic misgivings, devised in his criticism a rhetoric of the double No.

Eliot's essays advance lazily towards a final conclusion. His slow critical progress is meant to postpone understanding in order to annihilate in the reader any possible dissent. Eliot strives to keep other people's objections at bay. To do so, he must slow down the pace of his own critical reasoning. He hovers over the work, unwilling to unveil the mystery of its creation, to spear it with sharp critical lances. His love for the whole breeds a hatred for the critical plumber, who menaces the creator's designs by submitting them to the work of an alien mind. By claiming that the poet himself hardly knows his own meaning, and that the critics are even less qualified than the poet to discuss it. Eliot protects the unfathomable mystery of creation from prying intruders. He formulates his rational refusal to unveil the mechanism of creation. He would rather talk about poetry in broad daylight, than follow the crooked paths of the creator's mind, which might lead into philosophy, psychology, aesthetics. He proposes a limited understanding, which aims at respectfully protecting the secret of the work.

Eliot often complains that the mass of readers suffer from intellectual prejudice and narrowness. He even sees himself as the solitary, resented apostle and restorer of a genuine approach to poetry. Rather than judge poetry, Eliot would have us ‘feel’ it, accept it unquestioningly. So, shortly after complaining of the reader's narrowness of mind, Eliot refuses to allow the same reader to broaden his view, draw aside from the poem and appraise, understand. The same is true for his criticism. Whatever he may be stating, Eliot has an eye for what has not been uttered yet. He foresees all accusations, feels victimized beforehand. He defends his opinion before he has actually formulated it. He is not satisfied until every possible future objection has been nipped in the bud. He feels besieged by dissenters, and, if none happens to be around, Eliot himself formulates imaginary objections to his own ideas. He wishes to seem the only direct perceiver of some hidden depth. Therefore, he progressively restricts the group of privileged readers, until he is the only one left who (he claims) really understands. What he actually understands, that he will never divulge. Criticism, poetry and drama are all for Eliot, in the long run, words of no speech. His writings are pervaded by a rarely abandoned sense of secrecy.

Eliot recommends an emotional, intensely sympathetic reading. His advice is, Be on the creator's side. Criticism is, for him, like a stage, on which he wears the mask of the unbiassed, impersonal critic. Both Eliot's impersonality and its opposite, his aggressivity, are assumed. There is a blushing shyness in Eliot's fits of mockery, relieved only by the hope that, laughing at witticisms, the reader will not have time to notice the shaking hand and faltering voice behind the words. Eliot the critic is Eliot the pretender. His clever jokes conceal a bitter gravity. Prickly Eliot writes with his mouth pursed and a sour taste inside it.

Eliot is a good guide for those learning how to formulate private, self-centred judgments. His studies on various writers tend to forget their object and exhibit the personality of the critic. Very often, Eliot obliterates his subjects. He reduces all time to the present, all writers to himself. He is a critic of the adjustable past, all-mighty present and protean future. He uses anachronisms methodically. Uprooting past visions, he fuses them with later moments, thus handling time unorthodoxically. As far as other authors are concerned, he hardly peers outside himself in order to re-enact their creations in his own mind. Any topic he deals with leads to Rome, that is to the exposition of his own experience in the matter. He feels he must be the only creator in view. Therefore, he is in constant need of saying ‘I for one...’ With Eliot criticism often looks like a do-it-yourself job. His criticism is, though not openly, over-personal.

There is in Eliot's essays an admitted inclination for the immediately apprehensible, a need for the concrete. Ideas are given bodies clothed in comparisons from the field of chemistry, geography, physics, geometry, even hunting. The mind of a poet is a thread of platinum, a critic is sent on a wild-goose or a hare-and-hound chase, criticism has frontiers and boundaries. These trips into visualisations are much like the objective correlatives that Eliot devised for his poetry (so similar to Joyce’s epiphanies  and to Virginia Woolf’s image of life as a luminous halo): a humanization of abstract thoughts, a tool which intimates that Eliot meant his criticism to be experienced like a poem, emotionally rather than logically.

The tone of the essays is conversational: at times colloquial, often biting, always free of complication or confusion. His sentences are remarkably simple and clear, even when the ideas behind them grow tortuous and bushy. He gives you the feeling that you grasp something, but cannot see what precisely. In criticism, the verbal nature of Eliot's thoughts is more obvious than in his poems, where emotion veils the words. Reviewing and lecturing modified Eliot's diction. In his literary criticism, he has a discursive approach, a persuading strategy, a talkative defence.

