THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

medieval spiritual and a poetic authority which seemed to him to address the modern condition directly. Dante’s
verse, he reiterated throughout his career, was both scrupulously disciplined and easily intelligible. ‘The thought may
be obscure’, he proclaimed in an essay of 1929, ‘but the word is lucid, or rather translucent’. Speaking in 1950 he
insisted that Dante’s ‘universality’ provided any later poet with a constant reminder ‘of the obligation to explore, to
find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no
words for them’. When in Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1935-42) Eliot attempted to explore ‘beyond
the frontiers of ordinary consciousness’, his immediate prompting and much of his reference was Dantean.
Eliot’s Harvard doctoral thesis, left unexamined due to his prolonged
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absence in wartime England, was concerned with experience and the objects of knowledge in the work of the Oxford
philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846-1924) (he published the manuscript in 1964 as Knowledge and Experience in the
Philosophy of F. H. Bradley). Eliot later affirmed that his own prose style was closely formed on that of the subject of
his dissertation, but something of Bradley’s intellectual influence can also be indirectly felt in the concerns of the
broad range of his writing. Although he disarmingly claimed in 1964 to be no longer able to understand much of his
own argument, his emphasis on Bradley’s interest in the relationship of the subjective consciousness with the
objective world, and particularly on Bradley’s notion of the correlation of the individual mind with a larger, single
comprehensive consciousness, can be linked to Eliot’s persistent interest in individual and external patterns of order.
If in one sense he reinterpreted Bradley’s idea of a comprehensive consciousness as a responsive God, in another he
consistently sought to relate individual perception to a larger human tradition. Eliot’s critical essays attempt to define
and prescribe traditions which are historical, religious, moral and, above all, literary. In one of his earliest and most
celebrated, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1917), he argues that ‘no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
meaning alone’. He is equally insistent that personal emotions, provoked by particular events in a poet’s life, do not
make for ‘remarkable or interesting’ poetry. In its relation to a larger tradition, 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’. In the
series of lectures given at Harvard in 1932 and 1933 entitled The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism he defined
the ‘auditory imagination’ of a poet as ‘the feeling for syllable and rhythm’ which penetrated ‘far below the conscious
levels of thought and feeling ... sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing
something back, seeking the beginning in the end’. Earlier in his influential study of ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ of
1921 he justified the contortions of John Donne’s poetic thought by insisting that when a poet’s mind is perfectly
equipped for its work ‘it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience’. The ordinary man’s experience, Eliot
argued, is ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’; the ‘ordinary man’ falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these experiences
have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking, but for the poet like
Donne ‘these experiences are always forming new wholes’. Eliot’s attraction to the intellectual and lexical dexterity of
‘Metaphysical’ poetry would seem to have derived from a temperamental sympathy with a world-view which rejoiced
in complex patterning and which perceived a divine order beyond the physical evidence of disorder. Throughout, Eliot
shapes his literary tradition around those writers whom he sees as feeding his particular concept of ‘Modernism’.
Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Webster, Andrewes, Marvell, Dryden (just) and Dickens (glancingly) pass muster to
join the company of Virgil, Dante, and Baudelaire; Milton fails the test aesthetically, Blake intellectually, Swinburne
morally. In his discussion of two earlier critics whose
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stature he grudgingly acknowledges, Eliot sees the Coleridge of Biographia Literaria merely as a writer who had
found a vocation as ‘a ruined man’ and Matthew Arnold as little more than an ‘undergraduate’ in philosophy and
theology and a ‘Philistine’ in religion. When he treats his older contemporaries he finds much to admire in the
mystical Yeats but dismisses the agnostic Hardy as ‘an interesting example of a powerful personality uncurbed by any
institutional attachment or by submission to any objective beliefs’.
Eliot’s juvenilia, belatedly collected under the title Poems Written in Early Youth in 1950 (reissued posthumously
in 1967), contains examples of hearty student graduation songs as much as quizzical tributes to Laforgue. Two poems
in particular, ‘Nocturne’ of 1909 (a wry undoing of Romeo’s grand serieux wooing of Juliet) and the unpublished and
experimental ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ of c. 1911 (whose opening lines were incorporated into The Waste
Land), look directly forward to the work which first brought Eliot to wider public notice. His ‘apprenticeship’ proved
to be remarkably fertile. When he showed ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (also of c. 1911) to Ezra Pound in
1914, Pound announced he had found an American poet who had ‘actually trained himself and modernized himself
on his own’ (that is, without Pound’s generally benign interference). The poem was published in the Chicago
magazine Poetry in 1915 and appeared again, due to Pound’s shaping influence, in Eliot’s first important collection