T. S. Eliot - ON POETRY AND POETS

 

T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.

(Handwritten notes taken by José Angel García Landa, c. 1990)

   

 T. S. Eliot

ON POETRY AND POETS

 

1. ON POETRY.

 

The Social Function of Poetry  (1943, 1945)  - (15-25)

15- Meaning what the function has actually been, not what it ought to be— "if poetry—and I mean all great poetry—has had no social function in the past, it is not likely to have any in the future." Specific functions of particular genres, in particular ages, etc. 

16-  Didactic poetry has been superseded by prose; now it is restricted to satire or morals, etc. 

17- "We might consider the function of any of those kinds of poetry and still leave untouched the question of the function of poetry. For all these things can be dealt with in prose. Poetry is non-transient, it survives "the complete extinction of interest in the issues with which the poet was passionately concerned." 

18- The first sure function: "poetry has to give pleasure . . . the kind of pleasure that poetry gives", but "if it were only pleasure, the pleasure itself coule not be of the highst kind" — "there is always the communication of some new experience, or some fresh understanding of the familiar, or the expression of something we have experienced but have no words for, which enlarges our consciousness or refines our sensibility."  - But this is an individual benefit. Social benefit? "poetry differs from every other art in having a value for the people of the poet's race and language, which it can have for no other";

19 - "poetry is much mor local than prose"; "no art is more stubbornly national than poetry" (developing the feeling in a language, the personality of its people). 

20- "the duty of the poet, as poet, is only indirectly to his people: his direct duty is to his language, first to preserve, and second to extend and improve." Importance of the shareability of feelings.

21- "Unless they go on producing great authors, and expecially great poets, their language will deteriorate, their culture wiull deteriorate and perhaps become absorbed in a stronger one." Also, living literature is necesasary to prevent our being alienated from our literature of the past. An audience (big or small) is necessary for a poet in every generation; "dead poets cease to be of any use to us unless we have living poets as well." Pro a small, selected vanguard, élite "with the main, and more passive body of readers not lagging more than a genration or so behind."

22- Diffuse and subtle influence of poetry: "And this is what I mean by the social function of poetry in its largest sense; that it does, in proportion to its excellence and vigour, affect the speech and the sensibility of the whole nation." But poets not exclusively.

23- Dependent on the language at large - It depends on circumstances beyond its control. Vs. dividing people from people: "The hope of perpetuating the culture of any country lies in communication with others" - but vs. uniformity. ""Poetry is a constant reminder of all the things that can only be said in one language, and are untranslatable." Pro learning another language. 

25- Vs. the disappearance of poetry and of religious feeling, vs. the unification of the world for its own sake.

 

The Music of Poetry (1952) (26-38)

26- Eliot acknowledges his own contradictions as a critic. The critical writings of poets are interesting as defences of the kind of poetry they write or want to write. He advocates some poets of the past in an exaggerated way [e.g. the Metaphysical poets!], or in theorising he generalizes one type of experience [e.g. the objective correlative!]. "We must return to the scholar for ascertainement of facts, and to the more detached critic for impartial judgment."

27- "The critic, certainly, should be something of a scholar, and the scholar something of a critic". Ker: a scholar with a good critical sense. Vs. scansion (or schemes, etc.) as a criterion for judging the quality of lines. An [inner feel] of verse is necessary. 

28- "it is only the study, not of poetry but of poems, that can train our ear." Problems of foreign influence in the music of poetry: Greek on Latin, Latin on English. Possibility of value arising from the misxture, but Eliot pro assimilation without deliberate artifice.

29-  In English we have "a kind of amalgam of systems of diverse sources." Varying influence of each, but one law of nature remains: "that poetry must not stray too far from the ordinary everyday language which we use and hear." 

30- "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning" even if the meaning is not clear (irony vs. Freud). "It is a commonplace to observe that the meaning of a poem may wholly escape paraphrase. It is not quite as commonplace to observe that the meaning of a poem may be something larger than its author's conscious purpose, and something remote from its origins." "If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless."

31- The poem goes beyond the author's consciousness and awareness: "The reader's interpretation may differ from the author's and be equally valid—it may even be better" [But Eliot suggests generality as a mediating element between both]. Revolutions in poetic language generally are a return to common speech (Dryden, Wordsworth, or the early 20th c.): a reason for the special fulfilment inspired by contemporary poetry. "The music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the common speech of its time" and place. 

32- The poet must be faithful to his material. Value of dissonance, fluctuation: "no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is  a master of the prosaic."

33- "a 'musical poem' is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words which compose it, and . . . these two patterns are indisoluble and one." blank verse in drama is not the same as in other genres, even if it is prosocially the same. "The dependence of verse upon speech is much more direct in dramatic poetry than in any other." The dramatist's "idiom must be comprehensive of all the [characters'] voices, but present at a deeper level than is necessary when the poet speaks only for himself. 

34- The 19th-c. verse drama is dead both dramatically and because of their remoteness as speech; a tradition is important to succeed, and English blank verse began its decadence with Dryden. Poets "killing" a form, etc., though a successful one.

35- The task of poets (meaning their task towards language) varies according to the period they live in. It is not always to effect a revolution, as this is neither possible nor desirable. Explain & then developing (e.g. Shakespeare).

36- An excess in Milton and in Wordsworth? "Ony by going too far can we find out how far we go"; "the music of verse is not a line by line matter, but a question of the whole poem. There is a permanent tendency to return to set patterns, even now.

37- Set patterns die when they lose contact with colloquial speech, but they return. "Free verse"? "No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job"; "a great deal of bad prose has been written under the name of free verse"; "only a bad poet could welcome free verse as a liberation from form"—from dead form, ok. "Forms have to be broken and remade" following the [genius] of the language. 

38- "The liberties that he [the poet] may take are for the sake of order; vs. the degradation of tradition. Recent period in poetry is "a period of search for a proper modern colloquial idiom." When stability comes, the musical research, the poets will develop a sense of rhythm and structure. Rhythm may come before words in composition; contrapunctal arrangement. 2 taks of poetry: working in musical elaboration, and being recalled to speech.

 

 

What Is Minor Poetry? (1944) (39-52)

39- 

 

 

 

  

 

 

To be continued...