Eliot's is a Janus faced criticism. Every statement is closely followed by an ‘on the other hand ...’ Every opinion has a twin brother. Eliot tries to tell more fortunes at once. Many of his statements devour one another, filing out of the essay before there has been time for the reader to touch them. Eliot's main concern is to be everywhere at the same time. He keeps spinning round, and achieves an acrobatic agility, which makes it impossible for anyone to pin him down. His defensive criticism defends itself by using this foreseeing air.

With Eliot, no critical opinion is safe. All his statements are tentative. They have to fight hard the quicksands of criticism. Everything is relative, both true and false, at the same time. He professes confusion. I don't know – he seems to say –, I am not sure, my opinion may soon change, my words may be badly chosen ...  Instead of a conclusion, he leaves us holding a pair of imaginary scales (his sign in the Zodiac, by the way). The last tilt, the choice of only one face or aspect, will be caused by our own lack of balance, not his. For Eliot, there is no final conclusion, there is no last. His critical essay looks like a resourceful Santa Claus, bringing the most unexpected gifts. It is not easy, however, to induce the readers to grasp an absence. Eliot the critic, the same as Eliot the poet, tries to do it by emptying the words of their meaning. Like Valéry's serpent, which bites off its own tail, Eliot swallows his convictions as soon as he releases them. When a certainty is present, Eliot knows that it might stir in the reader the desire to refute it. But, when it is absent, the text conveys the critic's devout wish to possess it. An opinion which is half-absent may persuade better than one too obviously present. Eliot thus prefers writing a criticism of absences. He uses a subtle strategy: false modesties, falsely humble mockeries ...  His whole criticism can be regarded as a tentative understatement.

Eliot's pretext for questioning the statements he discusses is that one must have a tolerant eye for the variety of opinions which do not belong to us, precisely because all opinions are relative. Visions and revisions spring out of his mind continuously. His all-embracing generosity overlooks the fact that, in the process of accepting every view, he stifles the one he himself holds. It is an elementary truth of criticism that you cannot be either in two places or in two minds at once. Too many quicksands may discourage even the most valiant explorer from trespassing Eliot's critical land.

Eliot avoids committing himself to an opinion which might be contradicted by the reader. His lesson is one of elusiveness. He seems to advise: never utter a final yes, or it will presently be used against yourself. Neither is Eliot a synthetical critic. He has a good eye for the subtle details, for ‘minor works’ and neglected writers. His criticism is particularizing, it does not abound in general conclusions. His revisions are ingenious rather than systematic. He strolls through various ages and literatures, and from time to time uses a blind alley to take a rest. Then he goes back to the trodden highway of Shakespeare and Dante with refreshed spirit. His reversals are often tempests in a glass of water, charming acrobatics of marginal thoughts, put into masterful words. His is, in conclusion, a piecemeal criticism.

Eliot makes a detour from the common path of the transparent critic who trains himself in the trade of impersonality. He speaks a lot about impersonality, but to no avail. First, he avoids to identify himself with whatever author he examines. He  steps aside, goes as far as his irony will lead him, and, at a safe distance, reduces everything to himself, draws again upon his own personality. He creates a new genre of impure criticism, which he calls workshop  or practitioner's criticism. His gift for the memorable phrase moulds common ideas into impressive coinages. He is the creator of a critical style. Eliot may not be a literary critic proper, but the reputed issues, or rather the reputed formulas of his essays are numerous, and have had a large audience.

In The Sacred Wood, 1920, the essay The Perfect Critic diagnoses the disease of early 20th century criticism as ‘verbalism’ and ‘impressionism’. The impressionistic critic is defined as a sensibility with mixed critical and creative reactions, an incomplete artist. The same essay discredits the dogmatic critic, who tries to ‘coerce’, to lay down rules, to make judgments of worse and better.

In Imperfect Critics, he states that criticism is first of all supposed to provide a reason for reading: to stimulate the taste for an author. He also speaks of ‘sensuous thought’: a formula that means to him ‘thinking through the senses, or (...) the senses thinking’. The coinage implies a unity of sensibility and intellect, which will be enlarged upon in The Metaphysical Poets. The first requisites of a critic are here considered to be the critic's interest in his subject and his ability to communicate an interest in it. His main tools are supposed to be comparison and analysis.

