Selected Prose of
T.S.Eliot
Edited wit� an Introduction by
FRANK KERMODE
T. S. Eliot, Nobel Laureate, renowned poet, playwright, and essayist, is a towering figure in twentiethcentury literature. The eloquence and profundity of his works are no
less evident in his critical prose than
in his plays and poetry.
Eliot, in mature retrospect, perceived his prose in three groups
"essays in generalization," "appreciations of individual authors," and
"social and religious criticism."
Frank Kermode has followed this
prescription in selecting thirty-one
essays from Eliot's extensive prose
published over a half century of
social change and intellectual discovery. Every selection had previously been designated by Eliot for its particular significance. Each is presented in its entirety or in substantial
extracts. Chronology of publication
is followed within each group.
The result is a volume that, with
the editor's masterly introduction
and notes, reveals the development
of a brilliant man, his original ideas,
his cogent conclusions, and his consummate skill and grace ir. language.
T. S. ELIOT was born in St. Louis,
lt1.�svt'J.-i, was graduated from Harvard College, and then went abroad
and settled in England. He taught
for a brief time and, for a period of
eight years, was employed in Lloyds
Bank in London. In 1925 he entered book publishing, became a
British subject in 1927, and in 1948
was awarded both the Nobel Prize
in Literature and the British Order
of Merit. He died in 1965, having
made an indelible impress in letters
that will survive the ultimate test of
time.
FRANK KERMODE is Regius
Professor of English Literature at
Cambridge University, has been a
distinguished lecturer at several
American universities, and recently
delivered the four T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures at Kent University
in England. An accepted authority
on Eliot, he became convinced of the
need for a collection of Eliot's most
influential essays. This book is his
response.
Jacket design copyright © 197 5
by Robert Anthony
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
SELECTED PROSE OF
T. S. ELIOT
SELECTED PROSE OF
T. S. ELIOT
Edited with an Introduction by
FRANK KERMODE
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
New York
Copyright© 1975 by Valerie Eliot
Copyright 1932, 1936, 1938, 1949, 1950, © 1956 by Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc. Copyright 1940, 1949, © 1960, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Copyright © 1966, 1968 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Copyright 1933 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, renewed 1961 by Thomas Stearns Eli<r.. Some of these essays or excerpts from essays appear in the following
books: On Poetry and Poets, copyright © 1943, 1945, 1951, 1954, 1956,
1957 by T. S. Eliot, and To Criticize the Critic, copyright© 1965 by Valerie
Eliot, both published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. "Ezra Pound: His
Metric and Poetry," copyright 1917 by Alfred A. Knopf, renewed 1945 by
Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Introduction and notes copyright© 1975 by Frank Kermode
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
BCDE
Literary criticism is a distinctive activity of the
civilized mind.
T . S . ELIOT, 1961
CONTENTS
page 11
I
L I TE RA R Y C R I T I C I S M
ESSAYS OF G ENERALIZAT I ON
Before 1918
Reflections on Vers Libre (1917)
31
1918 -1930
Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919)
37
Hamlet (1919)
45
·
The Perfect Critic (1920)
50
The Metaphysical Poets (1921)
59
The Function of Criticism (1923)
68
19JD -I96S
from Preface to Anabasis (1930)
77
from The Use of Poetry and the Use ofCriticism (1933)
79
Religion and Literature (1935)
97
from The Music of Poetry (1942)
107
What is a Classic ? (1944)
PS
Poetry and Drama (1951)
132
APPR E C IA T I ONS OF I N D I VIDUAL AUTHORS
Before 1918
from Ezra Pound: His Metric and Poetry (1917)
149
from Henry James (1918)
151
1918 -19]0
from Philip Massinger (1920)
153
Andrew Marvell ( 1921)
161
9
CONTENTS
Marie Lloyd ( 1922)
1 72
Ulysses, Order, and Myth (1923)
1 75
Lancelot Andrewes ( 1926)
179
from Thomas Middleton ( 1 927)
1 89
Francis Herbert Bradley (1927)
196
Dante (1929)
205
I9JD-I965
from Baudelaire (1930)
231
from The Pensees of Pascal (1931)
237
In Memoriam (1936)
239
Yeats (1940)
248
Milton I (1936)
258
from Milton II (1947)
265
I I
S O C I A L A N D R E L I G I O U S CR I T I C I S M
The Humanism of Irving Babbitt ( 1 928)
277
from The Idea of a Christian Society ( 1 939)
285
from Notes Towards the Definition ofCulture (1948)
292
Appendix A
307
Appendix B
3 1 3
Index
314
IO
I NTRODUCT I ON
In 'To Criticize the Critic', a lecture delivered at Leeds University in 1961, Eliot looked back over his own career as a critic and sought to draw from it 'some plausible generalizations of wider
validity'. He distinguished several categories - Professional
Critics, Critics with Gusto (who call attention to neglected
writers), Academic and Theoretical Critics - but the category in
which he placed himself was that of the critic whose criticism is
a by-product of his creative activity, and 'particularly, the critic
who is also a poet'. (Other critics of this kind are Johnson,
Coleridge, Dryden, Racine and
Matthew Arnold.1) Eliot's critical
writings are diverse and extensive, but it is not to be doubted that
he put himself into the right group. His readers (and, of course,
his editor) must always be mindful of this, and of certain other
admonitions in the same retrospective survey.
