Mr. Eliot's Poetry BOOKS OF THE DAY

By EDWIN MUIR THE first eighty pages in this volume are taken up by the poems which have already appeared in Poems 1909-1925; the remaining hundred pages contain Mr. Eliot's poetic production for the last ten years, except for Murder in the Cathedral," which is not included. This second part begins with Ash-Wednesday, embraces two unfinished poems, Sweeney Agonistes and Coriolan, ten choruses from The Rock, four Ariel Poems, thirteen Minor Poems, and ends with Burnt Norton, which is in some ways different from any of Mr. Eliot's other poems, and is one of the most remarkable, I think, that he has yet written.

It will be seen from this that Mr. Eliot has been considerably more productive during the last ten years than during the sixteen years before ; but it is very difficult to judge whether he has been productive on the same level, firstly because a writer of such individuality as his changes the taste of his readers, and they come to his later work with a different mind, and secondly because his style has altered. The alteration has been towards a greater explicitness of statement ; Ash=Wednesday is far more explicit than any poetry that Mr. Eliot wrote before it, and it represents, I think, a turning point in his development. The Waste Land is no doubt his greatest work, but there is in it, compared with his later work, a certain blindness both in the despair it expresses and in turning away from despair at the end. Since The Hollow Men, where that despair reached its lowest depths, Mr. Eliot has never expressed it again ; he has taken it as a theme, certainly, in Sweeney Agonistes and other poems ; but though he is still in the midst of it, he is no longer within it. That is to say that he is not so firmly under the influence of his time and is more deliberately concerned with permanent things. The difference may be seen by setting side by side : " These fragments I have shored against my ruins" from The Waste Land, and " Redeem the time, redeem the dream

The token of the word unheard, unspoken "

from Ash-Wednesday. This difference, the difference between despair and faith, is so great that it is very hard to compare the two kinds of poetry that derive from it. A good deal of the second kind is obscure, like the first, but with a different obscurity : not the obscurity of deep darkness, but rather that of darkness against light. It is consequently less heavily charged and more easy to understand, more finally compre- hensible. - This must be admitted to be in its favour, unless we are to regard obscurity in itself, deep and total obscurity, al a poetic virtue.

The second half of the volume is nevertheless more unequal than the first. Sweeney Agonistes, brilliant as it is, is definitely in a lower class of poetry than the rest, and doubtless is intended to be. The choruses from The Rock are first of all choruses, that is compositions intended to be spoken and to be comprehensible as soon as spoken. They contain some beautiful poetry, they arc original in form, but they naturally lack the condensation which Mr. Eliot's poetry has at its best, On the other hand, almost all the shorter poems have intense concentration and perfect clarity at the same time ; Ash-Wednisday and the four Arid Poems are works of great beauty ; and Burnt Norton is surely one of the best poems that 'Mr. Eliot has ever written. Its subject is Time and its main text a quotation from ‘Herakleitos to the effect that

Collected Poems 1909-1935. By T. S. Eliot. (Faber and -Faber. - is. ed.) - - —* the road upwards and downwards is one and the same road. This poem is different from the others inasmuch as it is not

at all dramatic, being a pure intellectual enquiry into the nature and forms of Time. It alternates between the most close argument and the most vivid imagery expressing the contradiction of Time, a contradiction implicit in the recurring phrase, At the still point of the turning world." It contains lines of great beauty :

" We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below„the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before."

That is a far more rarefied poetry than

" In the juvescence of the year Came Christ the tiger In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judos,"

but it has something in common with it, a sense of the

fabulous ; the difference is that the second kind is very much more figured and patterned (to use wordS that recur frequently in it), which means that it is more thoroughly worked out. Imagery which is thoroughly worked out often becomes mechanical and lifeless ; but in this poem both the thought and the imagery are intensely concentrated, and gain immensely from the development. Whether this poem owes

anything to Dante I do not know, but one might chance the guess that Mr. Eliot's later development as a poet has been away from the Elizabethans, by whom he was so much influenced at the beginning, towards Dante.

Mr. Eliot's position as a poet is established, and his work has been more thoroughly discussed than that of any of his contemporaries. His influence on poetry has been decisive. That influence was due chiefly to his genius for poetry, but.it

was due also to certain qualities which he held in common with some other men in his age. He has had an influence on the form and on the attitude of poetry. By this I do not mean that he has encouraged a kind of poetry in which all sorts of poetical quotations and reminiscences alternate with realistic descriptions of contemporary life. This method was employed

very effectively in The. Waste Land because it was a natural

part of the scheme ; it has not been employed successfully by any of Mr. Eliot's imitators, and as a set poetic method it is obviously ridiculous. Mr. Eliot's dramatic approach has influenced the form of poetry away from the purely lyrical, and his exercise of the historical sense has influenced-the atti-

tude of poetry. The -first influence has been entirely salutary', ; it has led to a necessary reform of poetic language and a spirit of objectivity which had been buried in the degeneration of Romanticism. The reliance on the historical sense Mr. Eliot himself seems to have lost in his later work ; it does not go with religious poetry ; it cannot survive the -vision of " the still point of the turning world." But even in The Waste Land he used it conditionally, for there too, if less explicitly,

he was concerned with permanent things, which are not affected

by history. When the historical sense is employed without reference to these permanent things it leads to a shallowness; of the imaginative faculty, for it robs the individual existence of meaning and can in itself give no meaning to society, since society is still in becoming, and by the laws of history will always be. Where the historical sense has been used in this way, the responsibility is not Mr. Eliot's ; but it partly explains why his influence should be sa great with poets wbo do not hold his beliefs.