Tradition and the Individual Talent explains that literature as a whole is a system, a certain order of works. The essay tries to define the place of the reader, writer and critic in this ideal order. Tradition is an all-embracing term. It includes a historical sense (a ‘perception not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’, a ‘sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal together’). Any writer must have the feeling that all literature is contemporary to him, that all literature is a simultaneous order. Every poet must cohere, Eliot says. No poet can be valued alone. He must be judged by the standards of past literature. He must conform to the past. At the same time, the old must conform to what is new:

‘the past is altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’.

Every new work modifies the pre-existing order. It alters the countenance of previous works. Eliot sees the ‘conscious’ present as an

‘awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past's awareness of itself cannot show’.

In this light, erudition appears as a consciousness of the past. The poet, Eliot muses, must surrender himself to tradition. Somewhere else, he even says that a poet who borrows from other writers becomes a real bearer of tradition. The poet's progress is described here as a

‘continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.

The sentence that tradition requires surrender, depersonalization of the artist, has become a commonplace quotation, although its meaning is not any clearer now than it was in Eliot's time.

Another well-known opinion expressed in this essay is:

‘Honest criticism (...) is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry’.

A so-called ‘impersonal’ theory of poetry, of the creation of poetry follows. In order to make it clear, Eliot resorts to a comparison from the field of chemistry. The mind of the mature poet is like a filament of platinum introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide. The result is the appearance of a mixture, the sulphurous acid. Although the combination cannot take place if the platinum is not present, the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum. The platinum itself remains unaffected by the process. In the same way, the artist's mind is a receptacle for feelings, phrases, images (the material of poetry) which it ‘digests’, it ‘transmutes’ into a work of art. The conclusion is that the poet ‘has not a personality to express, but a particular medium’. This medium of poetry concentrates, fuses, generalizes the personal emotions into a poem which has nothing to do with the individual life it springs from. Eliot holds that we must not look for the poet in the poem, as he will not be there. He states:

‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’.

The essay concludes that the emotion of art is ‘impersonal’. It is a

‘significant emotion (...) which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet’.

It is not for the first time that, behind such earnest critical theories, we feel emotional, intensely personal Eliot in hiding.

The essay Hamlet and His Problems includes the famous finding of the objective correlative:

‘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 the particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked’.

Its pretext is Eliot's feeling that Hamlet is an artistic failure. The character's emotions are inexpressible, they exceed by far the ability of Shakespeare's words. These unuttered emotions are in excess of the facts. There is no adequate objective correlative, Eliot concludes, for Hamlet's feelings. Eliot even claims that Shakespeare himself may have ignored what was going on inside his own character's heart. Consequently, Shakespeare was not able to present Hamlet accurately. Eliot's argument is subtle:

‘Hamlet is up the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him’.

In the essay Philip Massinger, the question of poetic borrowings appears:

‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion’.

This theory explains Eliot's use of echoes from other writers in his poetry, and especially the fact that these echoes have hardly any connections left with their original context. Eliot uses them as if they were his own words, with an intensified meaning, though, because suggestive of several other meanings as well.

In Dante, we learn that philosophy is no more than an ‘ingredient’ of the poetic world. Eliot thought that a poet could borrow a philosophic system for his poetry. Poetry seemed to him to be better if it had a clear and ‘tenable’ philosophic pattern. The business of the poet is not to produce ideas, but to transmute them into poetry. It may follow that an analysis of poetry should not concentrate on the quality of its ideas, but on the emotions that lurk behind his words.

In the same essay, there is a sentence which explains why Eliot chose for his poetry a subject matter which to previous generations appeared totally unpoetic:

‘The contemplation of the horrid or disgusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty’.

The Preface to For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) contains Eliot's ‘general point of view’. He calls himself a

‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’.

The same essay violently indicts early 20th century verbalism. Eliot speaks of a language of ‘tergiversation’. He complains of the ‘vague jargon’ of his time, of the fact that people have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing’. He hates the half-understood words, which are torn form their place in psychology, he says, or other ‘half-formed’ science, and used after having been emptied of all meaning.