As he reviewed his work Eliot, in tones of amused severity,
observed in it certain faults : 'the occasional note of arrogance, of
vehemence, of cocksureness or rudeness, the braggadocio of the
mild-mannered man safely entrenched behind his typewriter'. By
way of excuse he urged upon all who cite his work the need to
reflect that it is not a single seamless garment or premeditated
system, but a series of essays belonging to different dates and
different stages of his life. He maintained that his early criticism
achieved its success partly because of its ·dogmatic manner and
because it was, inexplicitly, a defence of the poetic practice of his
friends and himself. Later readers enjoy the tones of warm
advocacy even though they do not understand exactly what the
author vas reacting against ; and so this early work is more
appealing than the more 'detached' and 'j udicial' pieces he wrote
later.
To get his work into perspective, Eliot proposed to divide it
into three periods. During the first he was writing for the Egoist,
in which appeared what is arguably his most influential single
essay, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent'. The main influences
1 The footnotes to this Introduction are at the end of the Introduction on p. 23.
I I
INTRODUCT I ON
on his work at this time were Ezra Pound (and through him Remy
de Gourmont and Henry James) and Irving Babbitt, who at
Harvard introduced Eliot to the philosophy of Humanism, and
whose traditionalist doctrines were reinforced, a little later, by the
ideas of T. E. Hulme and Charles Maurras. 2
The second period, from 1918 to about 1930, was primarily one
of regular contributions to the Athenaeum, edited by Middleton
Murry, and the Times Literary Supplement, edited by Bruce
Richmond ; and the third primarily one of lectures and addresses.
Throughout, he believed, there was 'an important line of
demarcation' between 'essays of generalization' and 'appreciations
of individual authors' ; and he thought the second class the more
likely to retain a value for future readers. Without wholly accepting that judgment, I have, in this selection, adopted the classification Eliot proposed, dividing the work into three periods, and, within those periods, into 'essays of generalization' and 'appreciations of individual authors'. (They overlap, of course ; the generalizations are founded on appreciations, and the appreciations require, for reasons explored below, to be set in a context of generalization. And there are anomalies : I hope nobody will complain that Marie Lloyd is not exactly an 'individual
author'.)
The scheme of this book therefore complies, as far as possible,
with Eliot's own prescription, and in the matter of selection it also
follows his lead. I shall not embark on a general defence of my
selections ; no two editors would fill the available space with
identical choices, though there would be agreement about six or
eight essays. A word, however, should be said concerning the
policy of choosing - with two exceptions - only what has appeared in collections made by the poet himself. There is a large body of criticism by Eliot that has never been collected ; some of
it is of high interest, and it is greatly to be hoped that it will one
day be published. But given the exigencies of space, an editor
ought, I think, to respect the initial act of selection made by the
critic himself. The exceptions to this rule are early essays on
James and Joyce, which are not only celebrated but have, with
Eliot's consent, appeared in anthologies.