The description of Francis Herbert Bradley seems to fit Eliot himself. Bradley, Eliot notices, assumed a

‘curious blend of humanity and irony, an attitude of extreme diffidence about his own work’.

This modesty, Eliot insists, is real. Bradley appears to him to be a modest and sensitive man, whose main weapon was irony. Eliot's study of Bradley's polemical irony may have been a sort of apprenticeship. The same as Bradley before him, Eliot also was in the habit of

‘discomfiting an opponent with a sudden profession of ignorance, of inability to understand, or of incapacity for abstruse thought’.

He also liked to turn a writer's device, even his tricks of speech, against their author. The effect of Eliot's essays is also very similar to the effect of Bradley's essays, in which Eliot notices that understanding is obscured by the numerous arguments, by the ‘dust of (...) logical battles’.

Another remark which applies to Eliot as well is made in The Humanism of Irving Babbitt. Eliot notices there that it is ‘proverbially easier to destroy than to construct’. Consequently, readers find it more agreeable to grasp destructive rather than constructive criticism. This may be an explanation to the fact that Eliot's picturesque oppositions were better taken notice of than his praising assents. His criticism is most vigorous when there is a rival ahead to be defeated, not a friend to be extolled. His essay on Ezra Pound is significant in this respect. As he could not very well disparage Pound's poetry himself, Eliot resorts to a well-chosen list of unfavourable reviews, which he quotes at length. Eliot, the critic who made no secret about not having a theory of his own, was not a constructive critic. He was unbelievably fond of harassing all final affirmations. His own affirmations are to be inferred from his denials. He secretly builds at night what he demolishes in broad daylight. His is a criticism of dissatisfaction.

The second essay on Dante (1929) opens with the question of the ‘discrepancy between enjoyment and understanding’. Eliot maintains that scholarship may ruin the experience of reading poetry. That a preliminary elaborate preparation of historical and biographical knowledge can operate as a barrier in the reading of a poem. Eliot confesses:

‘In my own experience of the appreciation of poetry I have always found that the less I knew about the poet and his work, before I began to read it, the better’.

Rather than the effort to understand, Eliot trusts something he calls the ‘direct shock of poetic intensity’. This poetic intensity is meant to hit the reader. As he states in a famous sentence, ‘genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’.

In the same essay, he speaks of a certain beauty of English poetic words, which lies in their ‘opacity’. They are ambiguous words, with numberless associations. He indirectly explains the difficulty of his own ambiguous lines, by saying:

‘... words have associations, and the groups of words in association have associations, which is a kind of local self-consciousness ...’

His ambiguity conveys indeed the feeling of its being local and of progressively restricting its area, until it becomes confined to the poet's own mind, the poet's own associations, which an outsider can only guess and never fully spell out.

The act of reading is described with religious earnestness:

‘The experience of a poem is the experience of both a moment and of a lifetime. It is very much like our intenser experiences of other human beings. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, of shock and surprise, even of terror (Ego dominus tuus); a moment which can never be forgotten, but which is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience; which survives inside a deeper and calm feeling’.

The disputed relation between philosophical belief and poetic assent also occurs in this essay. Eliot holds that, in reading poetry, we ‘suspend both belief and disbelief’. To his mind, in order to understand poetry, a ‘suspension of belief’ is necessary, a suspension of judgment. A poem has its own logic, which has nothing to do with understanding, Eliot decides. It is a logic of sensibility. A poem may very well borrow a system of ideas which turns out to be different from the reader's opinions. For the reader, this will be of no consequence. Poetry, Eliot says, can, at best, offer only the ‘illusion of a view of life’ (Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, 1927). What matters is the emotional grip in which the writer holds the reader. Which proves that the newer poetry, the same as the stream-of-consciousness novel, requires the reader's deeper surrender, that it has increased the dependence of the reader upon the author.

There is a statement in Dante which defines Eliot's critical approach. He announces that his opinions on Dante are founded solely upon reading the latter's works. Which means that Eliot's opinions are the result of his introspection, of an analysis of his own experience of reading. That is why he holds that they cannot be either verified or refuted by scholars. Eliot firmly establishes the boundaries of his emotionally introspective criticism, by stating:

‘I mean to restrict my comments to the unprovable and the irrefutable’.

In Seneca in Elizabethan Translation, 1927, (Essays on Elizabethan Drama, 1932), the use of quotations in a critical essay is discussed. To quote, Eliot says, is not the same as to formulate a critical statement. Yet, quotations are necessary to the critic because they are like baits offered to a possible reader, and did not Eliot state elsewhere that criticism was meant to supply a reason for reading?

The Function of Criticism, 1923, (Selected Essays, 1932) discusses the part played by criticism in creation proper. Creation turns out to be the highest fulfillment of all critical activity. The criticism of practitioners is then described as belonging to those writers whose critical activity is not all discharged in their work, and may try to use what is left of it in commenting on their own or other writers' works.

In The Metaphysical Poets (1921), the famous dissociation of sensibility is defined. The poets of the 17th century (John Donne in particular) are said to have effected a ‘recreation of thought into feeling’, and also to have achieved in their poetry a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought’. The metaphysicals, Eliot further explains, possessed a

‘mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience’.

They did not merely meditate on ideas poetically. Their unified sensibility managed to find the ‘verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling’. It transmuted ideas into sensations. It transformed an observation into a ‘state of mind’. The metaphysicals were ‘intellectual’ poets. After them, Eliot holds,

‘a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered’.

The merely ‘reflective’ poet, such as Tennyson and Browning, emerged. To John Donne, a thought was an experience which ‘modified his sensibility’. Donne felt his thoughts ‘as immediately as the odour of a rose’. With the later poets (especially, Eliot says, under the influence of Milton and Dryden), the language became more and more refined. The sensibility behind it, on the other hand, degenerated. It became more and more ‘crude’. Poets no longer feel their thoughts, Eliot notices. They merely ‘ruminate’ them in their minds. An infusion of emotions seems imperative.

The question of the ‘emotional equivalent of thought’ appears in Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, (1927) as well. It must be related to the description of difficult poetry in The Metaphysical Poets. Eliot notices there an indestructible relation, a unity of the idea with the emotion and the word, which existed in the 17th century, and seems to him to have vanished afterward. He feels called upon to recapture it, to go back to the concentrated, ambiguous poetry of the metaphysicals. This is the reason he gives for the difficulty of contemporary poetry (his own included):

‘... it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. (...) The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning’.

It seems to Eliot that the poet's most important task is to load the words with thought and sensibility, to concentrate on the language, to turn it into a transparent medium for poetry.

The lectures in The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933) focus their interest on the nature of creation and criticism. The main idea expressed is that the experience of poetry is ‘only partially translatable into words’. The conclusion to the lectures comes full circle to the starting point of the introduction: namely, that poets should not concentrate on criticism but creation, unless they want to have the sad fate of Coleridge, who was deserted by poetry, and had to talk because he could no longer sing. A good critic, Eliot decides, can only point at the poetry that seems to him to be really good. There is nothing more for him to do. Thus, Eliot views criticism emotionally, as an extension of our experience of poetry. The main concern of the critic is supposed to be the poet's use of language. Eliot says:

‘I wish that we might dispose more attention to the correctness of expression, to the clarity or obscurity, to the grammatical precision or inaccuracy, to the choice of words whether just or improper, exalted or vulgar, of our verse: in short to the good or bad breeding of our poets’.

The Introduction defends the mystery of creation, by deciding that a poem

‘is not just either what the poet 'planned' or what the reader conceives’.

The meaning of the poem cannot be stated in other words than those of the poem itself. No meaning, no ideas can be dissociated from the poet's words. There is only the poem, which does not allow of any but its own terms. Eliot states:

‘If poetry is a form of 'communication', yet that which is to be communicated is the poem itself, and only incidentally the experience and the thought which have gone into it. The poem's existence is somewhere between the writer and the reader; it has a reality which is not simply the reality of what the writer is trying to 'express', or of his experience of writing it, or of the experience of the reader or of the writer as reader’.

In Matthew Arnold, Eliot brings to life the ‘exhaustive’ critic, who is supposed to turn up every hundred years or so in order to rearrange the pattern of literary works, to review tradition in the light of the present. Revision is, thus, turned into a theory. Each new ‘master’ of criticism makes his own errors, which the following critic revises. ‘The longer the sequence of critics we have, the greater amount of correction is possible’, Eliot says, describing criticism as an unending line of visions and revisions. As for the theories concerning the act of communication in poetry, Eliot curtly settles the matter:

‘We can say that in poetry there is communication from writer to reader, but should not proceed from this to think of the poetry as being primarily the vehicle of communication. Communication may take place, but will explain nothing’.