I may here note one further restriction on my choice. I emphasize the literary, at the expense of the ecclesiastical, the political and the social criticism, which, in the course of time, came to
constitute a considerable proportion of Eliot's prose, and which
not only has its own importance but often illuminates both the
literary criticism and the poetry. I have tried to give some notion
of its tone and range, but the disproportion should be borne in
mind. The short bibliography in Appendix B (p. 3 1 3) shows
1 2
I NTRODUCT I ON
where the missing material is to be sought, and mentions one or
two of the better studies of it.
Eliot was clearly right in supposing that the most influential of
his essays were among the earliest (though I believe he underestimated the degree to which later work reinforced them and ensured that they should be read with unusual attention). The
works in question are 'essays of generalization' ; but despite their
superstructure of system and theory such essays as 'Tradition and
the Individual Talent', 'The Metaphysical Poets', and 'Hamlet'
all have their origins in his own creative reading of past poetry,
and in his programme for new poetry, his own and others', about
the time of Gero11tion and The Waste Land.
In May 1935, long after these seminal essays were written, Eliot
wrote a r.::markable letter to Stephen Spender. He was commenting on Spender's critical book, The Destructive Element, but also on his own experience. 'You don't,' he said, 'really criticize
any author to whom you have never surrendered yourself . . . .
Even just the bewildering minute counts ; you have to give yourself up, and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say, before you have wholly forgotten both surrender and recoyery. Of course the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.'3
'The bewildering minute' is a quotation from The Revmger's
Tragedy ; Eliot had used it both in 'Tradition and the Individual
Talent' and in the essay on Tourneur of 1931:
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor bmefit of a bewildering minute ?
He gave himself up to these lines, and by the same act possessed
them ; it is a characteristic 'surrender'. We are here, I think,
contemplating an aspect not only of Eliot's critical, but of his
poetic genius. The passage by Tourneur - or, as many now
believe, by Middleton -celebrates a peculiar blend of fascination
and disgust, a mortuary eroticism balancing on the moment of
simultaneous enchantment and loss, the sexual surrender. We
encountered a version of it in The Waste Land:
. . . blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a mommt's surrender . . .
and, negatively, in the seductions of the typist and the Thamesdaughters. We recognize it even in accounts of failure, of the IJ
I N TRODUCTION
withholding of the self: 'I could not J Speak, and my eyes failed'and in the prayer of the Hollow Men ; transformed, it becomes in Ash- Wednesday 'The infirm glory of the positive hour'. The
experience of the bewildering minute in poetry is powerfully
described in the essay on Dante : 'It is very much like our in tenser
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 calmer feeling.'
We remember that in the Vita Nuova it is Love who says Ego
dominus tuus, and Love is 'of terrible aspect' - he makes Beatrice
eat Dante's heart, and the dream, which leaves the poet sad,
represents an unrepeatable, irreversible and fearful experience
of a kind that may be associated both with love and with poetry.
Dante, speaking of his first seeing Beatrice, explains that the
whole spirit of the man or poet responds to this overwhelming
experience; the mind reacts as to beatitude, the body knows that
henceforth it will know perturbation and sorrow. Eliot himself,
in the essay on Dante, is clear that Dante is speaking of something
that happened to him : a sexual experience remarkable only in that
one would expect it to have happened before the age of nine, and
of course in its intensity : 'I cannot find it incredible that what has
happened to others should have happened to Dante with much
greater intensity.'4
In the letter to Spender Eliot is describing the originating
movement of his own most important criticism : a surrender, made
in all probability before the poetry that induces it is fully understood ; an excitement later to be integrated with 'a larger whole of experience'. The second moment, of recovery, is perhaps the
moment when such a line as Tourneur's settles into the mind
it will henceforth inhabit as part of a different complex of
experience. The third, 'having something to say', requires
speculation and systematization, perhaps historical and perhaps
theoretical - faithful to the experience but providing it with an
intellectual vehicle.
The first two stages occur in the poetic as well as the critical
process ; the third, for the poet, may be that 'workshop criticism'
of which Eliot speaks in 'The Frontiers of Criticism', 5 and which
was strikingly exemplified in the reworking, by Pound and the
author, of the Waste Land drafts. For the critic the third stage is
not so much creative as speculative ; he must place his 'impression'
within an intellectual structure ; his task is 'to analyse and con
Struct', to 'iriger en lois ses impressions personnelles', as Eliot puts it
14
I NTRODUCTION