For Eliot, poetry is a whole in which words, feelings and ideas cannot be discussed separately. Eliot is not a dissociative mind. He is a Unitarian critic, so to say. He thinks the poem to be the fruit of ‘auditory’ imagination, which is a total feeling for sounds and rhythms. This auditory imagination goes beyond the conscious thoughts and feelings, beyond meanings. It endows the poetry we read with an energy impossible to be analysed when the experience of our reading the poem is over.

The essay The Social Function of Poetry, 1943 (On Poetry and Poets, 1957) states that poetry is the ‘vehicle of feeling’. This makes it local and national, untranslatable. We can however feel a poem written in a foreign language, even if we do not understand every word of it. As Eliot puts it,

‘... in poetry you can, now and then, penetrate into another country, so to speak, before your passport has been issued or your ticket taken’.

The Music of Poetry (1942) deals, among others, with the mystery of creation. It must by no means be unravelled by the critic. In Eliot's words,

‘If, as we are aware, only a part of the meaning can be conveyed by paraphrase, that is because the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist’.

The ambiguity of a poem is consequently explained as caused by the fact that the poem means more than ordinary speech usually communicates. The music of a word in a poem depends on its context then, on its relations to other words. Each poem must have this multiple pattern of sounds and meanings. The close relation between the poetic idiom and the language of conversation is also discussed. The music of poetry, Eliot explains, is latent in the common speech of the poet's time. The directions of the evolution of poetic language seem to be two. One is to

‘explore the musical possibilities of an established convention of the relation of the idiom of verse to that of speech’.

The other is to catch up with the changes in colloquial speech. These two directions make up a cyclical movement, which goes from musicalisation to innovation. Time and again, poetry has therefore to be recalled to speech. Eliot feels he is one of the poets able to readjust it.

What is Minor Poetry? (1944) looks upon the fluctuating ‘stock market’ of literary values, while Poetry and Drama (1951) discusses Eliot's long cherished idea that the best medium for poetry is the theatre. The Three Voices of Poetry (1953) are: the poet talking to himself, the poet addressing an audience and the poet attempting to create a dramatic character.

The Frontiers of Criticism (1956) formulates the theory of Eliot's workshop criticism. In connection with it, Eliot confesses that he fails to see any critical movement deriving from himself. His criticism, he hopes, offers not a method to be used, but a certain mood to be experienced:

‘The best of my literary criticism – apart from a few notorious phrases which have had a truly embarrassing success in the world – consists of essays on poets and poetic dramatists who had influenced me. It is a by-product of my private poetry-workshop; or a prolongation of the thinking that went into the formation of my own verse’.

Eliot considers that his criticism has a meaning only if it is viewed in relation to his poetry, because this literary criticism supports, explains his poetry. He honestly admits this to be his limitation as a literary critic. As for the existence of adepts of his critical disposition, there he was wrong. In To Criticize the Critic (1961) (from the volume bearing the same title, printed posthumously in 1965), he states again:

‘I do not believe that my own criticism has had, or could have had, any influence whatever apart from my own poems’.

Fact is, his criticism did have an influence. Like all influences in this field (see Roland Barthes, for instance), it was not a felicitous one. Yet, literary critics soon managed to struggle free from it, and criticism survived.

In From Poe to Valéry (1948), Eliot notices that Valéry takes an opposite direction to his own. He sees in Valéry a narcissistic intellectual:

‘... the penetration of the poetic by the introspective critical activity is carried to the limit by Valéry, the limit at which the latter begins to destroy the former’.

This advance in self-consciousness seems to Eliot to be doomed. He foretells that ‘human mind and nerves will rebel’ against it.

The Classics and the Man of Letters (1942) speaks in favour of a ‘cultural unification in diversity’ of Europe. Among other devices, the echoes in Eliot's poems (from Dante, Virgil, Baudelaire, Laforgue, Wagner, etc.) have this aim of creating a common emotional language, a poetic Esperanto loaded with images of various nationalities.

The essay Reflections on Vers Libre (1917) states Eliot's life-long interest in poetic rigour. He once said (in his essay on Pound) that the poet should be so well trained in the art of making verse, that form should become an instinct for him. Eliot is one of the destroyers of 19th century poetic forms, but his poems are far from being formless. Eliot fought for a new rigour in poetry. He hated formlessness. The same as Valéry, he considers there is no freedom in art. Verses cannot be ‘free’. The poet must devise his own poetic pattern, and conform to it. Eliot will not have any poet give up rhythm and rhyme. He advises poets to master those two so well as to be able to take liberties, to innovate them. The same as Valéry, Eliot feels that the poet must devise for himself some ‘artificial limitation’: a certain type of rhyme or metre, which will operate as an obstacle to his sensibility, forcing it to concentrate, heightening its intensity. There is no escape from metre, Eliot decides. There is only mastery:

‘... the ghost of some simple metre should lurk behind the arras in even the 'freest' verse; to advance menacingly as we doze, and withdraw as we rouse. Or, freedom is only truly freedom when it appears against the background of an artificial limitation’.

Faced with the formless poetry of early 20th century, Eliot closed the matter by saying:

‘... the division between Conservative Verse and vers libre does not exist, for there is only good verse, bad verse, and chaos’.

In Eliot's early essays, the formulas that have had an ‘embarrassing’ fame are more numerous. After 1940, his statements are less self-assured. His personal theories are still interesting, subtle and numerous, but not so easily turned into common coin. As the previous enumeration has illustrated, when Eliot started revising himself, an air of uncertainty stole into his criticism, slowing down its ability of creating memorable phrases.

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‘There are limits’, Eliot says, ‘exceeding which in one direction literary criticism ceases to be literary, and exceeding which in another it ceases to be criticism’. (The Frontiers of Criticism, 1956). Eliot never grows tired of thinking out dangers and uncertainties for the commentators of literature. All approaches seem to him to be dangerous. He sees literary criticism as unsafe as the quicksands. Eliot defines the critic's main task as ‘the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste’. The statement itself is in bad need of elucidation. Criticism, however, Eliot continues, can hardly be restricted to elucidating words and correcting the readers' taste. Neither can it remain purely aesthetic. Social, historical, moral judgments (which abound in Eliot's essays) cannot be avoided. He meditates on the unsafe roads of criticism:

‘... you start with literary criticism, and however rigorous an aesthete you may be, you are over the frontier into something else sooner or later. The best you can do is to accept these conditions and know what you are doing when you do it. And, on the other hand, you must know how and when to retrace your steps. You must be very nimble’.

The critical devices Eliot mentions here and there in various essays are, some of them, meant to reveal the critic's sensibility (impressionistic and workshop criticism); others face the reader (interpretation, scientific criticism, literary history, advertising criticism); finally, some of them bring the author of the work to the front (biographical criticism).

Impressionistic criticism, as a method which allows total freedom to the critic, is accused by Eliot of being a mixed critical and creative reaction. The impressionistic critic is, to Eliot's mind,

‘the most dangerous type of critic. The critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which, through some weakness in creative power, exercises itself in criticism instead’ (Hamlet and His Problems, 1920).

The case he builds against the impressionistic critic is interesting because it reveals Eliot the creator. He is satisfied with the poetic world he creates, and he rejects any prolongation of the creative effort in a work of criticism. His first care is to stress the experience of reading as the most important stage of the critical reaction. The reader must side with the author emotionally. Next, he detaches himself from the author, contemplating the work from a distance, organizing his impressions of the work in a pattern of his own. He might, then, feel the prompting to express this pattern of impressions. This is how literary criticism begins, as a continuation of the work of art in a critical utterance. The critic reacts to a work of art by adding another work to it. This is Eliot's main charge against criticism. It is true that Eliot is not willing to deny the existence of critical works. He himself wrote so many of them. Yet, as he feels more at ease in poetry than in criticism, he makes a compromise. He describes the critical devices he uses in such a light as to seem less efficient than his poetic devices. In other words, Eliot the poet has a double, who is Eliot the critic. Whenever they are both in sight, Eliot feels guilty of duplicity. Then the two faces snap at each other, and the stronger (the poet) wins.

Consequently, in Eliot's opinion, the impressionistic critic has creative energies which he, as a critic, should never use. This critic, Eliot warns, is in danger of substituting his own impressions to the poetry which aroused them. Two charges might by brought against Eliot's verdict here. First, that the work as ‘pure’ work exists only in the author's mind. For the critic, for any reader, it becomes inevitably a mass of impressions. And second, what would be the interest of a critical work that would appear as a perfect copy of the piece of literature examined? Who would read works of literary criticism, if they did not exhibit another personality besides the poet's? It is obvious that accusing the impressionistic critic, Eliot the poet fights and defeats in an unfair combat Eliot the critic. The poet accuses the impressionistic critic (which Eliot was, after all) of being a failed writer, who prowls about other people's works in hopes of a miracle. This critic's secret wish is to steal from another work the creative energy he lacks, and this vain hope makes him react ‘in excess’. Such a critic can hardly elucidate a work, Eliot complains. He can, in exchange, alter it, and Eliot greatly fears it might not be a change for the better.

As an alternative to impressionistic criticism (read 'the criticism of those who are not writers themselves'), which menaces to usurp the author, Eliot suggests workshop criticism, the practitioner's criticism. The poet plays there all parts at the same time. His professed aim is to strengthen his creative energy. A critic using this method writes about authors who have influenced his own literature. He can later leave the realm of criticism together with his impressions aroused by other works, and take refuge in his own art, melting his critical reaction in his own poetry or prose. The impressionistic critic is a sad character, doomed to waste his powers in the unsafe interference area between author and reader. The generalizations, the critical terms a poet coins when considering other poets, are in fact ‘conceptual symbols for his emotional preferences’. In other words, the poet takes the liberty of being creative in criticism as well. These ‘conceptual symbols’ are, in a way, objective correlatives (to use another well known coinage) of his critical opinions.

All other forms of criticism besides the poet's own are contemplated with frowning distaste by Eliot. Interpretation is called the ‘lemon-squeezer school of criticism’. An interpretation is unreliable if it comes from someone else than the poet himself. On the other hand, the poet can hardly utter his meaning outside the poem. Consequently, Eliot reduces the realm of interpretation to the experience of reading:

‘I suspect, in fact, that a good deal of the value of an interpretation is – that it should be my own interpretation (...) ... a valid interpretation, I believe, must be at the same time an interpretation of my own feelings when I read it’.

As an alternative to interpretation, Eliot suggests that the critic had better offer the reader ‘facts about a work – its conditions, its setting, its genesis’, or do something (he does not specify what) to make the reader embrace the work in a friendly, unprejudiced way. If it ventures farther than that, interpretation may easily become an imposture. ‘Instead of insight’, Eliot claims, ‘you get a fiction’.

Scientific criticism is even more angrily rejected. The danger, for those who read it, is to mistake explanation for understanding, to invent a puzzle for the pleasure of discovering a solution. More than the rest, scientific critics seem to Eliot to be

‘extracting something from their subject which is not fairly in it’.

Valéry had once compared the same type of critic to a blind man who lectures admirably on colours.

Literary history is more mildly treated. Eliot's idea of tradition is well-known. Criticism is called upon, among other things, to supervise the literary stock exchange, to initiate a long chain of revisions. Eliot imagines the ‘exhaustive’ critic, who adjusts the countenance of tradition. A commentator of Eliot's criticism ironically remarked that Eliot devised this character in hopes that he himself might be assigned to play the part.

Valéry imagines another, more relaxed method of criticism, a kind of advertisement of the work. He speaks of a critic who should simply help the reader select what he should read. As motto for a library he suggests,

‘Plus élire que lire’.

The critic-advocate of the work is not exactly supposed to act as a reader, but as the ‘witness’ of the reader. Eliot, too, dreams of reducing the critic's role to that of a mere adviser. Eliot's ideal critic ought to bring the author in front of the reader, and prepare somehow the reader to meet the work sympathetically. This dumb critic, who can only point, but does not pronounce judgment, is Eliot's second favourite, after the poet-critic.

Biographical criticism, as an exposition of facts preliminary to the understanding of a work, is approved of by Eliot, on condition that the critic does not investigate the writer's life in order to explain the work by its psychological origin. As can be noticed, no literary method of analysis is really safe. Each has some major disadvantage, which prompts Eliot to discourage the critics from using it. He remarks, for instance:

‘... a literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately provoked by a work of art’.

After such a puritanical view of the critic's dowry, it is no wonder that in Eliot's realm, dumb and numb, the critic can hardly avoid being swallowed by the quicksands of criticism.